Democracy for the ME- A 2004 journey
Vienna, Brussels, Beirut, Cairo, New
York, Rome , Rabat: democracy, freedom, justice
2004, le Moyen-Orient en quête de non-violence :
Un parcours personnel
Chibli Mallat
“Though this be
madness, yet there is method in ’t.” (Hamlet, ii.2.207)
I. 31 Décembre 2004. Beyrouth. Présentation
Tout au long de l’année 2004, les tremblements de terre qui secouent le Moyen-Orient, et dont l’épicentre est l’Irak, semblent emporter les ‘agents du dialogue’ comme autant de fétus de paille. La terreur est à l’ordre du jour, et l’on peut douter de la capacité humaine à endiguer le flot de l’histoire, lorsque, bien plus modestement, penser cette violence au quotidien est déjà une gageure.
Malgré ces contraintes évidentes, nous avons essayé, à l’occasion de rencontres qui ont eu lieu sur les cinq continents, de tracer en 2004 le fil d’un engagement pour un Moyen-Orient comprenant plus de dialogue, et donc moins de violence. Au gré de contributions présentées à des audiences diverses et soigneusement choisies, en Europe, aux Etats-Unis, en Australie, en Afrique, et en Asie du Sud-Ouest, cette quête a pris des formes variées, dont certaines, militantes, revêtaient à dessein un caractère organisationnel. Cet article en regroupe les moments et les écrits les plus expressifs en trois langues euro-méditerranénnes (et un peu d’italien; les documents originellement en arabe paraissent ici en version anglaise ou française). Les textes sont introduits par une brève présentation contextuelle, l’appareil critique ayant été allégé au strict nécessaire.
Qui dit militance dit redites et répétitions, et ces textes ne s’en défendent pas. On y retrouvera autant les balbutiements de l’individu à la recherche d’un monde meilleur que les leitmotive de thèmes et de crises à caractère universel: crises d’Irak, de Palestine, du Liban, du Darfour; thèmes de démocratie, de liberté et de justice.
II. Décembre 2003-Février 2004. Baghdad. ‘Plan’ d’accélération de la souveraineté démocratique
Note. Lors de deux visites en Irak fin 2003 et début 2004, suite à des réunions de travail avec le Deputy Secretary of Defence américain, M. Paul Wolfowitz, nous avons tenté de formuler, avec les principaux acteurs au Conseil de Gouvernement à Baghdad, un passage plus rapide à la souveraineté qui soit informé par la préservation de l’union nationale et l’enclenchement d’un processus démocratique reposant en premier lieu sur les irakiens. Les deux textes publiés dans le New York Times rendent compte de ces visites et du ‘plan’ auquel elles ont donné lieu. L’article suivant, publié dans l’Orient-le Jour prend acte des retards et erreurs qui ont conduit à la suppression, dans le chaos, du Conseil de Gouvernement irakien. Le dernier article a pour origine une lettre adressée au ministre des affaires étrangères Irakien Hoshyar Zebari, un collègue de l’époque militante au sein de l’International Committee for a Free Iraq. Parmi ces recommandations, deux ont été inscrites dans la version finale de la décision du Conseil de Sécurité 1546 de juin 2004.
II.1 Note to the U.N.: Hands Off Iraqi Politics[1]
When members of the Iraqi Governing Council and L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Baghdad, open talks at the United Nations today, nothing short of the future of the region will be at stake. Having come under increasing pressure over its plan to form an Iraqi government without direct elections, the United States is counting on greater United Nations involvement both to help ease the resistance and secure a lasting democracy.
Beyond the involvement of additional stakeholders like France and Germany, can a more determined role on the part of the United Nations translate into government-building? Considering the organization's dismal record of silence during Saddam Hussein's 30 years of totalitarian rule, I'm not so sure.
Having visited Iraq last month to meet with the leadership there, I think the better solution already lies within the nation's borders. To spend a day at the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council headquarters is to learn what all honest people in the Arab world already admit: the most representative of all governments in the Middle East sits in Baghdad. With all its shortcomings and contradictions, the council covers the fullest possible spectrum of Iraqi society, from the Islamists to the Communists, and all the strands in between, including Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkmens and Christians.
The continued disagreements in the United Nations over the justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein and problems with securing postwar peace mask the one major achievement in the new Iraq: within the governing council and outside, freedom reigns supreme. It may sometimes look or sound messy to the rest of the world, but a fledgling democracy often does.
In a heartening sign, no one in Iraq, no matter what side of the debate he is on, is afraid to speak his mind. At the Baghdad airport, for example, an Iraqi employee expressed to me his regret that Saddam Hussein had been caught, and his hope that resistance will survive his arrest.
On the other hand, when I asked Dr. Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, Iraq's interim oil minister, about criticism by Baathists within his ministry for his close ties to the United States, he shrugged off the possibility of silencing them. This is especially remarkable, given he had lost several family members to Saddam Hussein's repression.
During my trip, I visited the Bahr al-Uloum home in Najaf, where some 50 tribal leaders from the Middle Euphrates Valley sang of their attachment to Iraq, Shiism and national unity from the mountain to the marsh. The family's patriarch, Sheikh Muhammad Bahr al-Uloum, a member of the governing council and an old friend, is optimistic about Iraq's future. But Sheikh Uloum, who like many struggled for decades against Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, is also upset at what he perceives as mismanagement of his country by the United States. More than eight months after the passing of the ancien régime, the scene is of intermittent electricity and phone service, no airport service and surreal lines for gas in a country with the second largest oil reserves.
But security, despite newspaper headlines, is a fleeting concern. After all, armed resistance to the new democratic order has no chance of success against the new spirit of freedom if basic services are restored, and if the national political process takes root. This is clearly the dual challenge ahead, and Iraqis rightly feel they are in the best position to run their country.
The way forward, then, is simple. The 10 members of the governing council whom I met with agree on this: the council, as a national unity government, should be unconditionally recognized as in charge of Iraq's destiny, with the support of the United States-led coalition and whoever else wishes to join in a democratic course of reconstruction.
As such, the council would be deemed the official interim government of Iraq - making the United States plan to select a national assembly by July 1 unnecessary. The council would be empowered to draft a constitution and set the parameters for what a new government would look like and when and how it would be elected. In the long term, this would consolidate the whole process of democracy - something Iraqis both in and outside the council want.
Strengthening the power of Iraqis over their own affairs can come with the proviso that any contender who furthers his own political agenda by violent means should be punished by either being banned from a leadership post or being brought to trial by an international court for those crimes. Human rights monitors, supported by the United Nations or the coalition, should be deployed to further ensure international commitment to the cause of democracy and nonviolence.
Today's meeting at the United Nations provides the perfect opportunity to focus the future of Iraq in the right direction: inward. When I met in Baghdad with Naseer Chaderji, a liberal Sunni Arab who sits on the governing council, he voiced skepticism of of the United States' reaction to a request for an acceleration of Iraqi self-governance. While Paul Bremer was a good listener, Mr. Chaderji explained, he was not following suggestions made by Iraqi leaders.
But after discussing the issue with other council members - including Ahmad Chalabi and Ibrahim Jafari, an Islamist Dawa leader - as well as with American officials committed to Middle East democracy, including Paul Wolfowitz, I am more hopeful. I sense that Iraqis and Americans are far more in agreement on the country's future than the controversies there suggest.
Now that the most dictatorial system in the region has been undone, the rest of the world owes Iraq's long-ignored victims a commitment to their national unity government.
II.2. East Meets West, at Least on Paper[2]
It was a rare scene of historical redemption on Monday when Sayyed Muhammad Bahr al-Uloum, a 76-year-old religious scholar and one of the first Iraqis imprisoned and exiled by the Baathist regime in the 1960's, presided over the Iraqi Governing Council as it unanimously approved the country's interim Constitution. But beyond the symbolism of Mr. Uloum's role, the document should be seen as an important text for the entire world: in it, East and West meet in an unprecedented manner; it incorporates a salute to Islamic law along with the adoption of federalism and Western-style personal rights for citizens.
Perhaps the most important phrase in the Constitution is in the preamble: the people of Iraq "reject violence and coercion in all their forms, and particularly when used as instruments of governance." Agreement on this principle, so contrary to an inordinately cruel 35-year rule, is the most remarkable achievement of the members of the Governing Council. If it holds in their future dealings, and is respected by their followers in power, then Iraq will have achieved its democratic transition.
However, having read the entire 62-article text in Arabic, I have a few problems. It may seem minor, but the language lacks literary elegance, which is particularly unfortunate considering the richness of the classical tradition. It is vital that the final Constitution incorporate phrasing that takes into account the unique Mesopotamian contributions to world legal history — from Hammurabi's tablets to the Iraq Civil Code of 1953, which incorporated concepts and rules of both secular and Islamic law.
As for the document's content, the West's main concern should not be about the prevalence of Islam — it and all other religions of the Iraqi population are protected against excesses and provocations. Nor should one worry that federalism is not sufficiently stressed — it is frequently mentioned in the text and has been a shared desire of most of Iraq's new leaders since at least 1992, when their colleagues at the University of London demonstrated to them how Malaysia and Nigeria were strengthened as nation-states by the adoption of federalism. So long as the Kurdish political leaders, who have enjoyed de facto autonomy for the last decade, accept that federalism means a single nation-state, the risk of the issue turning sour is limited.
What most concerns me, however, is the fuzziness and uncertainty over the transition to a permanent and democratically elected government. Sovereignty is to be returned to the Iraqis at the end of June, but there will be no elections this year and no referendum on a final Constitution until 2006. Who will rule in the interim?
The new document mentions the emergence of a government to be decided upon after "wide consultations." This body will adopt a series of laws for the creation of a National Assembly of 275 members, to be elected before February 2005. But the text does not further specify how electoral law will be organized. With no stated criteria and no models better than the one that led to the emergence of the unelected Governing Council, how can we hope for smooth and fair elections?
Once the 275-member Assembly is created, not only will it have to do the long work of drafting a final Constitution, it will also choose a "presidency council" of three officials, who will decide on a variety of matters including the appointment of a temporary government and prime minister.
Those familiar with the Iraqi opposition in its long exile have seen this sort of leadership structure before. The Iraqi National Congress, the umbrella group of exile organizations created in Vienna in 1992, had a leadership council of three men, who chose an "executive committee" with a president. The Iraqi National Congress fell apart because of personal dissension at the top, and the onset of the civil war among the two main Kurdish factions in 1993. Is it truly sensible to resurrect this power-sharing scheme?
In addition, Article 37 of the Constitution holds that once this Presidency Council is chosen, it can rule only by unanimous decision. That apparently means one man can effectively paralyze the council.
Two weeks ago in Baghdad I talked with several Governing Council members about my concerns. It became clear to me, if not to them, that disbanding the council and dismissing the governmental ministers in June will create uncertainty and tension that will far outweigh the benefits gained from forging a more representative body.
It is hard to advocate any shift from the vision of this wonderful new Constitution. But in the interest of Iraq's stability, it would seem wise to abandon the vague plan for new interim bodies and simply have the Governing Council continue to carry out its task for another year. This would allow each of the 25 Governing Council members to get a chance to hold the rotating presidency, including the three women waiting their turns. It would enhance the strength of the Governing Council, allow the return of sovereignty to Iraqis, and remove the stigma of continued occupation. And it is likely the best way to ensure that the Iraqi people will have a chance to vote on the truly democratic government and final Constitution they need.
II.3 Malgré tout, une leçon de démocratie à Bagdad[3]
Adnane Pachachi a payé le prix de son ambition. Quant au jeu d’apprentis sorciers de MM. Powell, Brahimi, Blackwill (l’assistant de Condoleezza Rice qui, avec Paul Bremer, s’est rapidement transformé en un haut-commissaire de l’époque coloniale), il leur a explosé au visage. Il faut espérer qu’ils en tireront la leçon en laissant plus de liberté aux Irakiens pour décider de leur avenir. Quant à leur candidat Pachachi, qui a laminé ses collègues au Conseil de gouvernment au profit de l’envoyé d’une Onu honnie par les autres leaders irakiens, les choses se sont finalement retournées contre lui. En novembre 2002, il avait déjà empêché que ne se constitue un gouvernement provisoire en Irak kurde, il a ignoré depuis novembre dernier un plan d’accélération de la souveraineté irakienne que la plupart de ses collègues, ainsi que le Pentagone – encore puissant – soutenaient contre un rôle superfétatoire de l’Onu. Sa carrière politique, à 81 ans, paraît terminée. Il faut espérer que la déconvenue de Adnane Pachachi, comme celle de nombre de protagonistes centraux dans le drame de l’Irak – Lakhdar Brahimi, Ahmed Chalabi, Paul Wolfowitz, tous personnages que j’ai bien connus, appréciés et critiqués au fil des ans, tous personnages qui n’ont pas réussi à faire de l’Irak le havre de paix et de démocratie auxquels ils aspiraient – ne les empêcheront pas de poursuivre cette mission avec enthousiasme, mais avec un peu plus de détachement.
Nous ne sommes pas au bout de nos suprises en Irak, certaines interviendront au fil d’une violence qui n’est pas prête de s’arrêter. Le dénouement d’hier a surpris, celui qui a porté Iyad Allaoui et Ghazi al-Yaouar respectivement à la tête du gouvernement transitoire et de la présidence du pays, comme ont surpris la disgrâce du Pentagone suite au scandale d’Abou Ghraib et celle d’Ahmed Chalabi, qui avait combattu ouvertement les Nations unies et appelé à une enquête irakienne sur les malversations liées au programme pétrole contre nourriture de l’Onu.
Deux
réflexions, in media res, s’imposent : la première est négative, qui montre
combien les disputes au sein de l’Administration américaine, le cynisme de la
vieille Europe, les contradictions qui ont précédé et suivi une victoire éclair,
obèrent l’espoir d’un Irak démocratique après une dictature de trente-cinq ans.
Il faut prendre acte de la réussite des factions violentes – l’organisation qu’a
laissée derrière lui Saddam Hussein, les mouvements radicaux à Falloujah, la
brutalité de Moqtada Sadr –, à empêcher la normalisation. À cela doit s’ajouter
la grande erreur américaine de ne pas avoir engagé les Irakiens dans le
processus de changement dès avant l’invasion, ainsi que l’incertitude qui a
dominé leur discours sur la “libération”. Dans un kaléidoscope à l’échelle
planétaire, chacun donnera une réponse différente à l’échec américain. Le
dénouement de ces derniers jours offre cependant une certitude, c’est le message
négatif de la journée d’hier : le nouveau gouvernement irakien est un
gouvernement de seconde classe, contrairement au Conseil précédent. Les deux
grands leaders kurdes sont représentés par leurs assistants, l’ensemble de la
faction Chalabi est mise à l’écart, le courant du libéralisme chiite au sein de
la hiérarchie religieuse, dans la figure exceptionnelle des Bahr al-Ouloum, est
réduit à néant, et maintenant Pachachi, tous sont pour l’instant écartés.
L’union nationale qui caractérisait le Conseil de gouvernement a été galvaudée
au profit d’un groupe réduit de dirigeants dont le passé ne présente pas
beaucoup de convictions libérales. Mais il y a également un message positif. Le
renoncement de Adnane Pachachi, proclamé président par des fuites téléguidées
par l’entourage de MM. Bremer et Brahimi (ce qui a détruit son ambition auprès
de ses pairs), n’en est pas moins remarquable comme message d’avenir. Il aurait
pu, comme Iyad Allaoui il y a quelques jours, s’accrocher à cette « nomination »
et attendre que le monde, et les Irakiens malgré eux, reconnaissent lentement ce
fait accompli. Dans un geste d’homme d’État, il a refusé. L’histoire le lui
reconnaîtra, et nous autres démocrates à la recherche désespérée de leaders
capables de dire non au poste suprême quand il se profile devant eux, non au
forcing brutal pour arriver au pouvoir, nous nous devons de le saluer.
Conscient de ces deux messages contradictoires, l’important est de considérer le
gouvernement actuel comme un gouvernement transitoire, mais aussi comme
gouvernement effectif. Les Irakiens ont besoin de paix avant tout, d’une paix
qui ne soit pas celle de la peur mais celle de la légitimité. Pachachi, Chalabi,
ainsi que les autres leaders irakiens écartés du gouvernment joueront, il faut
l’espérer, un jeu démocratique qui les ramènera peut-être au pouvoir. Le
prochain drame, lui, se passera la semaine prochaine au Conseil de sécurité sur
la souveraineté en Irak.
II.4 Letter to the Foreign Minister of Iraq: fixing Security Council Resolution 1546 (adoptée le 8 Juin 2004)[4]
HE Hoshyar Zebari
Foreign Minister of Iraq
June 3, 2004
My dear Hoshyar,
It has been fifteen years ago now since we first met in that obscure room of London University as guests of our London colleague, Sami Zubeida – another great Iraqi talent that brutal intolerance lost to the West. We were heartened that day to discover that more people cared for the fundamental rights of Iraqis than transpired on decision-making during the Gulf War. Against realpolitik, we have since doggedly worked for a federal, democratic Iraq, in a long, painful effort that has taken us to Vienna, Iraqi Kurdistan, New York, London, and so many other places, and which has now brought you as the foreign minister for the most sensitive country in earth.
The journey towards Iraqi democracy may have just started with, at last, an Iraqi democrat making his voice heard in the making of the next UN resolution. This is an occasion for which it is difficult to conceive a more important responsibility, and it will be useful to expose again—as you did to much effect earlier this year -- some of those leaders in the UN and on the Security Council who are trying to claw back their role in Iraq on the setbacks of US policy: they should be openly reminded how they supported, until the last minute, the dictator in power.
…. Now to the long-winded, arrogant current UN draft. Being in the trade, you and I know that diplomats and lawyers are verbose, and you must ensure that this ridiculously long resolution is pared down to what is essential. You recall our distress with Resolution 687 of 3 April 1988 which, despite remaining the longest in the history of the UN, managed to keep Saddam Hussein in power after the liberation of Kuwait.
How should the Resolution be reduced to what is essential to enhancing the chances for Iraqi democracy ? Let me suggest you restrict it to four key thoughts: withdrawal of foreign troops, common sense, federalism, and human rights monitors, and four simple clauses.
Withdrawal of foreign troops. By suggesting that the Iraqi government can request the withdrawal of the occupying armies, be they UN or multinational, an improvement of sorts has been achieved in the current, second, draft. But you know how weak the present government is, which does not even include the two historic Kurdish leaders in positions of responsibility. Something more convincing is needed, which is a timetable for effective withdrawal of non-Iraqi troops over a period of months. Such withdrawal can be achieved in stages, with the proper surrendering of power to the Iraqi authorities as fits the situation in the various regions. There is a risk for redoubled violence being meted out by all kinds of bloodthirsty and immoral factions to prevent normalization. If that happens, there is no harm in coming back to the Security Council to ask for a different arrangement. But it is imperative that Iraqis start seeing foreign soldiers withdrawing, and not more boots on the ground which keep sovereignty as a sham. You have already done it in Kurdistan, where I understand less than 300 soldiers remain to support the local authorities. This should be your model, and here is your first clause: “Withdrawal of non-Iraqi troops will start at once, according to a timetable agreed with the Iraqi government, to be completed within two years…
Common sense about elections. While the new condition of the second draft of the UN resolution under discussion – achievement of the political process – may appear at first as a good idea, the reason why elections have not taken place yet in Iraq is because of brutal factions who do not want a new, peaceful Iraq to emerge. These people, the Zarqawis, Muqtada Sadrs and Duris will continue to kill indiscriminately, you can be sure. Still, you will not be able to convince your people, let alone the world, that the presence of foreign troops is transitional if one does not see a tangible process that starts immediately in consonance with everyone’s hopes, including for US soldiers who should never have been asked to sacrifice their lives for the sake of Iraqi democracy.
Now much has been vested over the past year in the electoral process, and the draft text (and the interim constitution) insist on elections taking place before January 2005. That would be great, but here is where commonsense is needed. Let us be serious: how can you conduct national elections in Najaf or Kufa today, or in Falluja ? The same groups which have committed all these killings will not stop, in their search to restore the old order or some sectarian, messianic concept of Iraq. They must be not be given dates to tamper with. The electoral system should be severed from any other contingency, and more flexibility built into it. This is your business, not that of the UN. Let them just acknowledge your interim arrangements, and we can help you conduct free elections in Kurdish Iraq as we did in May 1992 in the teeth of the US government and all regional actors, as a model for the rest of the country to follow. So clause 2 of the SC resolution consists in ridding it from most clauses linking elections to ‘Iraqi sovereignty’ and/or ‘military arrangements’. You just need to have it declare that the occupation is over, and that Iraqis are in charge of their democratic destiny. And while you are paring down the verbosity of lawyers and diplomats, please make sure that “the leading role” ascribed to the UN and its representative disappears from the text.
Federalism. Only through a federal system can the various sections that compose Iraq be offered some protection. It is unfortunate not to see a Kurd as the president of Iraq, or as Prime Minister. You know the argument emphatically put to Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talibani since our early encounters in London in 1990: unless Kurds are secured a serious say in decision-making in Baghdad, there will be no end to their marginality and oppression. This is what federalism means: an effective participation in decision-making at the centre. This active participation in central decision-making is more important than the rights of Kurds in Kurdistan, which even Saddam could only dispute by the use of chemical weapons and systematic fear. We must not shy before this word, either for our peoples in Iraq and the Middle East at large, or internationally. Defend its inclusion in the Security Council Resolution.
Human rights monitors. All the above is secondary to the deployment of human rights monitors in Iraq. You know how much we fought for that, the support to Max van der Stoel, the UN special representative for human rights in the wake of our joint demands, and the resistance of Boutros-Boutros Ghali and then Kofi Annan to the idea. We shared, time and again, the efforts at the UN and elsewhere, especially during the terrible days of the Kurdish civil war, to have human right observers on the ground. You should convey to a world eager to hear what you will request openly from that resolution, that human rights should be monitored, especially after Abou Ghreib and the continued violence by brutal factions in Iraq against everyone: passers by, foreign soldiers, Governing Council members, let alone systematic sabotage to prevent a modicum of daily security. The whole role of the UN is superfluous, including all the monies promised, without a rule of law emerging in Iraq. Get rule of law in Baghdad, and everything, including foreign investment, will follow. So one short final clause: human rights observers in Iraq. Again, they could be deployed in Kurdish Iraq as soon as tomorrow morning.
Good luck. Your success in New York will determine also our future.
Yours in all seasons,
III. 3 Avril 2004. Palerme. Pour une Méditerranée cosmopolite[5]
Note. Début avril 2004, une conférence réunie à Palerme sous l’égide de syndicats chrétiens européens, notamment le Movimiento Cristiano Lavorato d’Italie, a permis de tendre un pont vers la société civile européenne sur un sujet tout aussi réel que symbolique du conflit entre les deux rives. Nous avons choisi l’occasion pour traiter de Jérusalem ville cosmopolite par ses trois religions.
We are here for the vindication of a plural, cosmopolitan, Mediterranean. We know the gap between the Southern and Eastern shores, and the Northern ones, included or about to be all included in the EU. And since the most significant frontier for the European Union is clearly the non-European Mediterranean, this presentation focuses on one of the most egregious rejection of plurality in the whole region, both in material and in symbolic, spiritual terms.
We do not need to belabour the symbolic dimension, save perhaps to say that symbol and reality merge tragically in Jerusalem. My closer interest in the city comes from the alleged floundering of the Oslo accords during the last negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, at Camp David in the summer of 2000, over Jerusalem. And it is in Jerusalem that the Intifada started physically, in the wake of the visit of Ariel Sharon on 28 September to the city. “Ariel Sharon knew what he was doing on September 28, 2000.” (Amos Elon, “The Deadlocked City”, The New York Review of Books, 18 October 2001.) The deliberate provocation achieved what he hoped for: demonstrations against Sharon’s visit, leading in turn to the unleashing of Israeli violence which claimed several Palestinian casualties. The Second Intifada, as an unusually consensual narrative admits it, ‘officially’ started on 28 September 2000. One will note that all the plans forged in Washington and at the UN to bring a halt to the killings put the collapse of the Oslo peace process at this very date.
Because this basic fact is forgotten, it is important to underline it. Ariel Sharon ‘officially’ started the Intifada, which has not stopped since, and its first victims were all Palestinian. The Intifada will not end so long as the engineer of violence that day, a man who started it in a classically Machiavellian way to become Prime Minister of Israel, remains in a position of responsibility.
So Jerusalem, city of peace, has turned into the focal point of intolerance in the Middle East, both symbolically or materially. This, alas, is not new, and the synthetic history of Jerusalem presented by Bernard Wasserstein (Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City, Yale University Press, 2001) shows the regularity over the past century of a pattern of cataclysmic Arab v. Israeli violence starting or culminating in the Holy City. Beyond that dimension, which will continue to elude those searching for peace for a long time to come, the present study wishes to dwell on a structural phenomenon which makes the issue graver and even more intractable.
Any discussion of Jerusalem has so far operated within the general framework of the Arab-Israeli framework. For the full historic mosaic of the City to obtain, this is simply not sufficient, because it carefully eludes the main trait that has ignored a critical component of Jerusalem: its Christian dimension.
For this different, even more tragic development in the modern history of the city, one can start with the conclusions of a paper completed two years ago by one of the best specialists of Jerusalem, Drew Christiansen s.j., namely that preserving the city’s Christian population, and by extension, the Christians of the Holy Land, “would require a miracle”. (Christiansen, Ms) In other terms, Christian Jerusalem is no more, because there are no Christians left in Jerusalem. The dramatic decline of Christian residents of the city is patent: in 1893, Christians represented 13 percent of the people of the Holy Land, in 2000, they are barely 2 percent. In Jerusalem proper, 30,000 Christians lived in 1944. They were still some 27,000 in 1967, when Israel occupied the city. According to some accounts, they are now fewer than 4,000.
In the Camp David negotiations four years ago, two phenomena stuck out in the otherwise traditional clash over sovereingty between the undifferentiated categories of Israelis (i.e. Jews), and Arabs (i.e. non-Jews), -- alternatively of Israelis (i.e. Jews), and Palestinians (i.e. non-Jews). The first oddity was that in the marathon discussions under President Clinton’s aegis, the impossibility to bridge the gap between the conflicting sovereignty claims of the two leaders assumed, throughout, that Ehud Barak was speaking for Israeli sovereignty over the whole city, while Yasser Arafat wanted the recognition of full (or quasi-full) Palestinian sovereignty over the Eastern Arab side of the city.
The question was not, one noted then already, that simple: was Barak defending Israeli or Jewish sovereignty, and was Arafat standing for Palestinian or Muslim interests? Were we witnessing in the conflict over sovereignty a simple national clash for Jerusalem as capital of the state of Israel as against the capital of the (state of) Palestine?
Or should the complexity be extended much further afield to Jerusalem as the Holy City for the three great historical monotheistic religions? On this qualification depends the future of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and, I would respectfully submit, a plural Mediterranean.
Despite the tireless rhetoric over the sacredness of Jerusalem for the three religions, the little which has surfaced from the two-week pow-wow in Camp David sounded dominantly sectarian: Barak, no doubt, was talking about the eternal capital of the Jews, and his “one Israel,” we have learned over the past fitfty years, is an exclusively “one Jewish Israel.” In a sense, the equation of Israel with Jewishness, at the expense of the equality of all its citizens, is hardly surprising. Israel is by definition a Jewish state.
The case on the other side is more troublesome. The so-far muted alliance of convenience between Christians and Muslims, an alliance largely driven by the Judaization of Jerusalem incidentally a problem for less fanatical Jews themselves fails to secure Christian rights as a key component for any solution vesting in plurality.
This is at the core of the first oddity, which is that Christians of the Holy Land continue to be represented vicariously, while their physical presence is dwindling to the point of oblivion.
The second oddity emerged from a brief declaration by Madeleine Albright in her visit to Rome on Aug. 1, 2000, as the talks were going on: “At Camp David certainly, the issue of internationalization was not the solution to it,” she said. What does this reference to internationalisation entail, and why was the US Secretary of State so dismissive of it ?
The two oddities are not unrelated, and disregard at Camp David for the international status of the city – which is the arguably established position in international law over Jerusalem, results from the absence of formal Christian representation at the negotiating table. Insofar as Jewish and Muslim representation dominated the negotiating table, and the American broker was hardly a Christian broker, one understands better the exercise in damage limitation which was carried out in the Vatican, after the fact, by the Secretary of State.
For better of for worse, then, including the risk of tying a further knot to an already intractable file, Jerusalem must be reclaimed as the Holy City for Christians also. The recurring rhetorical reference to its sanctity and importance for all three religions cannot be pursued if we are serious about preserving the city’s symbol status of a plural Mediterranean. For that, is needed a dual breakthrough: a diplomatic position forcing Christian representation on the negotiating table, on equal footing with the other two religious representatives, and a legal position that does not relegate Christians to a mere rank of pilgrims and tourists under the sufferance of Jewish or Muslim sovereignties.
Let us probe further these two avenues. Neither representation nor legal status is a simple proposal. While it will come as shocking, at first, for Christians to take some distance from equally victimised Muslim Jerusalemites, the logic of ‘city holiness’ is simply too powerful for such fig-leaves to endure any longer. And while this approach risks provoking a grave split within Palestinian society along sectarian lines, a direct representation of Christian interests is needed because the fig-leaf cannot mask a dominant sectarian logic playing itself out with no restraint.
One understands, in Israel’s continuous victimisation and hemming in, with a purpose to drive them out, of all Jerusalemites of non-Jewish denominations, why Muslims and Christians huddle in as a tight front under ‘Arab’ leadership. But the tragic fate of Christian Jerusalem requires those directly interested in not disappearing from the map – literally, the first time since Christ - to reclaim the mantle of their representation. Who can bear such a mantle is a difficult question in view of the ethnic cleansing of the Holy Land’s Christians over the past century, but Camp David has forced the issue of Christian Jerusalem on the world in a way which needs to be henceforth addressed in more attentive terms.
As for the contours of the “final” legal status, here also a revolution of sorts is needed, because Muslim (even presented as Palestinian) and Jewish (Israeli) sovereignties exclude, by their very nature, Christian rights. In other words, the legal status of Jerusalem must also accommodate the right to Christian sovereignty over the city. True, Christians are far less numerous than Muslims and Jews, but this is as much a fact of the ruthless policy of Judaization over the century, doubling up recently in the counterlogic of Islamisation, as it is because of their improper representation at the negotiating table. This will not be possible until a more serious re-examination of “internationalization” as legal solution. Innovation here is not needed, and a firm international law precedent can be found in the UN-adopted Statute of the City of Jerusalem known as ‘corpus separatum’. That statute, approved by the UN Trusteeship Council in 1950, consecrates in law Jerusalem’s “Special International Regime.”
A seachange is needed for an approach to Jerusalem which would conform with a view of international law in tune with a plural philosophy of the Mediterranean, including both the symbolic and material status of the city for all three world religions. Diplomatically, a full, comprehensive, representation is needed at the negotiating table for Christianity. In law, a determined share of sovereignty is required to acknowledge the Holy City’s special international regime. Without those two conditions, there is no future for Christian Jerusalem, let alone for a plural Mediterranean. Considering the reality of physically vanishing Christians in the Holy Land, part of that mantle needs to be donned from outside. Hence the choice of the present, important forum to conjure up this dark reminder of what is needed on the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean for it to be plural and cosmopolitan.
What can be done ? The technical dimensions of international law, with the several layers of texts since the frozen Corpus Separatum should not dent a resolve based on the principle of a City for all three religions, and governed by members of all three religions. Even in the tight discussions between the Israeli government and the Vatican, the concept of equality (for Christians) was carefully preserved in the 1993 Treaty between the two parties. That concept has been systematically undermined ever since by an active policy of discrimination against Jerusalemites of all non-Jewish persuasions through a full-fledged panoply of administrative measures and budgetary constraints, physical vexations, curtailment of freedom of movement, prevention of return, limitations on permits, land expropriation, and an enhanced policy of Jewish settlements.
Each one of these policies is identifiable, stoppable, and reversible under established principles of international law, and the Israeli government will be forced, hopefully by a majority of decent Israeli citizens, to confront these violations sooner or later. Nor is the discrimination limited to East Jerusalem and the neighbourhoods occupied and annexed in 1967. Christian Jerusalemites in particular know that their greatest density was in West Jerusalem since the end of the nineteenth century, and that the properties confiscated upon their forced flight in 1948 are not confined to the Old City.
Lawyers will find a way out once the principle of coexistence, of mosaic, of humanism, of tolerance are admitted as the centre of the preoccupation with the Arab-Israeli conflict. The EU offers many a model, not least the one about to be established in Cyprus, and it may take the enlargement to encompass Lebanon and Israel, as in the proposal of a traditional ‘Zionist’, to make the Land holy again. (See Mallat, ‘George Weidenfeld’s bright idea’, The Daily Star, August 2003) Even more than Paris, Jerusalem deserves a mess.
IV. 14 Mai. Vienne. Asymétrie et Ungeheuer[6]
Note. A l’invitation de l’ancien Vice-Chancelier autrichien, Dr Erhard Busek, un texte sur ‘les formes nouvelles de la guerre’ avait été préparé pour le colloque qu’il organise à Vienne annuellement sur la globalisation. Ce texte, qui fait partie d’une étude plus approfondie en cours, s’étant avéré trop technique pour être présenté à la rencontre, les remarques impromptues suivantes l’ont remplacé, sur le thème du ‘monstrueux (en allemand Ungeheuer)’, thème introduit en matinée par un jeune militaire orientaliste autrichien, Joseph Schröfl, citant une maxime célèbre de Nietzsche. Nous avions été présenté par Dr Busek pour parler ‘on behalf of the Arab world’, dans une séance qui comprenait également l’ambassadeur américain au Luxembourg offrant le point de vue de son gouvernement.
As you can easily surmise, I am not mandated to speak on behalf of the Arab world. Not that I blame you for having invited me, as it would be particularly dull if any of the foreign ministers or presidents in the Arab world nowadays came to speak to you. I do not speak on behalf of the Arab world, but one central problem in the representation in the Arab world is that ordinary people are better equipped to speak on its behalf than its anointed leaders.
The speech I originally prepared is part of academic work in progress which has been pursued over a number of years on those very issues that we are concerned about in this seminar: globalisation, terrorism, new forms of warfare. But we are running slightly late and it may be more useful to depart from that speech and react to some of the very excellent comments we heard this morning: this will allow a discussion where I am hoping to learn much from you in matters that are particularly difficult, uniquely complex as Dr. Busek said. It involves a template of paradigms that are not all too clear yet and that requires much more work in order to see more clearly into the nature of evil that one confronts at the dawn of the 21 century, and into the solutions one could find for this evil.
Evil is a loaded, unpleasant word, and the quote from Nietzsche -- the master who went beyond good and evil -- which introduced ‘Ungeheuer’ into our debate is therefore particularly enriching. One cannot even start any form of discussion or reflection to improve upon things if one does not note the particular grotesque form of evil which is growing amongst us, this monstrous, Ungeheuer dimension that we are witnessing nowadays in the crudest forms of violence, latest the killing of the young American chap and the video that was made of it. Neither is outside the realm of the Ungeheuer what we saw in the past few weeks rightly shaking America and the world in what has emerged from within the jails of Iraq.
Globalisation and asymmetry are taking place against intolerable forms of monstrosity which involve a public dimension necessitating some reflection on the vectors it chooses for open display. This is internationalisation or globalisation with a particular spatial dimension, and has taken, inter alia, the images carried in the horror video released on websites yesterday.
I would like, on a related matter, to focus a bit more on the subject that we are assigned this morning, which is the issue of asymmetry.
I am grateful for Dr. Schröfl because it is important to understand what is, and what isn’t, novel in the concept. The fact that he has been able to trace asymmetry back to Biblical times should warn us against the lure of expressions that seem to offer a novelty because they suddenly sound right. Identification of conceptual novelty is a particularly daunting task. Asymmetry requires therefore some more focused attention.
The other concept which also needs some reflection in terms of its ‘novelty’ is terrorism, and the following comment should also be viewed as a reaction to the speech of the US Ambassador. It seems to me that the failure of legions of jurists and law makers to define the concept of terrorism over two hundred years should perhaps encourage us to think through that concept, which is currently suggested as a ‘new’ type of modern warfare. I have from my very narrow legal point of view chosen, also out of conviction, never to use that in order to depict the political violence that we are witnessing nowadays.
What other words can we use? Well, as a lawyer from the Arab world, the greatest problem we have faced since the attacks of September 11 is the bandying about, with little critical sense, of the concept of ‘terrorism’, both from Western governments and our own. ‘Attack’ is another puzzling word. There was something special in 9/11 that should force us to wonder why these horrors have been called ‘attacks’ and why the legal concept that has been paralleling this word was ‘terrorism’.
This, I have argued elsewhere, is a serious, strategic mistake on part of the United States government, which imposed the word and the worldview that derives from it at a time when many of us lawyers have learned on the very benches of US law schools that it was impossible, counterproductive and mistaken to try incorporating the concept of terrorism as crime under international law: ‘terrorism’ simply does not bear enough specificity in order to be differentiated from other crimes that trigger responsibility and punishment. To be more specific, we have learnt in working towards the Convention of Rome in 1998 that resulted in the establishment of the International Criminal Court that the four concepts that trigger action by the prosecution in the International Criminal Court do not include terrorism. However, they do include the particularly important concept of "crimes against humanity". One has endeavoured, like Antonio Cassese, like Mary Robinson, to correct this erring, with the failure that you can hear everyday in the repetitive incantations about ‘terrorism’ the world over.
As for the depiction of what happened on 9/11 as an attack: of course it was an attack. But much more important is the question we should ask ourselves about what characterised this attack, as against thousands of attacks that take place across the globe every single day. The answer is relatively simple: what happened on 9/11 is a massacre. We actually never conceive of 9/11 as a massacre, discuss it as such, and examine the legal category that attaches to what, in lay parlance, is considered a ‘massacre’: the category known in international law as crime against humanity.
So instead of massacre and crime against humanity, we keep hearing of attacks and terrorism. But unless we work to replace your definition, Mr. Ambassador, we are bound to confront, time and again, a dead-end. Terrorism as you use it appears to derive from a considered definition, but it inevitably fails, including because of the political dimension that it carries. The United States and the rest of the world, reacting to this Ungeheuer, a continuous monstrosity that will strike again, I am sure, must use the tools that seasoned law offers, because it is in law that the difference gets made between a process that leads to the punishment of people who are using violence for purposes that are political and those who may be exercising a legitimate use of force. It is this rooting in law that makes a difference over the years between the two types of violence, that is between the sort of asymmetric violence sub-national groups are exercising in ways that are not acceptable and the violence in return that states carry out, both domestically and internationally, and which might, in some circumstances, be accepted, even occasionally required.
The strategic problem that the United States has faced since 9/11 gets exposed primarily by the fact that it is not ready to consider that a legal process is necessary—even if the financial dimension, for example, tends to be carried out by the USG through law. And yet the legal process is vital to make the difference in the use and misuse of political violence as the central battle for the 21st century.
Within this strategic choice there are problems, sure. There is the problem of efficiency, and that of asymmetry. And to mention also the EU, because Mr. Voggenhuber [Austrian MEP and speaker at the Vienna conference] has worked on the Convention, one should consider, facing the Ungeheuer that has plagued us in such a dramatic way since 9/11, one great failure of the European Convention in addressing Ungeheuer by means that are, for all intents and purposes, legal. This is indeed the problem for the European Union’s 21st century, and gets illustrated by the absence of a European prosecutor emerging out of the Convention. By striking out the proposal of a European prosecutor, the EU has shot itself in the foot by closing a major avenue to deal legally with Ungeheuer. I am sorry, Europol is not capable on its own to deal with Ungeheuer. It requires a judge for the legal process to make sense. Similarly the army, as we saw in Iraq, is incapable, on its own, of addressing violence, without some legal process usually overseen by a judge. Only that judicial control can raise the reaction to Ungeheuer from one which is routed in pure violence – and eventual Ungeheuer itself, -- to one which can be acceptable to civilizations defining themselves primarily in terms of states ruled by law.
Let me try to end with two problems that come with an alternative worldview that privileges law as its defining criterion, in an area of conflict which is still governed by the extraordinary template of war that Clausewitz has offered us in Vom Krieg. One faces indeed, against that template, two types of dilemmas: one is technical. In the history of warfare there is an element that is always unpredictable and, Dr Schröfl will correct me, that is technological change. We must therefore think more carefully about the brutal, basic and unintelligent – one is tired from hearing that the uses of mass murder are ‘brilliant’ – use of planes to hit the Twin towers; we must think hard about the use of sarin gas in Tokyo's underground as a serious prodrome of what the change in warfare might mean, with warfare being extensively defined as human beings doing mass harm to other human beings. The nature of a technological change and its globalization is one that requires a lot of work. Since it is impossible to predict how technological changes develop and how you can control them to avoid weaponisation, especially when they becomes so accessible and so ‘democratized’, we will not have easy answers, including to the dirty little bomb that one or the other Ungeheuer agent will be able to manufacture before too long and deliver. This is one aspect requiring more Clausewitzian, in-depth reflection.
There is another important area of the vexing dilemma brought about by asymmetry: we could describe it as the fact that all these sub-national units operating internationally would not be able to operate internationally if between them and the international scene there were a state that subjected their operations to some form of control. The problem one faces, and that brings us back to Dr. Busek and the problem of ‘representation of the Arab world’, is that none of the Arab countries, -- and there is a Middle Eastern specificity in 9/11, offers a model of a state governed by rule of law. Not one country in the Middle East is a democracy, and it is on these states that one is relying to hem in the monstrosity that has emerged in 9/11. That creates a serious dilemma, because you Westerners rely on states that do not believe in the rule of law.
Indeed, the most effective convention amongst Arab countries is the Convention against terrorism which was passed in 1999. Terrorism is the perfect tool for the arbitrariness of Arab governments dealing with their dissidents. And foremost among these dissidents those who use mere words to ask for change. We have to think a bit more creatively on the issue of the lack of democracy in the Middle East as one major, decisive, dimension in the limitations to be put on this Ungeheuer. One is asking Ungeheuer systems to put an end to the state of Ungeheuer which characterizes the Middle East, and the ensuing dilemma can only be described as serious. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Saudi system is a monstrosity: unless this is seriously been dealt with we are not going anywhere, and there is, in the Gulf, a century-long history of Western collusion with the Ungeheuer, with its characteristic propensity to ignore the way peoples that it governs.
This is true across the Middle East: no exception, and I am talking as an academic here. It is not customary for the US Ambassador here present (nor for other European Ambassadors) to include Israel as a non-democratic state in the region. This is wrong, and we have discussed this matter at length on other occasions, because Israel is part and parcel of Ungeheuer that has plagued the Middle East ever since its establishment in 1948, as is part of it the dedicated support it has received from the West over the past fifty years. Support to Israel is one additional problem of association with governments that are anything but Ungeheuer.
These forms of asymmetry result, I am afraid, in international monstrosities such as we saw on 9/11. In the Middle East, Israel should be defined for what it is, a monstrous state, which emerged from the replacement by force of the population from its native land by one brought from outside. This same pattern continues to date: Israel controls not only the Jewish population present in historic Palestine, but it has controlled for the past fifty years of its existence an ever larger non-Jewish segment, part of which remains on its territory and part of which has been forcibly expelled from that territory and remains outside it by the sheer exercise of force. Unless this Ungeheuer gets addressed in candid and express terms; unless one stands up to President Bush giving away a right of return that has been recognized internationally for over fifty years, a right without which Dr. Busek could do little in the Balkans; unless we ensure that very basic right for the individual who has been forcibly expelled and continues to be prevented from returning by sheer coercion to his native land, we will not be relieved from Ungeheuer in the Middle East. Unless we consider seriously whether we can genuinely talk of Israel as a democracy, I am afraid that the war to end all wars will not even have started.
V. 25 Mai. Bruxelles. Note critique sur le ‘Rapport des Sages’ de la Commission Européenne
Note. Au printemps 2004, Belén Bernaldo de Quiros, la responsable extrêmement dynamique de l’Action Jean Monnet à la Commission Européenne, nous a proposé de commenter sur le Rapport des Sages réunis à l’initiative du président de la Commission Romano Prodi. Ce commentaire a été présenté à Bruxelles dans le cadre de la conférence sur ‘Les Acteurs du dialogue’ qui a suivi la publication du Rapport. La séance était présidée par Catherine Lalumière, alors vice-présidente du Parlement européen.
De ce Rapport des Sages nous devons retenir le mieux, critiquer le moins bien, et écarter le pire.
Le pire c’est le parlement euro-méditerranéen suggéré. Nos parlements, au sud et à l’est de la Méditerranée, sont des chiffes molles, le lieu privilégié de la corruption politique des gouvernements. En attendant des élections nationales libres, évitons les parlementaires arabes comme acteurs d’un dialogue utile.
Le moins bien, c’est le trémolo des dialogueurs actuels: il faut faire face à cette réalité amère, qui veut que ceux qui participent au dialogue ne sont importants que dans la mesure où ils sont capables d’aborder la masse des laissés pour compte traînant loin derrière par ignorance ou à dessein, et de les intégrer au dialogue.
Ce Rapport est bien intentionné, mais l’enjeu mérite plus d’intégrité intellectuelle, voire de cynisme. ‘Aimons-nous les uns les autres’ est un slogan qui appartient aux églises et aux religions, pas aux acteurs d’un dialogue critique. Il faut des dialogueurs de choc, et un style franc.
Le meilleur du Rapport est sa conscience d’un ‘retour du politique’, souligné en son début, qui l’articule sur une politique de proximité prônée par la Commission sur la base de la vision de son président, elle-même axée en puissance sur un principe constitutionnel (Art I-56 du Projet de Constitution, ‘l’UE et son environnement proche’). Oui donc à ces institutions culturelles qu’on veut établir avec fortes finances, oui à une recherche forte sur la Méditerranée (mais en sachant qu’on n’a pas inventé la poudre, cf le projet dirigé pendant près d’une décennie par Robert Ilbert), oui à un plan Marshall de la culture – apprentissage des langues, centres de recherches, diplômes communs, débouchés de travail libres --, mais dans un esprit critique qui évite le verbiage creux. Condition d’éviter l’écueil: établir ce ‘dialogue’ avec la Société Civile par-delà, et si nécessaire, contre les gouvernements autoritaires du Sud. Retour au politique donc, sans ruse de la raison et du style, par “le pouvoir des mots en histoire” (Lucien Febvre, Michelet et la Renaissance, Paris 2002, original 1942-43, 21 : “Définition, formules… Mais précisément, ce que voudrait être ce cours – c’est, en dernière analyse, un essai sur le pouvoir des mots en histoire.”) Il faut donc privilégier les acteurs internationaux d’un dialogue-rupture. La paix en Méditerranée c’est la victoire d’autres acteurs du dialogue que ceux qui au Sud et à l’Est y ont jusque là présidé. Investir dans la culture est perte de temps si l’objectif déclaré du dialogue, dialogue par définition non-violent, mais dialogue de rupture musclé et critique, n'affiche pas son objectif de changer les présidents, rois et autres dialogueurs en chef dans les gouvernements du Sud et de l’Est de la Méditerranée. Au Nord, ce changement est naturel et s’appelle alternance.
VI. 15 Juin 2004. Beyrouth. Dictating to dictators[7]
Note.
Deux semaines plus tard, le père John Donohue, directeur du Centre d’Etudes sur
le Monde Arabe Moderne (CEMAM) à l’USJ, organisait une table-ronde, avec les
collègues libanais Michael Young (op-ed rédacteur du Daily Star) et Farid
Khazen (professeur en sciences politiques à l’université américaine de Beyrouth)
pour voir plus clair dans la pléthore de propositions de réformes occidentales
et arabes fusant de toutes parts sur fond d’immobilisme politique et de violence
redoublée. Nous avons trouvé utile de présenter une critique des propositions
européennes dans le prolongement direct du texte de Bruxelles.
Voici donc ma contribution à
la Commission Europénne à Bruxelles. Sa dimension un peu abrupte face
à des dialogueurs tous azimuts a choqué, mais la crise qui nous enveloppe ne
permet plus de mettre les gants d'antan, et force une reconsidération franche
qui nous porte -- par nous j'entends démocrates arabes, européens et américains
--, à mettre la démocratie à l'ordre du jour.
La différence n'est pas de mise. Le discours de Bruxelles, de Washington et du Caire doit répondre à la vision humaniste que nous partageons. Il ya deux ans déjà, en mai 2002, à la demande d'Anna Lindh, nous avions transmis un texte pour la considération des ministres d'affaires étrangères européennes, qui insistait aussi sur les illusions de miser sur l'Amérique contre l'Europe, ou vice-versa. Ces fossés, illusoires ou réels, ne sont pas utiles, et nos dirigeants tenteront longtemps de jouer le jeu d'une vieille Europe contre une jeune Amérique ou vice-versa, comme l'a fait avec un succès mitigé Saddam Hussein. Ces contradictions ne sont pas utiles à des humanistes qui partagent des valeurs fondamentales aussi évidentes que sûres. Au sein même de tous ces pays d'Occident, la fracture est inhérente aux divers acteurs : dans l'insistance sur la démocratie au sein du pouvoir aux Etats-Unis, les deux factions, avec leurs contradictions secondaires, sont aujourd'hui prises dans une lutte sans merci. En Europe, la situation est plus complexe par le fait de la reproduction de cette fracture dans chacun des pays, et au sein des institutions européennes.
A ce niveau de l'examen des projets, il est plus facile de faire de la prospection prescriptive que de l'analyse. L'analyse se perd aisément entre textes et réalités, et rien n'est plus élastique que ‘la science politique’ autant que ‘les relations internationales’. Après trente ans d'analyse, et vingt ans d'écrits et de militance pour les droits de l'homme, nous couperons, encore une fois aujourd'hui, comme il y a deux semaines à Vienne, comme il y a une semaine à Bruxelles, comme la semaine prochaine au Caire, au plus court : on ne peut dicter aux dictateurs, des rois du Golfe, de Jordanie et du Maroc, aux dynasties absolues qu'aux militaires en uniforme présidentiel, qu'un seul message : l'alternance. La dictature est aujourd'hui un crime contre l’humanité, après avoir longtemps été un crime contre le peuple.
L'abandon du pouvoir peut avoir bien des
modalités, mais c'est là le point de départ. Nous n'avons pas attendu l'Europe
ou les USA pour le dire, leur dirigeants sont d'ailleurs très en retard, voyez
les grandes réceptions qui continuent de plus belle pour tel ou tel potentat de
la région, sans compter les criminels de guerre vieux monde comme Ariel Sharon
et Mu'ammar Qaddafi, dont le seul lieu moral et politique de réception est
derrière les barreaux de la prison. Il faudra penser ces modalités dans une
tentative continue d' affuter le débat, les demandes, et l'action. Alternance en
Egypte, en Tunisie et au Liban, c'est le respect d'une demande
constitutionnelle, échue en octobre 2004, de ne pas rester au pouvoir.
Alternance en Syrie, ou en Arabie Séoudite, c'est une demande d'un gouvernment
d'union nationale, dont le modèle, trop bref hélas, a été le Conseil de
Gouvernement irakien.
Le reste, c'est des détails utiles à l'alternance du pouvoir exécutif, mais des
détails. Le message n'est pas encore passé en Europe, ou aux Etats-Unis, à lire
toute cette littérature qui nous envahit. Pour le faire passer, les partenaires
humanistes des deux côtés de la Méditerranée doivent se retrouver sur ce même
message : alternance pacifique au sommet du pouvoir exécutif.
VII. 7 Juillet 2004. Le Caire. Lancement d’un mouvement démocratique arabe
Note. La pléthore de propositions de réformes s’est naturellement accompagnée d’une pléthore de rencontres. Ces rencontres s’accompagnaient de grandes déclarations qui portaient souvent le nom de la ville où elles avaient lieu, Déclarations de Beyrouth, de Sanaa, d’Alexandrie… Après avoir pris part à un certain nombre de ces rencontres, il était clair que leur utilité devenait, en l’absence de structures de maintien et de continuité, de plus en plus mineure. Nous avons tenté d’y remédier à l’occasion d’une rencontre au Caire en juillet grâce au soutien du Dr Shaha Riza, responsable de la Société Civile dans le département Moyen-Orient de la Banque Mondiale et penseur efficace de la démocratie dans le monde arabe, en aidant à l’établissement d’un noyau de démocrates arabes appelé ‘Forum pour la réforme démocratique dans les Etats arabes’. Les deux textes qui suivent reprennent, pour le premier la contribution à la rencontre du Caire sur la réforme et des grandes crises régionales. Le texte suivant est la première déclaration du groupe sur la crise au Darfour soudanais.
VII.1 Défis externes et priorité ignorée: “la libération de la Palestine et de l’Irak est-elle une condition pour réformer les Etats arabes ?”[8]
Nous avions conclu lors d’études précédentes que la priorité ignorée dans toute discussion sur l’ouverture démocratique était l’alternance présidentielle, car l’alternance de la personne responsable des plus hautres décisions dans tout Etat est la première condition de démocratie dans l’histoire humaine. Cela bien sûr n’empêche pas que l’alternance soit tout aussi nécessaire, de manière également non-violente et volontaire, pour le reste des postes politiques dans la société, notamment dans les assemblées législatives, au niveau des parlementaires comme au niveau de leurs présidents, ainsi qu’aux divers niveaux de ce qu’on appelle communément la société civile. Il n’est pas déplacé de rappeler à l’occasion de la nécessité de s’opposer à une tendance patente dans de nombreuses organisations civiles-- partis politiques ou institutions non-gouvernementales traitant de la chose publique --, à perpétuer les mandats de leurs dirigeants. Il faut veiller en permanence à la protection du principe d’alternance régulière et organisée à la tête de ces organisations.
Le principe d’alternance à tous les niveaux de la société, -- dans la lignée du document d’Alexandrie en son point 6 --, conforte les demandes par la société de l’appliquer à la tête du pouvoir exécutif, et suggère une nouvelle méthode qui s’y rapporte dans la question de Palestine et celle d’Irak, qui sont les deux crises centrales de notre histoire proche. Car si la question irakienne a rejoint, par l’intensité des souffrances qui ont affecté le peuple irakien sur une période de quatre décennies, la crise dominante dans la région arabe au 20ème siècle qui est celle de Palestine, il faut garder à l’esprit les autres crises persistantes dans le monde arabe, chacune spécifique dans sa sphère étatique, au Sahara occidental, en Algérie, au Soudan, en Somalie, sans compter le registre tragique du gouvernment libyen pendant tente-cinq ans, les guerres passées au Liban et au Yémen, la violence montante au coeur du royaume d’Arabie Séoudite...
La Palestine et l’Irak ne sont donc pas une exception. Si guerres et crises forment l’intitulé caractéristique de la région, nous devons nous baser sur l’expérience des drames ‘secondaires’ pour traiter des deux crises centrales, drames qui n’en sont pas différents quant à la méthode : nous ne retardons pas notre préoccupation pour la démocratie dans nos Etats à cause de l’un ou l’autre de ces drames secondaires, qu’il soit interne comme en Algérie ou en Arabie Séoudite, ou régional comme au Sahara occidental. Il faut donc suivre une méthode semblable pour les deux crises centrales, et nous ne voyons pas l’utilité de l’argument suivant lequel la démocratie devrait être retardée au sein de nos pays sous prétexte de Palestine, ainsi que tous nos gouvernements continuent à le prôner pour faire l’impasse sur la réforme interne, y ajoutant récemment la crise irakienne dans un même style de logique approximative et d’argumentation élastique.
Cette habitude de faire l’impasse sur le changement démocratique sous prétexte d’Irak ou de Palestine ne leurre pas, il me semble, les démocrates arabes sincères, et je ne pense pas qu’il soit un argument sérieux dans notre concertation. Mais les tragédies irakienne et palestinienne requièrent un traitement supplémentaire inspiré de la cohérence dans la vision démocratique de la région dans son ensemble, en ce que cette vision comprend pour faire face aux violations des droits de la personne et des droits collectifs propres à ces deux crises.
Nous devons accepter notre échec dans le traitement des deux crises centrales avec efficacité et conviction, car nous avons souvent ignoré les dimensions démocratiques qui s’y rattachent intrinsèquement. Dans la crise irakienne autant que dans la crise palestinienne, notre intérêt pour les droits de la personne et pour la démocratie est constamment resté secondaire par rapport à la thèse de ‘l’intérêt supérieur’ avancé par nos gouvernements pour nous détourner de l’exigence du changement interne qui leur est demandé.
Dans notre attitude face au tunnel irakien pendant près de quarante ans, il s’agissait de couvrir la violence du régime sous prétexte de son opposition à Israel et à l’impérialisme, même lorsque Saddam Hussein avait engagé son pays dans la guerre contre l’Iran puis dans la conquête du Koweit. Malgré les supplications répétées des opposants irakiens pour les aider dans leurs misères quotidiennes, notre monde arabe dans son ensemble – au niveau gouvernemental comme pour les élites et dans ‘la rue’--, a persisté dans son refus de prêter attention aux demandes de soutien contre la dictature à Baghdad. Nous avons avalisé l’argument de ‘l’intérêt supérieur’ dans la guerre contre l’Iran sous couvert d’Irak formant la “barrière est” du monde arabe, ainsi que l’argument suivant lequel la route de Jérusalem passe par le Koweit.
La réalité est que les choses n’ont pas bien changé après la libération de Baghdad de la dictature et son occupation par les forces américaines et britanniques. Le soutien de la résistance violente sous toutes ses formes passe toujours avant la défense de ce qui permettrait aux irakiens de gouverner sans violence. Cela ne veut pas dire qu’il est possible d’assoir la démocratie sans opposer l’occupation américaine sous ses formes les plus brutales, d’Abou Ghraib jusqu’à sa confiscation du pouvoir national. Mais toute action sérieuse pour aider à établir un Irak démocratique passe dans la rue arabe et chez ses dirigeants par une patronisation des Irakiens au gouvernement – là aussi sous prétexte de leur manque de légitimité, comme si les membres des gouvernements arabes pouvaient prétendre à plus de légitimité que des gens qui ont lutté des années contre la dictature, et qui tentent aujourd’hui de réussir la transition démocratique en diminuant les pressions extérieures et en organisant des élections nationales --, et par une satisfaction affichée à l’égard d’actions dont le moins que l’on puisse dire est qu’elles défient tout sens humain.
Quant à la question palestinienne, elle aussi est grevée de cet ‘intérêt supérieur’ aux droits de l’homme dans cette terre maudite depuis un siècle. Elle aussi bénéficierait d’un traitement différent que celui qui domine dans nos milieux, notamment pour pousser les dirigeants palestiniens à rendre compte de manière démocratique de leurs actions et infractions, d’abord dans l’alternance à la présidence, poste dominé exclusivement par le même personnage depuis près de quarante ans, ensuite dans l’activation de la responsabilité des dirigeants israéliens pour des crimes que le droit international qualifie de crimes contre l’humanité ; ou encore dans un traitement en profondeur de l’échec démocratique dans la nature même de l’Etat d’Israel.
Dans cette quête pour un avenir démocratique sur la terre de la Palestine historique, on ne peut que souligner l’opposition de l’établissement de deux Etats indépendants au principe de l’égalité des personnes organiquement liées à cette terre, Israéliens et Palestiniens, ainsi qu’au principe du retour des réfugiés à leur patrie et leur dédommagement pour une souffrance ininterrompue depuis près de soixante ans. Voilà pour le principe rétrospectif de responsabilisation, la responsabilité étant un pilier fondamental de la pratique démocratique, mais la méthode est la même dans le tracé prospectif du droit de la personne et de la collectivité dans un cadre qui respecte avant toute autre chose le principe de l’égalité et des libertés, en tête desquelles se trouve en Palestine historique la liberté de mouvement.
Il s’agit donc d’un traitement démocratique des deux questions centrales, en Irak et en Israel-Palestine, et la remise à l’ordre du jour de la méthode et des critères qu’il faut alors adopter. Le résultat le plus important de cette nouvelle approche est sans doute le renversement des équilibres difformes qui dominent, et la confrontation des difficultés dans le cadre oublié de la démocratie et des droits de l’homme. Parmi les conséquences de cette nouvelle approche se dégage la nécessité de constater que le système en vigueur en Israel n’est pas démocratiquer, et ne l’a jamais été suivant les critères universellement reconnus : là se trouve une bataille des consciences et des convictions à un niveau de persuasion que nous devons gagner par des arguments juridiques et connexes, qui sont au cœur d’un message qu’il faut porter au reste du monde pour convaincre ceux qui persistent à prétendre qu’Israel est un Etat démocratique, car cet argument est le fondement principal de la politique occidentale dans la région.
L’absence de démocratie en Israel-Palestine nous ramène à la priorité ignorée une génération durant dans l’approche suggérée comme fil conducteur d’analyses et de positions. Nos gouvernements – en tant qu’expressions de nos Etats, dans ce que l’Etat représente comme sujet de droit à travers son gouvernement dans le monde,- ne peuvent sérieusement offrir de contribution sérieuse à ces questions tant qu’ils ne respectent pas eux-mêmes le principe d’alternance non-violente au sommet ; ils ne seront pas écoutés, quelque soit leur indignation envers les violations par Israel du droit international (en quoi ils ont raison) ; et nul ne fera attention à leur demande de l’égalité en Palestine – par exemple dans le cas des dirigeants libyens leur appel grossier à un Etat nommé ‘Isratine’ ; tant que l’égalité entre les gens n’est pas respectée au sein de nos Etats dans des formes constitutionnelles effectives qui permettent le droit compétitif à tout citoyen de briguer la présidence par le biais d’élections libres. Cet obstacle est majeur parce qu’il nous ramène au coeur de notre priorité ignorée, priorité suivant laquelle seul le changement démocratique à la tête de nos sociétés permet une action efficace dans les deux crises centrales. Ce changement est en fait la condition de résolution durable de ces crises, dans leurs dimensions interne autant qu’internationale, avec une conscience claire et un argument décisif.
A la question donc de savoir “si la libération de la Palestine et de l’Irak est une condition pour réformer les Etats arabes” répond un argument complexe :
1. Il faut remettre à l’ordre du jour la priorité ignorée dans l’ensemble du monde arabe, à savoir l’alternance sur un mode non-violent et civilisé au sommet du pouvoir exécutif.
2. Il n’est pas de priorité démocratique qu’un pays puisse avancer comme argument contre un autre pays, ni de priorité d’une crise sur un pays, ou d’un pays sur une crise. Le mode démocratique est un et indivisible, et ne porte pas en soi de contradiction, interne ou régional, ou de contradiction provisoire ou partielle.
3. Il revient à ceux qui oeuvrent pour la réforme démocratique dans leur pays de dénoncer son retard historique sous prétexte ‘d’intérêt supérieur’, que ce soit dans la question de Palestine ou dans la crise irakienne, et d’examiner les moyens de corriger cette vision structurellement erronée.
4. Les deux crises centrales se distinguent par des violations accusées et continues des droits de la personne, et l’absence aaggravée d’un processus démocratique qui rendent plus urgent, sans avancer une crise contre l’autre, leur traitement humain et juridique :
4.1 Ce traitement se fera en Irak par le rejet de la violence et par l’habilitation du gouvernement dans ses efforts de transition démocratique, que ce soit dans la mise en œuvre de la responsabilité pour les crimes passés ou la réduction des interventions étrangères sous forme de colonialisme, d’occupation ou de domination. Il requiert la création d’instruments de soutien arabe, notamment auprès des organisations de la société civile qui souhaitent aider les irakiens à dépasser les scories de la dictature et les drames de l’occupation.
4.2 En Israel-Palestine, l’impératif démocratique impose un changement fondamental dans l’approche, notamment dans les conséquences politiques et pénales dérivant dans chacune des deux sociétés de la responsabilité de leurs dirigeants pour la profonde impasse historique qui prévaut au sein de chacune de ces deux sociétés, comme dans leurs relations entre elles. Il faut repenser une solution démocratique qui consacre le droit de tous, individuels et collectifs, sur la base de l’églalité et de la liberté.
Si donc cette question est juste, -- et nous pensons qu’elle est ne l’est pas, pour être mal posée dans son traitement préférentiel de telle tragédie sur telle autre,-- il faut y répondre en avançant la réforme démocratique dans l’expression d’alternance présidentielle dans le monde arabe comme condition de libération de la Palestine et de l’Irak, et pas le contraire.
VII.2 Forum for Democratic Reform in the Arab States: Declaration on Darfur
We, the undersigned, members of "the Forum for Democratic Reform in the Arab States", join our voices with those Arab and international personalities and institutions who denounced and continue to forcefully denounce the crime of ethnic cleansing in the region of Darfur in the Sudan. We are disturbed by the lack of open denunciation of these practices by Arab governments and by a large number of Arab parties, NGOs and opinion leaders, -- in contrast with the active involvement of regional and international organizations --, and demand that the wall of silence typical in current Arab political practice, official and non-official, be henceforth breached. Silence towards the atrocities in Darfur is no different from the blanket ignorance of the systemic racial violence of Saddam Hussein's rule towards the Kurds, and from American support to, and European tolerance for, the brutal Israeli actions against Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Territories.
We underline the fact that recent events in Darfur, in their origin and consequence, reveal yet again the degree to which a sectarian and dictatorial government can go in undermining the fate of a nation for the mere purpose of remaining in power, a practice honed by the Sudanese government over years: this why the emergence of a government elected democratically is an urgent necessity not merely for the protection of liberties, but also for the national survival of the country.
We call upon the Sudanese government to stop immediately the killings, rapes, destruction of homes and farms, expulsion of residents, directly or indirectly by way of its militias, as has been reported by respected international institutions, in a region which has long suffered from drought, desertification and poverty, and we request an Arab/international investigation into the Darfur atrocities, which will consolidate the principle of bringing to trial those responsible for such mas crimes.
22 July 2004
Forum for Democratic Reform in the Arab States:
Hafez Abu Sa'da, Mustafa Bouchachi, Ghanem Jawad, Buchra Belhaj Hamidam, Baheydin Hasan, Dalal Bizri, Isam Khafaji, Muhammad Rumaihi, Jihad Zein, Hussein 'AbdalRazeq, Kamal Labidi, Usama Ghazali Harb, Chibli Mallat, Nehad Nahhas, Farida Naqqash, Murad Allal, Abdelaziz Khamis
VIII. Septembre 2004. Beyrouth. Retour sur le drame fondateur en Palestine[9]
Note. L’étude présentée dans cette section peut sembler de prime abord incongrue. Traitant du drame fondateur en Palestine il y a maintenant plus d’un demi-siècle, elle ne s’inscrit pas naturellement dans le souffle urgent qui sous-tend les autres occasions choisies. Nous l’avons cependant incluse dans cette quête non-violente d’un Moyen-Orient meilleur car elle rappelle la souffrance continue que constituent certains événements marquants de l’histoire de la région, et qu’il serait futile d’évacuer sous prétexte d’ignorance ou d’obsolescence.
I have rarely encountered so much internal resistance to finish a landmark work such as the one discussed in this review. This is not a function of the length of the book. True, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, almost three times the size of the original work published in 1988, is a work of unique archival research. But one often regrets that good books are not longer, so captivating do they become as the argument unfolds. Nor did the difficulty in finishing it lie in the fact that it does not carry the full story. True, the author suggests that the narrative will remain incomplete so long as the archives of the Arab capitals are not open, but it is unlikely that they will yield much to undermine the central argument, though archives elsewhere would offer an additional dimension to the history of 1948 Palestinian refugees. In the case of Jordan, it was carried out in Avi Shlaim's seminal work, "Collusion Across the Jordan" (Oxford 1998), and for other Arab countries in a collection of good essays edited by Eugene Rogan - "The War for Palestine," Cambridge 2001, including a chapter by Benny Morris and a formidable concluding essay by the late Edward Said. But "The Birth" is self-sufficient, and the wealth of material, together with the scrupulous attachment to their literal yield, makes it a particularly sober book. So it is not a matter of comprehensiveness. Finally, my difficulty in finishing the book is not because of the author's style. True, the turn-of-phrase is turgid, so interrupted it is by the documentation and its harsh, war-zone military prose. But the material is so rich that style weighs little against the thoroughness and wealth of information.
For me, the laborious effort in reading "The Birth" had a deeper reason, and a simple one at that: nausea. As I picked it up time and again to plod through a few pages, or a chapter, I was taken repeatedly by nausea, that special mental type of nausea where there is nothing physical to give up; a historic-like nausea in reading about the Saint Barthelemy massacre, or Nazi episodes in World War II; a nausea, though, which is not Sartre's or Camus' mal de vivre; a nausea which often comes with a report by Amnesty International of a massive human rights violation, or when television stations expose a horror without being gory about it; a nausea that continues to take you over Darfur, Iraq or Central Africa; the nausea of continuous, massive crime. "The Birth" is an occasion for nausea over 600 pages of systematic, relentless, unpunished brutality. This, I think, is why it took me so long to complete it.
The central agent in this brutality is the Jewish community of Palestine. The central victims are the Palestinians. The story recounted by Morris is simply harrowing. He describes five waves of organized violence which afflicted, over a few months, a hapless population with a view to cleansing Palestine of non-Jews - cleaning, cleansing, purifying are recurring words in the archives cited. The first wave started soon after the UN Partition resolution on Nov. 29, 1947, which divided the country in two and gave half of the land to a population which constituted hardly a third of the people living on the Mandate Territory (600,000 Jews, 1,400,000 Arabs), numerically, and owned a mere 6 percent of the land - who could accept that, and more importantly, what constituency could claim to express such acceptance? The efforts at cleansing the land were redoubled in March, with the infamous Plan D where the survival of the Jewish community was premised on expelling all Arabs in the way or left behind, and continued through the declaration of Israeli independence on May 14, 1948.
Many cleansing "plans" and "operations" followed. The third wave took place over a period of 10 days in July, with an exacerbation of the frenzy of killings, rapes and expulsions - a typical statement from one of the soldiers under Moshe Dayan's command: "I kill everyone who belongs to the enemy camp; man, woman, old person, child," p.426; from Allon to Ben Gurion: "What shall we do with the Arabs?" Ben Gurion, with a dismissive, energetic gesture: "Expel them," p. 429.) Result of the 10 days in the third wave: 100,000 Arabs in exile. The fourth wave was carried out after another lull following a pointless intervention at the UN. It took place between October and November 1948, shortly after the Sept. 17, 1948, assassination of Count Bernadotte, who had premised the organisation's role on the return of Palestinian refugees. The result: "Together, operations Hiram and Yoav and their appendages precipitated the flight of roughly 200,000-230,000 Arabs," p.492.
While the Israelis adopted "by consensus" a refusal to accept any return, including a policy to open fire on any villager who tried to return to his house or to harvest land, a fifth wave took place through two subsequent nonwar years, from 1948 to 1950. The fifth wave was designed to clear the borders of Arabs with a depth of 5 kilometers to 10 kilometers. Another 40,000 refugees. My own work on the Syrian-Israeli borders, and that of Morris in two other books, shows how the cleansing pattern was consolidated through the 1950s: Any attempt to return is met with death; small villages near the borders, or in demilitarized zones, are emptied from their inhabitants. At the same time, all efforts to reduce the misery of the Palestinian population was reduced diplomatically to naught. Result: some 700,000 (Morris) to 780,000 (Said) Palestinians uprooted. Another 150,000 remained, and 20 percent of these were internal refugees who were also prevented from going back to their homes.
Morris does not always express this narrative in so many words, and one would be surprised, if the book were to be put to an easy word-processing test, to see how many "buts" and "howevers" it includes. Hardly a section, when a particular atrocity is broached, does not include all kinds of qualifiers. While nuances are important, persistent qualifiers against massive ethnic cleansing adds to the feeling of nausea.
Another word-processing exercise would yield more harrowing results: In addition to the killings, what emerges in months of ethnic cleansing is a persistent pattern of looting, and more disturbingly of rape. I could not keep track of the number of rapes documented in this book, but the sense of nausea is also overwhelming for their recurrence. Documentation of rape as a pattern appears as a particular addendum in the new edition of the book.
"The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem" has a complex history, and the debate it elicited has not abated. Up until the late 1980s, it was taken not so much as given, but as inviolable and sacred truth, that the soon-to-be-Israeli Yishuv settled on land that its Arab occupants had deserted, and had deserted because their superiors had told them to do so. The Zionist foundation myth went so far as to assert that the land in question had been signed away by King Faisal (then peripatetically looking for a crown, which he later found in Iraq) when he entered into an agreement with the Zionist leadership in 1919. With the publication of Morris' "Birth" in 1988, all that changed. He, and others who joined him, such as Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe and Tom Segev, blew a hole through Zionist historiographical defenses and gave birth to what was called the "Revisionist School" of Israeli history. They made a lot of enemies.
Why did the research by Morris constitute such a watershed? First, because it is serious: The archival work is simply staggering. Second, because it undermined a number of received notions, notions that had in fact become taboo to discuss: He pulled the rug from under the received notion that the emptying of Palestine was a simple exchange of populations - Arab Jews from other Arab countries against non-Jews from Palestine, the dating is clearly circumscribed to a phenomenon of cleansing that goes in one single direction: Palestinians. And he attacked the other central notion that Arab governments had called upon the Palestinians to leave. Morris shows that the alleged call by Arab governments for Palestinians to leave their homes was simply untrue, reinforcing the common sense of any decent person: Exile is a tragedy - no-one enters into it willingly. But mostly, Morris' book uncovered patterns of massacre, rape and looting.
Much had, of course, already be written about this, attempting to challenge the official early history of the Israeli state. But it was work produced by outsiders: Erskine Childers and Walid Khalidi, in the early 1960s, then Edward Said and Noam Chomsky in the 1970s. It wasn't kosher. Baruch Kimmerling's masterful "Zionism and Territory," published with some difficulty at the international relations' center in Berkeley in 1983, came closest to internal dissent, and is acknowledged by Morris in his preface, but the real explosion had to wait until the late 1980s.
The reason that Morris' "The Birth" is so important is because the entire subsequent history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict must be traced back to 1948. The moment the political problem in Palestine is set at that date, the solution cannot avoid the refugee problem. The debate may get complicated over time, and in 1967 becomes one dominated by "occupation" and more refugees, UN Security Council Resolution 242 and other resolutions, while lately it has been dominated by Security Council Resolutions 1397 (March 12, 2002) and 1515 (Nov. 19, 2003), which establish a Palestinian state by 2005, and the International Court of Justice resolution on the separation wall on July 9. This is all important but does not efface 1948. The point is: The history of Israel, built on the death of Palestine, starts in 1948, not in 1967 or 2000. And Morris gets this right. And he deserves immense praise for having had the courage to confront the truths of 1948 head-on. But if Morris received the acknowledgment of countless historians for having had the guts to not shy away from the details of 1948, he has also heaped on himself the opprobrium of countless others for the conclusions he draws from those details.
A great many countries are born in sin, in utter, revolting violence. No case is more glaring than the whole settlement in the USA and the rest of the Americas, a genocidal process if any. But in the United States, and differently in most of Latin America, a policy of reverse discrimination prevails, including the creation of tax havens transformed into million-dollar- revenue-generating casinos for the descendants of Indian tribes. The American-Indian argument put forward by Morris was easily picked up by Kimmerling: "Morris has abandoned his historian's mantle and donned the armor of a Jewish chauvinist who wants the Land of Israel completely cleansed from Arabs. Never has any secular public Jewish figure expressed these feelings so clearly and blatantly as Professor Morris did. And in order to be completely lucid on this point he drew an analogy between Israel and North America: 'Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.' I do not know today any American historian or social scientist that agrees that the annihilation of the indigenous population of the continent was a necessary condition for the American nation or the constitution of American democracy." There are no American Indian - "native American" - refugees in 2004.
In Israel, the original sin continues.
"History," said Benedetto Croce, "is always contemporary." There are degrees in the intensity inflicted by history on current affairs, and this intensity is man-made. The Holocaust is one example, the Palestinian 1948 Exodus another.
The vectors of memory take many shapes, some expressed in sheer violence - the self-immolation of scores of Palestinians mostly from the refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza is the crudest and most recent. But memory is the business of historians, and history, as the search of what happened - wie eigentlich gewesen, in the celebrated aphorism of the 19th century German historian Ranke - is search for truth. No truth, no history. Once the truth is laid out, as scientifically and accurately as possible, others take up the mantle as political leaders or lawyers in compensation mega-lawsuits. For events like the Holocaust and the 1948 Palestinian Exodus, the decisive word is the historians’.
This is why the works of Morris, as the leading archival historian of what happened in 1948, are central. The rest, that is the consequences, political, legal or otherwise, is not his business. This should help us focus on the book, rather than the author, who has mired himself in recent months in a bizarre comparison between current events and those of 1948, and appears to suggest that the only way out is to drive the rest of the Palestinians living in Palestine out of it. In an infamous Haaretz interview in January 2004, the expulsion of the massive majority of the indigenous inhabitants was vindicated crudely as the need "to break eggs in making an omelette." The sense of nausea must also obtain from the capability of a reasoning human being to go to such lengths as advocating a parallel between 1948 and the current civil war: as if by any standards today, or indeed then (as documented elsewhere in the confidence Ben Gurion had of his clear military superiority), the Jewish community was at risk of disappearance in its Palestine settlement. Ultimately, Morris' ratiocinations on the current situation are not important - this is familiar terrain: With all the war crimes uncovered, Morris insists that the struggle was one of survival. "No choice" is another harrowing sentence of Israel's persistent mythical history. No choice in 1948, in 1956, in 1967, in 1982? In each case, the Israeli leaders started a massive war. And in the latest instance, on Sept. 28, 2000, the official date for the start of the present war, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, backed by Ehud Barak, visited the Jerusalem esplanade. Protest followed, with over 200 people wounded and four killed in unarmed demonstrations over Sept. 28 and 29. They were all Palestinians.
With all this, and the ensuing nausea, I am prepared to give Morris-as-historian the benefit of the doubt. For once his conclusions, when scientifically sound, are offered, the judgment becomes one that belongs to all of us. His argument for expelling the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza today, in the same way they were expelled in 1948 are profoundly disappointing and degrading to him, but the book shows beyond doubt, not only the massiveness of the Yishuv-inflicted tragedy in Palestine, but the responsibility of the international community, including the Arab states, Europe and the US, in not preventing it, or, when it happened, not reversing it. By any standards, the absence of coercive outside intervention to protect a massively victimized population is the one we saw before World War II, during the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto, through to the tragedy unfolding in Darfur. With all its qualifiers, Morris' work leads to this inescapable conclusion: This belongs to a pattern of atrocities and mass crimes of a special, unique magnitude.
This requires a profoundly different view of the military intervention of the Arab states in May 1948. 1948 is not, as the dominant Israeli (and international, including Arab) view still has it, a matter of "life and death" for the Yishuv. Arab armies were simply impotent to prevent the mass flight of a people, or to reverse it. It was the neighbouring states’ moral duty to intervene, as it was for any other power which could do it at the time. The fact is that the world forsook its legal and moral duty to save the Palestinians from ethnic cleansing in 1948.
Simple, serene work is needed that puts this center stage 50 years hence. Palestine is one land for two people, and it is no longer possible to write a history of Israel that does not include the one struggle that defines it over the past century, and which is bound to define it for the next. The history of the struggle defines the history of the two communities, this is a central change historiographic change in eternally imbricated populations, and it has now picked up pace in several other excellent books, by Baruch Kimmerling "The Invention and Decline of Israeliness," California 2001 and, with Joel Migdal, "The Palestinian People: A History," new edition Cambridge, Massachussets, 2003, by Ilan Pappe, "A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples," Cambridge 2004, and, on the other side - or the same one, actually and potentially, in the works of Nur Maslaha, and to some extent Azmeh Beshara and Yezid Sayegh. One needs more sociology and history that insists on this common destiny, because the future of the two peoples will forever be defined in common.
Search for solutions to persistent problems is always complicated by all sorts of conditions. Such, in 1948, is relative to instances of resistance and killings of Jews by Palestinians, the lingering mystery of the small minority of the 100,000 Palestinians not displaced - here more work is to be done on the Christian and Druze factor, not examined closely enough by Morris - the passage of time and further displacement in 1967, and "occupation." Still, the norm is simple and universal: Refugees, irrespective of the reasons for their flight, are entitled to return to their homes. They should also be compensated, but this will depend on a number of factors, including criminal responsibility, and Morris has an interesting note about how most reports of large-scale killings remain closed in the archives. Right of return may be qualified, but it remains the point of departure of morality and law, and cannot be emptied. This is the moral and legal departing position, true for Kosovars as well as Darfur refugees, and is embodied in the case of Palestinians in "the right of return" UN General Assembly Resolution 194 in December 1948. This is still the official position of the EU, of the US (despite President George W. Bush's insinuations), and of organizations like Amnesty International.
Since "The Birth" is so contemporary, our concern is this: If such are the facts, that the displacement was systematic, took a logic toward the worse as the battles raged, and resulted in a conviction on the winning side that the return of the refugees is unacceptable, why is the Palestinian state on non-1948 territory being pursued, on the Palestinian side, as the solution? Realpolitik is easily argued: A two state solution is being pursued exactly because the winning side reckons the right of return is unacceptable. To this end, it has written away the 1948 ethnic cleansing. That is, until Morris, which makes silence - and distortion - no longer tenable.
But realpolitik can be argued in the opposite way, and a groundbreaking realpolitik argument for "one Palestine-Israel" was made in "Israel: The Alternative," an article by Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books in October 2003. Judt flows from Morris. If 1948 underlines the moment the problem became intractable, if the history of Palestine and Israel - which is the same thing - can only be seen as an integrated whole, partition is bound to leave that issue unsolved. There are solutions offered by extremists: massive expulsions, targeted assassinations, destruction of property and walls on the one hand, and the killing of civilian Jews in the hope the rest will flee on the other. These are winning the day, but will not solve the issue either way. They will just add more monstrosities to the grim picture. One day, leaders will search for a different way forward, built more on the equality of people than on the division of land. Compromises were sought in the case of Oslo, and at Camp David. Compromise is now portrayed in America as the withdrawal from Gaza. But this is simply not sufficient, because it ignores the fact that history did not start in 1967. Jews and non-Jews living together are the only way forward, and this is something that both sides need to realize, and that Palestinian leaders must stand for, as they did up till 1974. It might take a generation, but after Kimmerling and his school of current Israeli-Palestinian sociology - of whom Morris for that crucial period of birth-through-ethnic-cleansing in 1948 is a vital source - that logic is implacable. It matters little what Morris says about his "understanding" of why massive expulsion could be repeated, for that part of the argument is just nauseating, and will remain as unfortunate idiosyncrasy of yet another historian "mugged by reality."
IX. Septembre-Octobre 2004. Sydney, Beyrouth, New York. Alternance au sommet : autour de la Résolution 1559
Note. Alors que je me trouvais en Australie avec Sadreddine Sadr, le fils de l’Imam disparu lors de sa visite officielle en 1978 en Libye, pour lancer la ‘Campagne pour la verité et la responsabilité’ dans l’affaire Musa Sadr, les événements se sont précipités au Liban. Ralliant un soutien fort du gouvernement syrien, contre une résistance libanaise sans précédent autant par son ampleur que par son caractère non-violent, le président libanais Emile Lahoud a forcé un amendement constitutionnel pour prolonger son mandat. En réaction, et pour la première fois depuis leurs dissensions en Irak, les gouvernements américains et français ont joint leurs efforts à l’ONU pour faire passer une résolution condamnant l’amendement et requérant le départ des troupes étrangères. Le premier texte, rédigé à Sydney juste avant le passage de la Résolution 1559, annonçait l’imminence de la crise et son sérieux. Deux semaines plus tard, à New York, nous rencontrions Terje Roed Larsen, le responsable à l’ONU du rapport du Secrétaire-Général requis par la Résolution. Le second texte est un bref commentaire sur ce rapport.
IX.1 A last-minute plea to Bashar Assad[10]
This is the last day, it seems, to make a plea for reason from Syrian President Bashar Assad and Lebanese President Emile Lahoud. This comes from a person who has learnt to appreciate the difficulty of implementing the rule of law in the Middle East.
The only argument put forward to undermine the most important democratic Lebanese offering to the Arab world - the peaceful alternation of power - was one of expediency and, implicitly, of so-called Syrian "higher national interest." This argument is flawed: The draft UN resolution seeking to change Syrian behavior in Lebanon, as the text stood on Thursday, will put the Syrian and Lebanese regimes on a collision course with the international community - and with a Security Council whose Resolution 425 Beirut and Damascus used over a period of 22 years to demand the liberation of South Lebanon from Israeli occupation.
A new resolution may also provoke unprecedented damage to the future of Lebanese-Syrian relations. Those who wish to see the two countries violently split apart, as almost happened in the worst days of the Israeli invasion of 1982, will welcome the UN decision, which calls for a withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon and free and fair elections. While it is true that no decent leader in the world, including the Lebanese and Syrian presidents, would contest the principles of Lebanese sovereignty and democracy, with Syria put on notice to implement these forthwith we could enter a struggle that may tear the fabric of Lebanese society. This, in turn, may undermine any hope of gradual, nonviolent reform within Syria and increase the country's regional and international isolation. Given the "regime change" in Iraq last year, at least some Arab countries will stand openly against Syrian policy in Lebanon.
Even more gravely, the UN resolution may lead to a situation where Lebanon's religious communities enter into conflict one with the other. The deliberate effort to ignore the consensus built around Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Butros Sfeir - who has adhered to a position supporting both Lebanese sovereignty and democracy, but also cordial relations between Lebanon and Syria - will give way to extremism coming from the worst fringes of Lebanese society, and will be fueled by a logic of international intervention.
However, Lahoud and Assad should also know that the argument put forward by Lebanon's Foreign Ministry, namely that the outside world has no business interfering in Lebanese-Syrian affairs, is erroneous in its reading of international law. Syria's presence in Lebanon and Israel's invasion were always, by their very nature, subject to international scrutiny. When, as has happened in the past two weeks, coercion was so manifestly exercised by Damascus against the will of the Lebanese people and their leaders, it was not only the right, but also the duty, of the international community to intercede.
Worst, Syria's and Lebanon's discounting of the UN resolution would only increase outside pressure. This may eventually lead to calls for the UN's demands to be implemented though sanctions or, even, military means.
That is not necessary. Whatever is said officially in Lebanon in favor of an extended Lahoud mandate, whether by Foreign Minister Jean Obeid (who, everyone knows, is eager to be president), Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, Speaker Nabih Berri, Deputy Speaker Elie Firzli, or others, is simply not an expression of their personal convictions, or that of their followers. It is a grave error to spite the unique unanimity the Lebanese have developed in favor of changing their president, irrespective of the quality of the holder of the position. By ignoring this, however, Lahoud may see his name blackened when this period of Lebanon's history is eventually written about.
Decent Lebanese democrats, who wish to avoid more blood being shed in the Middle East, can help devise an alternative resolution if Lebanon's constitutional process is reinstated. Bashar Assad must change direction and persuade Lahoud, at this strategically key moment for Syria and Lebanon, to stop his unconstitutional, undemocratic bid for an extended mandate.