16 December 2008
First person by Talal Nizameddin
Forgive me for not being too enthused about Jimmy Carter. I understand why he had a full-house audience when he came to speak at the American University of Beirut last Friday. He is a former US president and a celebrity of the most revered kind. I remember the TV images of his smiling face standing between a dark Muslim fellow and a white Jewish chap eagerly shaking hands. He is a historic figure, we are told, involved in the groundbreaking Camp David Peace Agreement between Egypt's President Anwar Sadat and Israel's Prime Minister Menachim Begin.
After 30 years of Egyptian-Israeli peace, I cannot help but look back and ask myself: What has the Camp David peace done for the Palestinians in Gaza or their compatriots scattered around the Middle East living as nameless nobodies? What has the Camp David Peace Agreement done for the Middle East region as a whole? Even more specifically, what has this peace done for the ordinary people of Egypt? The answer is a resounding triple nothing.
Where the peace agreement has succeeded is in relieving Israel of a major military headache and freed it from any obligation to resolving the Palestinian issue. Before Camp David the message to Israel was that if wanted to secure long term survival it needed to make peace with Arabs. After Camp David the pressure was placed on the Palestinians that they needed to run after Israel for peace to secure their long term survival. There are few historical interpretations that would dispute the fact that the Camp David Agreement signed under Carter's auspices made Israel stronger.
The problem is in the way we are deceived in the manner the term peace is used and abused by our media, politicians and scholars. It denotes the divide between the civilized Western culture and the dark-skinned barbarians living on the other side. Those who do not support peace, peace efforts and peace agreements, whatever they may be, are doomed by the enlightened West to belong to the savage world of ignorance and violence. According to these measures of standards George W. Bush betrayed the legacy of great civilized peacemakers such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton by making war and not peace. It was easy to castigate Bush because the count of dead American soldiers returning home in coffins became the gauge of his failure.
But the hypocritical West is not bothered by evaluating the failures of diplomacy if the dead, the impoverished, the hungry, the oppressed and the humiliated are other people because we can blame them for their pitiful state. Visitors to Egypt in recent years would have noted the horrible widespread poverty that is made worse by the population explosion. Egyptian government and politics is riddled with corruption on a grand scale as President Mubarak maneuvers to secure his son for the succession of his throne. Consequently, extremism and fanaticism is burning below the surface of society like the lava of a volcano waiting to explode.
Like water down the drain, the US has pumped billions of dollars into Egypt since signing the peace agreement. This is to enhance the sophisticated soft diplomacy that some of our enlightened Western thinkers love to promote and which became so fashionable in light of the coarse warmongering during the first term of the outgoing Bush administration. It may be cynicism that leads to the feeling that this soft diplomacy is the velvet glove wrapped around the iron fist of injustice.
Such skepticism should not be understood to be a stubborn rejectionist political stance toward the West, or genuine peace efforts. American media and to some extent some of their West European counterparts have often been heard, in reference to Arabs and Muslims, to ask the question: "Why do they hate us?" That is not a nave question to ask and the fact of the matter is that there is a lot of deep resentment toward the West that is not only found among unstable bearded militants but sometimes educated urban professionals. Perhaps the answer to that question lies in the fact that the question could be asked in reverse: "Why does the West hate Arabs and Muslims?"
No one better exemplifies this cultural logjam than French President Nicholas Sarkozy. Speaking on the occasion marking 60 years since the Declaration of Human Rights Sarkozy remarkably said that Lebanon was much better off since he involved himself and his team in local affairs. Which Lebanon exactly is Sarkozy talking about? The Lebanese still wake up every morning expecting an incident that would shatter their lives around them. The arrogant Sarkozy must know that one half of Lebanon's people are living in fear of better armed and more powerful foes. He also must know that there are many fathers, sons, mothers and daughters who are swallowing the bitter pill of realization that justice for their murdered loved ones is being traded off into the distant horizon. Sarkozy prides himself on being a political action man who does not fear getting his hands dirty to get things done. Yet in Lebanon and among a growing number of people in the Middle East it is the soiled hands of Sarkozy that are suffocating Lebanon's dream of freedom, independence, sovereignty and justice. But the wise man from France knows better than the immature natives in the eye of the storm.
A number of Western political studies centers believe that Syria can be pulled away from its Iranian alliance and brought into the Western sphere. It seems that there is so much enlightenment in the West that their leading thinkers have become blinded from seeing that the Syrian regime is too clever to sign a peace agreement with Israel and end up as another Egypt. The leadership in Damascus is too politically aware to isolate itself from the wider Arab and Muslim population and it certainly cannot see itself siding with Israel while the Palestinian people remain living in misery. That is unless of course the West knows this but tacitly expects the Syrian regime to crush its oppositionists with even greater severity in the name of peace.
Bush was considered a failure because he entered a military endeavor without a plan for peace. In other words after toppling Saddam Hussein, and the US Army did this successfully, the politicians did not envision an adequate scenario for a new Iraqi and regional landscape? Do we know where Sarkozy's diplomatic chicanery, in which he conveniently forged a deal with Syria for French oil giants Total, will take the prospect of liberty, justice and genuine peace in Lebanon and the wider Middle East?
This is a question we are not allowed to ask because like Carter, Sarkozy adopted the rhetoric of diplomacy and peace and abandoned the rhetoric of confrontation. The true result is that what is being achieved is the goal of maintaining and prolonging the status quo and not peace as is being touted. It means that the wise old men of the civilized world have also abandoned any hope that ordinary Lebanese, or Egyptians or Palestinians and other dark-skinned people deserve a dignified life. Now that America will have its first black president, it will be interesting to see if he will adopt a vision of a genuine peace that considers an end to the sense of injustice felt by the ordinary dark-skinned people of the Middle East.
Talal Nizameddin wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.
Copyright The Daily Star 2008.
