Roula Khalaf
10 October 2001
Leader pushes the right buttons
ARABS are hungry for heroes. Ever since Gamal Abdel Nasser, the late Egyptian president, waved the flag of Arab nationalism in the 1960s and caught the imagination of Arabs, the Middle East has searched for a successor.
But as the region drifted into disillusionment and persistent underdevelopment in recent decades and Abdel-Nasser and other leaders were defeated in wars against Israel public opinion has turned in despair to unlikely figures.
Iraq's Saddam Hussein was, to some extent, able to portray himself as a panArab leader, but his ability to win the hearts and minds of Arabs was constrained by the monumental mistake of the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Most recently Osama bin Laden has emerged. Riding on the wave of a revival of political Islam in the region, he has used religion rather than pan-Arabism, and combined it with emotional Arab causes to bill himself as a hero.
On the day after the US launched its first cruise missiles against Afghanistan, Bin Laden appeared on Qatar's al-Jazeera television channel to call for a jihad, or holy war, vowing that the US would not find peace until Palestinians did. Many ordinary Arabs were impressed.
Having watched television pictures of Palestinians killed by Israeli troops over the past year and lamented the failure of Arab leaders to force the US to put pressure on Israel, they found Bin Laden's words convincing.
"I'm a liberal, not an Islamist, but I have to say that Bin Laden is a master of the game he said the truth," said a Saudi intellectual. "He pressed all the right buttons: talked about Palestine and the plight of Iraqi children living under UN sanctions."
Bin Laden touched Arabs' deepest emotions, but until recently he was not a widely known figure in the Middle East; many Arabs saw him for the first time on Sunday. Very few share his appetite for violence.
Nor Moreover, he does he not represent mainstream Islamist groups in the Arab world, many of whom denounced the US strikes against Afghanistan on Monday and but gave no indication that they would heed Bin Laden's call for an Islamic uprising against the US. or their own rulers.
Still, analysts in the Middle East said his appeals, and more importantly the scope of the US war on terrorism, had the potential to unsettle the region. Arab streets were largely calm on Monday, though demonstrations took place in Egypt and the Palestinian territories.
Fahmi Howeidi, an Egyptian Islamist analyst, predicted that Bin Laden's appeals would find more resonance in the Gulf because of people's deep attachment to religion. In North Africa too, he said, French colonisation had left anti-western feelings.
The message, however, would have less of an impact in countries such as Egypt and Syria - paradoxically, those more affected by the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Not surprisingly, governments that issued reactions to the US strikes said they backed the US campaign, but in an apparent appeal for US understanding they underlined the importance of sparing Afghan civilians and broadening the fight to address political issues.
"Jordan backs the international effort to combat terrorism," said the Amman government, adding, however, that "military force should not be the only means to fight terrorism ... It should include resolving issues and basic reasons that cause frustration, which means reaching a just solution to the Palestinian issue."
Given widespread resentment of the US, feelings that breed the suspicion that its antiterror campaign is aimed at controlling Muslim lands, mean a drawn-out war could be exploited by opposition groups to create domestic unrest.
Although Afghanistan is far from the Middle East and a nonArab country, "if the war goes on for a long time and al-Jazeera shows more people being killed, there could be a reaction on the streets", said George Semaan, the editor of Al-Hayat, the London's -based panArab daily. A key element in judging the effect on the Arab world, he added, was where the US took the next phase of its war.
"Say the Taliban falls, does the US then go on to hit Iraq and other countries?"
Arab governments have said they received assurances from the US that the war on terrorism would not lead to attacks on any Arab country. But this may change as the US investigation proceeds.
Leaders also will have to distance themselves from the US if Washington decides to eliminate groups it accuses of terrorism but which Arabs consider legitimate resistance movements against Israeli occupation. Ghazi Aridi, Lebanon's information minister, stressed on Sunday that the US could not define terrorism on its own. They cannot impose things on people and lead them into this war," he said.
In recent weeks Arab officials have pleaded with the US for caution. Their argument has been that the more forceful the US military campaign and the higher the civilian casualties, the more Mr bin Laden will advance his aim of pitting the Muslim world against the west and weakening regimes.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2001 Business Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
