Hakki Alacakaptan -----------------------------------
De Standaard, September 18, 1995 "They Are Coming From the East" The West harbored fundamentalists as allies
This week sees the publication of the book "They are coming from the east by Paul Vanden Bavière, foreign news editor of De Standaard. The author has followed developments in the Arab world for 25 years. Below is an excerpt published by De Standaard. "They Are Coming From the East", Uitgeverij Scoop, 130 pages, 595 francs, ISBN 90-5312-046-7
Like other religions, Islam was seen as an ally in the fight against the Soviet Union and communism. Conservatives and fundamentalists made the best partners of all because they shared the West's aversion to left-wing nationalism. They also felt threatened, because as a result of decolonization, socialism and nationalism had become the dominant ideologies in the fifties. In 1955, the Baghdad Pact was founded on the lines of NATO, an alliance that counted Islamic states (i.e. countries with a Muslim majority population) such as Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan among its members. This was a period when the United States attempted vainly to build an Islamic alliance against communism and nationalism from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Most Arab and Muslim states dragged their feet on this U.S. project as a result of one man's efforts: Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970). He was the symbol of nationalism and socialism in the world of developing Moslem nations. Together with the Yugoslav president Tito and the Indonesian leader Sukarno, who was overthrown in 1965 by pro-US military, he was a co-inspirer of the non-aligned movement, a movement of states that did not want to choose between Washington and Moscow. For the Americans, all this made him bogeyman number one in the Arab and Islamic world. His coup in 1952 against the Egyptian monarchy was followed in 1958 by an anti-monarchic military coup in Iraq. This pulled Iraq immediately out of the Baghdad Pact. At the same time, it ruined Iraq's chance to get Kuwait from the British, who had been seriously considering this option. Instead, Kuwait became an independent sheikdom in 1961. The "Nasserite disease" spread to the Arabian peninsula as republican officers overthrew Imam Mohammed al-Badr of North Yemen. The last of the Nasserite coups took place in 1979, when Colonel Moammar al-Gaddafi overthrew Idries Shah in Libya and General Jafaar al-Noumeyri grabbed power in Sudan.
In its efforts against Arab nationalism the West allied itself with the natural enemies of the Arabs, Turkey, Iran, and Israel, as well as with Arabic regimes threatened by this nationalist tide, such as the kingdoms of Morocco and Libya, the Lebanese Christians, and the Hashemite sovereigns of Jordan and Iraq. But its biggest allies were undoubtedly the petrodollar-rich conservative and fundamentalist monarchies of the Arabian peninsula.
Besides fighting communism and Arab nationalism, Washington had a third reason for joining forces with the regimes in the Arabian peninsula, undemocratic though they may be. They were important oil producers. In the beginning of the next century the United States will depend on imports for 70% of its oil needs. The plans to set up a US Persian Gulf fleet, officially to contain Iraq and Iran, was undoubtedly informed by this consideration.
The United States' association with conservative and fundamentalist forces in the Middle East helped it to prevent several reversals of fortune. Washington scored an important victory when the CIA managed to reinstate the exiled Shah of Iran and to have the nationalist prime minister Mossadegh jailed in 1953. In 1958, American forces intervened in Lebanon's first civil war and prevented a Nasserite coup. In the same year, British forces landed in Jordan to save the Hashemite house from the fate that befell Iraq's monarch. With American help, Saudi Arabia caused Nasser major headaches in his effort to shore up the republicans in the civil war that ensued after the 1962 military coup in North Yemen. Egypt was so exhausted by this adventure that it suffered a massive defeat in the Israeli invasion of 1967. This was a blow from which Arab nationalism never recovered, paving the road for an Islamic fundamentalist reaction throughout the Arab world. With the rise of the rich, fundamentalist oil-producing Arab states, The US won not only the Cold War, but also the war against Arab nationalism.
The West's fight against everything that smacked of nationalism and socialism was not waged purely at the governmental level. Contacts were made in all Islamic countries with conservative and fundamentalist groups in order to create opposition movements. The Muslim Brotherhood, in particular, enjoyed the close sympathy of the West as long as it was being pursued by Nasser or served as the main pillar of support for the 40-plus-year reign of Jordan's King Hussein.
In the 'fifties the US and British embassies in Baghdad approached the Shiite cleric in the Bedouin city of Najaf to collaborate against the influential group of communist sympathizers in the kingdom of Iraq. Barely 30 years earlier, the British had used poison gas against the Iraqi Shiites when they had rebelled against their new occupier after World War I. The British Minister of Colonies Winston Churchill, who had expressed deep outrage at the Germans' use of poison gas against British troops on the Westhoek front during the war, did not find such use objectionable against what were manifestly barbaric tribes.
In politics, it is accepted that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but this policy can also turn out to be disastrously shortsighted, as Israel discovered to its dismay. It turned a blind eye when the Muslim Brotherhood was organizing a local chapter in the occupied territories in 1967, considering it to be a religious, apolitical movement that could counterbalance the PLO. The Brotherhood, with considerable funding from oil-rich Arab states, was allowed to take root.
That the Brotherhood's Islamic nature gave it an anti-western character and that it had sent volunteers to Palestine from Syria and Egypt, among others, to fight in the 1948 war, were distant memories even for the Brotherhood itself. It saw Arafat's project for a secular Palestinian state where Moslems, Christians, and Jews would coexist as equals, as something to be prevented at all costs, to Israel's great delight.
The outbreak in 1987 of the Intifada, the Palestinian popular uprising, revived the suppressed nationalism of the Muslim Brotherhood. It formed its own Islamic resistance movement, the Hamas. The Izzeddin Kassem brigades, now infamous for their bloody attacks, became their armed wing. They were named after the Syrian sheik who was one of the first "martyrs" of the Palestinian uprising in 1936 against the Zionist colonizers and the British occupation forces in Palestine (...)
Despite the crystal-clear meaning of its name, Islamic Resistance, and the reference to an anti-Zionist resistance fighter, Hamas initially nevertheless received Israel's support. Anything was better than "terrorist" Arafat with whom Israel would "never" negotiate. Hamas' politics, which excluded peace with Israel and any territorial compromise, suited Jerusalem's purpose, as it undermined Arafat's policy of a negotiated peace. Thus was Hamas able to set up an organization that did in fact undermine Arafat but also proposed to fill its shoes in resisting the Israeli occupation when the PLO renounced armed resistance in the framework of the Middle East peace process in 1991. Israel found that it had been holding a viper in its breast and paid a bloody price.
Holy War
The American plan to create a fundamentalist movement in Afghanistan also turned into a real catastrophe. The result is that Moslems, who received battle and arms training from the CIA in camps in Pakistan, as well as fundamentalist indoctrination, spread out over the world to use their acquired skills in attacks and guerilla warfare. When the CIA began its training program in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion in 1979, there was no Islamic fundamentalist threat to speak of despite the Islamic revolution in Iran. Even the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II by the Turk Mehmet Ali Agca on May 13, 1981 on St. Peter's Square, did not call the world's attention to the possibility of such a threat. The attack was eagerly seized upon for a propaganda victory over Moscow, which was accused of wanting to liquidate the Polish Pope because he posed a threat for its Eastern European empire. As no suitable Russians were to be found in Rome who could be arrested, a "Bulgarian connection" was discovered. This led to an innocent employee of the Bulgarian national airline spending years in jail. After the fall of communism no one could find a single trace of the plot to kill the pope in either the Soviet or the Bulgarian archives (...)
Agca's links to the extreme-right-wing Grey Wolves organization in Turkey and his earlier activities as a Moslem extremist, which have now become evident, were all hushed up at the time. It became once more apparent that Moslem fundamentalists had put the Pope high on their death list when in January 1995 an assassination attempt was foiled in Manila, The Philippines. The man behind the attempt was Ahmad Ramzi Yousef who was also considered to have masterminded the World Trade Center bombing in New York (...)
In the thick of the Cold War, in 1979, Washington could not allow Soviet expansion in Afghanistan. The holy war against the godless Russians was successfully launched. The Philippine Interior Minister Rafael Alunan stated with some exaggeration that a total of four million Moslems were trained as warriors of Allah in Afghanistan. A more accurate number would be in the several hundred thousands. Most of these were Afghans and Pakistanis but volunteers came from the entire Islamic world, from Morocco to China. It is estimated that the Arab world produced up to 35.000 mujahedeen (fighters), among which 5.000 from Algeria and an equal number of Egyptians. They transited through Saudi Arabia, receiving a salary of 50.000 franks and handing over their passports as insurance, and left for Pakistan.
To recruit these fighters the CIA reactivated its old connections with fundamentalists of every color, such as the blind sheik Omar Abel-Rahman in Egypt, spiritual leader of Al-Jamaa al-Islamiyya (The Islamic Society), which since 1992 had been carrying out a fundamentalist guerilla war against the regime of President Hosni Mubarak. The sheikh was being sought by the police for having inspired the assassination of President Sadat in 1981 through a pronouncement that sanctioned the execution of apostates, but he was cleared of all charges at the murder trial. He procured a US visa through his CIA connections and escaped to New York. He was arrested there some months after the World Trade Center bombing on February 26, 1993, where six were killed and more than 1.000 wounded. He was not accused of being a perpetrator, a charge for which five other Moslems got life sentences, but as their inspirer and as instigator of other planned crimes such as blowing up the United Nations building and the Jersey Tunnel and assassinating President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. The affair has some shadowy aspects. Emad Salem, a former Egyptian army officer, was an FBI agent who infiltrated the sheik's circle of followers and is alleged to have acted as an agent provocateur. Ahmad Ajaj, a Palestinian defendant, was a MOSSAD agent, according to the Israeli weekly Kol Ha'ir. Finally, a disused "rebel conspiracy" law dating from the Civil War was dug up to bring the 56-year-old blind sheik to the bench. The former friendly agent had now become a bogeyman, illustrating how Muslim fundamentalism reverts from friend and ally to enemy.
Paul VANDEN BAVIERE