Windows On The Middle East
Newcastle Herald
Saturday November 8, 2003
IN his new book, The World from Islam, veteran Australian journalist George Negus wonders which is the biggest threat: terrorism, or ``The War on Terror".
``Wherever we are, in Australia or elsewhere, we're all learning to live with two global threats. One is the spectre of frontier-free terrorism whenever and wherever it occurs. The other is the war against terrorism, whenever and wherever it's waged. The third worry is that each of these threats, real or perceived, is as potentially devastating as the other. Muslims or non-Muslims, what will eventually be the greatest threat to our comfort, our freedom, our cultures and our ways of life - terrorism or the war against it?"
Interviewed on the subject last week Negus said he believed many ``distasteful things" were already occurring in the name of the American-sponsored ``war" and he feared that worse could come.
Having visited the Middle East many times over the past 20 years, Negus has some very strong views on the subject and he puts them forcefully in his book.
What he's calling for is another war - a war on ignorance - to be fought with words and with a genuine desire for peace instead of with guns and a blind desire for revenge.
``There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world and we in the West have to make a bigger effort to understand them. Mutual ignorance is the big problem."
He is heartened that many people are suddenly trying to find out more about Islam and about the roots of the trouble in the Middle East.
``I hesitate to say this, but maybe we needed something as atrocious as September 11 and something as highly questionable and controversial as the invasion of Iraq to make people want to know about the issues."
Negus is troubled by what he describes as ``an apocalyptic mentality" on the part of some politicians and commentators who seem to believe that only a great, final battle between Islam, Judaism and Christianity on the other can solve the problem.
``That's what we have to counter," he said.
``That's why I wrote the book, because somebody has to put the other case. And our greatest allies in that are the moderate Muslims - the 99.9 per cent of Muslims who detest terrorism and want to live peacefully with the rest of the world."
But Negus makes it clear in his book that he believes there can't be a solution that doesn't address the Palestinian issue.``Just by writing about this issue in the current climate you lay yourself open to accusations of being anti-semitic," he said, ruefully. In the book he writes of some Jews and Christians who contacted him when they heard what he was working on. ``Some were aggressively defensive of their religions, particularly Christianity. Others were aggressively offensive towards Islam."
But it his chapters on Palestine that are the most powerful in his book. He describes Gaza, for instance, in painful, eyewitness detail.
``People - and by design rather than by accident they're all Palestinian Muslims - don't live in Gaza, they survive. Situated at the southern end of the country's coastline, the narrow, cramped Gaza strip is hemmed in by either well-off Israeli settlers or heavily armed Israeli forces. The Palestinian authorities who run the place are often inept or corrupt, or both.
``. . . while it's better than the cardboard-box-on-the-footpath existence of Calcutta's ghastly slums, that's about it.
``Strip or city, Gaza is incontestably a poverty trap. By any standard used to evaluate that global human quandary, Gaza is at the wrong end of the rich-poor spectrum. There is no way you would live the way its inhabitants do unless you had no choice or had a profoundly political reason for doing so. The million and more Palestinians who scrounge an existence in this dry, dusty, dilapidated, often bombed-out place fall into one or other of those categories.
``It is the problem in a seething nutshell - not just the Middle East problem, but the much wider one between a quarter of the world's population and the other non-Muslim three-quarters.
``To be honest, it's so obvious that you don't really have to live in Gaza's daily nastiness to recognise the roots of Palestinian Muslim enmity and hatred. But it helps to have seen it, smelled it and experienced it even for a brief period of time.
``The Palestinians are not angry and vengeful for no reason. `Cause and effect' applies there too.
``Barricaded in as they are, there isn't a great deal they can do about this invidious situation. In the meantime, they ponder their plight. They fret. They fantasize about a better life. They question whether they even have a right to exist. They become angry. They become angrier and some do silly, irrational things - like blowing up themselves and a few innocent Israelis and thinking that will alter things for their fellow Palestinians, that it will take down the checkpoints, create jobs and even bring about a civilised future for them and their kids. As I say, it's irrational, but verging on the understandable."
Negus makes it clear he has no time for suicide bombers or for those who incite them for either profit or political motives.
But he passionately argues the point that both Israel and its supporters can and should do more to solve the problem. In fact, he believes it would not be anywhere near as hard to solve as many would have the world believe.
``So many people have come to depend on Palestine not being resolved," he said. ``A big sticking point has been Jerusalem." (The major issue is how to share a city that is sacred and important to all three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.)
``But now Israel is building a fence around the area it almost ensures the thing can't be fixed. They are creating a physical barrier to a mental, social and emotional problem. You can compare it to the futility of the suicide bombers. It's a mutual futility that defies all intelligence," he said.
Negus says the ``one-sided" behaviour of the United States towards the issue has created an obvious imbalance and a credibility problem for the superpower.
``When you have one country that is criticized when it fails to follow United Nations directives and another that isn't, then you have an imbalance. With that one-sidedness you can understand people getting pissed off," he said.
Negus also criticised the Howard Government in Australia for an alleged lack of policy on Palestine.
``We were even-handed once, but now we don't have a policy," he said.
``We follow the US, which itself is one-sided, so you can understand the Islamic world being sceptical of us. When I went back to the Middle East in December and April to do some final interviews for the book I found for the first time ever that people were discussing Australian politics. People in the Middle East could not understand why we had abandoned our even-handed policies.
Negus describes the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq as ``an unmitigated disaster".
``You're seeing a lot of families of servicepeople back in America screaming their tits off about the situation," he said, likening the growing public unease to that which developed around the Vietnam conflict.
``For the Americans to be now admitting they're in strife over there probably means it's a lot worse than it looks from here," he said.
SANDRA Lee's new book, Guzin Najim's The Promise: An Iraqi Mother's Desperate Flight to Freedom, is an entirely different work from Negus's, although the subject is related.
Negus, though harsh in his criticism of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, clearly feels the invasion of Iraq has not, on balance, been a good thing.
The subtext of Lee's book, however, seems to be that almost any price was worth paying to remove Saddam.
That, certainly, is the view of the book's subject, Guzin Najim.
Guzin, who now lives in Sydney after having won refugee status, writes in a note at the end of the book: ``When the brave Australian soldiers joined with those of the United States, Britain and Poland to fight to free my country from Saddam Hussein, I offered a prayer of thanks. I prayed they would succeed and return to their homes safely in the knowledge that they saved us from a tyrant."
Guzin's story offers some fascinating insights into life among Iraq's extremely wealthy elite in the years before Saddam and into the persecution some members of this elite endured when they managed, in one way or another, to upset the prickly and egotistical dictator.
There are no apologies from Guzin for her privileged early life. She was born into a wealthy and influential family and married into another one. When she and her husband Ra'ad wed in 1974 they honeymooned in London before moving into a large mansion in Baghdad filled with superb antiques.
An up-and-coming diplomat, Ra'ad and his wife and children enjoyed postings to England, Yemen, Afghanistan, Greece and Canada, were widely travelled and mixed with influential people.
Lee spends some valuable early chapters of her book explaining Iraqi antiquity and more recent political history. She describes the installation by Britain of a puppet king in 1921, the destruction of the monarchy by a group of army officers in 1958 and the subsequent long-running turmoil that led, ultimately, to Saddam Hussein and his brutal Ba'ath party seizing control and establishing a vicious dictatorship.
The book portrays Guzin and her family tiptoeing around the uncertainty that flowed from the dynamic and dangerous political situation, maintaining their valuable contacts and striving to preserve their wealth as unpredictable events occurred.
Such as the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, which cost some US$200billion and left as many as 500,000 dead on both sides.
By the early 1980s, Guzin reveals, she and her husband were contemplating running away from Iraq.
``The people in the Ba'ath party were very difficult to deal with and our point of view was different from theirs. We didn't like them. We believed in the politics of our families - we always supported the royal family," she says in the book.
But their careful inquiries suggested running away would not be easy and they had grave fears that family members might be killed as retribution if they did.
Guzin describes being in Baghdad during the first Gulf War, when American missiles rained on the city: ``We can't sleep at night - the bombing sometimes starts at 8pm and went all night till morning."
``We have a clock on the wall - tick, tick, tick - it was very quiet, we were just waiting - tick, tick, tick - and we all became very nervous from it. Then when the bombs hit, it was like disco colours going off in the sky from the explosions".
Lee writes: ``While never directly hit, Guzin's home was badly damaged from the fallout. Two missiles detonated at the end of Princess Street, shattering windows and putting baseline cracks in the walls.
``One night the bombing was so relentless that the children were screaming in terror and Guzin shepherded them to a corner in the garage and covered them with her body as the entire house shook around them."
If the war was bad, the aftermath was possibly worse, with Iraq lapsing into a state of crippling poverty and fear.
In 1995 Guzin's husband Ra'ad was taken away from his workplace by members of the Iraqi secret service. He was questioned and apparently made to drink poison before being returned to his family. Four days later he was dead.
Before he died, he begged Guzin to promise him that she would take their children away from Iraq. This is the promise for which the book is named.
Her husband's murder signalled the beginning of a period of traumatic house arrest for Guzin and her two children, Lina and Mohammed. During this period, in which they were not allowed to leave their home and had to rely on their servants for almost all their contact with the outside world, they were subjected to daily harrassment from secret service men, seeking ``papers" they believed Ra'ad must have left behind.
After years of terrifying and brutal harrassment, Guzin - still rich, despite all that had happened - managed by a combination of connections and bribery to escape from Iraq into Jordan.
Pursued, however, by the secret service, she applied for and was granted refugee status and came to Australia to live.
Despite the overthrow of Saddam's regime she has no plans to return to Iraq and wants to become an Australian citizen.
There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world and we in the West have to make a bigger effort to understand them.
© 2003 Newcastle Herald