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Cairo: Facing Up To The Past

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  • Cairo: Facing Up To The Past

    FACING UP TO THE PAST

    Al-Ahram Weekly, Egypt
    Nov 1-7, 2006

    Gamil Mattar* seeks an end to the morally corrosive guilt that infects
    international relations

    "There have been plenty of words of condemnation of suicide bombers
    but few on the Israeli attacks on Gaza, in particular the attacks
    on civilian installations," MP Andrew Turner told a panel on the
    Palestinian question and the war against Lebanon.

    "Indeed, they [UK parliamentarians] blamed Hizbullah and the seizing
    of two soldiers for the conflict in Lebanon and for Israel's reaction
    to the seizing of those soldiers." In contrast, "Human Rights Watch
    condemns both sides pretty unequivocally for breaches of international
    law and of internationally recognised human rights. It condemns
    Hizbullah for taking hostages and using the soldiers as pawns to
    negotiate the release of prisoners held in Israel... and it condemns
    Israel over the lawlessness of its attacks on South Lebanon, for the
    extraordinarily high level of civilian casualties that followed."

    "Those were the tactics of the Nazis in 1939 and 1940 -- attacking
    fleeing civilians from the air," he added.

    Jews in the House of Commons and throughout Britain were deeply
    offended and demanded an apology from the MP for comparing Israel
    defending itself with the Nazi Holocaust. The head of the Conservative
    Party asked Turner to apologise, which he did. Israeli leaders, and
    Zionist leaders in Britain, went away satisfied; they had benefited
    considerably.

    The whole incident provided an opportunity to remind the British
    public, and the wider world, of the holocaust, which is a permanent
    feature of the agenda of Israeli leaders and Zionist lobbyists
    abroad. The incident also proved a gift to Israel and British Jews
    since, in asking a member of his party to apologise, the Conservative
    leader landed exactly where Israel and British Jews want him.

    Henceforth, whenever his party so much as thinks of criticising
    Israel they will be able to remind him that it has anti-Semites in
    its ranks. Finally, the attack against Turner worked to re- instill
    in European leaders the fear of the axe of being labeled anti-Semitic
    which hovers over the heads of anyone who dares criticise Israel or
    ignore the facts of German history as it is currently being related.

    In East and Southeast Asia, people are discussing the future of
    their relations with Japan under a new, strongly nationalistic prime
    minister who has shown no inclination to express regrets over his
    country's imperialist policies towards its neighbours. China is not
    alone in insisting that Japan apologise unequivocally for the crimes
    it committed in Manchuria and Nanjing during the Sino-Japanese war
    and World War II. Both Koreas, too, have demanded an apology for
    the Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula and the inhuman and
    degrading treatment meted out against its inhabitants by the occupation
    authorities. The Philippines has similarly demanded an apology from
    Japan for forcing Filipino women into sexually servicing Japanese
    soldiers during World War II.

    Japan has so far resisted offering an apology these countries find
    acceptable. Simultaneously, it remains aware that the issue could
    flare up whenever an Asian government finds it convenient to exploit
    it politically. A notable instance occurred last year when student
    demonstrations erupted -- or, more appropriately, were staged --
    against Japan, in the course of which demonstrators trashed and burned
    Japanese commercial establishments in several Chinese cities.

    Given China's current circumstances the phenomenon is likely to
    resurface with every new domestic crisis, particularly those fed by the
    growing income gap, the lack of freedom and growing popular demands.

    More recently France and Turkey came to loggerheads over a law passed
    by the French National Assembly criminalising denials of the Armenian
    Holocaust that took place in the final years of the Ottoman Empire.

    Ankara denies the genocide, insisting that Armenians died
    in the Russo-Turkish War after siding with the Russians. The
    Armenians, however, insist that hundreds of thousands of them were
    indiscriminately slaughtered at the hands of Turkish forces.

    As in eastern Asia contemporary politics have been instrumental in
    igniting this almost century-old fuse. In some Western nations, there
    are vested interests strongly opposed to Turkey's admission into the
    EU, and willing to go to great lengths to forestall this prospect. In
    addition in France, as in Germany, Netherlands, and elsewhere, there
    is growing xenophobia targeting Muslims in particular, and manifested,
    in part, in increasingly strident demands to restrict immigration
    and in overt hostility to immigrant communities.

    On the other side of the equation Turkey remains bent on
    Westernisation; a fundamental part of the secularism upon which the
    modern Turkish state is founded. Simultaneously, Islamist forces,
    as well as the increasingly active Kurdish Labour Party, have the
    Ataturkists bristling.

    It is difficult to imagine that Ankara will back down from its position
    or even offer a gesture that would make it seem as if it were backing
    down. Far more likely is that Turkey will respond in kind, accusing
    France of never having apologised for the atrocities it perpetrated
    in Algeria. The ploy is interesting in that it may well work. France
    is not in an enviable position on this issue, for while there is no
    hard documented and incontrovertible proof of an Armenian genocide
    for which the Turks should apologise, there is abundant evidence of
    French crimes in Algeria.

    In fact, if Turkey, Algeria or other countries of Africa and Asia felt
    like it, they could raise any number of problems over the humanitarian
    crimes committed by colonial powers, many of which are still within
    living memory of the peoples of colonised nations.

    Neither Chirac, nor any other leader of Belgium, Netherlands, Italy,
    the US or other western powers, is about to let his country be the
    first, or only, nation to apologise to peoples that until not so long
    ago -- sometimes well into the second half of the 20th century --
    were regarded as second class human beings.

    Islamist leaders have demanded an apology from the Catholic Pope for
    a notorious paragraph in a speech he delivered in Germany and they
    are still demanding apology after apology from Denmark. And were it
    not for the fear that infected Arab and Muslim political leaders in
    the wake of 11 September, they would probably also demand an apology
    from Berlusconi for the remarks he made while prime minister of Italy.

    In Central and South America indigenous peoples, and those of mixed
    descent, are demanding compensation for centuries of deprivation
    and displacement, and for the acts of genocide perpetrated against
    them since the Spanish conquest. Only recently has the voice of this
    large segment of the populace of the Americas had the opportunity
    to make itself heard. Leading minority figures affirm that their
    campaign is developing in the direction of an "organised uprising",
    the primary aim of which is to secure an apology from the governments
    of Spain and Portugal for the crimes and cruelties inflicted upon
    them by colonial authorities and, later, by the ethnically Spanish
    dominated governments that followed independence. I suspect the world
    will soon be hearing much more from the increasingly active movements
    representing more than 50 million indigenous Americans whose cultures
    and civilizations were shattered and, in some cases, wiped off the map.

    For more than two centuries, the non- Russian peoples of Central Asia
    and the Caucasus have resisted the attempts of Tsarist, Soviet and
    Putinist Russia to alter their identities and cultures by overwhelming
    their countries with large influxes of white Orthodox Christian
    Russians. Today these peoples, especially those of the northern
    Caucusus and of the recently independent nations of Ukraine, Georgia
    and the three Baltic states, have the right to demand an apology
    from Moscow, at the very least for the practices of the Stalinist
    period which ushered in nightmarish oppression, genocide and the mass
    transfer of peoples.

    Other peoples of whom we have never heard but who probably lived
    on the islands of the South Pacific and South Atlantic -- now
    populated primarily by people of European descent -- will have no
    such recourse. Having been vacated from their islands, for military
    purposes, as was the case with Diego Garcia, or having died out or
    been killed off, they have no progeny to press for an apology for
    the destruction of their cultures and identities.

    Our world will remain a dismal place in which people die in the
    thousands because of the refusal of wealthy nations, which formerly
    colonised these peoples' countries, to come forward with sufficient
    aid to rescue them from starvation. Congo, Sudan, Somalia and the
    countries of West Africa spring immediately to mind. At the same
    time other peoples -- in Palestine, Iraq and countries targeted by
    the project to create a New Middle East -- are dying culturally and
    spiritually because of blockades and foreign occupations forced on
    them by more powerful nations in the interest of their self-serving
    economic and political plans.

    Civilization must begin afresh. Perhaps what is needed to set it
    off on the right track is an international charter drawn up and
    signed by the representatives of the member nations of the UN, of the
    nations that have yet to attain independence and of the minorities in
    existing nations. Under this charter all signatories would submit a
    written declaration, to be appended to the charter and regarded as an
    integral part of it, in which they confess to and apologise for the
    injustices they perpetrated against other peoples and which, in turn,
    are officially accepted by the peoples in question.

    I doubt that those who are laying the groundwork for ever more
    horrendous tragedies, in the name of the clash of civilizations,
    the fight against terrorism, the war against the axis of evil and
    other such headings targeting Arab and Muslim peoples, will like this
    suggestion. But then neither will many others who are growing angrier
    and more embittered by the day under the pressures of oppression,
    economic strangleholds and flagrant injustices.

    The world is plummeting towards an appalling precipice and is being
    pushed ever more rapidly in that direction by extremists of all
    political and religious hues, by racists and bigots from all races
    and faiths. These are the type of people neither inclined to give
    apologies nor accept them. Would Israel and the Zionist movement accept
    an apology by Europeans and others for crimes perpetrated against the
    Jews? Would Israel apologise for the crimes it perpetrated against
    the Palestinians and the Arabs, who are still a party in this conflict?

    I believe that an official exchange of apologies and acceptances
    of apologies between Israel and other countries, and between other
    countries and other peoples would usher in a new era in international
    relations, in which rights are restored to the dispossessed, feelings
    of guilt fade and even the thirst for vengeance subsides.

    * The writer is director of the Arab Centre for Development and
    Futuristic Research.

    http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/818/op1 11.htm
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