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Posted on 10/14/2001, 2:53:24 PM by jasowas

SCARS OF COLONIALISM ARE NOT QUICK TO FADE TENSIONS:

European empire building after World War I left a legacy of turmoil in the Islamic world that is still felt today.

WHEN THE GAUNT, bearded face of Osama bin Laden appeared on American television screens only minutes after the bombardment of Afghanistan began last Sunday, he justified the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against America with a reference to the history of his region.

"What America is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted," he said. "Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than 80 years of humiliation and disgrace its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated."

Only 80 years? Usually the Islamic complaint against the West goes back at least 1,000 years to the Crusaders. But it was 84 years ago almost to the day that Alfred Balfour, then British foreign secretary, declared a policy in which the most powerful empire of the day supported the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The declaration became a modern pillar of Zionism's claim to Palestine.

And precisely 80 years ago, the British and French victors of World War I were redrawing the map of the Middle East. Balfour's declaration was only one of the many wartime agreements that had to be taken into consideration, but it was still a steadfast part of British foreign policy, even though Balfour's successor despised it.

"The Balfour declaration, for good or ill, clearly did complicate matters," says David Fromkin, a professor at Boston University. The Jewish issue was just one many issues before the European powers completing their conquest of the world. The Middle East was the first piece of geography that Europe tried to colonize with the Crusades, but the last inhabited part of the world to come under its rule.

For the most part, the Europeans divided it up as they did Africa - to suit themselves, not the indigenous inhabitants. If anyone was in charge of the process, it was Winston Churchill. At his side was T. E. Lawrence, already a media star decades before David Lean's 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia.

Ultimately, England and France sliced up the Ottoman Empire that before the war stretched from its capital in Istanbul to the tip of the Red Sea, taking in what is now Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Yemen, and much of Iraq and Iran - then known as Mesopotamia and Persia.

It was the still-huge remnant of Muslim rule that once went from Spain across the south of central Europe and North Africa through the Middle East and all the way to India.

"Until the first World War, the Middle East, though subject to considerable foreign influence, was under mostly self-rule," Fromkin says. "After the war, the Allies moved in and cut up the region to suit themselves."

Fromkin presciently titled his definitive study of this process "A Peace to End All Peace," paraphrasing a line from British officer Archibald Wavell, a veteran of Mideast fighting, on the treaty that ended World War I, an ironic comment on Woodrow Wilson's statement that that was "A war to end all wars." The region has been soaked in blood ever since.

The Ottomans entered the war on the German side and lost. The victors took away their empire, creating political and geographical tensions that resonate to this day. Many now see the Ottoman days as part of a glorious past of Islamic domination.

"Bin Laden was talking about a post-Ottoman world, part of a worldview that sees things having gone wrong since Western powers came to dominate in the Middle East," says Rashid Khalidi of the University of Chicago. "It is also a worldview that casts the Ottoman era and the Islamic regimes that preceded it in a very ideal light." Ottoman power was opposed by Arabs who resented Turkish domination and allied with the British in World War I, some hoping to expand their own influence and territory. Arab nationalists who emerged after the war taught their subjects that the Ottomans were oppressive conquerors. Yet Madeline Zilfi of the University of Maryland, College Park says it is no mistake that Ottoman days are now looked back on as the last time Muslims were in charge of their own destiny in a large part of the world.

"I think people in the Middle East started going back and reading about it for themselves and appreciating what their ancestors had done," she says. "The Ottoman state, for all of its faults, retained the loyalty of the vast majority of its Muslim subjects ... it operated wholly as an Islamic state." Zilfi notes that even the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran invoked the Ottoman days, though the Ottoman Sunni Muslims were in constant conflict with the Persian Shiite Muslims of what is now Iran. She sees bin Laden's mention of it as part of his very effective act.

"If you listen to bin Laden, he comes across as something of a media maven who is able to pull out of a real grab bag what he thinks is going to play."

When Churchill, then in charge of British colonies, called together members of his government in Cairo in 1921, the rules of empire building had changed. No longer was the talk of bringing civilization to the uncivilized. By this time the United States had withdrawn from the negotiations as President Woodrow Wilson's idealistic schemes for a League of Nations that would respect the sovereignty of indigenous peoples was rejected by his own government. Russia was also out of the picture, struggling with its own revolution.

The spoils were left for Britain, which had done the most fighting in the region, and France, which already had a presence in the Arab world through its colonies in North Africa.

At Churchill's side was Lawrence, whose contribution to the military conquest of the region was minimal, but who wielded influence because Lowell Thomas, the American journalist, had taken a film show about Lawrence on the road and made the shy, eccentric Englishman a major star. Churchill leaned on Lawrence for his local knowledge.

The deal essentially went down like this: Britain strengthened its hold on Egypt, got Palestine and control over Iraq, the various Gulf states and what would become Jordan. France got Lebanon and Syria. "I tell my students just to look at the map," Khalidi says. "Look at all those straight lines. These borders are not natural borders."

Zilfi says the needs of the Arab population were rarely taken into account. "The great principle that was overlooked, and to a great extent is still overlooked, was the notion of the consent of the governed," she says. The Arabs made a stab at self-government, meeting in Damascus in 1920 and electing Feisal, who had fought with Lawrence, as head of a pan-Arab state. The French drove him out and asserted their own authority over Syria. As Fromkin tells the story, France then proclaimed part of Syria the colony of Great Lebanon, grouping together Maronite Christians - the proteges of the French - with their Muslim Druze rivals and a huge variety of Sunni and Shiite Muslims in the Bekaa Valley and elsewhere, an ethnic cauldron that continues to boil over to this day. Meanwhile, Britain lived up to its wartime commitments by making Feisal the king of Iraq and giving his brother Abdullah dominion over an area called Transjordan. Fromkin says this was to have been a temporary measure.

Bandits from Transjordan - essentially an unsettled region - were raiding Syria, and the British were worried the French would use this a pretext to move into Palestine. Abdullah was supposed to bring some order to the territory and then find another position. But he decided he liked ruling it and declared himself king. His Hashemite great-grandson is now on the throne of Jordan. Kuwait and the other states along the Persian Gulf got their lines on the map because of relationships with the British that dated back to the 19th century when they were ports for ships of the British East India trading company.

Fromkin says the Kurds were originally supposed to get a homeland, but they managed to make everyone mad at them and "fell between the cracks," ending up as part of Iraq and Turkey, where they continue their ethnic struggle to this day. One reason it is surprising that bin Laden brought this era up is that his own homeland - and the source of most of his wrath - Saudi Arabia was pretty much left alone.

Its ruler Ibn Saud drove his rivals - including the Hashemites - away after World War I ended, and the Allies steered clear of this ruler of the holiest sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina. Even during the Ottoman years, there was little outside governance of this part of Arabia.

In part that is because it was in the hands of descendents of the Wahhabis, a fierce fundamentalist Islamic sect that arose in the 18th century and imposed its will on the holy sites, destroying mosques that did not adhere to its beliefs. "They were considered lunatics by most Muslims at the outset," Khalidi says. Their reputation was well-known. In the 19th century, Zilfi says, Wahhabis came upon a group of Syrian pilgrims headed to Mecca and killed 10,000 to 20,000 of them for some violation of their strict rules, which did not allow the use of anything - such as beads - that did not exist at the time of the prophet Mohammed.

The Wahhabis, who intermarried with the Sauds over the generations, are considered the spiritual ancestors of bin Laden, whose major complaint is that the land of the holiest sites in Islam is being defiled by the presence of United States troops in Saudi Arabia, though the troops are purposely stationed far from Mecca and Medina. There is precedent for such rage. Fromkin says that during World War I, the Emir of Mecca refused to allow British troops to come to that city, though it was in danger of being overrun by an Ottoman force. "He would have rather lost the city than see non-Muslims there," Fromkin says, noting that the British used their navy to save the day.

Western powers would have probably continued to steer clear of the Saudis if their country did not contain 20 percent of the world's known oil reserves, a fact that has made the ruling family among the richest people in the world. With its troops in the region, the United States is now seen as the inheritor of the mantle of colonial governance of the British and French.

Fromkin says that bin Laden represents "the feeling that the Saudi family no longer follows the teachings that it mouths." "This is a family of thousands of people who impose a fierce rule in their own country where people are forced to live this severe religious life," Fromkin says. "But as soon as they get away, you can see them living completely differently in Nice or Monte Carlo."

Khalidi says the main legacy of this colonial period is a lack of liberal democracy throughout the region. The very idea was opposed by the British and French and often oppressed in the years since, he says, as stability was always chosen over democracy.

"The United States has stood for democracy in other parts of the world," he says. "In this part of the world, it never has." The result, he says, is that there is no way to determine if the people of Saudi Arabia are bothered by the presence of U.S. troops. Though, clearly, the Saudis are nervous about that presence and even the appearance of cooperation with the United States in the fight against bin Laden.

"In a country like France, with a democratic government, it was easy to find out," he says. "Under De Gaulle in the '60s, people made known their views that they did not want us there. We have no bases in France but they are still our ally.

"In Saudi Arabia, it is not possible to ascertain what people think," he says. The result, Khalidi says, is to give credence to people like bin Laden. "When liberal democracy is discredited, people are forced to look for other means," he says.

http://www.sunspot.net/news/opinion/oped/bal-pe.map14oct14.story?coll=bal%2Doped%2Dheadlines

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