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发帖数: 3105 | 1 Lament for a Vanished Middle East
By Charles Gave
It is desperately saddening to see the terrified population of the Middle
East fleeing for refuge towards a Europe that has utterly forgotten what the
region looked like just a few decades ago. Yet nobody can hope to
understand the disaster that is unfolding if he knows nothing of the events
that shaped the modern Middle East.
Through an accident of family history, I was born in the Syrian city of
Aleppo 72 years ago, my father having been one of the few French army
officers stationed in Syria at the time – 12 out of 500 – to have sided
with the Free French forces of Charles de Gaulle, rather than with the Vichy
regime of Philippe Pétain.
How can I possibly describe the Syria of my birth? It was a marvel of
diversity, a true kaleidoscope of races and religions. All the great empires
of the past – from the Mesopotamians to the Ottomans – had passed through
, and all had left their traces. Clustered around the citadel of Aleppo, the
oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, one found the Armenian
quarter, next to the Jewish district, itself next to the Greek settlement.
All were surrounded by Muslim areas, variously inhabited by Druze, Kurds,
Alawites, Sunni, and Shia. And for the most part all these various peoples
lived peaceably together, doing business with each other in good faith.
Education was provided by the religious orders. Boys attended schools run by
the Jesuits, and the girls were taught by Christian nuns – regardless of
denomination.
Before the Conquest
Really “Most of the Christian sects had lived in the region since long
before the Moslem conquest, and felt a perfect moral right to live in what
was, after all, their home. In the Iraqi capital Baghdad, for example, half
the 18th century population was Christian. The Assyrians of Northern Iraq
claimed to have been converted to Christianity in the 1st century by Saint
Thomas. In the mid-20th century they were a strong community – a true
nation. Today there are almost none left. The survivors are in Sweden. In
Egypt, the minority Copts, descendants of the original Egyptian population,
held important positions in trade, the universities and in politics, with
more than a few appointed ministers.
Throughout the region, the Jews were absolutely essential to society and
commerce. Of course, Jews had lived in Iraq since the time of Nebuchadnezzar
II. But they had also made up much of the population of Alexandria in Egypt
ever since it was founded by Alexander the Great – it was in Alexandria
that the Old Testament was first translated from Hebrew to Greek. Elsewhere,
in all the great historic cities of the region – Cairo, Istanbul, Damascus
, Aleppo – Jewish communities made up the network through which different
peoples traded with each other.
Each community was an intrinsic part of the social system, and the result
was a diverse and resilient society. Of course, once in a while there were
problems, such as the Damascus pogroms at the end of the 19th century. But
the authorities had little patience with trouble-makers, and quickly
restored order.
Today, however, for the first time in history, there are no longer any Jews
on the southern shores of the Mediterranean and, outside Israel, few in the
Levant. Christians of all denominations have either disappeared, or are
under severe pressure, with the Egyptian Copts facing daily attacks. The old
social order has broken down completely. The question is: Why?
Family History
To answer, it will be necessary to highlight two historical missteps that
have been slowly destroying the Middle East since at least the middle of the
20th century. The first concerns my family history. My grandfather, Ernest
Schoeffler, was governor of the predominately Alawite province of Latakia
during the French mandate. The Alawites, who are concentrated in north
western Syria, are an offshoot of the Shia branch of Islam. Today, they
control the political power in Syria, or whatever is left of it.
Conscious of the extreme diversity of the local population, my grandfather
promised the Alawites that when the mandate ended they would have their own
independent, or at least autonomous, state. Indeed, he lobbied hard in Paris
for each Middle Eastern population to have its own “state” as far as
possible. He envisaged a Kurdish state, a Christian state centered on Beirut
, a Jewish state around Jerusalem, a Druze state, an Armenian state and so
on. The idea was that none of these mini-states would be powerful enough to
dominate the others. And if there was trouble, the regional policemen –
France, Britain, or even Turkey – would step in to re-establish order.
However, in 1936, the leftist Front Populaire was elected in France. My
grandfather was summoned to Paris by the Minister of the Colonies, who
informed him that thenceforth French policy would be to create a “Greater
Syria”. And of course this Greater Syria would be a secular state, because
the French left had one overriding obsession: to destroy religion. In
response, my grandfather did something few people do today: he stuck to his
principles and resigned.
Disastrous Policy
The French government proceeded with its plan to create a unitary state in
Syria, with centralized institutions for the army, police, civil
administration, justice, education, and health. The consequences of this
policy were all too foreseeable. The main goal of each and every different
community became to seize control of the apparatus of the state in order to
protect its own community. In Syria, by far the largest community, at 60% of
the population, was Sunni. To prevent the Sunnis, with their strength of
numbers, establishing total dominance over the country, the Alawites, with
the tacit approval of the other minority groups, established their own
control over the state, which they have ruled ever since.
I have no doubt at all that the refugees fleeing Syria today are minorities
terrified that the Alawites will lose power, which up until the Russian
intervention looked highly likely. They know full well that if the Alawites
were to fall, the Sunni reprisals would fall on all Syria’s minority
communities, not just on the Alawites.
The fundamental historical error here was the attempt by the French and the
British to create centralized states in the Middle East, states which both
the Quai d’Orsay and the Foreign Office believed would, with a little
diplomatic maneuvering, do their bidding. This was a total break with the
Ottoman tradition. The Turks generally took a hands-off approach to running
their empire, intervening only when someone did something especially silly.
When that happened, the Janissaries were quickly sent in, and the old order
promptly restored. By imposing centralized structures on communities with
little in common, the European powers ensured that every local lunatic would
attempt to take control of these structures and use them to impose their
vision on the other minorities, all too often through “ethnic purification
”. It was a recipe for chaos and civil war if ever there was one.
A Wahhabi Project
This brings me to the second historical misstep. For most of their history
the Sunnis of Syria and Egypt were peaceful, tolerant people, who lived in
tribal groups under the authority of elders who did a reasonable job of
maintaining order. This tradition crumbled in no time in the face of the pan
-Arab socialism propounded by Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser and
Syria’s Baath Party. As a result, the Sunnis were easy prey for the puritan
Wahhabism exported by Saudi Arabia in reaction to the rise of pan–Arab
Socialism. Wahhabism is by far the most retrograde of all the different
sects of Islam. When Ibn Saud created Saudi Arabia by federating the tribes
of the Nejd and Hijaz, he did so with help of the Wahhabi clergy. Now, for
the last 50 years, money has flowed in a torrent from Saudi Arabia to the
rest of the Middle East, Africa, South East Asia, and Europe to build
Wahhabi mosques: “schools” where the only things taught – and only to
boys – are the Koran and religious extremism.
The goal of this project is to “purify” the Middle East, returning the
region, and eventually the rest of the world, to an “original” form of
Islam unpolluted by non-Wahhabi religion, or indeed by any influences from
the last 1,400 years. Isis is nothing but a Wahhabi project.
Extraordinarily, this project has enjoyed the unstinting support of French
diplomacy under the guidance of Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, and now
François Hollande. I cannot imagine that this support for the most
regressive of Sunni religious movements is due to the fact that close to 10%
of the French electorate is Sunni, and that 90% of those vote for the left.
That may explain French policy under Hollande, but it cannot account for
the policy stance under Sarkozy and Chirac. There can only be two
explanations: sheer stupidity, or that French presidents, both of the right
and left, have been “captured” by France’s arms exporters.
At the end of this little historical survey – very much influenced by the
family history of the writer – the reader must ask what can be done to stop
the rot. The answer is simple. First, the West must clearly identify the
enemy, which is not the Muslim religion, but the Wahhabi sect. And it must
immediately break off all relationships with the states, such as Saudi
Arabia and Qatar, which are exporting this virulent form of extremism.
That means closing western embassies in those countries and expelling their
citizens from ours. Of course we will have to stop accepting donations from
these countries to finance our electoral campaigns, which require ever-
increasing amounts of money to win votes for candidates of ever-decreasing
legitimacy. That would be very bad news for our media industry, so it may
never happen. And needless to say, we must also stop selling these countries
warplanes, helicopters, missiles, radars, tanks and other weaponry. That
might be sad for our defense industries, but one does not prosper by selling
weapons to one’s enemies. As Lenin said: “The Capitalists will sell us
the rope with which we will hang them”. |
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