The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Nor were the names of prisoners included in their lists. When fifty-five-year-old Mohamed Abul Abbas died mysteriously in a U.S. prison camp in Iraq, nobody bothered to call his family. His American captors had given no indication to the International Red Cross that the man behind the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise liner in 1985 had been unwell; his wife, Reem, first heard that he was dead when she watched an Arab television news show. Yet in his last letter to his family, written just seven weeks earlier, the Palestinian militant wrote, “I am in good form and in good health,” adding that he hoped to be freed soon. So what happened to Mohamed Abul Abbas?

  Although he was a prominent colleague of Yassir Arafat for more than three decades, the world will for ever link his name with the Achille Lauro, when members of his small “Palestine Liberation Front” commandeered the vessel in the Mediterranean and, in a cruel killing that was to cause international outrage, shot dead an elderly Jewish American, Leon Klinghoffer. Yet within ten years the Israelis themselves would allow Abul Abbas, now a member of the Palestine National Council, to enter the occupied territories to participate in elections in the Gaza Strip. He even visited his old family home in Haifa in Israel. He supported Israeli–Palestinian peace agreements and favoured the annulment of the anti-Israeli articles in the PLO’s charter. Like so many of Arafat’s colleagues, he had undergone that mystical Middle East transformation from “super-terrorist” to peacenik.

  So why was he ever incarcerated in the harsh confines of America’s airport prison camp outside Baghdad? He was never charged with any crime, never offered a lawyer, never allowed direct contact with his wife and family, able to communicate with the outside world only via the Red Cross. It was they who finally telephoned his wife, Reem, in Beirut to confirm that her husband was dead.

  “I know nothing about this—nothing,” she wailed down the telephone to me. “How did he die? Why were we told nothing?” Mohamed Abul Abbas remains the most prominent prisoner to die in U.S. custody in Iraq and joined a growing list of unexplained deaths among the 15,000 Iraqis and Palestinians held by U.S. military forces. The occupation authorities in Iraq would say only that they were to hold a post-mortem on Abul Abbas’s remains. The Palestine Liberation Front had long had offices in Baghdad, along with Arafat’s PLO; the head of the PLF’s “political bureau,” Mohamed Sobhi, said that Mohamed Abul Abbas’s arrest by U.S. troops on 14 April the previous year had “no reason in law other than the need of the American soldiers at that time to look for false victories. We all knew that Abul Abbas had been to Palestine in 1995 and that the United States and Israel both allowed this. After that, he travelled to Palestinian areas and to other Arab states many times. We had told all this to the Americans here and demanded that he be released. In his last letter home, he said he hoped to be freed soon. So what happened to him?”

  Reem Abul Abbas, who has a child by her husband and two by an earlier marriage, said that he was still living in Baghdad when American troops entered the city on 9 April last year. “He was trying to keep away from them because many people—Iraqis and Palestinians—were being arrested, people who had done nothing. Then American troops raided our home. Mohamed wasn’t there but I saw it all on Fox Television. Would you believe I saw my own home on television and they had moved things around and draped a Palestinian flag over a mirror and then invited Fox Television to film it. On the evening of April 14th, Mohamed called me from a Thuraya satellite phone from a friend’s home. It was a big mistake. I think that’s how they tracked him down and found him. Not long afterwards, American soldiers came up the stairs.”

  The U.S. occupation authorities initially announced the capture of the “important terrorist Abul Abbas,” making no mention of his return to the occupied territories or that the Israelis themselves—who might have been more anxious than the Americans to see him in prison—had freely allowed the PLF leader to enter their territory as a peace negotiator. “First he was a ‘terrorist,’ ” his wife, Reem, said. “Then he was a man of peace. Then when the Americans arrested him, they made him a ‘terrorist’ again. What is this nonsense?” Within months, the same transformation was to be undergone by Yassir Arafat. Abul Abbas’s last letter to his family, dated 19 January and written in neat Arabic on one side of a sheet of Red Cross paper, gave no indication of his fate. Addressed to his brother Khaled in Holland, it is a prisoner’s familiar appeal for letters and news, of expressions of affection and hope. “Dear Khaled,” it begins, “. . . first I present my kisses to the head of your dear mother and I hope she’s ready to prepare the ‘dolma’ and the red chicken that I love, because my first lunch (in freedom) will be at her home. What is the news about my family and my dearest Issa? . . . Very special greetings to him, his wife and children and for your brothers and sisters and their families because they are my family, too, and my dearest ones . . . I hope you can send me a dishdash . . . I am in good form and in good health and I really need to know news of my family and friends. I have great hopes of being released soon—with God’s will.” Mohamed Abul Abbas appears to have had no premonition of his imminent death. But forty-nine days after he wrote his letter of hope, he was dead.

  Iraq allowed the world to forget Palestine, where Yassir Arafat was now living in the foetid, unwashed offices in which he had been held under effective house arrest by the Israeli army in Ramallah. The Israelis broke off all contact with him. So did the Americans. Palestinian suicide bombers blew themselves up across Israel until Ariel Sharon began building a vast wall across the West Bank, cutting off hundreds of Palestinian villages, carving a de facto annexation into the land which was supposed to be a Palestinian state. The wall, it should be said at once, could not be called a wall by most journalists—even though it was far longer than the old Berlin Wall. “Wall” has ugly connotations of ghettoes and apartheid. So it became a “security barrier” in The New York Times and on the BBC or else, even more fancifully, a “fence.” The International Court at The Hague—to which the broken Palestinian Authority sent its spokesmen—ruled the construction illegal. Israel ignored the ruling.210

  And it continued its policy of murdering its opponents. These “targeted killings”—another example of Israel’s semantic inventions which the BBC and others obediently adopted—went for the top, even though the innocent were inevitably killed in the same attacks. On 21 March 2004 an Israeli helicopter fired a missile at the elderly and crippled head of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, as he left a mosque in Gaza. It didn’t take much courage to murder a paraplegic in a wheelchair. Likewise, it took only a few moments to absorb the implications of the assassination. Yes, he enthusiastically endorsed suicide bombings—including the murder of Israeli children. Yes, if you live by the sword, you die by the sword, in a wheelchair or not. But something infinitely dangerous—another sinister precedent—was being set for our brave new world.

  Take the old man himself. From the start, the Israeli line was simple. Sheik Yassin was the “head of the snake”—to use the words of the Israeli ambassador to London—the head of Hamas, “one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist organisations.” But then came obfuscation from the world’s media. Yassin, the BBC World Service Television told us on the day of the murder, was originally freed by the Israelis in a “prisoner exchange.” It sounded like one of those familiar swaps— a Palestinian released in exchange for captured Israeli soldiers—and then, later the same day, the BBC told us that he had been freed “following a deal brokered by King Hussein.”

  Which was all very strange. He was a prisoner of the Israelis. This “head of the snake” was in an Israeli prison. And then—bingo—this supposed monster was let go because of a “deal.” So let’s remember what the “deal” was. Sheikh Yassin was set free by no less than that law-and-order right-wing Likudist Benjamin Netanyahu when he was prime minister of Israel. The now dead King Hussein hadn’t been a “broker” between two sides. Two Israeli Mossad secret agents had tried to murder a Hamas official in Amman, the capital of an Arab nation
which had a full peace agreement with Israel. They had injected the Hamas man with poison and the late King Hussein of Jordan called the U.S. president in fury and threatened to put the captured Mossad men on trial if he wasn’t given the antidote to the poison and if Yassin wasn’t released.

  Netanyahu immediately gave in. Yassin was freed and the Mossad lads went safely home to Israel. So the “head of the snake” was let loose by Israel itself, courtesy of the then Israeli prime minister—a chapter in the narrative of history which was conveniently forgotten when Yassin was killed. Which was all very odd. For if the elderly cleric really was worthy of state murder, why did Netanyahu let him go in the first place? Much more dangerous, however, were the implications. Yet another Arab—another leader, however vengeful and ruthless—had been assassinated. The Americans want to kill bin Laden. They want to kill Mullah Omar. They killed Saddam’s two sons. Just as they killed three al-Qaeda men in Yemen with a remotely piloted drone and rocket. The Israelis repeatedly threatened to murder Yassir Arafat. And shortly after Yassin’s death, the Israelis struck again, firing another missile at the new Hamas leader, Abdul-Aziz Rantissi. It was Rantissi who had been illegally deported to Lebanon with hundreds of other Palestinians more than a decade before, who had lived out the long months of heat and snow in the “Field of Flowers” close to the Israeli border. It was the same bearded Rantissi I had last interviewed in Gaza, who had told me then, “the preferred way of ending my life would be martyrdom.” I had looked out of the window then, searching for an Apache helicopter. Now it had come for him.

  No one had begun to work out the implications of all this. For years, there had been an unwritten rule in the cruel war of government versus guerrilla. You can kill the men on the street, the bomb-makers and gunmen. But the leadership on both sides—government ministers, spiritual leaders, possible future interlocuteurs valables as the French used to call them when in 1962 they discovered they had murdered most of the Algerian leadership—were allowed to survive.

  True, these rules were sometimes broken. The IRA tried to kill Mrs. Thatcher. They murdered her friend Airey Neave. Islamic Jihad murdered an Israeli minister in his hotel room. But these were exceptions. Now all was changed utterly. Anyone who advocated violence—even if palpably incapable of committing it—was now on a death list. So who could be surprised if the rules were broken by the other side?

  Is President Bush now safe? Or Tony Blair? Or their ambassadors and fellow ministers? How soon before “our” leaders are “fair game”? We will not say this. If—or when—our own political leaders are assassinated, shot down or blown up, we shall vilify the murderers and argue that a new stage in “terrorism” has been reached. We shall forget that we are now encouraging this all-out assassination spree. The Americans failed to condemn Sheikh Yassin’s assassination just as they did Rantissi’s. So we took another step down a sinister road.

  Then death came to the old man. Arafat had long shown the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease but in the filth of his smashed Ramallah compound his health was bound to deteriorate further. He had fallen into the habit, even in the company of diplomatic visitors, of pulling off his socks and rubbing the sores on his feet. He had difficulty concentrating, lost his appetite. To the same visitors, he would ramble on about his 1982 battle against the Israelis in besieged Beirut. Some of his entourage realised that his mind was wandering, that he was losing his grip on the real world, that he was dying. They were right. The Israelis at last allowed the desperately sick Arafat to leave his ruined headquarters and the French transported the elderly man to the Percy military hospital outside Paris. Here, on 11 November 2004, on the eighty-sixth anniversary of the end of the First World War—the war which had produced the Balfour Declaration and Britain’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the conflict which ultimately caused his people’s dispossession and exile—Yassir Arafat died.

  I watched his funeral in Cairo, a grim, short journey on a horse-drawn gun carriage down a boulevard in which not a single Egyptian or Palestinian civilian was allowed to walk, before a phalanx of Arab dictators, some with blood on their hands. They had been chatting beside a mosque when a far gate in a palace wall opened and six black horses clip-clopped onto the road with the coffin, still bearing the Palestinian flag which the French had laid over it. And for almost a minute, no one noticed the horses or the coffin. It was like a train that steamed unnoticed into a country station on a hot afternoon. Yet when the body arrived in Ramallah, the Palestinians gave Arafat a more familiar funeral, shrieking and wailing—tens of thousands of them—fighting to touch the coffin and shooting cascades of bullets into the air. Arafat would have enjoyed it, for it was as chaotic, as dramatic, as genuine and as frightening as his own flawed character. And of course, the world was happy. Now that Arafat had gone, there was hope. That was our reaction. While the Palestinians grieved, they were told that life would now improve.

  So, after democratic elections—something that Arafat never approved of—the colourless Mahmoud Abbas became president, a man whom the Americans and British thoroughly approved of. Abbas had written Palestinian documents for the Oslo accord, 600 pages in which he did not once use the word “occupation,” in which he referred only to the “redeployment” of the Israeli army rather than its withdrawal. Yet while he promised to end “terrorism”—Abbas’s ability to use America’s and Israel’s lexicon was among his many accomplishments—the land of Palestine slipped from under him. Hamas and Israel broke ceasefires and then President George W. Bush announced, after a meeting in the United States with Ariel Sharon, that new realities had to be faced, that while he wanted a democratic Palestinian state “side by side” with Israel, the larger Jewish settlements built illegally on Palestinian land would have to stay. He had said this first in April 2004, when Arafat was still alive. It amounted to the destruction of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which said that land could not be acquired by war. Ariel Sharon was prepared to close down the puny little settlements in Gaza—housing just 8,000 Israelis—and this was a “historic and courageous act.” And the result? Vast areas of the Palestinian West Bank would now become Israeli, courtesy of President Bush. Land that belonged to people other than Israelis could now be appropriated with America’s permission because it was “unrealistic” to accept otherwise. The Palestinians were appalled. This was just the sort of deceit and dishonesty that Osama bin Laden enjoyed talking about. Indeed, if George W. Bush thought he could define what was “unrealistic” in the Middle East, one was entitled to ask another question. Did he actually work for al-Qaeda?

  We all have lands that “God” or our fathers gave us. Didn’t Queen Mary Tudor of England die with “Calais” engraved on her heart? Doesn’t Spain have a legitimate right to the Netherlands? Or Sweden the right to Norway and Denmark? Or Britain the right to India? Didn’t the Muslims—and the Jews—have a right to fifteenth-century Andalusia? Every colonial power, including Israel, could put forward these preposterous demands. Every claim by Osama bin Laden, every statement that the United States represents Zionism and supports the theft of Arab lands, had now been proved true to millions of Arabs, even those who had no time for bin Laden. What better recruiting sergeant could bin Laden have than George W. Bush? Didn’t he realise what this meant for young American soldiers in Iraq? Or were Israelis more important than American lives in Mesopotamia?

  IN HIS LAST HOURS as U.S. proconsul in Baghdad in the summer of 2004, Paul Bremer decided to tighten up some of the laws that his occupation authority had placed across the land of Iraq. He drafted a new piece of legislation, forbidding Iraqi motorists to drive with only one hand on the wheel. Another document solemnly announced that it would henceforth be a crime for Iraqis to sound their car horns except in an emergency. That same day, while Bremer fretted about the standards of Iraqi driving, three American soldiers were torn apart by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, one of more than sixty attacks on U.S. forces over the same weekend.

  It would be difficult to find
a more preposterous—and distressing—symbol of Bremer’s failures, his hopeless inability to understand the nature of the debacle which he and his hopeless occupation authority had brought about. It was not that the old Coalition Provisional Authority—now transmogrified into a 3,000-strong U.S. embassy, the largest in the world—was out of touch. It didn’t even live on planet Earth. Bremer’s last starring moment came when he departed Baghdad on a U.S. military aircraft, two U.S.-paid mercenaries—rifles pointed menacingly at camera crews and walking backwards—protecting him until the cabin door closed. And Bremer, remember, was appointed to his job because he was an “anti-terrorist” expert.

  It was a terrible summer. If they could not always strike at the Americans, the insurgents would produce their Wal-Mart suicide bombers and destroy those they deemed collaborators. On 28 July, for example, hordes of impoverished would-be police recruits were massacred, up to a hundred of them in the Sunni city of Baquba, as they lined up unprotected along a boulevard in the hope of finding work. The bomber—identity, as usual, unknown—drove his Renault car into a mass of 600 unemployed young men looking for jobs in the police force, detonated his explosives and cut them to pieces. The bomb left a 7-foot hole in the road and wounded at least another 150 men and women, many of them shopping in a neighbouring market.

  It would be the last summer when it was still possible to move on the roads of Iraq with some hope of not being killed or kidnapped and decapitated. I took a boat out on the Tigris, where the boatman, a former Iraqi soldier called Saleh, who was wounded in the Iran–Iraq War, offered to take me to Basra. A bit far, I thought, a full week’s journey on Saleh’s barge. So I settled for a trip out of Baghdad, past Saddam’s old school and the wreckage of the defence ministry and the armies of squatters in the ruined apartment blocks. And as we drifted down the pea-green waters of the Tigris, I asked Saleh, who was a Shia, if there was any hope for the Middle East, for Iraq, for us. “Our Imam Ali said that a man is either our brother in religion or our brother in humanity and we believe this,” he said. “You must live with all men in perfect peace. You don’t need to fight him or kill him. You know something—Islam is a very easy religion, but some radicals make it difficult. We are against anyone who is killing or kidnapping foreigners. This is not the Muslim way.”