by Robert Fisk
103 Recording these details, a Quaker magazine, reporting the work of an international Quaker working party on the Israeli–“Palestine” conflict, notes that “we have been disturbed to find that within Israel the option of ‘transfer’—that is, the ethnic cleansing of large numbers of Palestinians from the occupied territories, or even of Palestinian citizens from inside Israel itself—is now discussed openly by politicians, intellectuals, religious leaders and many other segments of society . . . we condemn this idea and any other proposal that fails to respect the equal worth of all of God’s children.”
104 If Hizballah helped to construct that gateway, then the Palestinians surely passed it on to the Iraqi insurgents of 2003 and 2004. Suicide bombers were to appear daily on the streets of the major cities of Iraq, a country which had hitherto had no record of self-annihilation in its various insurgencies against foreign rule. In Iraq, too, civilian lives lost their sanctity for both sides. If the bombers or their controllers felt any compassion for the hundreds of innocent men and women torn apart by their attacks on American and British convoys, police stations, barracks, hotels and occupation headquarters, they never expressed any sorrow. The Sunni resistance, in the words of one of its progenitors, was not “overly worried” about civilian casualties because the insurgents were prepared to “pay any price” to destroy the occupation. But revolutions in guerrilla warfare, however brutal, do not cross frontiers unless the people who wish to adopt them have a cause.
105 In Korea, a country with its own vault of sadness and betrayal, this feeling is translated as han. A writer on Korea has concluded that “it is likely the misfortune of all small countries to experience injustice at the hands of larger, more powerful neighbours. The Irish cultivate their version of han towards the English; Polish han is directed at the Russian and German neighbours that have long wrestled for control of the land that lay between them.”
106 Like the American and British armies, the Israelis often announce a “media” title for their operations which bears no relation to the actual military codename. Thus Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was officially called “Operation Peace for Galilee”—a propaganda legend that gullible journalists happily disseminated—while its real codename was “Operation Snowball.” Unlike “peace,” snowballs increase in size and power as they roll downhill.
107 Amnesty International’s statistics showed that between 27 February and June 2002, which included two major Israeli offensives and the reoccupation of the West Bank, nearly 500 Palestinians were killed, many during armed confrontations, although 16 per cent of the victims— more than 70—were children. From the first Israeli incursions in March until June 2002, more than 250 Israelis were killed, including 164 civilians of whom 32 were children. More than 8,000 Palestinians detained during this period, according to Amnesty, were “routinely subjected to ill-treatment” and 3,000 Palestinian homes were demolished.
108 Though not so formidable that the old Palestinian guerrilla hands who had endured the six weeks’ siege of Beirut in 1982 showed any admiration for them. “Why didn’t they fight?” one of them asked me in Lebanon a month later.
109 The Israelis said the Red Cross were allowed to enter but that they chose not to do so. The Red Cross said this was untrue. The Israelis then claimed they had a video of Red Cross officials declining the Israeli offer. But when we demanded to see this video, the Israeli authorities failed to produce it. Few journalists believed that it existed.
110 The Bethlehem siege provided another “first” when BBC Television World News, unable to cover the fighting round the church with its own cameras, repeatedly used Israeli army video footage—without announcing its provenance.
111 Again, to no avail. In January 2003, Yaron was in Washington, presenting Israel’s defence “needs” to justify a request for $4 billion in “special defence aid.”
112 And woe betide the diplomat or journalist who points this out. In 2001, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris accused the Swedish president of the European Union of “encouraging anti-Jewish violence.” For her to condemn Israel for “eliminating terrorists,” the centre wrote in a letter to the Swedish prime minister, “recalls the Allied argument during the Second World War, according to which bombing the railways leading to Auschwitz would encourage anti-Semitism among the Germans.” Sweden was making “a unilateral attack against the state of the survivors of the Holocaust.” And the Swedish EU president’s crime? She had dared to say that “the practice of eliminations constitutes an obstacle to peace and could provoke new violence.” She had not even called the Israeli murder units “death squads.” The Swedes did not apologise. But nor did they correct the misuse of historical facts. The principal Allied excuses for not bombing the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps included “technical difficulties,” the belief that the task should fall to the Soviet air force, and the contention that all means should be directed to the overthrow of Nazi Germany—which would be “the positive solution to this problem.” The latter reasons— inadequate and shameful in the light of history though they are—would not, of course, have made the Wiesenthal Centre’s note to Stockholm as unpleasant as it was clearly intended to be.
113 Variations on the Sharon theme were to emerge in the Israeli press. Although Israel furnished humanitarian aid to Kosovo Albanians—an act which Sharon said he supported—the fear that NATO’s campaign could be transposed to the Middle East persisted. “. . . there is something to the question raised by Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon about a future Israeli response to the possibility that Arabs in the Galilee will demand their own separatist framework,” Dan Margalit wrote. “ . . . One can assume that Israel would never behave like the Serbs and engage in massacres while forcibly evicting the population across the border. But what exactly is the level of evil that allows NATO to attack a sovereign state that is protecting its sovereignty?” As a journalist in Serbia at the time, I asked the same question about Serbia’s “sovereignty,” not least because NATO inserted a mischievous clause in its prewar peace proposals to Milošević that would force him to accept NATO troops across all of Serbia. But Margalit’s description of Serbia’s massacres “while forcibly evicting the population” was a word-perfect description of Israel’s own behaviour in 1948. There was also a Kinzer-like diminution of history in Margalit’s throwaway remark that “the massacres of Albanians undertaken by Slobodan Milosevic” were “somewhat reminiscent of the Turkish massacres of Armenians . . . terrible crimes but not a Holocaust.”
114 In a Palestinian document detailing the case of Mahmoud Freih, a seventeen-year-old who set a bomb for an Israeli tank in Gaza, the Israeli “translation” stated that he had been protected by the Palestinian Authority. In fact, the original Arabic document stated clearly that the Palestinian Authority had prevented the bombing of the tank by cutting the wire to the detonator before finally inducing Freih to join Arafat’s men.
115 Reality did not always win over propaganda. Amnesty’s 2002 report said that despite repeated claims to the contrary, “no judicial investigation is known to have been carried out into any of the killings of children by members of the Israeli Defence Force in the occupied territories, even in cases where Israeli government officials have stated publicly that investigations would be carried out.” Yet just over two years later, Michael Williams, an editor of The Independenton Sunday, felt able to “applaud the rigour with which it [Israel] applies the rule of law to the actions of its military . . .”
116 Theories abound on the origin of the term pied noir. In his history of the Algerian war of independence, Alistair Horne says the expression may have come from the black polished shoes worn by the French military, or from the metropolitan French idea that the African sun burned the feet of the colons black. More recently, an Algerian told me that the name was given to poor Spanish immigrants who lived in a quarter of the Moroccan capital of Rabat but who allegedly never washed their feet. When French citizens moved into the same area, they inherited the name and then brought it with them to Alge
ria.
117 The Harkis were the loyal Algerian auxiliaries of the French army who were to be betrayed by their masters in 1962—left behind to be butchered by their fellow countrymen or dumped in misery in the south of France.
118 No language protects politicians from flights of fancy about democracy and Islam. I leave it to readers to spot the non sequiturs in the following extracts from Boudiaf’s Algiers press conference on 16 February 1992—which he gave in Arabic and French—as well as his self-delusionary optimism and incomprehension of what drove so many Algerians to support the FIS. “The halting of the electoral process was made necessary in order to safeguard democracy,” he said. “The electoral process was stopped because it had come to represent a danger to Algeria. But the state of emergency had nothing to do with any restriction of fundamental freedoms . . . The situation is improving day by day. Algeria has become fed up with Fridays of terror and doubt . . . In Islam, tolerance, understanding and modesty can go together with democracy. A ‘closed’ Islam, which harks back to thirteen or fourteen centuries ago, cannot work with democracy. In Iran, is there or is there not democracy? I leave it to you to decide . . . people are not being hanged here. If we had followed the election principle, we would have had hanging in Algeria . . . Islam should not accept extremism. Mosques should be a place of preaching, of rest and moderation. Religion has its place, but democracy is a march towards a modern society which includes political pluralism.”
119 By 1995, the Algerian government would officially admit that 15,000 of its citizens had been murdered, that there had been 6,000 wounded and 2,143 acts of sabotage. In fact, the true figure of deaths was thought to be closer to 75,000.
120 Massu was only giving advice—the French government was supplying much more serious help to the Algerian military. Throughout much of 1994, France was sending helicopters, night-sight technology for aerial surveillance of mountain hide-outs, and other equipment, much of it aboard French military flights into Algiers airport. The son of a French government minister was said to run a private security company outside Paris which legally sold millions of francs’ worth of equipment to the Algerian security police. Just as the Americans sold helicopters to Saddam during the Iran–Iraq War on the grounds that they would be used for “civilian” purposes, so the French, ten years later, sold nine Ecureuil helicopters to Algeria for “civil” use—thus avoiding statutory investigation by the French inter-ministerial commission for the inspection of military exports (Cieemg); the machines, of course, had only to be fitted with rockets and night-sights to become front-line weapons. The French were also listening in to all Algerian military radio traffic from a former cargo vessel, sailing along the Algerian coastline and crewed by members of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE, the French secret service). Code-numbered A646 Berry, the white-painted vessel monitored Algerian forces in the Lakhdaria Mountains. Its work was augmented by radio intercepts from French air force planes, and intelligence officers inside the French embassy in Algiers. On Christmas Eve 1994, “Islamist” gunmen seized an Air France airliner at Algiers airport and, after executing three passengers, flew it to Marseille for refuelling, threatening to crash the aircraft into the Eiffel Tower. French troops stormed the plane at Marseille, killed the hijackers and rescued the passengers. The surprising thing about the hijack was not that it took place, but that the French national airline was still operating scheduled flights into a country where law and order had virtually disintegrated and where the very name of France had become a death sentence to those of its citizens who remained in Algeria. No one, of course, asked whether the gunmen seriously intended to fly into the Eiffel Tower—or whether their plan might in the future inspire other, more ambitious projects involving passenger airliners and tall buildings.
121 Ramadan in 1994 had been an especially doleful one for Algerian intellectuals. The dramatist Abdelkader Alloula, director of the Oran national theatre, was shot dead on his way to give a drama lecture. Four days later, Aziz Smati, a television producer, had been seriously wounded— he was now a paraplegic—and in September of the same year, gunmen shot dead Cheb Hasni, the best-known performer of rai music. Only a threat by the Kabyle people to “declare war on Islam” temporarily saved the life of their own kidnapped singer Lounes Matoub; he was released after fifteen days of captivity. Accusing intellectuals of “frivolity” and of insulting the Muslim religion, the armed goups had come to regard the artistic community—not without reason—as the forefront of the intellectual battle against an Islamic republic. One of Rachid Mimouni’s best-known books was Of Barbarity in General and Fundamentalism in Particular; the only surprising thing about his own death in February 1995 was that he died of natural causes. In Egypt, authors were also being targeted. The writer Farag Fhoda was murdered; the Gema’a Islamiya— the “Islamic Group”—knifed the Nobel prize–winning author Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo but failed to kill him. Karim Alrawi, the Egyptian writer who had done so much for the human rights movement in Cairo, explained that the “Islamic struggle” was specifically cultural in nature. “Because Islam is the religion of the Book, the Koran is the very word of God uttered in the Arabic language. Arabic is therefore both the language of everyday discourse and the Sacred Language . . . Yet to be a writer is to be a creator of texts and to claim for them a truth that does not necessarily partake of the sole truth of the one sacred text. For that reason, the target is writers, not merely their words.”
122 The British were not alone in sending Algerians back to their homeland for execution. The Belgian authorities deported a junior FIS leader, Ben Othman Bousria, to Algeria on 15 July 1996, on the fraudulent grounds that he would not be in danger if he was returned. After again trying to flee Algeria, he was arrested while trying to cross the Libyan border and died in police custody at Mostaganem. A police report said he had “committed suicide” by throwing himself out of a security forces office while awaiting trial.
123 In its highly mendacious “evidence,” the U.S. government quoted an article from The Independent—filed by me from Algiers on 8 March 1995—in which I wrote that photographs of murdered Algerian intellectuals were “enough to make you hate them [Islamists], despise them, deprive them of any human attribute, let alone human rights—which was, of course, the intention, provided you could forget how many people voted for the FIS in the elections which the government annulled.” The U.S. Justice Department failed to see the irony in the last line—nor the clear implication that the pictures had been published as part of an Algerian government propaganda campaign. The American documentation was also very sloppy. The titles of at least two Algerian newspapers were misspelled—and no reference made to the Algerian pouvoir’s insistence that the Algerian press must print news of “terrorism” according to the regime’s instructions. Many of the articles reported massacres that the FIS had condemned. After I wrote about the American administration’s misuse of my articles in The Independent, all reference to them mysteriously disappeared from the U.S. Justice Department’s list of “exhibits” against Haddam.
124 On 16 December 2004, an investigator approved by the Algerian government admitted that Algerian security force members were believed to have killed 5,200 civilians. “. . . individually, agents of the state carried out these illegal acts,” Farouk Ksentini said. “The war was terrible and there were excesses. But the state itself has not committed any crime.” Two weeks later, Ksentini told Reuters that “agents of the state” had “disappeared” 6,146 civilians.
125 Under OPEC rules, Kuwait maintained a production quota of 1.5 million barrels a day but had recently been producing 1.9 million barrels. The favoured OPEC price of $18 a barrel had been falling to $14 and Saddam Hussein was claiming that a fall of $1 per barrel would cost Iraq $1 billion a year in lost revenue—and that the collapse in world prices had so far cost Iraq $14 billion. No one disputed the overproduction. But the Iraqis alleged that Kuwait had been taking oil from Iraq’s southern fields by boring northwards alo
ng their mutual frontier—in other words, Kuwait was thieving the resources of the nation whose war machine saved it from Iran’s revolution.
126 Mahmoud was a political dissident as well as an AP reporter in Nasser’s Egypt. He would always wear a broad smile when he recalled the experience of being questioned by police torturers while suspended by his feet above a vat of lukewarm human faeces in Cairo’s Citadel prison.
127 This was fully understood by Western oil analysts whose carefully argued if essentially dull studies made the same point. “Most Arabs are convinced that the U.S. intervention in the region is not motivated by a desire to uphold international law,” Robert Mabro wrote in October 1990. “They would have dearly liked the U.S.A to play this role in the region, to play it in Palestine and in Lebanon as it is now claiming to do in Kuwait. But the U.S.A’s consistent failure over decades to uphold international law when Israel’s policies and actions are involved leaves very deep doubt in the Arab mind about the true motivations on this occasion.”
128 As usual when we needed visas, they were not forthcoming. If the Saudis wanted to invite journalists to an Arab conference, however, their embassies were ready to issue us with entry permits within hours. When we wished to avoid these tiresome events, we merely declined to fill in the question in the visa application which asked for our religion. The Saudis would then assume that we were Jewish—and, abiding by their own outrageous and racist policy, decline to issue us with a visa.
129 Many were the brave expatriates—and Kuwaitis—who escaped their Iraqi captors. George Woodberry, the British temporary Securicor operations director in Kuwait, had approached the border in his four-by-four only to find 50 Iraqi tanks lined up in front of him. “We couldn’t see them until we were on top of the dune and by then it was too late to turn round,” he told us. “So we drove on between them with tanks 40 yards on each side of us. We didn’t wave or say anything, we just kept driving. The tank crews were just standing there, watching us . . . ” Woodberry described occupied Kuwait where “the place has stopped working. The Iraqi soldiers bang on people’s doors demanding money and food. Every shop has been looted. The Palestinians looted as well as the Iraqis—Palestinians who had lived there for years. There are safes and strongboxes lying in the streets where people dragged them out to break them open. There’s not a shop or an office in the centre of the city which hasn’t been cleaned out by the looters.”
