Minorities in the Arab Heartland

...WhenAnwar Sadat became president in 1970, following Nasser's death, he sought to counterbalance Nasserist and leftist challengers by encouraging Islamic movements...

...The Lebanese left, in the meantime, contributed to the undoing of the state by advocating a "Unity of Struggle"—the linkage of internal Lebanese problems to the Palestinian revolution...

...There was a brief but severe disruption in 1958...

...If ever a country was at a historical impasse, it is Iraq...

...Palestinian incursions from Lebanon into Israel resulted in Israeli retaliations...

...Hence they emphasized Lebanonism rather than Arabism, and pressed for the protections democracy afforded them...

...The rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the 1970s raised new, important questions about this "oneness...

...At first glance, it might seem that Israel, a state built by a long-time minority, might serve as a democratic example for the region...

...Arab Sunnis, with about 20 percent of Iraq's population, have also used the Iraqi Ba'ath to rule their country, repressing Shiites (who make up about 60 percent and are ethnic Arabs, unlike their Iranian co-religionists next door) and bru100 • DISSENT Minorities in the Arab Heartland tally subjugating the Kurds...

...and as Ba'ath Pan-Arabism was a vehicle of radical lower-middle-class revolt against older elites in the Arab world, so in Syria it served those dissatisfied with bourgeois (and, not incidently, Sunni) hegemony...

...The uprooting of the Palestinians wounded the Arab sense of self...

...q SUMMER • 1996 • 103...

...The opposite was the case...

...Egypt's Christians Cairo was traditionally Baghdad's rival for leadership of the Arab world...

...As a consequence, there was an immense flow of capital into Beirut, which became the Arab world's banking and investment center...

...A Copt was number two in its hierarchy for years...

...troops) in its wake...

...Iranian and Turkish Kurds have suffered considerable oppression—principally, though not entirely, cultural—yet it is hardly comparable to the violence perpetrated by Baghdad...

...The latter, they feared, ultimately implied union with Syria and the consequent creation of a Sunni majority...

...there was, moreover, little recognition that this would frighten non-Muslims...

...But Nasser turned Egypt upside down...

...But whereas the Christian role in Lebanon was long fortified by that community's economic and cultural success, this was not so with the Alawi in Syria...

...102 • DISSENT Minorities in the Arab Heartland The Arab-Israeli Conflict The Arab-Israeli conflict exacerbated the problems of minorities in several Arab lands...

...There have been bloody clashes between the two leading Kurdish factions...

...While Syria's Sunnis are a majority dominated by a minority, Iraqi Sunnis are a dominating minority...

...The Assembly had a six-to-five ratio of Christians to non-Christians (based on a 1932 census—the only one available...

...In the November 1995 elections only a few Copts ran and all lost...

...Pan-Arabism (especially Nasserism) was then stirring the Arab world...

...Thus ended a singular form of Mideast democracy, one that had lasted some three decades and contrasted sharply to the other Arab states, which were governed by either monarchical dynasties or dictatorships...

...The complicated stories of Israel and Lebanon reveal that calls for democracy, however important, are also insufficient...

...The latter, though mostly Sunni Muslim in religion, are a distinct ethnic/national community with their own language who compose about 20 percent of Iraq's inhabitants...

...Things stabilized, only to unravel a decade later...

...most Jews in the Arab world were gone by the mid1950s...

...Acollective hysteria increasingly possessed the Lebanese, and none of the country's communities was immune...

...Minority elites are scattering to Western capitals where some become integrated and others feel lost...

...Now, however, there are additional, perilous trends within: a rise of Copt migration to the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, and a move by some Copts in Egypt from their "national" church into "alien" (Catholic or Protestant) churches...

...Indeed, Copts were overrepresented in the Wafd which, from its 1919 challenge to British rule until Nasser's 1952 revolution, was the country's major political party...

...Egypt's political world has become increasingly Islamicized, with quotes from the Quran serving to proclaim what is good and what is bad...

...hence the need for military dictatorship...

...This might seem a shaky way to govern, but the aim was to accommodate a plethora of minorities in a land where no single group composed a majority...

...Initial optimism was dashed quickly, as Kurds were soon ensnared in their own internecine rivalries, undermining prospects for stability and their own safety from within...

...Needless to say, the Kurds viewed the whole arrangement with suspicion...

...And also the majorities...

...Many of their ablest sons found a way out through military careers, which were shunned by well-to-do urban Sunnis...

...So, in turn, Arab masses deeply mistrusted democracy and mistreated their own minorities, some of whom didn't conceal their sympathy for Israel (for example, Iraqi Kurds and Lebanese Christians worked with Israel on various occasions...

...The "wisdom" behind this was simple: if you cannot avenge yourself on Israel, strike a weaker substitute...

...For it to take hold, there needs to be a metamorphosis in political culture as well...

...What came, finally, was not "unity" but a war of fragmentation in which all camps—Christian, Muslim, Palestinian—splintered within and against each other...

...Lebanese politics was based on an unwritten "National Pact" fashioned when independence from France was achieved in 1943...

...The consequence, however, was competition for leadership rather than unity, and this intensified after Egypt was ostracized in the Arab world for its peace with Israel in 1978...

...Whatever Shia sympathy there was for the Ba'ath, it was gone by the 1970s, especially because Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, dependent on the army and preparing to attack Iran, liquidated most Shia in the party leadership and then deported two hundred thousand Iraqi Shia as "Iranian fifth columnists...

...The Kurds were in the north, the Arab Sunnis in the center, and the Arab Shiites in the south...

...al-Da 'awa ("The Call"), the Shia fundamentalist political organization, is financed by Teheran...

...Thus a common Pan-Arabist ideology reigned in Baghdad and Damascus...

...All the Christian sects (Maronite, Greek Orthodox, and so on) may have together composed a majority, but they are part of a minority in the Arab world...

...The Ba'ath responded with an "iron fist...

...Since Iraq's birth, Baghdad has tried to keep the Arab Shia majority at bay...

...They borrowed a majoritarian "Arabist" consciousness from the region around them and thought little of distinguishing what was "inside" (Lebanon itself) from what was "outside" (the Arab world as a whole...

...The country enjoyed relative stability and a coupling of political democracy with an active, prosperous private sector while nationalist radicalism, turmoil, and military coups engulfed Arabs elsewhere...

...Leading figures of Nasser's Egypt were mostly staunch Muslims, although an unknown and generally disdained Copt, Kamal Ramzi Stino, was given decorative cabinet portfolios...

...Arab-Kurdish friction finds a parallel in the Sunni-Shia feud in Iraq, although here the problem is religious rather than ethnic, and the sources are ancient...

...It is not surprising that Copts felt marginalized, all the more so given the regime's often xenophobic rhetoric on behalf of Arab and Islamic unity...

...A democratic virus, a transformation, a metamorphosis—it is this combination that will allow Mideast minorities to flourish...

...Ankara extends friendship to Iraqi Kurds partly to exploit them against SUMMER • 1996 • 101 Minorities in the Arab Heartland Turkey's Kurds...

...After each military defeat, fanatics among the Arabs imposed more restrictions on their own minorities...

...All this provided easy pretexts for reactionary ideas and behavior among the Arabs...

...Although the country had avoided extensive entanglements inArab-Israeli confrontations, now it could not escape them, SUMMER • 1996 • 99 Minorities in the Arab Heartland and Palestinian groups also aligned with various Lebanese communal factions...

...To curry favor with fundamentalists, he frustrated Coptic efforts to build new churches...

...Even though Baghdad acquiesced to Kurdish "autonomy" in 1970, it almost immediately violated it...

...Perhaps the worst moment was the March 1988 assault with chemical weapons on the Kurdish village of Halabja, resulting in a massive slaughter (in "retaliation" for Kurdish "collaboration" with Teheran...

...They were long an oppressed, poverty-stricken rural community...

...Sadat defeated his foes, but only by initiating a process that would eventually lead to murderous attacks by fundamentalists on Copts—and then on tourists, police, army recruits, and on Sadat himself...

...And while the Sunni-dominated Ba'ath spoke ambiguously of "secularism," Shia were still barred from the officer corps...

...The Shia tribal organization (which is similar to that of the Kurds), together with their"dissident faith," was seen by Sunnis as obstacles to the consolidation of a modern, centralized state...

...After all, the situation of the Copts has deteriorated since the Camp David accords...

...Moreover, enemies of Baghdad have been happy to use Iraqi dissidents for their own purposes...

...Expression of particularity by any community became a symptom of conspiracy and dissidence...

...Since 1963, the Alawi, who make up about 11 percent of the population but are entrenched in the military elite, have, through the Ba'ath party dictatorship, ruled over a vast Sunni majority...

...Israel shows how fanaticism can materialize within democracy and Lebanon shows that democracy in one country cannot bring salvation to the Mideast—or thrive in isolation...

...Ba'ath ideology is Pan-Arabist, so an interesting contrast emerges: whereas Maronites in Lebanon used "Lebanonism" to respond to their minority status in the Arab world, the Alawi turned to radical Arab nationalism and militancy toward Israel as responses to their minority status in Syria...

...Still, what's needed is the spread of a democratic virus throughout the Mideast...

...This represents a search for new lives and identities that may, in the long run, augur poorly for this minority's future...

...The traditional Iraqi elite is Sunni, and when political misunderstandings or class tensions arise, fanatics in its ranks still look back in anger to Shia's origins in a rebellion against Islam's mainstream in the seventh century...

...An array of regional factors intruded then, exacerbating Lebanon's weaknesses and upsetting a delicate religious and ethnic balance...

...The onslaught against the Kurds became increasingly appalling, especially during the Iraq-Iran war...

...This was coupled with the establishment of a Kurdish parliament and local government...

...Baghdad sought, forcefully, to impose unity throughout the state...

...This seems to have had little impact...

...At the same time Saddam's atrocities against Kurds and the Shia intensify loyalties among these two groups to everything except an Iraqi state...

...A breach opened between Lebanese society and its past constitutional and political norms...

...The Shia and the Kurds face the same dilemma: how to build an opposition against a totalitarian regime that tolerates only one notion of what Iraq should be...

...Since the early 1970s a new breed of educated and well-to-do Shia leaders had emerged, calling for reforms that would increase the power of their community, which is poor and concentrated in the south and the Bekaa Valley...

...One might even say it encouraged powerful false equations to take subconscious hold in much of the Arab world...

...Democracy, the West, and "minoritarianism"—these meant Israel, something that exists at Arab expense...

...Not surprisingly the Shia struggled (with considerable success) to retain independence for their educational institutions and were also skeptical of Pan-Arabism...

...He nationalized foreign interests and this especially affected the Copts, whose urban middle classes played prominent middleman roles...

...Historic Kurdistan comprises parts of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, all three of which have sought to stifle any efforts aimed at Kurdish independence or autonomy...

...economic well-being bolstered political compromise, although capitalism thrived concurrently with the entrenched power of a powerful landlord class...

...In the meantime, Coptic religious authorities sought to enhance their standing in the country by taking a radical position against the EgyptIsrael peace process (even though Boutrous Boutrous Ghali, a Copt, was then minister of state for foreign affairs, and played a central role in the negotiations...

...Urban Copts tended more toward cosmopolitanism and a loyalty to Egypt per se...

...7 Syria's east, Iraq has, since 1968, been governed also by a Ba'ath party...

...Add to this unhappy picture the disintegration of liberated Kurdistan in northern Iraq and the fear of Sunni Arabs that they will be victimized in a post-Ba'ath Iraq (thus they see Saddam as protector), and it doesn't bode well for those few brave souls who would like to see their country united but democratic and tolerant...

...In addition, the Christians (especially the Maronites), who dominated the army, advocated strong measures against the Palestinians They also showed little understanding of the Shia Muslim population, which was now beginning to assert itself...

...Nasser's Jacobin state sought uniformity and abolished the Christian quota in parliament on the grounds of the "oneness" of the "Arab people of Egypt...

...this is the antidote to intolerant majoritarianism, to viewing any self-expression by a minority as a form of dissidence...

...It rested on a confessional system in which it was understood that each major group had certain prerogatives...

...This was complicated by Damascus's policy of supporting Palestinian attacks from Lebanon into Israel while preventing them from Syria, which thereby escaped counter-strikes...

...Ensuing decades were marked by Kurdish revolts, often with foreign help...

...This leaves little room for the Copts, indeed for any non-Islamic minority...

...These pressures—from Nasserism to the growth of Islamic fundamentalism—led Copts to look to their church as their sole shelter...

...For example, the president was to be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, the foreign minister a Greek Orthodox, the Defense Minister a Druze, the speaker of the assembly a Shiite, and so on...

...After the Gulf War of 1991, Iraqi Kurdistan received international protection, preventing a return of Saddam's forces...

...Lebanon's Collapse Finally the country could not be isolated from regional developments...

...The Ba'ath Regimes: Syria and Iraq Syria itself is dominated by a minority...

...It is useful to begin a survey of them with Lebanon, if only because this small country was once perceived both as a refuge for minorities and as an alternative model for inter-communal relations in the region...

...A vast transformation is required, as much in the consciousness of the region's inhabitants as in its institutions...

...The Arab-Israeli conflict, and especially the reemergence of Palestinian nationalism after 1967, put Lebanon—which contains a sizable population of refugees from the 1948Arab-Israeli war— under great pressure...

...Looking across the Arab world, it is evident that many of its minorities are eroding, either physically or politically...

...And in the end, Damascus, which never really accepted Lebanon's amputation from Syria during the French mandate, asserted its hegemony in Lebanon through "peace-keepers...

...The Alawi are a dissident offshoot from Shiite Islam, which is itself a dissident offshoot from Islam's Sunni mainstream...

...One lesson from the last half century may well be that Arab-Israeli peace is a necessary condition for the wellbeing of Mideast minorities, but it isn't enough...

...Israel's accent on its Jewishness and its reduction to second-class status of the Palestinians who remained within its borders added insult to injury...

...in addition there was an array of other groups such as Turkomans, Yazidis, Christians, and Jews (the latter were mostly gone after 1950...

...and Syria seeks defecting Iraqi Ba'athists to use against Saddam...

...Coptic Christians, Egypt's chief minority, number three to four million according to official estimates, but the church estimates eight million and others speak of twelve million (out of a total Egyptian population of approximately sixty million...

...Even though Muslims and Christians enjoyed roughly equal social, economic, and political opportunities, at least theoretically, the Muslims grew fiercely antagonistic to the Lebanese state...

...The problem goes back at least to the 1920s, when Britain was given a League of Nations Mandate that stitched together three very different Ottoman provinces into contemporary Iraq...

...Finally, Israel's successive military victories and the post-1967 occupation turned it into an absolute evil in humiliated Arab eyes...

...The common denominator was the absence of a common denominator...

...One reason it worked as long as it did was that the middle classes were broader than in much of the Arab world...

...This pressure increased after 1970-1971 when, following the PLO's defeat in the Jordanian civil war, the principal concentration of Palestinian armed forces moved into the miserable refugee camps in Lebanon...

...they are at home with an Egyptianism that includes the land's pre-Islamic and Pharonic components, not Pan-Arabism...

...Some seventeen sects, comprising a population of 3.5 million, lived here together in relative though sometimes precarious accord until civil war devastated the "Lebanese way of life" in the mid-1970s...

...Lebanese Muslims, especially Sunnis, allied with the Palestinians, whose fighters became an "alternative army" to the government's "Christian army...

...Tensions between Copts and Muslims today are intense, but this should not obscure the fact that Copts once played a major role in Egyptian politics, beginning with the struggle for independence...

...Alawi officers became the voice of their community and the backbone of the Ba'ath...

...In Egypt we find an interesting, and strikingly different, story when it comes to minorities...

...For Baghdad's Pan-Arabism—whose early ideologists were, in the late 1920s, deeply influenced by German nationalism and romanticism— Kurds were an "anomaly...

...The Shia, in turn, recall that it was then that their great leader the ImamAli bin abi Taleb and his son al-Hussein were assassinated, leading to the Sunni-Shia split (whose cultural and political dimensions—and animosities—have reproduced over the centuries...

...The Copt educational system was integrated into the (generally more backward) state system and the church itself, with its proud traditions dating to the early Christian era, was subordinated to a narrow bureaucracy...

...Islam is Egypt's state religion and some 90 percent of the population is Sunni, although precise statistics are hard to come by...

...agitation, armaments, and money were supplied by Cairo and Damascus to their allies in Lebanon, and Christian-Muslim tensions in Lebanon exploded in civil strife that brought foreign intervention (U.S...