The Tribal Trap

...The Malays were only too glad to help the British make trouble for an ethnic group for which they had little affection in the first place...

...In the tortuous politics of the Middle East, alliances with the superpowers are often less than they seem...

...those actually involved saw it in very different terms...

...The officers who had brought the news that Washington didn't want to hear were cashiered...

...Then in 1974 rebels in neighboring Ethiopia overthrew Emperor Haile Salassie...

...We once saw Somalia as a Soviet client and a threat to the stability of the Horn of Africa...

...A perfect example is the contention between Somalia and Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa...

...The peaceful transition from white-dominated Rhodesia to black-ruled Zimbabwe took place through democratic procedures, with British and American support...

...There was even greater alarm when the ruling Dergue faction in neighboring Ethiopia also aligned itself with the Soviet bloc...

...They also comprised a good portion of the communists...

...His name was Dean Rusk...

...to denounce Nicaragua's Sandinista government for its brutal treatment of the Miskito Indians...

...The conflict between Ethiopia and Somalia in Northeast Africa is a case in point...

...You can't write it because the editors in New York can't understand it...

...These rivalries were not lost upon Iran's Middle East rivals, however...

...There was great alarm in this country when, in 1969, Somali leader Mohammed Siad Barre declared his country a "People's Democracy" and formed an alliance with the Soviet Union to`that end...

...Jesse Leaf, a CIA analyst on Iran from 1968 to 1973, wrote a report for his superiors warning of the Shah's megalomania...

...At one time, only two of the 45 employees at the U.S...

...We can play such a peacekeeping role, however, only if we remain an impartial third party whom both sides can trust...

...Most immigrants came here voluntarily...

...We should pause before calling events in Lebanon a Soviet victory...

...And what about the Soviets, and their Syrian allies...

...By continually turning such local disputes into East-West confrontations, we invite defeats of our own making...

...If it happened here, why not elsewhere...

...The three-year civil war never became a factor in the East-West conflict...

...and Western interests, if for no other reason than its substantial oil resources...

...On occasion, we have seized upon such divisions in a completely cynical manner...

...The dominoes, it seemed, were starting to fall...

...Jonathan Rowe...

...In some cases, we may have to change our thinking about partition...

...Now that Americans are leaving, Lebanon will no doubt revert to its previous status as a bloody but largely incidental place...

...As for Syria's motives in Lebanon, Assad's desire to prevent an Israeli or PLO stronghold there surely weighs more heavily on his mind than does either loyalty to the Soviets or hostility to ourselves...

...Few manage to master the language of a country...

...In Lebanon, by contrast, the veil has been removed to reveal a society tearing itself apart in a civil war between tribal factions...

...As events in Poland have shown, our presence is not necessary for the Soviet Union to find itself in trouble...

...We might temper our alarm at such Soviet involvements by remembering the dilemmas that they can bring upon themselves...

...Reports from the field henceforth had to conform to the ideology of top officials, not to reality...

...Caputo's New York editors are not alone...

...In some instances we may be able to help prevent such wars...

...Should an independent Kurdistan ever arise, its people are not likely to harbor much warmth towards us...

...Together with the Shah, for example, we supported the rebel Kurds in Iraq in 1975, only to abandon them when the Shah cut a deal with the Iraqis...

...After all, ethnic, racial, and religious conflicts are hardly foreign to our shores...

...At times local divisions can work to our advantage...

...Suspect in principle, such efforts can backfire in practice...

...This extraordinary prosperity, moreover, swept up most immigrant groups into an all-embracing culture of material betterment, at least until recently...

...Nowhere has this been more clear than in Lebanon...

...This January, as we all know, the Moslems, backed by Syrian forces, routed the army...

...Each faction proceeded to carve out a satrapy defended by its own private army...

...Perhaps one useful lesson in this regard is being demonstrated in the one place where we would never risk military involvement: in Eastern Europe...

...In Lebanon, we fell into a similar trap...

...But the Maronites still rule, and the Shiite majority is still last in line...

...We saw the conflict in terms of competing ideologies...

...These ceded lands included grasslands in the central highlands of the Horn of Africa that are essential to the nomadic tribes there...

...The new constitution prescribed a line-up of descending power and authority, based on the population balance between the Christians, Sunnis, and Shiites in 1943: a Christian president, a Sunni Moslem prime minister, and a Shiite Moslem speaker of the parliament...

...Not surprisingly, our Marines soon came under Moslem attack, especially by the long-denied Shiites, to whom these Marines were now a hostile force...

...Nor have we suffered by leaving Afghanistan to the Russians...

...The folkways of the foreign service bureaucracy only strengthen its proclivity for reporting what its superiors already believe...

...Nigeria, by contrast, is far more important to U.S...

...What can we expect of fragile nations that have existed for less than a generation and are torn by such divisions, often in many more directions...

...They urged that we deal directly with the rebels, led by Mao Tse-tung, and try to bring about a settlement that would be favorable to the United States...

...By and large, the era of nationalist wars is over...

...Such legalistic formulations, which harken so deeply to our own national experience, mean precious little when applied to a country like Lebanon, which the French carved out of Syria following the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s...

...The assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs at that time later became secretary of state and tried to repent, in Vietnam, for the "loss" of China...

...These officers, moreover, rarely have time to establish solid sources of information when they are assigned to a country...

...We saw our purpose in South Vietnam as stopping Chinese communist expansion, yet the hostility between the Vietnamese and the Chinese went back for millennia...

...Their charisma enabled them to overcome tribal divisions for a short time...

...Cowboys and- Indians The American Civil War and our mostly successful experience with ethnic assimilation are not the only reasons we tend to overlook the local sources of tensions in other parts of the world...

...In late 1980 Iraq expected its invasion of Iran to ignite an immediate uprising of ethnic Arabs in Khuzistan, the southwestern region of Iran, where its major oil fields are located...

...By 1983, however, Reagan had decided that unifying Lebanon.could thwart the Soviets in the region, and so threw our weight behind the "central government," which was led by the son of a Maronite chieftan...

...When the Europeans left, these native elites were positioned to take power...

...Something similar occurs when U.S...

...They accepted the right of the majority to govern and sought only access to our politics and our prosperity, which in most cases they gained...

...The French, who were responsible for the territory under a League of Nations mandate, sought to protect the friendly Maronite Christians from the Moslems surrounding them...

...and Ngo Quegen was immortalized after he burned a large fishing fleet in the shallows of Haiphong harbor in 939 A.D., thus helping his country gain independence, at least for a while...

...The recent clashes in Zimbabwe between the ruling Shonas and the minority Ndebele have been greeted in the American liberal community by remarkable silence...

...The fact is, Assad sits uneasily as a minority Alawite—a Shiite sect—ruler in a majority Sunni country, and his options are limited accordingly...

...Assuming what has come to be our customary role, we began to train and supply the Lebanese army, which itself was deeply divided along religious and other lines and barely controlled Christian Beirut, let alone the rest of the country...

...Editors like simplicity, and nothing simplifies complicated foreign entanglements as much as a Soviet devil...

...Caught once between fellow Marxists in Ethiopia and Somalia respectively, the Soviet Union is in the middle once again, this time between its Ethiopian client and the Eritrean rebels in that country's northern Moslem province, many of whom are Marxists...

...official who called Assad a "classic example of an insecure person who can feel good only when everyone else around him feels bad...

...The latter did not deal kindly with the now defenseless Kurds...

...For seven years, the United States wisely kept its distance, but in 1982 the Reagan administration— like the Kennedyites 20 years before them—saw the hand of Moscow, this time through the agency of Syria...

...Let us not delude ourselves:' Ronald Reagan has said...

...The China experience cast a permanent pall over the foreign service...

...It took 25 years, and a bloody conflict in Vietnam, before we repaired the split...

...Abraham Lincoln proclaimed in his first inaugural address that ". . . in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual" and this "perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of national governments...

...So they created a new country in the southwest corner of Syria, where the Maronites were concentrated...

...For years, the country has had a Moslem majority, with the Shiites the single largest group...

...A 1975 clash between Palestinian guerrillas and Maronites in Beirut triggered the beginning of a national disintegration...

...shrift to local histories, since they see all conflicts as mere episodes in a cosmic East-West struggle...

...In Lebanon the local reality finally forced the press out of this simplistic mold...

...The question "Who lost China...

...America first became involved in 1982, as part of a neutral—and well-received—peacekeeping force...

...Now the tribal conflicts within these nations should be more apparent to our leaders...

...Abraham Lincoln after all is not our only model...

...Mapmaker, Mapmaker Tribal conflicts are going to increase in coming years...

...The problem, in large part, is the unique circumstances of our own history, which we tend to project upon everyone else...

...Already, relations between Syria and Moscow are strained, in no small part because Syria has backed the PLO rebels against Arafat, whom the Soviets have always supported...

...Equally important was the Chinese civil war of the late forties, which set the pattern for much of our blundering ever since...

...Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick stands up in the U.N...

...If a "second-rate power" could do it, then certainly we could too...

...those who display an inordinate interest in their surroundings can be suspected of having "gone native," to the detriment of their future advancement...

...Twice in the seventies, Zaire's Katanga (now Shaba) province rebelled, and was suppressed only with the help of outside aid...

...There was also George Washington against King George III...

...But more often than not, that role is simply to enable the leaders of developing countries to play the superpowers off against one another in their quest for arms and aid...

...Compare this experience to, say, that of Lebanon, where nationhood was imposed from without, and where the majority Moslems did not have access to the political and economic advantages that the minority Christians enjoyed...

...But clearly, the Soviet leaders have learned in Afghanistan, as in Ethiopia, that the tribal trap can close in on them as well as on ourselves...

...Yet another European conference, this one in Brussels, proclaimed early in 1960 that these tribes, many of which spill over their artificial colonial boundaries, would become a nation called Zaire on June 30...

...In South Vietnam we threw our support behind a Roman Catholic leader, Diem, who was intensely disliked by the Buddhist majority in his own country...

...Stories like the Iranian hostage crisis, with its blatantly antiAmerican protagonists, get enormous media coverage...

...Today, after all the turmoil of the Vietnam war, the lineup in Southeast Asia today is the Soviets and the Vietnamese against the Chinese and ourselves...

...There was a similarly deep hostility between the Chinese and the Russians, both of whom were trying to whisper into Ho Chi Minh's ear...

...For three decades after the Second World War, the struggles of nationalist movements against colonialism effectively camouflaged the divisions within these emerging nations...

...As that war steadily drains Moscow's resources, Soviet activism elsewhere has also diminished...

...In the 1970s this rickety government finally came apart...

...Prior to that war, a group of young foreign service officers became convinced that the country's leader, General Chiang Kai-shek, was corrupt, unpopular, and destined to fall...

...In developing nations, the leaders of the independence era—individuals like Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah of Pakistan—are gone...

...There may be good reasons for shifting foreign service officers between posts, in particular cases...

...struggle, we often do not understand them very well...

...Postcolonial ideologies such as communism and the various Third World socialisms have not fulfilled their promises, and nationalism, once such a unifying idea, is approaching political exhaustion...

...We proceeded to overlook similar tribal animosities throughout the Vietnam war...

...A blood feud on a national scale doesn't...

...It favored, moreover, an Ethiopian nomad group, the Gallas, which is a traditional rival of these Somali tribes...

...In Iran, for example, American analysts were instructed not to contact members of the opposition, for fear of angering the Shah...

...Tribal and religious animosities do not explain everything about the Middle East...

...The Christian minority thus became, overnight, a majority, much to the displeasure of the Moslems who were caught inside this new country...

...Only a common enemy could bring these three together, and we eagerly bumbled into the role...

...For those who are not students of Middle East politics, it may be helpful to review the history briefly...

...policy...

...The Reagan administration might attribute the latter result to its own bellicose rhetoric...

...How can we respond to such unraveling without getting entangled in debilitating civil wars...

...Such regimes do not take great risks, which in the Middle East would include open alliance with the United States, recognition of Israel, or the broadening of political participation among their own populace...

...This is eloquent testimony to the tenacity of ancient rivalries in the face of today's superpower conflicts...

...It is probably no coincidence that Egypt, one of the few countries in the region without major tribal or regional divisions, has pursued the boldest policies over the years, including, most recently, accommodation with Israel...

...Sadly, they aren't...

...It should apply the lesson elsewhere in the world...

...After a bloody power struggle, the victorious Mengistu regime declared that it, too, was Marxist-Leninist...

...The HausaFulani in Nigeria, the Punjabis in Pakistan, the Maronites in Lebanon, all became dominant in this way...

...Then the demographics began to change, without any adjustment in the constitutional formula...

...The Trung Sisters, leaders of an abortive uprising, threw themselves into the Red River rather than surrender...

...In both cases, such partition has evolved in practice, in spite of American opposition...

...The Soviet Union, now courting the Marxists in Ethiopia, was caught in the middle, and tried to restrain its fellow Marxists in Somalia...

...We backed the Hmong tribesmen against the communists in Laos, for example, and we used the Montagnards in Vietnam to similar ends...

...The power-sharing arrangement in this new country was a box of kindling waiting to be ignited...

...Instead, the invasion gave Khomeini a rallying point for Shiite Persians against the Sunni Arabs ruling Iraq, at a time when tribal and political tensions had been threatening his revolution...

...became a national obsession and set the stage'for the McCarthy era...

...This was ominous indeed for those who see the world in terms of a monolithic communist threat...

...embassy staff in El Salvador did not intend to investigate allegations of violence against deportees from the United States who had returned to parts of the country considered dangerous (see "Murder by Deportation," Jonathan Rowe, February...

...But as a general policy, this becomes a debility...

...It would have taken a rather diligent reader, for example, to learn that there were important tribal rivalries in Iran with which Khomeini had to contend: the rebellious Azerbaijanis in the north, the Baluchs in the southeast, and the Kurds, who straddle the Iran-Iraq border...

...But in 1967, when the Ibos launched their war to create an independent Biafra, ideology did not enter in...

...Somalia is now a recipient of American aid and a "Western outpost" in the Horn of Africa...

...To them, it's Right versus Left, rich versus poor...

...Even some established Western nations are torn along ethnic and other lines: the Basques still trouble Spain, Belgium remains divided between the Flemish and Walloons, Welsh and Scottish nationalisms surface regularly in Britain, Catholics and Protestants remain at odds in Ireland, and French Canadians continue to push for autonomy in Quebec...

...The successful diplomatic career is built on a new assignment every two years or so...

...In the Middle East, this can count for a great deal more than one's view of the relative merits of Adam Smith and Karl Marx...

...While illustrating how the leaders of developing countries can use ideology to manipulate both the Soviet Union and ourselves, the Ethiopia-Somalia example also suggests that we do not necessarily lose whenever the Soviet Union becomes involved somewhere...

...Much of our inspiration for the Vietnam war came from the British success against the communists in Malaysia in the early 1950s...

...If they weren't engaged in this game of dominoes, there wouldn't be any hot spots in the world ." In the mind of Ronald Reagan and many others, the centuriesold rivalries and hatreds between Moslems and Christians, Arabs and Persians, blacks and whites, are the inventions of the ruling clique in Moscow...

...Without the glue of such leaders or beliefs, older loyalties of family and clan steadily reemerge, and the new nations that for a time could contain them, come apart...

...The left tends to dismiss such reports by lumping the Miskitos with Somoza's former henchmen, or by questioning Kirkpatrick's motives for raising the charges in the first place...

...That was fine at first...

...Where ethnic and religious groups came to America because they wanted to, elsewhere they were thrust together simply because someone else said they would be...

...Television especially, but print journalism as well, has to have "good guys" and "bad guys," no matter how complex the situation...

...When Lincoln proceeded to put down the South's revolt, he was establishing for all times, in the minds of those who make our foreign policy, the transcience and illegitimacy of tribal tensions and separatist claims...

...As Caputo's fictional reporter observed, foreign reporting by journalists, like that of our diplomats, more often reflects our own assumptions than the realities abroad...

...Keeping out of local conflicts, and avoiding the tribal trap, will be most difficult for us when the Soviet Union is involved...

...The Syrians, for their part, never recognized Lebanon as independent, and never sent an ambassador to Beirut...

...Is there any reason why a Lebanon divided into Syrian, Israeli, Christian, and Moslem zones, for example would be contrary to American interests...

...We forget the special circumstances that have hastened our assimilation of ethnic groups...

...embassy in Iran spoke Farsi, let alone Kurdish or the other regional languages...

...One result of the Berlin conference was the creation of the Belgian Congo, an agglomeration of more than 100 tribal groupings, the principal of which are the Bantu-speaking Kongo, Mongo, Luba, Luhua, Lunda, and Bivaka tribes, and the Nilotic-speaking Alur and Zande...

...But on the-ground, in Somalia, local concerns were more pressing...

...And why has not the United States considered partition as a solution to the tensions in Cyprus...

...Unfortunately, the American press does little to improve upon the information that comes through official channels...

...The Soviet Union underlies all the unrest that is going on...

...Siad Barre's power base was the army...

...Nearly every time such tensions arise—Lebanon is a good example—we manage to see a replica of our once fledgling government, beleaguered by a latter-day version of our South...

...These minority regimes will not last forever (as the recent fate of the Maronites suggests) nor will the lines that outside powers drew arbitrarily on a map...

...A number of these officers had been raised in China as children of missionaries and knew both the language and the nuances of the conflict...

...when it was over, despite the regrettable bloodshed, Nigeria remained pro-Western...

...It is possible, for example, that in the early sixties the old rivalries between the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Soviets could have helped us work a settlement in Southeast Asia and avoid a massive military involvement...

...The Chinese were, on the whole, the more prosperous...

...A good portion of the foreign-policy establishment of the United States is baffled by the tribal wars and blood feuds of Africa, the religious hatreds of the Middle East, the ethnic conflicts of Asia...

...The result was just what the foreign service officers had feared—a China allied with the Soviet Union...

...In DelCorso's Gallery, Philip Caputo's novel about war correspondents and photographers, a wire service chief explains the Lebanese conflict to a reporter newly arrived in Beirut: "This war is one big family feud, it's the Hatfields and the McCoys raised to the thousandeth power, only you can't write that...

...Events in countries in which local realities resist such cowboy-and-Indian formulations, often go unreported...

...but they left in their wake, in many cases, failed economic plans and enormous foreign debts...

...The Marehan, Ogaden, and Darod officers quietly let Siad Barre know that his government and, indeed, his own safety depended upon taking back the ceded land...

...By July, the new nation's army had mutinied...

...Instead of seeking to inform our policy, the function of the foreign service became, in large measure, to confirm what our top officials already believed...

...Conservatives, of course, have always given short Gordon Rayfield is a political risk analyst who lives in New York City...

...The latter, sensing that their butter was no longer on the Soviet bread, suddenly found Marxism dispensible, and declared their allegiance to the West...

...The Politics of Grass When we try to understand the world's conflicts as =Fe episodes in a universal Soviet-U.S...

...We sized up the enemy with similar acumen...

...This traditional hostility overwhelmed the modern overlay of Maritisin...

...These tribes, the Darod, the Ogaden, and the Marehan, traditionally had occupied lands the British had given in part to Ethiopia after the Second World War...

...Sunni Side Up Our inability to see past our own assumptions has led us into folly time_ and again...

...Consider, for example, how the two erstwhile Soviet clients in the region, Syria and Iraq, are on opposing sides of the Iran-Iraq war...

...Tempted by the disarray within its neighbor, Somalia tried to lay claim to Ethiopia's Ogaden region, which is populated by Somalis and has long been a point of contention between the two countries (see sidebar, page 52...

...Foreign service officers tend to stay close to the major cities, where they enjoy the comforts of home, and stay clear of danger...

...Under the China Lobby's pressure, we abandoned our neutral stance and weighed in behind Chiang, who proceeded to lose...

...Better, compare it to Africa, where the national boundaries are the result of European colonists sitting down in Berlin in 1884 and literally drawing lines on a map, with more regard for their own mineral interests than for tribal or other human affinities...

...Bewginning in 111 B.C., the Vietnamese chafed under the Chinese's rule for more than 1,000 years, and their folk-memory is populated with heroes who tried to overthrow this hated oppressor...

...The Somalis, however, saw the situation in a very different manner...

...That makes sense to them...

...This much is well known, but apparently it is not well learned...

...As a result, much of our intelligence came from the Shah and his security forces, which were, to put it mildly, less than objective...

...Given this`threat from the officers who controlled his own army, Siad Barre had no choice He went to war with Ethiopia, renounced his Soviet ties,'and aligned Somalia with the West...

...The United States, preoccupied with Vietnam, did not declare its interests at stake...

...But they explain a good deal more than conventional press formulations...

...We base our attitudes towards separatist movements, for example, largely upon the experience of our own civil war...

...National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski switched metaphors, and worried aloud about an "Arc of Crisis" stretching from Somalia to the Indian Ocean...

...Somalia proceeded to invade the Ogaden, and Cuban troops soon arrived to help repel the invasion...

...These efforts ran up against the so-called China Lobby, led by Henry Luce of Time magazine, among others, which saw Chiang as the "George Washington" of his country...

...The same is true of narrow-based regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Iraq...

...To insure his control, he..had to install officers from tribes allied to his own, in key positions right down to the battalion level...

...For example, the Monthly reported recently how U.S...

...Syria's Assad is an Alawite, while Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is a Sunni...

...Thus factions in the Middle East and elsewhere are regularly portrayed as either "moderates" or "radicals," the former being proWestern, pro-American and pro-freedom, while the latter are pro-everything-Russian...

...The grasslands near the coast cannot sustain flocks throughout the year, hence, the nomadic tribes must constantly from coastal wells to the uplands and bmacokve When Britain gave these lands to Ethiopia, therefore, it threatened the livelihood of the tribes, that were Siad Barre's base of power...

...In their eagerness to support the black African states against the odious apartheid regime in South Africa, for example, liberals assume a solidarity among nonwhites in the region that simply does not exist...

...Newsweek quoted an unnamed U.S...

...Another impediment to our comprehension is the way we have assimilated, more or less, the many waves of immigrants that have flooded to our shores...

...But liberals often make a similar mistake...

...The United States declared it now had a "vital interest" in Lebanon...

...We read regularly, for example, of Syrian President Assad's "intransigence," as if the main impediment to Middle East peace was one man's character defects...

...Even in Iran, those aspects that did not fit the good guy/bad guy mold got short shrift, and as a result we didn't really understand the logic of events there...

...Policy pretty much determines reporting rather than the other way around," Leaf told The New York Times...

...Instead of teaching us a lesson, China became the script that we would read time and again...

...Abe Lincoln in Lebanon This is not to suggest that ideology plays no role in global politics...

...As President Reagan put it, it was our task to ensure the "unity, independence, and territorial integrity" of that country...

...Why is it so hard for us to see the world with clear eyes...

...He was told that such a report could not be circulated because it conflicted with U.S...

...What the can-doers in the Kennedy administration overlooked were the local factors that lay beneath the British success...

...They were much less concerned with our superpower conflict than they were with grass...

...Lebanon was a marginal area of Middle East politics until the Reagan administration chose to make a stand there...

...Malaysia was split fairly evenly between Malays and Chinese, and the animosities each group felt for the other ran deep...

...The old colonial governments, which bequeathed today's map to us, often followed a policy of divide and rule, placing one tribe in authority over the rest...

...When it was ideology against grass, the grass prevailed...

...Once again we had to beat a retreat from a country in which our preconceptions had led us astray...

...The map of the world has changed many times in the past, and it will change many times more...