The One Conspicuously Missing Word.

 By Bouthaina Shaaban

When President Bush said in his State of the Union Address that “The United States has no right, no desire and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone” I hoped that this may indicate a new American policy in the Middle East but my hopes quickly disspated when I heard what he had to say about Palestine, Iraq, Syria and Iran. Despite the fact that President Bush reiterated that ‘elections are the measure of democracy and that the US is leading a campaign to free many countries in the world, nonetheless he chided countries which always conducted constitutional elections and which have pluralist political and intellectual life and whose press reflects opposition while embraced other countries which have nothing of this at all. But what I found most worrying in President Bush’s address is that he spoke about the Middle East region as if its people (who are mainly Arabs) are either nonexistent or they need to be taught the basic human values which in President  Bush’s opinion could be summed up in two words: Democracy and Freedom. What is never stressed by Mr. Bush is that democracy is not only elections, but it is a whole set of political, religious, social and intellectual values and there is no doubt that countries which are free of foreign occupation are engaged in processes to establish these values for their own benefit and the welfare of their own people.

If we take the essence of what Mr. Bush aims to achieve we find that it constitutes the very character of Arab History and culture. Arab people pride themselves that their region is the cradle of human civilizations , monolithic religions, the values of social concord, dialogue, freedom and tolerance among all religions that endowed humanity with its alphabet, law, algebra, medicine and astronomy This is why it is strange to hear president Bush saying that he wants to break ‘the old patterns of violence and failure’ in our region and in fact these are not old patterns at all but they are patterns which came with foreign occupation of our region, an occupation that brought with it Chauvinism, racism and extremism which then bred violence, ethnic cleansing and genocide. At a more recent date, my country, Syria for example, called for an international conference to combat terrorism in 1985, because even then we had suffered from a wave of terrorism and extremism to which the US, and the West in general turned a blind eye at the time and even called some of the terrorists, human rights fighters and gave them asylum and now the West refers to the same people who killed innocent citizens on our streets and fled to the West as ‘Syrians’ in order to accuse Syria of terrorism ignoring the very significant fact that Syria had been chasing them for two decades.

President Bush divides the world into those who are on the right side of freedom and those who are not as his new Secretary of  State also makes you feel as if “liberty’ is an American made commodity that senior officials in the US are busy marketing for the entire world as part of it shares the belief in freedom with the US while the other part, in the forefront of which is the Middle East, of course, does not even like freedom and has to be taught how to accept to be free. We, here, in the Middle East, ask ourselves what is meant by freedom and how could the assumption occur that there is a human self in the world that does not yearn for freedom. In this regard I would like to offer a service to American officials by bringing to their kind attention how the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley defined freedom in, his poem “The Mask of Anarchy”, 1819, in the aftermath of Peterloo Massacre in Manchester:

‘For the labourer thou are bread,

And a comely table spread

From his daily labour come

In a neat and happy home

Thou art clothes, and fire and food

For the trampled multitude…

To the rich thou are a check,

When his foot is on the neck

Of his victim, thou dost make

That he treads upon a snake.

For the Iraqi  and Palestinian people liberty is first and foremost to be free of occupation and of the humiliation of occupation from which men, women and children are suffering. Neither President Bush nor Secretary Rice in her tour of Europe and the Middle East mentioned the key word ‘occupation’ which is the origin of all evil, terror, violence and misery in our region. In Israel Ms Rice states that ‘We will have to, all of us, make certain that there is an effective fight against terrorism, because security and terrorism are at the core of peaceful existence’, thus conspicuously avoiding what is at the core of a peaceful existence in our region: it is to put an end to the Israeli occupation of Arab territories and to give the Palestinian people their legitimate right of self determination and to stop the Israeli theft of their land and water. It should not be hard for Israel to take decisions to free the best Arab youths kidnapped or arrested without trial simply because they want to live on their land free of occupation, and it should not be hard for Israel to stop building an apartheid wall that grabs the best of the Palestinian land and tears the matrix of Palestinian lives into shreds. These are not hard decisions to make. And finally security solutions will not work so long as occupation sits heavy on the chests of free people. No two people should differ that the first obligation to spread liberty in the world should start with freeing people from foreign occupation; that is exactly what the Palestinian people have been fighting for just as the American people fought at one time. Without ending occupation in our region no security or peace would endure no matter how hard we try. This is the logic of history and the experiences of all people all over the world and our region and people are no exception.