Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September 1998, pages 76-78

Diplomatic Doings

Pakistani Foreign Minister Says Current Indian Actions Rooted in “Hindu Mythology”

Pakistani Foreign Secretary Shamshad Ahmad says his country now is living in the shadow of a heavily armed Indian regime whose aggressive actions are based on “Hindu mythology.” In a July 7 speech delivered before the Asia Society in New York, Ahmad charged that India is using unverified charges of Pakistani terrorist infiltration into Kashmir and a non-existent threat from China to justify its nuclear weapons program and to raise military threats against Pakistan.

The Pakistani minister, who met with U.S. officials in Washington before making his talk in New York, said India never makes available to Pakistan names or other information to substantiate its claims that it has captured infiltrators from Pakistan into Kashmir. “We say that to verify these charges, let neutral international observers be stationed on both sides” of the line of control that divides the Pakistani- and Indian-occupied portions of disputed Kashmir, Ahmad said. “India has always refused.”

Charging that “the facade of an India upholding universal values has finally been lifted,” Ahmad said his country now faces an Indian ruling party “whose actions the prime minister justifies in parliament on the basis of Hindu mythology.” India boasts of having “a big bomb” and of having acquired from Russia billions of dollars worth of new military equipment, and threatens to build temples on the ruins of mosques and to seize Azad Kashmir, the portion of Kashmir occupied by Pakistani forces, Ahmad said. Under these circumstances, giving in to demands for Pakistan to relinquish its nuclear option would be “forfeiting our right to exist.”

He added that previous U.S. sanctions had crippled Pakistan’s conventional weapons defenses and had left his country no alternative other than to develop nuclear weapons, even before the latest round of U.S. sanctions that followed Pakistan’s six experimental atomic detonations. He added that his country had little faith in the bilateral talks with India which the U.S. and other nations are supporting, because in the past such talks have not solved fundamental problems.

He also said that Pakistan would not agree to any proposal to make the current cease-fire line across Kashmir into a permanent international boundary as a first step toward reducing India-Pakistan tensions. “That would violate U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for a free and fair plebiscite” among Kashmiris, he said.

He did not comment directly on Indian hints that it might sign the international Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, as the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council have urged. However, in a significant break with previous Pakistani policy, the Pakistani foreign secretary said the possibility of Pakistan signing the treaty even before India does now is being discussed “at all levels” of Pakistan’s government.

—Richard Curtiss

Washington Bids Farewell to Oman’s Salim Almahruqi

Sometimes the most complex questions have the simplest answers. One question sometimes asked by observant Arab Americans is why, although the Arab world as a whole gets very shabby treatment from the Washington-New York-based U.S. media, a few Arab countries seem virtually immune from unfair criticism. Possible answers are that U.S. media treatment correlates closely with how receptive that country is to U.S. policy initiatives; whether or not Israel’s many friends in the U.S. media perceive that country as a threat to Israel; the volume of bilateral trade with the U.S.; how that country scores in the annual human rights reports issued by the State Department, Amnesty International and other groups; how many Americans trace at least part of their ancestry to that country; how many Americans live or have lived and worked there; and how many American tourists visit and have a good time there.

They all are reasonable answers, and in their totality they explain a lot. But those close to the issue, like editors of this magazine, can suggest exceptions to every one of those answers.

So what’s the missing ingredient that would help explain the exceptions? Certainly one is the quality of that country’s diplomatic representation in the United States. For some Middle Eastern countries France, Britain, Germany, Japan, China, Russia, Italy or a powerful neighbor are particularly important, and they may send their best and brightest students to universities in one or another of those countries to learn the language, and perhaps later to return there as diplomats.

For many Middle Eastern countries, however, the United States is the most important foreign country. They make sure that their young diplomats learn English early, and although they may serve in other countries, some of the best keep being sent back to the United States. (It may surprise some Americans to realize, however, that Washington is not always a coveted assignment. Commuting between McLean, Virginia, and Massachusetts Avenue in the District of Columbia, and needing two cars in order for both husband and wife merely to get around, is a little more complex and a lot less affordable for a junior officer than walking 100 feet between an embassy office and a comfortable villa or high-rise apartment in Sofia, Santiago or Tunis.)

But can an astute ambassador, an energetic commercial attaché, or a friendly and efficient consular section make a significant difference in bilateral relations with a superpower? You bet they can.

And no one is in a better position to make a significant long-term impact than foreign service officers engaged in “public diplomacy.” These include the cultural attachés who help place students from the home country in U.S. universities and help select American students, scholars, teachers and other professionals for exchange visits.

The practitioners of public diplomacy also include press attachés, the best of whom are far more than mere spinmeisters with the media. In Washington they routinely cultivate those Americans who write about or report on their area of the world. If the press attaché is doing a good job, such American journalists soon fall into the habit of calling to check facts when that country comes up in the news.

And, if the press attaché has backing from his bosses in the home country—usually in the Ministry of Information rather than in the Foreign Ministry—those American journalists who show the most interest are very likely to be invited to attend some event in the home country, and then be given an opportunity to travel around and conduct interviews for some background and to generate addition media coverage.

Even if the journalist doesn’t have the time to make the visit, as often happens, the press attaché has made a friend for his country. And, if the American journalist can make the time, sometimes by taking leave from his job, then the press attaché generally has made a friend into a well-informed advocate.

One of the handful of Arab countries that has enjoyed consistently favorable treatment in the U.S. media and academia is the Sultanate of Oman. Most of the reasons listed above apply. But this writer knows two more that aren’t listed.

One, from the past, was a very active Hungarian-born Omani cultural attaché who had exactly eight travel grants to bestow on U.S. student and faculty members each year. Because he made them truly competitive, selecting students both on the basis of their academic records and on written submissions describing why they wanted to visit Oman and what they hoped to do when they got there, he attracted some of the very best.

There are scholars in the Middle East studies field whose careers were launched and whose lives changed by those generous grants. Distant Oman, with a population of no more than two million on the southeastern periphery of the Arab world, now has a host of friends in North American academia.

Just about the time that this effective cultural attaché retired, Oman’s embassy in Washington, DC acquired a press attaché who has had an equally far-reaching impact on U.S.-Omani relations. However, Salim M. Almahruqi’s embassy assignment was not his first tour in the United States.

After earning a B.A. in political science at Amman University in Jordan in 1982 (just before Oman opened a university of its own), he worked in 1982 and 1983 as a foreign affairs correspondent with an Arabic-language daily newspaper in Muscat, the Omani capital.

Then he became director of external relations in the Omani Ministry of Information, a key position in his country which he held from 1984 to 1987. Almahruqi’s first tour of duty in the U.S. followed as he enrolled in the American University in Washington, DC and earned an M.A. in international relations in 1989.

Then he returned to Oman to serve as office director for Oman’s Minister of Information in 1990. The following year he returned to Washington for what became a seven- year tour of duty from 1991 to 1998 as embassy press attaché.

During the same period three Omani ambassadors came and went. But Salim Almahruqi stayed on, playing a role in the transformation of his country from a virtually closed society for which journalists frequently had a great deal of trouble getting visas to one in which journalists were welcome, and sometimes invited in large numbers from all over the world for special national events.

In the same period remote but incredibly scenic Oman changed from a country which simply didn’t issue tourist visas except to visitors from fellow Arab and Islamic countries. Now it is a favorite destination not only for well-heeled visitors from Europe, Japan, and the Americas, but even for group tours organized primarily for sun-seeking refugees from northern Europe’s long, cold and wet winters.

At exactly the time Europeans most want to get away, the surf on Oman’s beautiful Indian Ocean beaches is at its most enticing, and conditions are most desirable for automobile trips by those in search of unspoiled oasis villages in remote mountain valleys and barely explored desert archeological sites with the potential to shed new light on the earliest origins of human civilization.

Through all the changes in his homeland, Salim Almahruqi has presided quietly over one of the most efficient sections in one of the most efficient embassies in Washington, answering a daily variety of questions and, from time to time, seeing American journalists off on what for many is the trip of a lifetime.

Like everything he had done over the years in Washington, even his departure on June 15 with his wife and three children was well-organized but low-key. In May he invited the writer to lunch to meet his successor. She is Nadia M.K. Osman, daughter of a Sudanese-born medical doctor who has lived and worked for much of his life in Oman. The lunch, one of a series to “pass on the contacts” Salim Almahruqi had developed over the years, gave him a chance to express his own views on the traditionally good relations between his country and mine, and on how to improve relations between Arabs and Americans in general.

U.S.-Arab relations are close, he said, “for a number of reasons. The U.S. is becoming more involved in the Middle East. The region is more accessible than in the past. And Arab representation in Washington is better than before.”

On the other hand, he continued, “more needs to be done, and more focused efforts are needed. The negative stereotypes are there. I think we need to invest more time and resources outside the Beltway. With better presentation and constant effort and follow-up we have a better chance of changing those stereotypes.”

As for his own experiences, Almahruqi said he has been able to travel extensively to meet students, academics and media people. He noted that he has been able to encourage more Americans to come to Oman, and that academic and cultural exchanges are growing.

Thanks also to U.S.- and Omani-funded Fulbright programs, there has been much more interaction between Americans and Omanis than in the early years when one of his predecessors made such good use of eight student grants a year. Now there are about 600 Omani undergraduate students studying in the United States, and there are about 3,000 Americans living in Oman.

And, Almahruqi said with a smile, quite aside from government-sponsored academic and technical development activities and the steadily increasing tourism, there also are 60 American women married to Omani men and six or seven Omani women married to American men, a good many of them living in Oman.

A few days later I was invited to a farewell party for Salim Almahruqi given by the Middle East Policy Council, publishers of Middle East Policy, a scholarly quarterly. I was surprised to find sitting around a large and convivial table editors of just about every non-Zionist publication concerned with the Middle East, from time-sensitive political and economic newsletters to the venerable National Geographic magazine.

I soon realized that just as I had thought I had a uniquely warm and productive relationship with Oman’s politically savvy press attaché because of my own personal ties to his country, extending back over a period of almost 30 years, most of the other editors present felt the same close relationship to Salim Almahruqi.

Seeing what an impact a capable person in his position can have on bilateral relations made my own government’s current policies in this regard seem all the more misguided. With the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Information Agency, which provides U.S. embassies with their press and cultural attachés and which administers public diplomacy programs as diverse as Fulbright academic exchanges and the Voice of America, is being folded back into the State Department at the insistence of North Carolina Republican Senator Jesse Helms.

This isolationist chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee seems to have little use for the rest of the world’s people except as consumers for his state’s tobacco products. He also probably understands that as he shrinks the State Department’s budget while embassies are forced to devote increasing shares of their resources to security and solving the problems of the growing American population overseas, the resources available for cultural exchanges and salaries for press and cultural attachés will rapidly diminish. How ironic that as other countries increasingly recognize that in democracies the fourth estate is more powerful than any of the three branches of government, the United States is forgetting it.

In any case, Oman’s information efforts are in good hands. With his successor properly launched in Washington, Salim Almahruqi has taken up duties in his country’s Information Ministry, and has let it be known that the welcome mat is out for his many American media friends.

As a practitioner of the public diplomacy trade during my 30-plus years in the U.S. foreign service, I recognize a quality performance when I see one. I predict that so long as Salim Almahruqi continues to play a key role in U.S.-Omani relations, they’ll remain in great shape.

—Richard Curtiss

Amr Moussa Speaks at CSIS

Egypt’s Foreign Minister Amr Moussa discussed U.S.-Egyptian relations, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and weapons proliferation in the Middle East during a July 13 presentation at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.

The U.S.-Egyptian relationship is based on three pillars, according to Moussa: peace, security, and development. To strengthen these goals, both countries engage in extensive bilateral military and economic cooperation, he said. Moussa was in Washington to inaugurate a new element of the U.S.-Egyptian relationship, the first of several “strategic dialogues” held by the two countries.

Turning to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Moussa contrasted the current impasse in the peace process with the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement—the Camp David accords—signed in 1979. Key elements in the Camp David accords were trust and mutual confidence-building measures, both of which are strikingly absent in current peace negotiations, according to Moussa. “The peace process has come to a complete halt” because of this, he said.

“The policies of the current Israeli government have put Israel’s intentions in doubt throughout the [Middle East],” Moussa said. “The time has come to reassess the peace process and return to the process begun at Madrid, namely, land-for-peace.”

The Egyptian foreign minister also discussed weapons proliferation in the Middle East, citing three important goals: eliminate all weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological and nuclear) and their delivery systems, develop an effective network of confidence-building measures, and reduce the number of conventional armaments in the region. These steps must be implemented, he said, in order to ensure the future security of the Middle East.

Of particular concern, he said, is Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal, variously estimated to contain 100 to 400 nuclear warheads. “Giving Israel an exemption from international nonproliferation norms does not ensure Israel’s safety and security,” Moussa said, referring to Israel’s non-signatory status on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Egypt has lobbied the international community vigorously to help make the Middle East a nuclear-weapons-free-zone, but ultimately has failed because of Israel’s arsenal and America’s willingness to protect Israel diplomatically in the United Nations.

—Shawn L. Twing