November/December 1994, Pages 64-65

Middle East and Peace Activism

By Janet McMahon

AAI, Americans for Peace Now Host Beilin, Shaath

Americans for Peace Now and the Arab American Institute jointly hosted a luncheon marking the first anniversary of the Yasser Arafat-Yitzhak Rabin handshake and featuring talks by major players in the negotiations that led up to that historic event. Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin apportioned blame for the long Palestinian-Israeli stalemate to Israelis as well as Palestinians.

"Something like [the Declaration of Principles] could have happened long before," Beilin said. "It did not happen because of the truisms that kept us from moving ahead." Among the truisms he listed the belief that "the first Israeli who shook hands would face the end of his career" and "the feeling that Peace Now was premature."

However, Beilin said, "those of us who believed in Peace Now were right. There is an agreement with the Palestinians, and there is no way back." Although he said the agreement with the Palestinians "was the most difficult" and "most emotional," he was not optimistic that there would be an agreement with Syria before the end of the year, as other members of his government have predicted. He warned, instead, that "it is my feeling that we have 10 or 11 months, no more." After that, he said, "we will be in the middle of the [1996] electoral campaigns in both countries [Israel and the U.S.]. Without peace with Syria we are not going to have comprehensive peace in the Middle East. It will be very sad if the experience of '93-'94 will be just another date in the long list of missed opportunities."

Nabil Shaath, a Yasser Arafat loyalist and major negotiator of the Palestinian-Israeli implementation agreements, spoke and answered questions by satellite from Oslo, between a day of difficult negotiations with the Israelis and an evening concert, marking the DOP's first anniversary, attended by 6,000 people in the Norwegian capital.

He cited the Israeli release of Palestinian prisoners, the opening of schools for the first time under Palestinian authority, reduction in the level of violence, and the return of families of policemen and political leaders employed by the Palestinian Authority as "reality, not dreams."

"All of these usher in the dreams of peace and the building of a sane society," Shaath said. "I have returned with my wife and children after 46 years of exile and I just fell in love with Palestine. But we still have problems."

He cited closures, Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, the division of Hebron, and Israeli harassment of Palestinian institutions in Jerusalem. "We need the elections as rapidly as possible, internationally supervised, in order to complete that peace and turn it into a peace of which every Palestinian and every Israeli can be proud," he said. "We would like to see those elections by the end of the year."

Acknowledging his introduction by Palestinian intellectual Sari Nusseibeh at the luncheon, Beilin noted that they had been friends for many years. Introducing another speaker at the event, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT), AAI president James Zogby hailed the Senate Appropriations Committee chairman as one who believes that "the hands of our government should not be tied in the effort to make peace."

Zogby also paid special tribute to Gail Pressberg, former president of Americans for Peace Now, who helped arrange the luncheon, for her years of activism on behalf of Middle East peace. Pressberg stepped down as president to facilitate admittance of Americans for Peace Now last year into the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The luncheon was attended by ambassadors or their representatives from Egypt, Israel, Oman, Morocco, Qatar and Tunisia, as well as the PLO and the U.S. government.

National Democratic Institute Discusses Palestinian Elections

At a Sept. 14 luncheon hosted by the National Democratic Institute of International Affairs (NDI), some 40 interested representatives from a variety of governmental and non-governmental organizations heard NDI field representative Ranjit Singh's observations about recent political developments in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Singh described NDI programs designed to familiarize Palestinians with the democratic process, including sending Palestinian observers to upcoming elections in other countries, and bringing foreign representatives to participate in Palestinian town meetings on the election process.

The focus of NDI's work has been the town meetings, with a Palestinian organization as co-sponsor, held throughout the West Bank and Gaza.

Builders for Peace Announces Projects

Builders for Peace, a consortium of Arab-American and Jewish-American businesspeople, has announced a list of nine projects for the newly autonomous West Bank and Gaza. At a White House ceremony presided over by Vice President Al Gore and marking the Sept. 13 first anniversary of the Declaration of Principles of peace, four projects initiated by Arab Americans, four by American Jews, and one by an American Mormon were described. They include a 300-room Marriott-managed hotel and a Culligan water bottling plan for Gaza.

Builders for Peace, headed by Arab American Institute president James Zogby and former California Democratic Congressman Mel Levine, a veteran pro-Israel activist who raised funds in Southern California for pro-Israel political candidates across the nation, facilitates access by businessmen to two U.S. government funding agencies. These are the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), much of whose previous activity has been to fund business activities in Israel, and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (TDA). OPIC has provided $90 million in loans and political risk insurance to five of the ventures. TDA has assisted with feasibility studies and orientation visits for Palestinians to meet with U.S. experts in their business and technical specialties.

Algeria Discussed at MEI

Abdeslam Maghraoui, scholar-in-residence at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, spoke on "Islam and Democracy in Algeria" on Sept. 21 as part of the Institute's ongoing series of lunchtime briefings. Maghraoui, who is writing a book on contemporary Algerian politics under a MacArthur grant, noted that Algerian national reconciliation is imperiled by fissures developing between moderates and hard-liners among both the government and Islamists.

He sketched two alternative scenarios for the future. Under one, moderates on both sides would prevail, leading to a cease-fire and conciliation. Under the second, the FIS would decline invitations to a national dialogue, leading to a split in the military. In that case, lower-grade officers might join the Islamist cause, seeking to carry out a pro-Islamist military coup similar to that in the Sudan under Omar Al-Bashir.

"It is hard to be optimistic," Maghraoui told the audience.

representative to such a meeting for the previous 28 years. "If we want to avoid the lifting of the arms embargo...then we must pay the price and increase the diplomatic and military pressure on the Serbs," French Defense Minister Fran?is Leotard later told reporters. "We have to harden our response to the violations which occur...There has been a real deterioration in the last few weeks."

"There will be no more pinprick airstrikes," echoed British Defense Minister Malcolm Rifkind. Said Defense Minister Volker Ruehe of Germany, "NATO will react more consistently to infringements. We need stronger coordination between NATO and the United Nations."

A good way to start dealing with the last problem is to get rid of the present U.N. military commander in Bosnia, Lt. Gen. Sir Michael Rose, who arrived eight months ago in an aura of klieg lights and vows to get tough, but eventually succumbed to a case of Stockholm syndrome. Apparently warned by British political leaders to stop stirring up the Serbs, he turned his righteous anger on the U.S. instead.

"If someone wants to fight a war here on moral or political grounds, fine, great, but count us out," Rose said in September. "Hitting infrastructure, command and control, logistics, that is war and I'm not going to fight a war in white-painted tanks."

Responded a U.S. official, "General Rose is waging a diplomatic war with the United States, not with the Serbs."

In fact, however, it is U.N. special representative Yasushi Akashi who has veto power over requests for airstrikes from his U.N. personnel on the ground and has exercised it so often that, although there have been NATO planes patrolling the skies over Bosnia daily for more than a year while Serbs have been taking potshots at U.N. bluehelmets below, only six relatively genteel airstrikes have been permitted, some after Serbs had been warned to clear the area to be attacked.

So egregious is Akashi's own case of Stockholm syndrome that, after months of being contradicted, berated and humiliated by Bosnian Serb military leader General Ratko Mladic and Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, Akashi has disgraced himself further with a false report that Bosnian government forces had committed the kind of atrocity for which Serbs are justly famed.

After government forces overwhelmed a Serb command post Oct. 6 on Mount Igman, overlooking the one road open between Sarajevo and government territory, Akashi charged that Bosnian forces had slit the throats of the defenders, shot each in the head, and then mutilated the bodies. What Akashi didn't know at the time was that six wounded Serbs taken prisoner in the attack could corroborate the government account of a standard commando operation in which four Serb sentries were silently knifed to death, enabling the government forces to surprise and wipe out the command post with heavy firepower that left 12 more Serb soldiers and 4 Serb nurses dead. Caught lying, the U.N. withdrew Akashi's false charge the next day but, regrettably, hasn't yet withdrawn Akashi.

The Akashi problem was deftly summarized by columnist Jim Hoagland in the Oct. 6 Washington Post: "Politically the United States has chosen sides in Bosnia. But militarily, it is the captive of a U.N. bureaucracy that does not believe in choosing sides. This is a road map to a dead end."

In any case, in the highly unlikely event that Milosevic's embargo on the Bosnian Serbs is genuine, the war may end within months. If it is not, however, the civilized world's dilemma is summed up in a Sept. 30 Wall Street Journal editorial:

"There may be no clear way out of the predicament, but the U.S. can certainly improve the odds. Lifting the arms embargo would be a step in the right direction. A rigorous application of air power to enforce the exclusion zones would be another...The operative word here is enforcement: By refusing to enforce the laws it devises, the U.N. is sabotaging any hope for a solution."