Ivo Skoric on Mon, 1 Oct 2001 04:27:53 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> ivogram (x3): islam, saudis, bosnia |
[digested @ nettime] "Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net> Re: Islamic world trapped in historical impasse Re: Ground Zero and the Saudi connection More on Telling a Big One - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - From: "Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net> Date: Sat, 29 Sep 2001 16:53:43 -0400 Subject: Re: Islamic world trapped in historical impasse We are probably going to see failure of both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in the next chapter of this development. This will go down like the Eastern Europe went down once, state by state. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan had the most potential to go down like former Yugoslavia - violently. ivo date sent: Sat, 29 Sep 2001 12:32:17 -0400 send reply to: International Justice Watch Discussion List <JUSTWATCH-L@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU> from: Daniel Tomasevich <danilo@MARTNET.COM> subject: Islamic world trapped in historical impasse to: JUSTWATCH-L@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Saudia Arabia is the spiritual home of Wahabism that is driving bin Laden and his followers. Hopefully there will be more focus on Riyadh than Kabul. We in the West have based our political strategy in the Islamic world on an alliance with Saudi Arabia (not to mention hitching our economies to its vast oil reserves). But there is a timebomb ticking away. Bin Laden aims to topple the Saudi regime and turn Arabia into the base for his assault on the West. Even if we kill bin Laden, the struggle to transform Saudi into a cockpit for Wahabite extremism will continue. Daniel (article not for cross posting) ------------------------------------------------------------- The Scotsman September 28, 2001, Friday ISLAMIC WORLD TRAPPED IN HISTORICAL IMPASSE BY: George Kerevan FORGET Afghanistan. The key to Islam is Saudi Arabia. Forget the debate over the rights and wrongs of America's support for the state of Israel. The hatred towards the United States felt by the young Islamic intellectuals who look to Osama bin Laden for leadership is as much to do with its backing of the current Saudi regime as it has to do with the occupation of the West Bank. And our ultimate ability to reconcile the Islamic world with Western-style modernisation, on which might depend the peace and prosperity of the entire globe over the next century, lies in Riyadh not Kabul. Let us begin by trying to understand the central impetus behind the friction between the Islamic world and the West that led to the atrocities in America on 11 September. Palestine is a totem of this friction, not its cause. The fiercely proud Islamic community - roughly a third of humanity - is trapped in a historical impasse. For it is the West and Western values that have triumphed globally: our economic model, our science, our individualism, our notion of women's rights and our sexually-charged consumer culture. Leave aside for a moment quite how this has happened, but the Islamic - and particularly the Arab - world is an economic failure. The average per capita yearly income of the Islamic nations is now barely GBP 2,000 - a tenth of the rich West. In 1950, Egypt and South Korea were peasant economies on a level pegging. Today, capitalist Korea, without Egypt's cheap electricity, is five times as rich. This reality is what hurts Islam's young intellectuals who fly planes into the icons of international capitalism. Worse, the Arab countries tried for a generation between the Fifties and the Eighties to modernise (aka create Western industrial economies) and failed. The head of this movement was the charismatic Gamel Nasser in Egypt. Nasser believed in socialist central planning which only resulted, as it did in Eastern Europe, in bureaucracy, waste and corruption. But Nasser had one blindingly important insight. He knew you had to bridge adopting Western modernisation (albeit skewed by Dr Marx) with some ideological balm to soothe the realisation that the Islamic world was thereby admitting its economic and cultural dead-end. Nasser sought to overcome this psychological barrier by advocating a militant Arab nationalism premised on the eventual political unification of the Arab world. Nasser's mythological Arab unity dissolved in conflict between the various military cliques who seized power across Islam in an attempt to build the chimera of Arab socialism (and waste their oil revenues in the process). In the Western democracies, we did not grasp what would happen with the eclipse of Nasserism. Sadly, Islam's young intellectuals easily flipped from Parisian Marxism to religious fundamentalism - not such a chasm to leap. Admitting you have "failed" twice in a row is hard on personal identity, especially in a martial society. It's the kind of mental crisis that can resolve itself too easily in martyrdom. So across Islam, the bright young university men - not Dr Marx's proletariat - have sought a psychological retreat from what they perceive as Western cultural victory by adopting a purist, modern version of Islam called (but not by them) Waha-bism. Enter Saudi Arabia, the spiritual home of Wahabism. This cult was created by Mohammad Ibn Wahab at the end of the 18th century. Wahab led an extreme fundamentalist revival of Islam based on its own texts - for example, Wahabis think that the Iranian Shi'ites, who revere different Islamic historic writers, are a heretical sect founded by Jews to destroy Islam. Wahabism, unlike mainstream Islam, also relegates women to an inferior role. Osama bin Laden is a devoted Wahabite, as are the Taleban. Ibn Wahab joined forces with the Arabian Arabs against the Turkish Ottoman Empire. In the 19th century, one of these, Ibn Saud, adopted Wahabite doctrines as his official creed. During the First World War, Britain aided the Saudi family to eject the Turks and take control of the Arabian peninsula. Then came oil riches. For today's passionate young Wahabites, their creed represents a revivalist purity and reaffirmation of their great heritage. But it is also a "successful" model: for it was the pure Wahabite faith that drove out the Turks and won independence without recourse to Western ideas (if you forget Lawrence of Arabia). But the new Wahabites have an enemy beyond the West - the current Saudi regime itself. Extremists such as bin Laden and his ilk see their spiritual home as now corrupt and pro-Western. We in the West have based our political strategy in the Islamic world on an alliance with Saudi Arabia (not to mention hitching our economies to its vast oil reserves). But there is a timebomb ticking away. Bin Laden aims to topple the Saudi regime and turn Arabia into the base for his assault on the West. Even if we kill bin Laden, the struggle to transform Saudi into a cockpit for Wahabite extremism will continue. The reality of the Saudi economy is that without oil revenues it is an utter basket-case waiting to melt down, precipitating the overthrow of the existing royal family and its replacement with a fundamentalist regime. For the past 20 years, Saudi economic growth on average has been a pathetic 0.2 per cent per annum. The national income per head, once as large as that of the United Sates, has dropped remorselessly to today's third-world $ 7,000. Many of the 15 million Saudis have not noticed this catastrophic economic failure because the government keeps them in uneconomic jobs subsidised by massive foreign borrowing. The country has turned from being a net creditor in the Eighties to being a net debtor on a large scale, possibly running into several hundred billion dollars. The cash empties down two drains. Firstly, a vast network of inefficient state-owned industries, from petrochemicals to services, that makes the old Soviet Union look entrepreneurial. The other subsidy black hole is the all -powerful monarchy itself. This is centred on the remaining 24 sons of the kingdom's founder, Ibn Saud, who died in 1953. Most are in their sixties and seventies, leaving the dynasty ageing dangerously. As much as 40 per cent of government revenues go to the family. But Saudi Arabia has one of the fastest-growing populations in the world. Some 110,000 Saudis come into the workforce each year and only 40,000 find jobs. Unemployment stands at 14 per cent, and 20 per cent among young Saudi men. Mix unemployed youth, official corruption and Wahabite extremism and you have all the makings of the situation that overthrew the Shah of Iran. In May, gangs of Saudi youths rioted at the new Feisaliyya shopping complex in Riyadh. Here is our problem. We in the West have no policy for creating free-market democracy in the Islamic countries - which essentially means destroying Wahabism. Worse, the linchpin of our anti-terrorism coalition is an ultra -conservative but wobbly Saudi Arabia, the official home of Wahabism. A week after the attack on New York, Saudi's ailing King Fahd flew to Switzerland for medical treatment. He's still there. Back home, there is talk of friction between Crown Prince Abdullah (aged 77) and defence minister Prince Sultan (aged 76). Keep your eyes on Riyadh. _________________________________________________________________ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - From: "Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net> Date: Sat, 29 Sep 2001 16:04:13 -0400 Subject: Re: Ground Zero and the Saudi connection Yes, this is true. There is that subtle distinction between Saudis and Romanovs. While they both presided over decadent monarchies with idle, runaway, mostly foreign educated elites, whose offspring peculiarly started to romantically identify itself with the majority of deprivileged 'subjects' - Romanovs, at least, did not finance their own mortal enemies. Saudis want and need the US to protect them from their own creation, while not wanting to part with it. This is a very tough proposition. It is like an alcoholic that demands help but wouldn't give up the bottle. How about creating WA (Wahhabis Anonymous) and a 12 steps program for overcoming the religious zealotry addiction? ivo date sent: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 18:33:43 -0400 send reply to: International Justice Watch Discussion List <JUSTWATCH-L@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU> from: Andras Riedlmayer <riedlmay@FAS.HARVARD.EDU> subject: Re: Ground Zero and the Saudi connection to: JUSTWATCH-L@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU > ancient feudal monarchy to stay in power so long by bribing > everybody around into protecting them. Meanwhile, their youth built > very dangerous beliefs, that are now slowly coming back to > threaten the old monarchy - not very different than the relation > between Bolshevism and Tsarist Russia - only that The Saudi monarchy is unlike the Romanovs (who were anything but promoters of revolutionary ideas). As both Schartz and Tariq Ali point out, the Saudi monarchy is still publicly espousing Wahhabism and financing its propagation abroad. But the young Wahhabi radicals - most of whom get their training and their extreme ideas in Saudi-financed fundamentalist mosques and madrasas in Pakistan and elsewhere - despise the monarchy as having betrayed the Wahhabi ideals in exchange for Western protection and Western decadence. "Running dogs" who must be "cleansed" along with the West, the ultimate source of corruption. If one had to search for a historical parallel, I'd say the relationship btw the Saudi monarchy and the Islamist radicals is more analogous to that btw the old-guard Communists in China and the Red Guards who turned upon their aging mentors, denouncing them as corrupt "running dogs" of Western imperialism who had to be done away with. Some millions of deaths later, the Cultural Revolution fizzled out. Let's hope this one will not be as costly. Andras - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - From: "Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net> Date: Sat, 29 Sep 2001 16:04:08 -0400 Subject: More on Telling a Big One I think the people in the Balkans are simply jealous that media attention went elsewhere (David Rohde, the journalist hero of Srebrenica, is in Northern Afghanistan, for example), so they want to bring all those cameras back. So, they keep finding bearded Arabs among themselves. Maybe Osama Bin Laden and Radovan Karadzic should, indeed, switch hiding locations to confuse international forces. Those were not able to dig Radovan out of his hide-out, despite having the military control over the region in which that hide-out is placed. Good luck with finding Osama. ivo ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Bin Laden loyalists said heading to Bosnia By Daria Sito-Sucic SARAJEVO, Sept 28 (Reuters) - Dozens of militants linked to Saudi-born radical Osama bin Laden's organisation are trying to flee Afghanistan for Bosnia, the Interior Minister of the country's Muslim-Croat federation said on Friday. The ministry said it was ready to intercept those seeking refuge, presumably with local sympathisers, and had already taken measures with the United Nations policing mission and the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Bosnia. "We have got information from a reliable source that 70 people, who are involved in bin Laden's organisation, are preparing to leave Afghanistan for Bosnia, thinking it is now the safest place for them," minister Muhamed Besic said. Bin Laden has become the world's most wanted man after being named by the United States as the prime suspect for this month's suicide attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and The Pentagon near Washington. After the attacks local media revived allegations that Bosnian wartime authorities had issued a passport to bin Laden but this has been repeatedly denied. Some media have accused past Bosnian governments of backing foreign fighters with links to bin Laden. Some foreign Muslim volunteers, known as Mujahideen, were given passports in gratitude for fighting with Bosnia's Muslim-led army in their 1992-1995 struggle against Serbs and at times also against Croats, but the government puts the number at only 420. The suffering of Bosnia's Muslims in the war and perceived Western sloth in coming to their aid became a rallying cry for hardline Islamic groups across the world. But the presence of hundreds of militant Arabs became an embarrassment for Bosnia's Muslim authorities after the war, with the United States conditioning aid on their departure, fearing that some were planning extremist actions. Besic said Bosnia's role as a transit centre for illegal immigration between East and West had enabled some criminals and terrorists to enter the country. "There are well-founded suspicions a number of criminals and terrorists used this way to enter Bosnia," he said. WAVE OF ARRESTS Bosnia's federation recently launched a crackdown on foreigners with Bosnian citizenship who were wanted abroad. It was intensified after the September 11 suicide attacks. Besic said four Arabs were wanted by Interpol on terrorism charges. Two Egyptians were extradited to France, one Turk was handed to Germany on drugs charges and the remaining two Egyptians will be extradited to Egypt in following days. Besic said one of the Egyptians, also wanted by Croatia for allegedly taking part in a bomb attack, would not be extradited to Bosnia's neighbour due to Zagreb's failure to hand over a suspect in a car bomb attack on a Bosnian minister. Besic said that his ministry, acting upon information from Interpol and some foreign embassies in Sarajevo, had been tracking 13 people who were "under a well-founded suspicion of being linked to terrorism." He said local Bosnians and also foreigners with Bosnian citizenship were among the suspects.Bosnia's 1995 Dayton peace deal split the country into a Muslim-Croat federation and an autonomous Serb republic under a weak central government. 11:02 09-28-01 Copyright 2001 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. 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