Cruelty and Silence War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World Kanan MAKIYA (Samir al-Khalil)
CLIELTY AND SILENCE con fronts the rhetoric of Arab and pro-Arab- intellectuals with the realities of political cruelty in the Middle Fast.
The first part of the book, 'Remembering Cruelty', is told in the words of Khalil, Aby Haydar, Omar, Mustafa and Taimour - the Arab and Kurdish heroes of this book. The author of Republic of Fear (here writing under his real name), in a bid to place cruelty at the centre of Arab discourse, turns their words into stories, or metaphors for occupation, prejudice, revolution, and routinised violence. Makiya was the first per- son to bring the campaign of mass murder in northern Iraq known as the Anfal, Le the attention of the outside world, a campaign comparable in its horror to those perpetrated by the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge. That story, told through the eyes of the boy, Taimour, brings the journey to a close.
'Remembering Cruelty' is about taking responsibility for that legacy of searing pain; it is about finding hope for the future through acknowledgement.
In the second part of the book, Makiya links these tales of survival to an examination of the Arab intelligentsia's response to Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War. He shows that the flood of condemnation of the West for its handling of the crisis was barely matched by a trickle of protest over Saddam's brutal massacres of Arabs and Kurds. The words of the intellectuals are separated by a gigantic chasm from those of the survirors. Makiya attacks the Israel; occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the way the Gulf War was conducted and left unfinished by the Allied coalition. But he also argues that 'anti- Zionism' and 'anti-imperialism' have been turned by this intelligentsia into a 'politics of silence' towards cruelty.
In his exploration of these landscapes of cruelty and silence', Makiya lays out the nationalist mythologies that underpin them. He calls for a new politics in the Arab world - one that puts absolute respect for human life, and revulsion against cruelty, above everything else.
Contents
Acknowledgments / 9 A Note on Transliteration / 13 Introduction / 15
SILENCE / 231 7. Who Am I? / 233 8. New Nationalist Myths / 253 9. Landscapes of Cruelty and Silence / 284 10. Defining Silence / 312
Notes / 329 Index / 359
Introduction
ON AUGUST 2, 1990, when I heard that Saddam Husain had just invaded Kuwait, I felt sick. The instinctive thought was that he was going to get away with it. The Arab world was in a moribund, fragmented state and Saddam Husain knew his world, however little he may have understood anyone else's. Had he been allowed to get away with the annexation of the whole or part of Kuwait, everything that he stood for in politics would have been projected outward, shaping the Arab world for generations to come. For each one of us, the most important moments in politics begin with the kind of raw feeling that overcame me as I sat in my living room listening to the news. All the complex analyses and fancy formulations—which are a writer's trade—fall into line behind such feelings. Writing and thinking turn into mere elaboration of elemental instinct.
"Saddam Husain has to be stopped," I wrote that same August. "The major flaw in the American-led effort against him is that the shock troops in the front lines are not Arabs. The old nationalist, anti-imperialist formulas are therefore already being trotted out, to terrible effect. For the sake of the future of the Arab world itself, Arab must be seen to be fighting Arab in the sands of Arabia for the sake of the restoration of the sovereignty of Kuwait and against the principle of violence in human affairs which is what Ba`thi politics is all about."1
ONJANUARY 17, 1991, the day the Allied forces began bombing Iraq, I was in Cairo to attend the twenty-second annual Arabic language book fair. Stepping out of the taxi that had brought me from the airport to my hotel the week before, I saw spread out on the pavement of Tarat Harb Street a host of cheap mass-market paperbacks, among which was a pirated Arabic edition of Republic of Fear. An Egyptian friend claimed it had been put out by a man who worked for the Saudi intelligence services. Thumbing through the pirated edition of my book, I asked the eager bookseller if he knew any- thing about who had written it. "He used to be one of them," he replied. "Then he broke with his comrades just before the invasion of Kuwait and spilled the beans." The book was flanked by two spy memoirs. One was Peter Wright's Spycatcher, and the other was by a former member of Mossad, entitled By Way of Deception. These had appeared in Arabic in time to make a big hit at the book fair. Cloak and dagger spy stories are popular in Egypt, and it seems Republic of Fear was deemed by Egyptian book distributors to be of the same genre.
Lying on the same pavement on Tal'at Harb Street, just outside the front entrance to my hotel, was one of the half dozen or so scurrilous attacks on Salman Rushdie which can be found all over Cairo. This one had a Satanic caricature of Rushdie on the front cover with horns protruding from his head two inches above the ears. Elsewhere, spread out on the pavement, was a collection of everyone's favorite Egyptian love stories, and the most ubiquitous book in the whole of Cairo, The End of the World, written by the Billy Graham of Egypt, the "Shaikh and Imam" Muhammad Mutawwali al-Sha`rawi. Apocalyptic scenarios, magical events, as- trological predictions, conspiratorial machinations, and cloak and dagger politics were very much the rage in Cairo on the eve of the Gulf war in January 1991.
At the fair there were also books which argued for the separation of mosque from state by Muslim rationalist thinkers like Fouad Zakariyya and liberal secularists such as the writer Farag Fouda. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend a public talk by Fouda on his latest book. After the talk, Fouda passionately debated hundreds of angry opponents. It took enormous courage to defend secularism in public like that. For that courage, on June 9, 1992, less than a week after Fouda had publicly criticized President Hosni Mubarak for restricting civil liberties in Egypt, he was gunned down by Muslim extremists.2
Another new book on the Gulf crisis, Oil and Blood, pseudonymously written and virulently hostile to Saddam in its rhetoric, furnished alleged secret documents of the Iraqi regime, including lists of the names of all Jews in the Ba'th Party and an account of their "real role" in Iraqi politics. This is the methodology utilized by the Ba'th themselves. In the 1980s, Fadhil al-Barak, the director-general of internai security in Iraq, wrote a book which attempted to document how "evil expansionist forces" worked by planting spies and saboteurs in Iraqi Jewish and Iranian schools.3 The lists he provided in bis book are the very same ones that the unknown authors of Oil and Blood have replicated in theirs. Mr. al-Barak's fortunes changed after the Gulf war. He fell out of favor with bis Ba`thi employers. Under torture, he confessed to being a spy for Russia and Germany. In the summer of 1992, his body was returned to his family in Takrit in a sealed box.4
EXTRAORDINARY times do strange things to a book. Republic of Fear was finished in 1986. It took a long time to get published. Strange as it may seem now, only a short while ago very few people were willing to believe that things were that bad inside Iraq. Many a reader or editor found the manuscript "biased and one-sided," not scholarly enough, or excessively polemical. I still wince from the memory of being rejected by one publisher because the most eminent Arab scholar of modern Iraq in the United States reported that the book "insults" the people of Iraq. Because of Saddam Husain, however, I ended up with something as close to a best-seller as a specialist book on one country of the Middle East (barring Israel) can be in the English language.
I counted fifteen new titles on the Gulf crisis in Cairo's book fair, fifteen "instant" books, as the phrase goes in the trade. Among them were two different Arabic editions of the first four chapters of Re- public of Fear. I think the second half of the book was considered too academic for Saddam's demonization. One edition was published by Dar al-Thaqafa, a tiny, respectable, secular publishing bouse. The second pirated version was the one I found on the pavement of Tal`at Harb Street. Later, I found out that another pirated edition, a terrible translation of all eight chapters, had been published by an Islamic publishing house called Dar al-Zahra'. All of this sudden interest should be set against the fact that no Arabic language publisher would touch the manuscript from the time it was completed until Saddam Husain's invasion of Kuwait.5 Macabre and terrible though the circumstances were, I was pleased by all the attention. What writer wouldn't take pleasure in seeing his book spread out on the pavement of Tal'at Harb Street in Cairo, especially beside a manual with red hearts plastered all over it on how to write love letters? The rest of my company on the pavement, I could do without. For example, The Butcher, an instant book on Iraq with a grotesque caricature on the cover of the Iraqi leader stitching the map of Kuwait to Iraq. Ironically, my book was becoming redundant at exactly the moment it was becoming popular. I was trying to draw attention to the importance of taking the violence of the Ba'th very seriously. No one needed to read 300 pages to find that out after August 2, 1990.
Serious doubts about the meaning of all of this attention, how- ever, do creep in when one realizes that by being published and distributed in the manner I have described, Republic of Fear was not going to be taken seriously by some of the very people it was written for, namely, in this case, the Egyptian intelligentsia. Instant books have the same reputation in Cairo as they do in London or in New York. If one considers the argument of Republic of Fear as having implications for the state of contemporary Arab politics, then the likelihood is that this argument would be ignored through association with The War Between Islam and the Devil, another dusty companion on the pavement of Tarat Harb Street whose cover depicts Dracula-like fangs coming out of Saddam's mouth and blood drip- ping from a dagger in his hand pointed at the Ka'ba in Mecca. True, many Egyptian and Gulf Arab intellectuals were now critical of the Iraqi regime. But they had become so only after August 2, 1990, and everyone's inclination in January 1991 was to focus all blame on Saddam Husain, as though the brutishness of his person was all that had gone wrong in the Arab world in the past twenty years.
The real catastrophe, however, was not the intellectual scene in Egypt or the state of Egyptian publishing; it was the mind-set exhibited by the intelligentsia of the Arab world, particularly those originating in countries east of Egypt. The support for Saddam among the most cosmopolitan, secular, and westernized stratum of Arab intellectuals—in particular the most sophisticated group among them, the Palestinians—was extraordinary in its breadth and depth. h is one thing for a Palestinian in the Occupied Territories who is being humiliated daily by the Israeli military authorities to feel a sudden surge of sympathy for "the dark-skinned knight on his white horse," as that wonderful exception, the Palestinian writer Emile Habibi, satirized Saddam; it is something else entirely for the growing number of journalists, writers, or professors in Western universities who think of themselves as "Arab" or "pro-Arab" to be uttering the same sentiments in support of a brutal tyrant and in the full knowledge of what he was doing to fellow Arabs.6 During the first flush of the Gulf crisis, an Arab cultural malaise which has been many years in the making, and which is best symbolized by the emergence of Saddam Husain himself, erupted forcefully onto the center stage of Arab politics.
Like many Iraqis, especially those with a record of activism on the Palestinian question, I had some very unpleasant personal experiences with this Arab reaction. I was attacked for writing Republic of Fear under a false name. To some, the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil was confirmation that I could only be a Mossad agent, or "an Iraqi Jew." The facts are more prosaic: neither I nor anyone from my family has been hurt by the Iraqi Ba'th, and writing under a pseudonym was the most practical way of ensuring that things stayed that way.
Much has been made of pseudonyms and political positions; far too little of what actually happened inside Iraq. Republic of Fear tries to build a case that Ba`thi Iraq should not be dismissed as a run-of the-mill dictatorship with equally nasty counterparts all over the Third World. In the course of the 1970s it developed into a totalitarian state, one that bore a greater resemblance to the Soviet Union under Stalin in the 1930s and Hitler's Germany than it did to Jordan or Saudi Arabia. Does the evidence marshaled in the book confirm such conclusions? For that matter, does the enormously expanded body of documentation on Iraq now available confirm or refute that characterization of the Ba`thi state? What actually happened in Iraq over the last twenty years? Accepting the broad limes of the argument in Republic of Fear has implications which go far beyond Iraq, extending to the whole Arab world. Arab intellectuals wanted to avoid those implications during the Gulf crisis.
ON MARCH 7, 1991, during the Iraqi uprising against Saddam Husain, I went public at a symposium organized by Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. At that forum, and in the others that followed, I called on the Allied forces to finish the war and take upon themselves the task of replacing the Ba'th regime with a transitional government:
The scale of the Iraqi defeat curies with it a historic opportunity for a new beginning, one likely to shape the region's politics in less than a generation. But first the allied forces must openly recognize and work with the Iraqi insurgents . . . and march into Baghdad. . . . [A] strategic political leap equal to the scale of the war itself is required. What would have happened if the US had withdrawn from Europe after World War II, with no commitment to democracy and economic reconstruction?'
The United States was not obligated to come halfway across the world with 443,000 soldiers to sort out the problems of the Middle East. Saddam Husain was no threat to American citizens. American presidents had dealt with him before and they could certainly deal with him again. George Bush, in particular, was comfortable doing business with Saddam Husain.8 But once the United States chose to shoulder that responsibility, and once the fighting began, then it acquired an obligation to the people of Iraq to end things differently, an obligation which it did not have before all those Americans were sent to fight in the Gulf.
After I went public with this position, the non-Iraqi Arab reaction that I had experienced earlier got worse. For example, the Arabic daily Al-Quds al-'Arabi decided to publish an "Exposition and Discussion of the Ideas of Kanan Makiya" following the U.K. showing of the documentary The Road to Hell, in which I reported on the organized mass murder of more than 100,000 Kurdish civilians between February and September 1988 (see chapters 4 and 5 of this book).9 The article, written by the Syrian Subhi Hadidi, appeared under two subheadings: "How Did the Book `Republic of Fear' Became a Legend?" and "Out of Despair Comes Mental Pan- demonium."10 Hadidi's purpose was to show that Samir al-Khalil, this "rising star of the Iraqi opposition" who called on the Allied forces to finish the war and take out the Iraqi dictator, was a creation of the Western media. His light will fade, the article implied, as his true Shi`ite sectarian colors become pronounced.
Although the article's banner headline proclaimed it to be an exposition of ideas, at no point did it address the argument of Republic of Fear. Hadidi wrote that he did not have the space to go into it. But a lot of thin.gs can be said in two whole pages of a daily newspaper (approximately 3,200 words). What else, one might reasonably ask, was there to write about? Moreover, there was not one word in Hadidi's two-part article on the terrible allegations made in that documentary. How important is the fact that at least 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women, and children were trucked from their villages to their deaths over a six-month period in 1988? How important is it that since 1975, no less than 3,500 Kurdish villages have been demolished by the Iraqi government in the name of Arabism?
On the other side of the Atlantic, Edward Said, University Professor at Columbia and probably the most prominent Arab intellectual in the Western hemisphere, criticized Republic of Fear as a project serving to "advance the thesis that the feuds and violence in the Middle East are due to, relatively speaking, prehistoric causes, inscribed in the very genes of these people [Arabs]." Samir al-Khalil, he said in an interview on the role of intellectuals during the Gulf war, is a "guinea pig witness," who functioned as a "native informant" serving the interests of American policymakers.11
There is more despair and hopelessness buried in such words than there is in a whole library of books devoted to the brutality of Middle Eastern dictatorships and the terrible human costs of their wars. To be political, and to want to reclaim the meaning of political action in the Arab world, is to refuse to become a prisoner of this kind of language. Decades of unremitting violence in the region have allowed skepticism, cynicism, and absolute distrust to grow alarmingly among us. No one can say what might have happened had the Arab world reacted to Saddam Husain's invasion of Kuwait the way it should have. To expect too much (as I did in August 1990, when I called on Arabs to lead the fight against other Arabs over the issue of Kuwait, and none did so, preferring to leave it to the United States) is better than to be ensnared in bitterness and despair. On the other hand, insisting upon what is right—finishing the war and taking out the tyrant—is not the same as believing that it is going to happen; it is about projecting into the world an attitude of hope. Things don't have to be as bad as they actually are. If I am preoccupied with the cruelty and violence that has grown so alarmingly in the Arab world, it is in the belief that there is no other way of making that cruelty recede from our lives. No one can know what tomorrow will bring, and so everything and nothing are always possibilities in moments of great crisis. This political stance is at bottom a refusal to give up on the Arab world from which I originate, and it is a refusal. to give up on the West where I now choose toreside. There is no politics, no future, and no hope without such acts of acknowledgment and refusal.
THE GULF CRISIS was never simply a matter of foreign manipulation or of the evil man playing the demagogue; it was at bottom an Arab moral failure of historic proportions, for which everyone who cares for the future of this part of the world must feel personally responsible. Something, somewhere along the line, has gone profoundly wrong in the Arab world; Saddam Husain merely typified it and acted it out. In this book, I do not claim to have fully explained what went wrong; my purpose is to acknowledge and describe it. Amidst the tempest of emotions released by the Gulf war, Cruelty and Silence was conceived with this in mind.
While cruelty and violence overlap, they are not the same. Violence can be justified according to the ends that it pursues (for in- stance, as an act of self-defense). There can be violence between equals. Cruelty, on the other hand, can never be justified because it is the intentional infliction of physical pain on individuals who are in a position of weakness. For there to be cruelty, there has to be subjugation and powerlessness in some form. Psychological or social cruelty is beyond the scope of this book, but to a large extent both follow from—and feed into—physical cruelty. The violation of the human body by force or with an instrument of some kind has a visceral, irrational, and irrevocable quality about it. It is the bedrock under all the layers of horrible things that human beings do to one another.
The cruelty that I am concerned with has nothing to do with genes " or "prehistoric causes"; it is political in cause and universal in effect. Its mere occurrence is an affront to everyone's humanity and this makes it cut across national and religious boundaries and sensibilities. Cruelty of such a universal kind has grown in many parts of the world in recent years, at faster or slower rates (one has only to think of the break-up of Yugoslavia and the daily death toll in Sarajevo). One of the key questions posed in the second part of this book is: Has cruelty grown in the Arab world in the last two or so decades? And if so, what forms has it taken?
Certainly it grew in Iraq during the decade of the 1980s. The latest cycle of invasion, occupation, war, and uprising that Saddam Husain unleashed on the region ended cataclysmically with the Ba`thi regime still in place. In the course of the uprising, Iraqi hopes were raised and then dashed. Yet nothing could ever be the same again. One of the most closed countries in the world had been opened up, and virtually every Arab, for a brief moment, had something urgent to say on the subject. Most importantly, the victims of cruelty were beginning to speak, and to tell stories, as they had never done before. I wanted all those new words that were tumbling out to write this book for me. The first part of the book, therefore, is by far the most important; it is a journey through that cruelty told in the words of individuals who experienced it at first hand. My role was to turn the words of the heroes of this book—Khalil, Abu Haydar, Omar, Mustafa, and Taimour—into stories, tales of the otherwise impossible-to-believe things that we human beings are capable of doing to one another.
Khalil is a remarkable Kuwaiti who stayed in Kuwait during the occupation, and was changed by the experience. Painful though that experience was, it taught him who he was. He searched me out in the summer of 1991, and we discovered a deep bond, out of which emerged the first chapter of this book.
Abu Haydar is a former officer in the Iraqi army, born in the holy city of Najaf. He decided on March 1, 1991, that he had had enough, and took his life into his hands to revolt against Saddam Husain. The story of his Intifada is told in the form of a collage of Iraqi voices. The rebels were cruel to their erstwhile tormentors. In their own words, they tell of the things that they did. Still, I believe they struck a blow for freedom in Iraq. In the wake of their failure, Najaf and Kerbala were sacked as no Iraqi city has been sacked since the Mongols took Baghdad in 1258. Even as I write, the Ba'th are trying to rebuild them, as they rebuilt Babylon, in their own image.
Omar is a young engineer from al-A`dhamiyya in Baghdad. He spent forty-two days in a Baghdad prison. Although he was not tortured, he entered a world of unimaginable horror which has become a kind of norm inside Iraq.
I met Mustafa in Iraqi Kurdistan in November 1991. He took me to see a monument he had built to memorialize the deaths of sixtyeight of his fellow Kurds from the village of Guptapa, wiped out in a chemical gas attack in 1988. Twenty-five of them were members of his family.
I first saw the Kurdish boy Taimour in a videotape clip passed on to me in August 1991. He was Sitting cross-legged on the floor, talking about how he had survived execution by a firing squad in August 1988. His father, mother, and three sisters were not so lucky. Thirteen months after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, like everyone else, I was growing immune to Ba`thi atrocity stories. But there was something different about this one. Maybe the difference registered because of a wad of paperwork which I had been given a few days before seeing the tape. These were copies of official documents captured by Kurdish insurgents during the March 1991 uprising. Their significance had hitherto been ignored. The paperwork and the videotape became inextricably connected in my mind. The connection had a name: the campaign of mass murder (mentioned earlier) conducted by the Iraqi army between February and September 1988.12
The greater a crime, the harder it is to eliminate all of its traces. Taimour was somewhere out there in the mountains of Kurdistan, willing to bear witness. I entered Iraq on November 11, 1991, to interview Taimour and to see those captured documents. I came out with many terrible bits and pieces of evidence, not all of which have been woven into the stories that comprise the first part of this book.
Cruelty is private, directed at individual human bodies; it is profoundly personal in its implications for the rest of a victim's life. Taimour gets dressed up to look like a big, brave guerrilla fighter these days and trotted out to be interviewed by all and sundry. But he is still just a little boy who was as old as my daughter is now when the world collapsed in on him.
I am a writer, not a human rights worker, and I do not claim to have done justice to the terrible things that have happened to the people whose names appear as chapter headings in Part One. If I have done my best and stuck to the facts as far as it was possible to establish them, I still know that in the case of the people whose stories I have tried to tell, no one's best is ever good enough. To restore Khalil, Abu Haydar, Omar, Mustafa, and Taimour at the center, I had to turn them into metaphors for gross cruelty. Inevitably, real flesh and blood individuals have been written into a new kind of Arab archetype. IN HIS last dark meditation, just before taking his own life, Primo Levi wrote of the people who have survived unfathomable acts of cruelty:
Almost all the survivors [of the Holocaust], orally or in their written memoirs, remember a dream which frequently recurred during the nights of imprisonment, varied in its detail but uniform in its substance: they had returned home and with passion and relief were describing their part sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved one, and were not believed, indeed were not even listened to. In the most typical (and cruellest) form, the interlocutor turned and left in silence.13 If cruelty is individual, then silence is collective. It arises from the actions of many individuals working, consciously or unconsciously, as a group. Breaking with silence as a way of dealing with the legacy of cruelty is thus itself necessarily a collective act. While the cruelties that are talked about in Part One were going on, the Arab intellectuals who could have made a difference if they had put their minds to it were silent.
Like cruelty, the silence of Arab intellectuals is not immutable. Many sensitive Arab minds are profoundly aware of how deep the intellectual and cultural malaise inside the Arab world became during the 1980s. I will constantly be referring to what they have to say. The main point of this book is that the collective Arab silence toward the cruelties that are so often perpetrated in the name of all Arabs originates from many years of thinking in a certain way; it is, therefore, not an essentialist or an unchangeable condition; it is a politics of silence. During the Gulf crisis, the form that this politics of silence took was the myth of Saddam as some kind of saviour, and its mirror image, the idea that the crisis and ensuing war grew out of the machinations of Western racism or imperialism.
There was a time when an all-powerful West meddled with and shaped the destiny of the world. A fair amount of that still goes on. The point of the second part of this book is not to deny the obvious; it is to show how "history" has been internalized by the intelligentsia of the Arab world into a profoundly unhealthy political mind-set, one which is at variance with the actual condition of Arabs. Many Arabs knew that something had gone terribly wrong inside the Arab world, but they chose not to speak out, especially not before a Western audience. This kind of intellectual thus became part of the problem, instead of spearheading its solution. In times of moral crisis, silence turns into acquiescence. The abdication of intellectual responsibility is greater among such Arabs than it is among those who don't see the problem in the first place; it is greater precisely because they know better.
The flood of articles and statements written by these intellectuals in the first year and a half of the crisis, elaborating upon the myth, are therefore my prime source in depicting this politics of silence. Pseudo-scientific generalizations and abstractions hide too many sins; silence has its own concrete language, which needs to be illustrated. In any case, by naming names, and quoting what people said and thought, I expose myself as much as I expose those I am criticizing. Some people changed or moderated their opinions after the full scale of the Iraqi military debacle became clear. Some are to- day talking out of both sides of their mouth at the same time, which suggests that the passions that led to those articles and statements in the first place did not always change. Those emotional wellsprings, not the individuals themselves, lie at the center of my critique.
People are endowed with the gift of being able to change their minds. I bank on that gift because I have seen it at work in so many young Arabs. I write for them. With them in mind, this book ap- pears in three languages at the same time (English, Arabic, and Kurdish). These young people of the Middle East urgently need to break with the heroes who have failed them. They need to invent a different language by which to examine who they are and what it is they want out of this world. The truths that I am dealing in are not cast in stone. They are made by human beings. They are choices which can just as easily be unchosen. There is no general truth that is not particular and individual; that is what hurts so much. But, then, so does cruelty and the language of those Arab intellectuals who have labored to justify it.
We will never stop debating what is truth, but no one should ever have to be in any doubt over what is cruelty. This book is a polemic in favor of calling things by their rightful names; of recognizing failure and of taking responsibility for it. Unlike the satisfaction I felt in telling the stories of Khalil, Abu Haydar, Omar, Mustafa, and Taimour, I found no pleasure in dissecting the words of Arab intellectuals. But it had to be done. Things have gone too far now and there is no turning back from the road that Saddam Husain himself first opened up when he entered Kuwait on August 2, 1990. The stakes are very high because in the end this is a fight over the kind of future the Arab world wants, a struggle over that persistent Middle Eastern question: "Who is an Arab?" In this fight, I seek to be fair, but I do not chim to be impartial. My purpose is not personal, but my style is. I want to tap at the roots. I want to reach into the emotional heart of things instead of staring uselessly at intellectual mirrors. In the meantime, the graves of the dead are still open in the Arab world.
London December 1992
Cruelty and Silence War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World Also by the author (writing as Samir al-Khalil)
REPUBLIC OF FEAR The Politics of Modem Iraq
THE MONUMENT Art, Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SWiV 2SA Random House Australia (Pty) Limited 2o Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney, New South Wales 2061, Australia Random House New Zealand Limited 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand Random House South Africa (Pty) Limited PO Box 337, Bergvlei, South Africa Random House UK Limited Reg. No. 954009 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0-224-03733-1 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St. Ives PLC
