Cruelty and Silence

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.