The speaker of parliament announced yesterday that that the Syrian regime will hold presidential elections on 3 June 2014. This announcement comes amid an array of speculation about the strategies of the regime in the face of over three years of the Syrian uprising, a brutal and destructive regime response, and the militarization and radicalization of key segments of the opposition. With over 130,000 dead, approximately nine million displaced, and nearly fifty percent of the population dependent on aid, how do we make sense of the Syrian regime's announcement of elections amidst civil war?

In the below interview with Worldview airing on National Public Radio (NPR), Jadaliyya Co-Editor Bassam Haddad discusses the recent announcement, its broader context, and possible implications. The interview was conducted and broadcast on Monday 21 April 2014, the day of the elections announcement.

Bassam will also be speaking at UIC, a Community Fundraiser for Humanitarian Relief, and at the University of Chicago this week.

Reinoud Leenders, Spoils of Truce: Corruption and State-Building in Postwar Lebanon. Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2012.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Reinoud Leenders (RL): Since my first encounter with Lebanese politics and society in the mid-1990s, I have been fascinated with the nature and role of the state in this country. This was primarily because I became exposed to a lively array of contradictory narratives on the state when talking to ordinary Lebanese and living in and visiting the country for over a decade. On one and the same day, it was quite conceivable to listen to one politician on the radio slamming the financial drains imposed by Lebanon’s state enterprises, then to hear an economist at some symposium praising the country’s tradition of “laissez-faire,” after that to be told by an industrialist that red tape had stifled his business, and next to hear a taxi driver cursing at the chaotic Beirut traffic, ma fi dawla, ma fi nizam! (there’s no state, no order!). When asked about these apparent contradictions, Lebanese academicians and analysts would patiently explain to me the enigmatic nature of the Lebanese state. But often their narratives dwelled in much greater length on other pressing topics, such as ever-rising sectarianism and Lebanon’s changing exposure to the region’s turbulent politics. To me at least the real nature of the “weak” state in Lebanon—its operations, its institutional qualities, and its significance—remained a mystery.  

In 1997 I had embarked on a PhD project at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. I wanted to study Lebanon’s economic policies and post-war reconstruction in an attempt to get to the heart of this country’s political economy. However, this approach proved ill-advised, as I soon realized that the main source of controversy and friction was not so much state policy, but the very nature of state institutions and their links to society at large. Simply put, what the state “did” seemed to matter much less than whether and how the public administration distinguished itself from the main exponents of the private sector and their interests. Indeed, many of the political contests about the role of the state seemed to occur in the virtual absence of noteworthy state policies in the first place. Thus a study of the latter seemed a step too far and appeared to be based on a range of assumptions that I had not even realized I was making. I needed an approach that would highlight that amorphous entity called “the state” without assuming that its structures and institutions were already in place.

It was in this context that my journalistic interest in political corruption in Lebanon acquired an unexpected significance. When I was writing regular dispatches from Beirut for Middle East International in the late 1990s, Lebanon was immersed in a lively and at times rancorous debate on rampant political corruption and numerous scandals of politicians allegedly enriching themselves at the expense of the public coffers. Although much of this debate was soon overshadowed by the self-serving political manipulations and wrangling so typical of Lebanese politics, the renewed curiosity in corruption was inspiring. I felt that some of the anti-corruption activists were implicitly posing the same question that was on my mind: What kind of state had emerged out of the rubble of war and destruction since Lebanon’s Parliament set in motion the peace process adopted in 1989?

The connection between political corruption and the nature of the state appeared to me as following from two considerations. First, while political corruption was commonly if loosely understood as the use of public office for private gain, inquiries into the phenomenon inexorably touched upon the nature of the Lebanese state. Second, the curiosity as to the exact circumstances of political corruption—elaborate and technical by nature—drew attention to state organizations whose peculiar institutional arrangements now seemed to matter a great deal more than they had before. Thus, while political controversy raged over an overwhelming array of corruption cases, for example in the country’s energy sector, local newspapers focused on explaining how the Ministry of Industry and Oil was in fact structured and operating. Press reports on these subjects read like a fascinating journey through the state’s myriad of institutions, many of which had attracted no or little attention before. In brief, in their outrage over political corruption, Lebanese journalists, intellectuals, and politicians rediscovered the significance of the state. By doing so, they unwittingly offered me a window into the nature and origins of state institutions in post-Ta’if Lebanon.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

RL: The book unpacks the widely held view that corruption permeated Lebanon’s state institutions throughout the post-Ta’if period until 2005. It does so, first, with reference to general appraisals and surveys on the subject; this is a methodology that has expanded greatly over the last two decades or so when it comes to the study of corruption generally. Yet more importantly, and less common in “corruptology,” the book explores in detail how corruption implicated senior policymakers and high-ranking public servants in key sectors of the Lebanese economy and government, including transportation, health care, energy, natural resources, construction, and social assistance programs. The study aims to understand why corruption levels from Ta’if in 1989 until the Syrian withdrawal in 2005 have been so profound. In this context, I believe that causal explanations can only make sense if incidences of corruption are first analyzed in their own immediate institutional and political contexts. Accordingly, much of the book is devoted to the unique stories of each of these institutions, as it assesses their susceptibility to corruption, looks into their nature and qualities in terms of bureaucratic organization, and analyzes the underlying politics of these institutions’ evolution.

This eventually brought me to two key sets of observations. First, I established that all the institutions that I had scrutinzed failed to meet some essential criteria associated with bureaucratic organization and derived from its Weberian ideal-type. It is here that most existing analysis on “public sector reform” ends. Yet I argued that the qualities of such corruption-prone institutions should be viewed as the outcome of the political decision-making process. I referred to these complex mechanisms through the shorthand notion of the “political settlement.” Before demonstrating its effects on institution building in each individual institution under study, I examined Lebanon’s post-war political settlement for its main features.

In this context, I argued that since the Ta’if Accord, Lebanon’s political settlement entailed five main and interrelated traits: 1) high levels of inclusiveness and an extreme dispersal of power, resulting in quasi-permanent gridlock in the decision-making process; 2) the predominance of the “troika,” or the elites holding the country’s key political positions, and their politics of apportionment (muhasasa); 3) continuous attempts to circumvent the built-in stalemates of the formal political arrangement enshrined in the Ta’if Accord and the constitution; 4) weak popular support for political elites, which generally resulted in the vulnerability of those filling high political positions; 5) the overriding role of the Syrian leadership’s interests in Lebanon, and particularly its manipulation of the country’s internal differences. In the book, I hope to have demonstrated that these features, taken together, go a long way in explaining that public institutions became exposed to high levels of corruption.

J: What is there to gain in using the notion of a Weberian ideal-type of a bureaucracy for this analysis?

RL: I did not expect the criteria of bureaucratic organization to fully apply in Lebanon. I ultimately hoped to be able to better conceptualize how Lebanon’s state institutions operated as they did. As a professor at SOAS, Sudipta Kaviraj, put it once in a different context, “by using a familiar concept, and by carefully observing the processes and reasons for its disconfirmation, we can begin to inflect or change the concept, or see that in its logical place we need some other concept, not the one we have used.” In my book, I suggest that this “other concept” may be captured by the notion of a muhasasa state,or an “allotment state,” in which fierce struggles over the building of state institutions and their significance coexist with an utter disregard for the universal application of bureaucratic rules. This apparent contradiction is reflected in the initially puzzling views that both praise “laissez-faire” in Lebanon and in the same breath denounce stifling statism.

Furthermore, what I found striking is that not all Lebanese state institutions failed to pass the test of a Weberian bureaucracy. The Lebanese Central Bank, for instance, presents a positive but relative exception to the failure of Lebanon’s state institutions to meet basic bureaucratic criteria. At the same time, the Central Bank managed to curb or prevent the corruption thriving elsewhere. I argued that following a short period wherein Lebanon’s political elites also eyed the Central Bank for their corrupt schemes, it managed to insulate itself from the otherwise incapacitating effects of the post-Ta’if political settlement. This was due to some unique circumstances that failed to emerge elsewhere. With the expansion of the market in treasury bills that financed Lebanon’s bulging public debt, political elites gained a positive and personal interest in upholding the Central Bank’s independence and institutional safeguards. This, I argued, can be explained by these elites’ own purchase of treasury bills, the vast returns involved, the critical role of the Central Bank in this context, and its reputation of integrity on which Lebanon’s debt market crucially relied. Ironically, therefore, Lebanon’s political elites were in strong agreement when it came to creating and sharing in Lebanon’s debt burden, but otherwise their fierce differences undermined virtually all state institutions, their policies, and their services.      

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

RL: First of all, I hope that ordinary Lebanese readers, as well academics, researchers, and policymakers, will read the book. As debating corruption scandals is a favorite past time in Lebanon, the book probably will not tell these readers much that is new about the scale and intricacies of corruption in their country, but it may invite them to develop some new perspectives on it.

For one thing, I noticed that many Lebanese adhere to mono-causal explanations of rampant corruption as they variously blame “sectarianism,” “the war,” “clientelism,” “a culture of corruption,” or, at least before the Syrians pulled out, simply “Syria.” These explanations on their own fail to shed much light on all the corruption cases that I looked into. At the same time, they seem to suggest that very little can be done in terms of countering corruption. As I argued in the book, the groundwork for serious anti-corruption reforms—and more generally, for establishing a genuine peace—will have to involve a redesign of Lebanon’s post-Ta’if political settlement. Short of that fundamental change, flawed state institutions and corruption will continue to flourish. Of course, this will be a herculean task; indeed, a lot more is at stake than combatting corruption. Yet continuing to repeat the World Bank’s mantra of “administrative reform” without addressing its essential political underpinnings is not going to do the job.      

In hindsight, I think my study gained some additional relevance thanks to the Arab uprisings since 2011. Certainly, a wide range of grievances has prompted mainly leaderless crowds to take to the streets and public squares of the Arab world. But, arguably, popular anger over pervasive corruption has been at the root of the uprisings. Regime crooks personifying corruption, like the Trabelsi clan in Tunisia and Ahmad ‘Izz in Egypt, were among the first to be targeted by protestors. Mass mobilization in Lebanon, of course, was much less successful for its own reasons, but not because Lebanon did not share the astounding levels of corruption that elsewhere helped to ignite mass anger and collective action.

Even though corruption should be studied and understood in its specific context, I believe that my book’s approach and methodology could be useful in the study of high levels of corruption throughout the entire Arab world. In any case, we should not content ourselves with economists’ quantitative surveys to understand corruption in the region, or indeed beyond, and leave them to prescribe remedies that often ignore the “political” in political economy. The injustices challenged by Arab protestors necessitate political solutions and alternatives, not managerial stopgaps.

Finally, my book may be uncomfortable reading for those who insist that liberal power-sharing strategies in conflict management and resolution provide some sort of panacea for divided societies hoping to recover from armed conflict. If one accepts my assessment that post-Ta’if Lebanon shares some important traits of “consociational” engineering, both widespread corruption and the unstable respite of a truce may well be its collateral costs. Time and time again, postwar countries pursuing “consociationalist” or inclusive political strategies have witnessed extraordinarily high levels of corruption and, associated with this, shaky postwar recoveries. Think, for example, of post-1995 Bosnia-Herzegovina, post-2002 Afghanistan, and, of course, post-2003 Iraq. Thriving corruption in such “post-war” countries has often been blamed on the capital-intensive and inherently obscure features of the construction sector. Other times, it is argued that massive foreign aid used to bankroll postwar recovery caused widespread rent-seeking. Yet in Lebanon, construction was only one sector wherein corruption flourished and foreign aid has been negligible. In Lebanon, and I suspect in other “post-war” countries as well, virtually all state institutions are riddled with corruption because their creation and functioning depended on a debilitating, “consociational” political settlement aimed at dividing up the cake instead of jointly baking a new one.                     

J: As Lebanon faces an escalating political crisis, what lessons can scholars and policy makers take from your work?

RL: Clearly, Lebanon’s current problems are not all of its own making. The ferocity and spillover of the civil war in neighboring Syria and, more specifically, the fact that now one-fourth of Lebanon’s population are Syrian refugees, would put serious strains on any political system. Yet it can be argued that the crippling effects of the country’s political settlement, shaped in Ta’if and by and large confirmed in the Doha agreement of 2008, cause Lebanon to be particularly exposed to such pressures.

For one thing, Hizbullah has fully entered the political game and has turned to this cumbersome political settlement in order to shield itself from pressure to disarm and, more recently, to substitute for Lebanon’s foreign policies vis-à-vis the Syrian crisis. Not so long ago, Hizbullah officials lambasted Lebanon’s pork-barrel politics and the established elites’ petty politicking, and contrasted these with the supposed integrity and empowerment of its own resistance agenda. Today, Hizbullah firmly banks on the gridlock built into the country’s political settlement that not only brings about unbearable levels of corruption, but also grants Hizbullah ample leeway to pursue its narrow interests.

Against this background, state institutions continue to be fully exposed to corruption, which currently holds back foreign donors from providing Lebanon with the financial support that it needs to cope with the refugee crisis. In short, the need and urgency of serious reforms, if not a complete overhaul of Lebanon’s political settlement, have only been underscored. In this respect, although I do not want to come across as the all-knowing Middle East “expert” telling the Lebanese what to do, Lebanon should work toward a new political settlement that de-emphasizes the diktat of the “national unity government” and instead encourages the dialectics of government and opposition. It needs to modify and clarify the powers held by the country’s “three presidents” to allow not just for political balance, but first and foremost for policymaking. It needs electoral reforms to foster confident and representative elites. And it needs a new national pact on how Lebanon, its leaders and citizens alike, should relate to its neighbors and to the region at large.

These daunting imperatives, in my view, will continue to haunt Lebanon, no matter what strategies are devised to postpone or circumvent them, whether by way of the politically sterile universe of “administrative reform” or by joint Saudi-Western efforts to bloat the country’s security forces.   

J: What other projects are you working on now?

RL: When I was Middle East analyst for the International Crisis Group between 2002 and 2005, I started visiting Syria and conducting research there. When I came back into academia, I embarked on a research project with Steven Heydemann that resulted in an edited volume, Middle East Authoritarianisms, comparing Syria and Iran and involving a number of excellent scholars. When the Syrian uprising started in March 2011, I developed, together with other researchers on the region, a renewed interest in social movement theory. I tried to learn from it to first make sense of the onset of the mobilization in Syria, and then to analyze the origins of violence and the militarization of the uprising. At the same time, I have tried to map out and explain the Syrian regime’s responses to the uprising and, later, its ruthless counter-insurgency campaign. In this project, I take issue with a common notion, echoed in discussions on the Syrian crisis, of authoritarian regimes as being inherently myopic, unimaginative, anachronistic, irrational, or even “stupid.” I hope to explore these and other themes further in a research project on the role of Syria’s borderlands in both the uprising and the insurgency.

But the topic of corruption, and related governance issues, still interest me. I am currently working on a research assignment from the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies on the possible implications of Lebanon’s recently discovered offshore oil- and gas-fields in terms of governance and corruption. After having done some research on the use of the judiciary in authoritarian Syria, I have also turned to the Lebanese court system to explore how corruption and its lack of independence affected the routine reproduction of power in what Farid El Khazen once called Lebanon’s “authoritarianism by diffusion.”  

Excerpt from Spoils of Truce: Corruption and State-Building in Postwar Lebanon

From Chapter Six: “Corruption and the Primacy of Politics”

Corruption and Its Causes through Lebanese Eyes

I have already noted a strong congruence between the conceptual understanding of political corruption proposed in this book and the ways in which many Lebanese understand the notion. It may be instructive to compare my findings on the causes of rampant corruption in postwar Lebanon with some key Lebanese voices on the subject. Such opinions—obtained from media sources, interviews, personal encounters, and a few academic works—do not constitute a scientific or representative sample. Nevertheless, a brief discussion may be useful.

As many Lebanese have similarly associated corruption with the quality of state institutions, it may come as no surprise that many causal explanations for rampant corruption have focused on matters related to bureaucratic organization. Two criteria receive special attention. The lack of oversight mechanisms and external controls has been commonly lamented for facilitating impunity among corrupt officials. Yet even more attention has focused on politicians’ conflicts of interest and their detrimental effects on administration. Hariri’s considerable wealth and his involvement in countless business enterprises both in and outside Lebanon fostered the general impression of political elites in ruthless pursuit of self-enrichment at the expense of a “state of institutions.”

Furthermore, some Lebanese observers pointed at the political process following Ta’if as being responsible for the general failure to build solid bureaucratic institutions that could withstand the lure of corruption. The politics of the troika and muhasasa have been particularly blamed for undermining the “rule of law” and “the public interest.” Yet most such analyses were presented to condemn—rather than analyze—such practices. In this context very few established a link between the peculiar politics of the troika and the formal political arrangement originating in Ta’if. On the contrary, common disapproval of the troika’s politics of muhasasa was generally accompanied by a call to respect the constitution and honor the Ta’if Accord (Mansour 1993). Much closer to my approach is Da’ud as-Sayigh’s article “In Search of Authority [sulta] in Lebanon” (AN 7 April 1999), which blames the volatile and unconstitutional politics of the troika on the constitution itself. That document, he argues, failed to identify clearly a workable balance of power or “center of gravity” in the decision-making process. Yet Sayigh does not explicitly make the connection between these flaws and muhasasa or corruption. Finally, some Lebanese observers also have suggested ways to characterize the Lebanese state against the background of failing bureaucratic institutions and rampant corruption. Although the discourse on Lebanon’s “weak state”—and its opposite, a (strong) “state of institutions”—prevails, Albert Dagher, a Lebanese economist, suggested a categorization that, at least outwardly, approximates my suggested notion of the allotment state. The Lebanese state, he argued, should be viewed as a “distributive state” wherein effective policymaking is surpassed by a game of fromagisme (a French term akin to the expression “dividing up the pie”) that impels decision makers “to be content with simply spending public resources without paying attention to their origins” (2002, 24). Accordingly, Dagher concluded, state policies to promote economic productivity have been conspicuously absent.

At least at a general level, a few Lebanese observers and commentators therefore appear to share my own analysis of corruption. Yet one-dimensional causal explanations—whereby corruption is linked to just one phenomenon believed to capture Lebanese politics—have been much more common. Widespread corruption has been exclusively blamed on, variously, engrained sectarianism (ta’ifiyya), the country’s long-established politics of patronage (mahsubiyya) and clientelism (zaba’iniyya), its (civil) wars, the massive wealth accrued by businessmen-turned- politicians, Syria’s occupation, the lopsided nature of the Lebanese economy, and a culture that condones corruption. I do not have enough space to take issue with each of these diverging views. Indeed, they are often advanced with aims different from those of an academic account of the causes of corruption. Yet a few remarks may help clarify the main arguments of this book.

Most important, while some of these claims may have explanatory value when it comes to individual cases of institution building and corruption, none of them suffices to explain all cases and associated institutional qualities. An exclusive focus on war-related factors and their legacies, Syria’s role, or sectarianism may be echoed in my analysis of this or that particular institutional setting. Yet they certainly do not cover all cases. Thus, for instance, sectarianism indeed played an important role, but it did not determine institutional outcomes and corruption levels in all cases. Sectarian differences were only one way in which elites diverged. Other fault lines included regional conflicts, competition between old and new elites, and contests between elites in control of certain state resources versus elites with private assets and interests. Indeed, political alliances frequently formed between elites from different sectarian backgrounds, as, for example, in the oil business.

Common to most if not all of these arguments is that they do not differentiate among specific forms of corruption. Consequently, they do not follow the distinction proposed in this book between high and low political corruption. Indeed, if the manifestations and underlying mechanisms of different forms of corruption are similar, then the differentiation may not be warranted. On closer examination, however, it turns out that many Lebanese arguments on corruption deal only with low political corruption. This seems particularly true for analyses that lean on patron-client approaches or “(neo-)patrimonialism” (Hamzeh 2001). Such approaches emphasize the particularistic nature and vertical structure of Lebanese politics, which one can indeed argue resulted in “patrons” providing state jobs, services, and/or favors to their “clients” and involved corruption. Yet patrimonialism does not focus or reflect on intra-elite relations, whether these are of a conflictive, cooperative, or collusive nature. As shown throughout this book, most high political corruption in postwar Lebanon originated at this level and much less so at the level where “patrons” catered to the needs of their subservient “clients.” In this context corruption in postwar Lebanon differed in nature and scope from the patronage-induced corruption in Lebanon’s First Republic prior to 1975, as analyzed by Michael Johnson (1986), Marun Kisirwani (1971, 1974, 1978), Michael Hudson (1985), Samir Khalaf (1977), and others. This is not to say that patron-client relations in postwar Lebanon had no significance. Surely one of the features of the postwar political settlement—vulnerable elites—provoked processes that resemble those of patrimonialism. Yet none of the corruption cases explored in this book can be reduced to these terms, and patrimonialism does not explain all or even most of them.

As my own analysis has been informed by New Institutional Economics, it may come as no surprise that an approach closely matching my attempt to conceptualize Lebanon’s allotment state (Dagher’s “distributive state”) was developed by an economist. Otherwise there is little affinity between my analysis and economic or indeed economistic understandings of corruption. Most economists (both Lebanese and foreign) commenting on unbridled corruption seem more or less to agree that Lebanon’s state apparatus is excessively large as elites stuff the public administration with their followers and supporters, which in turn fosters corruption. Yet this claim is questionable even if one accepts the proposed correlation between excessive public sector employment and corruption. Measured in terms of the number of public sector employees relative to the labor force in general (12.5 percent in 2004), postwar Lebanon’s public sector employment does not stand out as excessively large, certainly not in comparison with other Arab states (Ministry of Social Affairs 2007, 85; Schiavo-Campo et al. 1997, 38; Garner 2003; World Bank LQU second quarter 2005). Of course, the right or optimal size of public sector employment in any economy is a matter of fierce debate, as are the ways to measure it. Yet the available data tell us that Lebanon simply does not have a bloated bureaucracy. The elites’ reliance on getting their supporters appointed to state jobs played a qualitative role in fostering corruption, not because it resulted in state obesity. Furthermore, many Lebanese economists also echo the dominant view that excessive and unproductive state interference in the economy is the main cause of corruption. This argument cannot be corroborated in the Lebanese context either. The corruption cases explored in this book were not limited to incidences of statist excess, and indeed I encountered patterns of corruption in areas where the state did not interfere heavily at all. Wasteful or interventionist policies may incidentally have prompted high levels of corruption (as, for example, in the state’s major subsidies for IDPs). Yet as we find corruption in policy areas where the state did not interfere (or, depending on one’s perspective, failed to do so), “statist” excess cannot be regarded as a prime cause of corruption.

A final fundamental difference with economists’ readings is that I believe that corruption is rooted in the ways in which politics, not economics, is conducted. Because of this fundamental divergence, the correspondence between Dagher’s “distributive state” and my characterization of Lebanon as an allotment state ultimately breaks down. Dagher views the main source of national income—external rents—as the chief causal factor in his analysis of failing developmental policies and corruption, not the country’s political settlement (Dagher 2002, 25). In the Lebanese context this argument seems hardly persuasive. After all, the country’s external rents—consisting mostly of remittances from the sizeable Lebanese diaspora—accrue not to the state but rather to private households. In short, Lebanon’s society may arguably be a rentier economy, but it does not follow that a rentier economy inexorably generated a “distributive state.”

[Excerpted from Spoils of Truce: Corruption and State-Building in Postwar Lebanon, by Reinoud Leenders, by permission of the author. Copyright © 2012 by Cornell University. For more information, or to buy this book, click here.]

Jeudi 17 avril, il est vingt-deux heures trente, et le concert des klaxons retentit depuis une bonne heure dans Alger-centre. Le Président-roulant a gagné. Ses supporteurs ne sont guère nombreux, mais ils gesticulent et font autant de bruit que possible. La plupart ne s'arrêtent pas et passent en voiture autour du jardin de l'Horloge. Un vieux commandant de police admoneste les passagers d'une voiture officielle qui insistent pour se garer à l'endroit où il se tient debout, comme s'il était devenu quantité négligeable, comme si un bout de papier leur donnait le droit d'écraser un type en uniforme de trente ans leur aîné. Le flic les remet à leur place. Pendant ce temps là d'autres fans de Boutef arrivent et tirent des feux d'artifices. Il est difficile de savoir lesquels sont payés et lesquels sont vraiment des afficionados du Président. Les youyous qu'on entend sont en fait diffusés par un camion qui tourne autour du jardin. La joie est ostentatoire. Des journalistes viennent solliciter ceux qui distribuent les affiches du Président-candidat pour des photographies convenus mais qui auront une chance de se vendre. Tout cela n'est pas vraiment surprenant. Déjà le matin même, du côté de Bab El-Oued, un homme prétendant donner des consignes au nom de l'homme d'affaire Ali Haddad prévenait de mobiliser des supporteurs de l'USMA pour fêter la victoire de Bouteflika. A dire vrai, ce spectacle prévisible laisse comme un fond d'amertume.

L'élection, un non-choix

On pourrait dénoncer la fraude, le rôle de l'administration, la répression et les « services » de manière tout à fait censée. Toutefois, le principal nœud gordien de cette élection réside dans l'absence d'alternative crédible venant du champ politique. Grand succès de la mise-à-jour du système algérien, le pluralisme discrédité garantit au candidat du régime, même impotent, le statut de favori.

L'ancien premier ministre Ali Benflis était présenté comme l'opposant numéro un. Vu d'Algérie, et pour quiconque a une connaissance minimale du que politique, il ne faisait guère de doute qu'une victoire serait d'une part une grande surprise, d'autre part le signe d'un retournement du cartel qui tient l'Etat contre la Présidence. Au mieux donc, Benflis était un lièvre utilisé pour mettre en scène une campagne compétitive, au pire un candidat du régime déguisé en opposant. Les résultats plaident pour la première solution. Le constat n'est guère flatteur pour un initié, un homme censé connaître les rouages du système, et qui aurait pourtant été réduit au rang de caution démocratique, de simple alibi[1].

Concernant les poursuivants, leurs scores ne sont certainement pas si éloignés de leur poids politique réel. Le troisième par ordre d'arrivée, Abdelaziz Belaïd[2], est un ancien militant du FLN qui a par la suite créé sa propre organisation, le Front Al-Moustakbal. Le plus jeune des candidats est en fait à la tête d'un FLN new look, dont le slogan « dialogue, stabilité, développement » n'est qu'une resucée sans saveur du discours politique dominant. Dans l'ordre viennent ensuite Louisa Hanoune, Ali Faouzi Rebaïne et enfin Moussa Touati. La première, qui fut jadis une trotskiste de tendance lambertiste, est désormais la préposée au poste de candidate féminine. En-dehors des périodes de campagne pour les élections présidentielles, elle soutient le Président invisible et vocifère contre la main de l'étranger. Rebaïne est le vieux candidat de la famille révolutionnaire par héritage. Sa troisième campagne ne lui aura toujours pas permis de dépasser le score pharaonique de 1%. Cela ne l'aura pas empêché d'encaisser l'argent promis aux candidats qui daignent apporter leur concours à la mise-en-scène démocratique. Quand au dernier, un ancien policier devenu politicien, son parti national/populiste/conservateur s'était distingué en mettant aux enchères des places de candidats à la députation en 2012. Jamais avare d'un diagnostic fin et progressiste, Touati a expliqué cette fois que la création d'un fonds destiné aux femmes divorcées ayant des enfants à charge était un danger pour la cellule familiale. Peut lui importe visiblement que cette catégorie de population fragile soit en nombre parmi les sans-abris.

L'amertume ne venait sûrement pas de la non-élection des adversaires de Bouteflika. Tous à leur manière, ils représentent ce qu'il y a de grotesque, redondant, négligeable ou inquiétant dans le champ politique algérien. Ils sont autant de raisons de se méfier des représentants putatifs. A l'exception de Benflis, leur élection n'avait été envisagée par personne, y compris eux-mêmes. Les scores prêtés au Président-roulant sont donc crédibles. A en croire ce qui ressortait de différents bureaux de vote à Alger, une écrasante majorité des votants ont accordé leur confiance à un vieillard impotent. C'est dire si ses challengers n'avaient rien pour générer l'enthousiasme. 

L'abstention comme seul recours ?

Comme lors des derniers rendez-vous électoraux, le chiffre le plus important demeure le taux de participation. En dépit de son gonflement par tous les moyens légaux et illégaux, il est officiellement en forte baisse, avec 51,7% en 2014 contre 74,5% en 2009. Les critiques avancent pour leur part des chiffres bien plus bas, de l'ordre de 15-20% (ce qui est crédible vu d'Alger, mais ne pourra de toute façon pas être démontré). Le taux de participation officiel est alors lu comme une expression du taux de légitimité que le cartel a bien voulu accorder à son Président-roulant. Imperceptiblement, en suivant ce raisonnement censé, on entre alors dans l'art connu et aventureux du déchiffrage des arcanes du pouvoir. Qui soutient qui et contre qui ? Le DRS et les ennemis de Boutef dans l'« Etat-profond » ont-ils envoyé un signal de désaveu ? Ou au contraire Toufik est-il le grand perdant de 2014 ? Les questions se posent, les théories passent et l'incertitude demeure. Quiconque veut se perdre en conjonctures est le bienvenu dans les cafés d'Alger-centre.

En tout état de cause, en tenant pour corrects les chiffres officiels, on arrive à 8 millions de voix pour Bouteflika sur 20 millions d'électeurs. Ce n'est pas un triomphe à la soviétique comme pouvait l'écrire El Watan[3]. Loin d'être capable de mobiliser un pouvoir de coercition suffisant pour faire voter « 100% » de la population, à la manière de feu Saddham Hussein, le cartel mal-aimé est bien obligé de vivre avec des Présidents mal-élus. L'empressement des relais du pouvoir à s'approprier le soutien du « peuple » traduit la sensibilité de la question. Dans un style typiquement « pravdaien », El Moudjahid s'extasie devant une « participation remarquable » et un « geste accompli le cœur plein d'espoir », ce qui lui permet d'affirmer que « l'Algérie [devient], de ce fait, le bon exemple à suivre aux plans des droits de l'homme et de la démocratie »[4]. Cela prêterait à sourire si ces propos négationnistes ne niaient pas la défiance de 10 millions de personne avec une insolence désespérante.

De fait, l'abstention fait toujours figure d'ultime recours, de « mode de contestation par défaut résultant directement de la faillite de la classe politique »[5]. Certains ont recours à des moyens plus radicaux, mais qui deviennent finalement tout aussi routiniers, à l'image de ces émeutiers qui ont saccagés des bureaux de vote dans la wilaya de Bouira, grande spécialiste en la matière (si par hasard, vos pas vous mènent à Bouira, vous comprendrez sans doute leur mécontentement légitime). D'autres, esthètes, innovent avec élégance. Une pensée pour le génie de Béjaïa qui s'est enfui avec une urne, et dont on n'a pour le moment aucune nouvelle. En bref, quel que soit la forme du message, le contenu reste le même : voter c'est cautionner, et donc hors de question.

Toutefois, si l'abstention affaiblit la légitimité du Président-roulant, elle n'implique pas mécaniquement la constitution d'une alternative, loin s'en faut. L'Algérie demeure dans ce statu quo politique fragile qui la caractérise, même si la tendance est à un mouvement centripète au sein de ceux qui refusent les résultats de cette élection. 

Après-élection 

Depuis plusieurs semaines, l'attention de nombreux militants et éditorialistes en Algérie s'était déjà tournée vers l'après-élection, vers ce qu'il conviendrait de faire une fois la farce terminée, une fois le processus entériné, une fois les journalistes étrangers repartis. Ainsi, la convergence des oppositions au quatrième mandat et leur transformation en des mouvements ayant un agenda clair est à l'ordre du jour. Il semble que cette fois-ci, contrairement à 2011[6], les organisations partisanes et les mouvements plus orientés vers une action sociale se constituent d'emblée en deux pôles de convergence séparés.

Les différents partis ayant appelé au boycott de l'élection cherchent à capitaliser sur ce mouvement de rejet. Réunissant le MSP (islamiste-modéré), le RCD (berbériste) et Jil Jadid (libéraux) ainsi que certaines personnalités sans étiquette comme l'ancien Premier ministre Ahmed Benbitour, cette coalition hétéroclite propose désormais de lancer une conférence nationale pour la transition démocratique. Toutefois, en dépit de la relative nouveauté des leaders des différentes formations impliquées, leur proximité passée avec le gouvernement ne joue guère en leur faveur. Sans préjuger de l'avenir de ce rassemblement politique, on peut dire qu'il est déjà affaibli par sa fragmentation et par le discrédit général du champ politique. En d'autres termes : entre revendiquer la parole au nom des abstentionnistes, et les mobiliser concrètement, il y a un gouffre.

Parallèlement aux « boycotteurs », plusieurs syndicats et associations appellent à la formation « d’un espace de la société civile de convergence et de lutte, démocratique, autonome et inclusif ». Derrière ce jargon abstrait transparaît l'idée d'une réunion la plus large possible des partisans du changement n'étant pas directement affiliés à un parti politique. Ici encore, les acteurs partent divisés. En plus de mouvements connus comme le syndicat autonome SNAPAP ou l'organisation de jeunesse RAJ, ce sont pour le moment des fractions dissidentes d'autres organisations (CNDDC, LADDH) qui complètent le rassemblement. Quoi qu'il en soit, les consultations se multiplient de part et d'autre pour mettre en place des alliances efficaces et des plate-forme communes. S'il faut reconnaître un mérite au quatrième mandat, c'est bien d'avoir fournis un élément de cristallisations des revendications politiques.

Il faut encore rajouter d'autres acteurs individuels et collectifs qui n'ont pas encore repris l'initiative depuis l'annonce des résultats. Le FFS s'est maintenu à l'écart durant la campagne, sans appeler à la participation ni au boycott. Le plus vieux parti d'opposition semble donc camper dans une position prudente, qui consiste à ne pas se laisser dicter son calendrier par le cartel tout en appelant au consensus national. D'autres personnalités mériteraient d'être considérés dans cette après-élection, comme l'ancien Premier Ministre réformateur Mouloud Hamrouche qui est récemment sortit de sa réserve pour mettre en cadre contre les risques de déstabilisation.

A cet égard, il ne faut pas non plus oublier que l'après-élection aura aussi lieu entre les différents groupes qui constituent le cartel. Une révision constitutionnelle est déjà à l'ordre du jour, avec l'introduction probable d'un poste de vice-président et donc de dauphin officiel. La Présidence ne lâchera le trône. Même impotent et monté sur roulette, l'homme soutenu par un entourage qui ressemble de plus en plus à une bande (Saïd, Belkhadem, Sellal, Ghoul, Benyounes, Saïdani...) est déterminé à mourir au pouvoir, voir même à désigner son successeur. Le sourire charmeur qui jadis masquait son regard de glace a disparu. Désormais, ses ennemis au sein du régime et en-dehors n'ont qu'à bien se tenir.

The following interview with Ümit Kurt tackles how the physical annihilation of the Armenians paralleled the confiscation and appropriation of their properties in 1915. By citing the various laws and decrees that orchestrated the confiscation process, Kurt places our understanding of the genocide within a legal context.

Ümit Kurt is a native of Aintab, Turkey, and holds a bachelor of science degree in political science and public administration from Middle East Technical University, and a master’s degree from Sabancı University’s department of European studies. He is currently a PhD candidate in the department of history at Clark University and an instructor at Sabancı University. He is the author of several books, including Kanunların Ruhu: Emval-i Metruke Kanunlarında Soykırımın İzlerini Aramak (The Spirit of Laws: Seeking the Traces of Armenian Genocide in the Laws of Abandoned Property, 2012) with Taner Akçam. His main area of interest is the confiscation of Armenian properties and the role of local elites/notables in Aintab during the genocide. Below is the full text of the interview Kurt granted The Armenian Weekly earlier this month.

[Ümit Kurt. Image via "The Armenian Weekly.]

***

Varak Ketsemanian (VK): What were the laws and regulations that governed the confiscation of Armenian properties during the genocide?

Ümit Kurt (UK): A series of laws and decrees, known as the Abandoned Properties Laws (Emval-i Metruke Kanunları), were issued in the Ottoman and Turkish Republican periods concerning the administration of the belongings left behind by the Ottoman Armenians who were deported in 1915. The best-known regulation on the topic is the comprehensive Council of Ministers Decree, dated 30 May 1915. The Directorate of Tribal and Immigrant Settlement of the Interior Ministry (İskan-ı Aşâir ve Muhacirin Müdiriyeti)sent it the following day to relevant provinces organized in fifteen articles. It provided the basic principles in accordance with which all deportations and resettlements would be conducted, and began with listing the reasons for the Armenian deportations. The most important provision concerning Armenian properties was the principle that their equivalent value was going to be provided to the deportees.

The importance of the decree of 30 May and the regulation of 31 May lie in the following: The publication of a series of laws and decrees were necessary in order to implement the general principles that were announced in connection with the settlement of the Armenians and the provision of the equivalent values of their goods. This never happened. Instead, laws and decrees began to deal with only one topic: the confiscation of the properties left behind by the Armenians.

Another regulation was carried out on 10 June 1915. This thirty-four-article ordinance regulated in a detailed manner how the property and goods the Armenians left behind would be impounded by the state. The 10 June 1915 regulation was the basis for the creation of a legal system suitable for the elimination of the material living conditions of the Armenians, as it took away from the Armenians any right of disposal of their own properties. Article 1 of the 10 June 1915 regulation announced that “committees formed in a special manner” were going to be created for the administration of the “immovable property, possessions, and lands being left belonging to Armenians who are being transported to other places, and other matters.”

The most important of these committees were the Abandoned Properties Commissions(Emval-i Metruke Komisyonları). These commissions and their powers were regulated by Articles 23 and 24. The commissions were each going to be comprised of three people, a specially appointed chairman, an administrator, and a treasury official, and would work directly under to the Ministry of the Interior.

The most important steps toward the appropriation of Armenian cultural and economic wealth were the 26 September 1915 law of eleven articles, and the twenty-five-article regulation of 8 November 1915 on how the aforementioned law would be implemented.

Many matters were covered in a detailed fashion in the law and the regulation, including the creation of two different types of commissions with different tasks called the Committees and Liquidation Commissions(Heyetler ve Tasfiye Komisyonları); the manner in which these commissions were to be formed; the conditions of work, including wages; the distribution of positions and powers among these commissions and various departments of ministries and the state; the documents necessary for applications by creditors to whom Armenians owed money; aspects of the relevant courts; the rules to be followed during the process of liquidation of properties; the different ledgers to be kept, and how they were to be kept; and examples of relevant ledgers. This characteristic of the aforementioned law and regulation is the most important indication of the desire not to return to the Armenians their properties or their equivalent value.

The Temporary Law of 26 September 1915 is also known as the Liquidation Law (Tasfiye Kanunu). Its chief goal was the liquidation of Armenian properties. According to its first article, commissions were to be established to conduct the liquidation. These commissions were to prepare separate reports for each person about the properties, receivable accounts, and debts “abandoned by actual and juridical persons who are being transported to other places.” The liquidation would be conducted by courts on the basis of these reports.

The temporary law also declared that a regulation would be promulgated about the formation of the commissions and how the provisions of the law would be applied. This regulation, which was agreed upon on 8 November 1915, regulated in a detailed fashion the protection of the movable and immovable property of Armenians who were being deported, the creation of new committees for liquidation issues, and the working principles of the commissions. The two-part regulation with twenty-five articles moreover included explanatory information on what had to be included in the record books to be kept during the liquidation process, and how these record books were to be used.

In brief, these were the major legal rules and regulations in 1915.

VK: How did the Ottoman government deal with the property of Armenians living in Istanbul, since no actual massacres took place in the capital? Were there laws for them, too?

UK: It is very important to note that these laws and statutes were known as the Abandoned Properties Laws, which was the official euphemism and an established term in the CUP propaganda to characterize the expropriation of the Armenians, and were merely applied to deportedArmenians. Movable and immovable properties of Armenians who were not deported were not subjected to the Abandoned Properties Laws. As known, there were some Armenians deported from Istanbul—of course, very limited compared to Western Armenia—and properties of those deported Armenians in Istanbul also went through this process of confiscation, expropriation, and liquidation of their properties.

VK: How does the concept of confiscation and destruction of property help us understand the broader picture of the genocide?

UK: Actually, a new group of critical genocide scholars has started to come up with a new definition of genocide by taking into consideration the confiscation and destruction of property and wealth of the victim groups. In doing so, these critical genocide scholars have brought Raphael Lemkin’s original definition of genocide to the attention of existing genocide scholarship.

I see Raphael Lemkin as the founding father of genocide literature. Lemkin introduced the concept of genocide for the first time in 1944 in his book entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The book consists of a compilation of 334 laws, decrees, and regulations connected with the administration of seventeen different regions and states under Nazi occupation between 13 March 1938 and 13 November 1942. That is to say, Lemkin did not introduce the concept of genocide together with the barbaric practices like torture, oppression, burning, destruction, and mass killing observed in all genocides, but through a book quoting and analyzing legal texts. Could this be a coincidence?

Given its importance, it is necessary to stress this one more time: In the year that Lemkin completed the writing of his book (1943), he already knew of all the crimes perpetrated by Nazi Germany. However, he did not present the concept of genocide in a framework elucidated by these crimes. On the contrary, he introduced it through some laws and decrees that were published on how to administer occupied territories and that perhaps in the logic of war might be considered “normal.” We cannot say that this situation accords well with our present way of understanding genocide. In the general perception, genocide is the collapse of a normally functioning legal system; it is the product of the deviation of the system from the “normal” path. According to this point of view, genocide means that the institutions of “civilization” are not working and are replaced by barbarism. Lemkin, however, seems to be saying the complete opposite of this, that genocide is hidden in ordinary legal texts. By doing this, it is as if he is telling us not to look for the traces of genocide as barbaric manifestations that can be defined as inhuman, but to follow their trail in legal texts.

Genocide as a phenomenon fits inside the legal system—this is an interesting definition. And this definition is one of the central theses of our book. The Armenian Genocide does not just exist in the displays of barbarity carried out against the Armenians. It is at the same time hidden in a series of ordinary legal texts.

What we wish to say in our book is that genocide does not only mean physical annihilation. Going even further, we can assert that we are faced with a phenomenon in which whether the Armenians were physically annihilated or not is but a detail. How many Armenians died during the course of the deportations/destruction or how many remained alive is just a secondary issue from a definitional point of view; what is important is the complete erasure of the traces of the Armenians from their ancient homeland.

The total destruction of the Armenians marked the fact that a government tried to eliminate a particular group of its own citizens in an effort to settle a perceived political problem. Between 1895 and 1922, Ottoman Armenians suffered massive loss of life and property as a result of pogroms, massacres, and other forms of mass violence. The 1915 Armenian Genocide can be seen as the pinnacle of this process of decline and destruction. It consisted of a series of genocidal strategies: the mass executions of elites, categorical deportations, forced assimilation, destruction of material culture, and collective dispossession. The state-orchestrated plunder of Armenian property immediately impoverished its victims; this was simultaneously a condition for and a consequence of the genocide. The seizure of the Armenian property was not just a byproduct of the genocidal policies of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), but an integral part of the murder process, reinforcing and accelerating the intended destruction. The expropriation and plunder of deported Armenians’ movable and immovable properties was an essential component of the destruction process of Armenians.

As Martin Dean argues in Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933-1945, ethnic cleansing and genocide usually have a “powerful materialist component: seizure of property, looting of the victims, and their economic displacement are intertwined with other motives for racial and interethnic violence and intensify their devastating effects.” In the same vein, the radicalization of CUP policies against the Armenian population from 1914 onward was closely linked to a full-scale assault on their property.

Thus, the institutionalization of the elimination of the Christian-Armenian presence was basically realized, along with many other things, through the Abandoned Properties Laws. These laws are structural components of the Armenian Genocide and one of the elements connected to the basis of the legal system of the Republican period. It is for this reason that we say that the Republic adopted this genocide as its structural foundation. This reminds us that we must take a fresh look at the relationship between the Republic as a legal system and the Armenian Genocide.

The Abandoned Properties Laws are perceived as “normal and ordinary” laws in Turkey. Their existence has never been questioned in this connection. Their consideration as natural is also an answer as to why the Armenian Genocide was ignored throughout the history of the Republic. This “normality” is equivalent to the consideration of a question as non-existent. Turkey is founded on the transformation of a presence—Christian in general, Armenian in particular—into an absence.

This picture also shows us a significant aspect of genocide as Lemkin pointed out. Genocide is not only a process of destruction but also that of construction. By the time genocide perpetrators are destroying one group, they are also constructing another group or identity. Confiscation is an indispensable and one of the most effective mechanisms for perpetrators to realize the aforementioned process of destruction and construction.

VK: What happened to the property after it was seized from the Armenians?

UK: Most of the Armenians properties were distributed to Muslim refugees from the Balkans and Caucasia at that time. Central and local politicians and bureaucrats of the Union and Progress Party also made use of Armenian properties.

The exhaustive process of administering and selling the property usually involved considerable administrative efforts, employing hundreds of local staff. Economic discrimination and plunder contributed directly to the CUP’s process of destruction in a variety of ways. At the direct level of implementation, the prospect of booty helped to motivate the local collaborators in various massacres and the deportation orchestrated by the CUP security forces in Anatolia in general.

The CUP cadres were quite aware that the retention of the Armenian property would give the local people a material stake in the deportation of the Armenians. In many cities of Anatolia, especially local notables and provincial elites who had close connections with the CUP obtained and owned most of the properties and wealth of Armenians. This process was realized in Aintab, Diyarbakir, Adana, Maras, Kilis, and other cities in the whole Anatolia. For my PhD dissertation project, I am exploring how Armenians properties and wealth changed hands and were taken over by local elites of the city during the genocide.

Similar to the policy of Nazi leaders regarding the “Aryan”ization of Jewish property in the Holocaust, the CUP aimed to have complete control over the confiscation and expropriation of Armenian properties for the economic interests of the state, but could not prevent incidents of corruption from taking place.

It should be emphasized that corruption was fairly rift among bureaucrats and officers of the Abandoned Properties Commissions and Liquidation Commissions who were the responsible actors for administering and confiscating Armenian properties under the supervision and for the advantage of the state, as did happen in the “Aryan”ization of Jewish property.

Despite the widespread incidence of private plunder and corruption, there is no doubt that the seizure of Armenian property in the Ottoman Empire was primarily a state-directed process linked closely to the development of the Armenian Genocide. However, the widespread participation of the local population as beneficiaries of the Armenian property served to spread complicity, and also legitimize the CUP’s measures against the Armenians.

A number of leading members of the Central Committee of the Union and Progress Party, as well as CUP-oriented governors and mutasarrıfs, seized a great deal of property, especially those belonging to affluent Armenians in many vilayets. In addition, according to one argument, CUP leaders also utilized Armenian property and wealth to meet the deportation expenses.

Also, it is worth mentioning an important detail on the National Tax Obligations (Tekâlif-i Milliye) orders. This topic is important to show the Nationalist movement’s viewpoint concerning the Armenians, and also Greeks and the properties they left behind. The National Tax Obligations Orders were issued by command of Mustafa Kemal, the head of the Grand National Assembly and commander-in-chief of the Turkish Nationalist army, to finance the War of Independence against Greece. The abandoned properties of Armenians were also seen as an important source of financing for the war between 1919 and 1922.

After the establishment of the Turkish Republic, in 1926, Turkish Grand National Assembly passed a law. This law was promulgated and enforced on 27 June 1926. According to this law, Turkish governmental officers, politicians, and bureaucrats who were executed as a result of their roles in the Armenian deportations or who were murdered by Dashnaks were declared “national heroes,” and so-called Abandoned Properties of Armenians were given to their families.

And finally in 1928, the Turkish Republic introduced a new regulation that granted muhacirs or Muslim refugees who were using Armenian properties the right to have the title deeds of those properties, which included houses, lands, field crops, and shops.

As you can see, a variety of actors and institutions seized properties and wealth that the deported Armenians were forced to leave behind.

VK: What did this entire process of confiscation and appropriation represent, on the one hand to the Ottoman Elite, and on the other to the average Turk? Was it an ideological principle or a mere motivating element for further destruction?

UK: We should be very cautious when giving a proper answer to this question. Also, in my view, this aspect of the Armenian Genocide should be compared with the “Aryan”ization of Jewish properties in the Holocaust. We can see palpable resemblances between these two dispossession processes.

It is obvious that the material stake for the average Turkey played a significant role in his/her participation in the destruction process of Armenians. Economic motivation was always present and enabled CUP central actors to carry out their ultra-nationalist ideological policies against Armenians in terms of gaining the support and consent of average Turkish-Muslim people.

To have a better appreciation of the motivation of the average Turk, one should look at what happened at the local level—which means we need more local and micro studies in order to understand how the deportation and genocide alongside the plunder and pillage of Armenian properties took place in various localities in Anatolia.

The process of genocide and deportation directed at the Armenians was, in fact, put into practice by local notables and provincial elites. These local actors prospered through the acquisition of Armenians’ property and wealth, transforming them into the new wealthy social stratum. In this respect, the Union and Progress Party’s genocide and deportation decree on 27 May 1915 had a certain social basis through the practice of effective power, control, and support mechanism(s) at local levels. Therefore, a more accentuated focus on the local picture or the periphery deserves closer examination.

The function of the stolen Armenian assets in the Turkification process makes the confiscation of Armenian properties a social matter. In this respect, the wide variety of participants and the dynamic self-radicalization of the CUP and state institutions at the local level need to be examined. Although the CUP was involved throughout the confiscation process and was fully in charge of it, the collaboration of local institutions and officers also played a considerable role. The local institutions and offices could not operate in complete isolation from their respective societies and the prevailing attitudes in them.

The expropriation of the Armenians, therefore, was not limited simply to the implementation of the CUP orders, but was also linked to the attitude of local societies towards the Armenians, that is, to the different forms of Armenian hatred. As in the empire, the corruptive influence that spread with the enrichment from Armenian properties in Anatolia could also have led to various forms of accommodation of CUP policies. The robbery of the property is also a useful barometer to assess the relations of various local populations toward the CUP, to the CUP central and local authorities, and also toward the Armenian population in each city.

With regard to the widespread collaboration of parts of the local populace in measures taken against the Armenians, the distribution of a great amount of the Armenian property provided a useful incentive that reinforced hatred for the local Armenians as well as other political and personal motives.

One should keep in mind the fact that the participation of local people is a necessary condition to ensure the effectiveness of genocidal policies. Planned extermination of all members of a given category of people is impossible without the involvement of their neighbors—the only ones who know who is who in a local community.

Therefore, the entire process of confiscation can be evaluated and construed as both an ideological principle and economic motivation. These two aspects cannot be separated from each other in our analysis. In my view, the ideological principle was hugely supported and complemented by economic motivation and material stakes. In some instances, ideology played a more significant role than economic motivation, and in other instances economic interests came into prominence vis-à-vis ideology. Yet, in any case, these two parameters were on the ground and constituted effective mechanisms and dynamic in the confiscation, plunder, and seizure of Armenian material wealth.

[This article was originally published in The Armenian Weekly.]

In this talk, I focus on the military commission trial for Khaled Sheikh Muhammad and four other men accused of responsibility for the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, a case often referred to as "the trial of the century." The presentation offers a first-hand perspective on what it is like to go to Guantanamo, and an analysis of the critical and contentious issues that this case raises. The government is striving to pursue accountability for the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, but justice is complicated by the fact that all five defendants were held for years in secret prisons and tortured by the CIA, and everything surrounding this case is shrouded in secrecy, which severely impedes the legal process. I thus discuss how the military commission system is struggling to contend with these complicated issues in a multi-defendant death penalty case.

My father and I were discussing increasing construction and diminishing public space in Beirut and, in particular, access to the seafront in the Manara neighbourhood. Suddenly, he asked if I had ever noticed al-Ba'sa (in English: The Grudge). “Which grudge?” I answered. “I thought we were speaking about buildings.” The "Grudge,” he tells me, “is a house—or maybe a wall—built to block the sea view of some residents. It is a building located in Beirut’s Manara area, just by the old lighthouse. It was constructed in the mid-1900s and might just be the thinnest inhabitable building in the world.” I was slightly taken aback by the name, and the fact that I—an urban planner and architect who often walked in the area—had no clue what my father was talking about. Rather than ask for more information and appear clueless, I decided to investigate the so-called “Grudge” myself at the first opportunity.

Finding the Grudge

The destruction of Beirut during the war, the post-war reconstruction efforts, and the current real-estate boom drastically changed the city’s housing stock. Therefore, my hopes of learning more about The Grudge and its history seemed nominal. It has become common practice in the city to destroy structures and replace them with high-end housing. The whole situation is made even more difficult by the city’s building and zoning laws, which allow for taller buildings around the city. These changes have been accompanied by weak action plans and inefficient public policies to preserve the urban fabric. Both policies and laws were designed to invite investors to destroy existing structures and build newer, grander ones. The private sector was quick to comply with these policies, with the outcome being the changing of the city’s social fabric. Old buildings are being replaced with new ones catering to the high-income strata, speeding up the gentrification of the city. Against this background, it was safe to presume that this old deserted building, in the steadily developing Manara neighbourhood, would soon be destroyed. The Beiruti real estate prices were on the rise, and the plot on which it stands, redeveloped.

Curious to find out more about The Grudge, I walked around in the area, asking people I met along the way about the building. After having been sent in almost every possible direction, and finally down to the Corniche, I walked back up the hill to the old lighthouse. Suddenly, I spotted right in front of me a 14-metre-high edge, no wider than one metre! I had passed it many times before, had even looked at the facade, thinking, “What an intriguing, abandoned low-rise building with a sea view.” Mesmerised by its “fake” facade, which at first glance made the house appear wide enough to be inhabitable, I approached the concierge of the building next door to inquire further. “Yes, I know. It’s shocking,” he said, before I had even finished my question. “It’s a wall. But people used to live in it. Is this what you were looking for?” The concierge continued to explain that this wall is the most expensive real estate wall in Lebanon, before admitting that he was actually relatively new to the area and didn’t know more about it. He suggested I return during the week and talk to a mechanic whose shop is located on the ground floor of the building.

[The "Grudge" seen from its widest edge, looking west. The building to the left is
the German school in Beirut. Image by author.]

Understanding the Grudge

At home that evening, I tried to trace the evolution of The Grudge from the various maps I have of Beirut. The size of the plot is indeed very small and narrow. A map from the 1920s shows a road cutting right through the area, while one from 1936 outlines how it was divided into several parts, with a small corner plot where The Grudge sits today. These multiple planning layers, which include road infrastructure developments, setbacks for other forms of public infrastructure, and plot divisions according to inheritances, often create several such small, “unusable” private plots that remain abandoned in overly dense cities. 

Intrigued by this habitable wall disguised as a building, I returned to my father with questions. “Why is it called “Grudge,” and why and how was it built?” I asked him. My father then started recounting an urban myth. “There were two brothers who each inherited a plot. Let’s call them plot A and plot B. Unable to agree on how to develop the two parts, since plot B was partly reclaimed by road infrastructure, the owner of plot B decided to develop the minuscule piece of land on his own. That way, he hoped that his building would block the brother’s view of the sea so that the value of his land would decrease.”

[Location map showing plot A (where the "Grudge" was built, and adjacent plot B,
and the nearby lighthouse (manara). Old map of Beirut, adapted by author. ]

So, it turns out that The Grudge, an extremely narrow building standing on a mere 120-square-metre piece of land, is actually the physical embodiment of a grudge between two brothers. Ironically, the thin house was built by two slightly more loyal brothers, architects Salah and Fawzi Itani. While the facade, with its proportional windows and balconies, seems to be hiding a normal building, a look at one of the flanks reveals a different story: the building was constructed to serve as a wall, blocking what would have been a million-dollar view.

According to residents in the neighbourhood, The Grudge was built in 1954. The liveable wall ranges in depth from four metres at its widest, to sixty centimetres—the depth of a closet—at its slimmest. What is even more exciting is that the building, it turns out, is one of the few buildings in Beirut that will be saved from destruction by the law. Although it is not listed as a heritage building, and therefore not protected by the bill protecting such buildings, the plot on which The Grudge stands cannot be developed under the city’s current building and zoning laws. According to those laws, no new structure may be built in its place, even if the house is demolished, because the plot has an area that is smaller than what you are allowed to build on. Therefore, leaving The Grudge the way it stands is more profitable for its owners than tearing it down, as they would not be able to sell the land to developers.

[The "Grudge" seen from its thinnest edge, looking east. Image by author.]

Living in the Grudge

On my next trip to the building, I met the mechanic who the concierge had told me about. He is a busy father who works as a fisherman and runs his workshop in order to put his daughters through college. He shares what he knows about The Grudge. “The building is unique and blends into the city much more than the high-rises being developed around it. This is Beirut, not New York,” he says. “I am from here, and these fast changes and the privatisation of the city are not acceptable to me. I can hardly fish in the sea anymore because of the private claims to the seashore. I hope they won’t bring this building down too. But I don’t think they will. It is not in their interest.” Having spent the last seventeen years working in the shop as a mechanic, he reluctantly acknowledges that he may have to leave it one day. Currently, he rents it unofficially at a very low price from the owners in exchange for keeping a watchful eye on the deserted building. He also told me that the house is well known in the city for several reasons. “Before the war, people called it The Queen Mary, or The Ship,” he said. Upon seeing my puzzled expression, he asked: “Haven’t you seen the roof yet?”

Soon, I found myself inside the building, heading for the roof. The stairwell and entrance are wide enough to enter comfortably. “I am inside the wall,” I thought to myself, excited. I discovered that each floor is divided into two apartments. The first begins with a kitchen, followed by a series of rooms that sequentially diminish in size as they become more private. As you continue into the apartment, the space gets narrower with each room, until you reach a very tight area. The apartment ends at a bedroom, followed by a long fifty-centimetre walk-in closet. The roof clearly shows the footprint of the building and highlights its narrowing effect.

[A view from the roof of the "Grudge" building. Image by author.]

The second apartment on the wider side of the site is also connected by a corridor that cuts through each room. The quality of light in the space and the sea view from the rooms make it seem large enough for a resident to forget that he or she lives in what is essentially a wall. The high ceilings and windows allow ample light to flow in, which helps to create a sense of spaciousness. Each room inside The Grudge has two sources of light; one towards the brother’s plot—today, the German school, with The Grudge blocking its view—and the other from the front, towards the Mediterranean with its beautiful, uninterrupted view of the sea.
 

[Interior view of the "Grudge." Image by author.]

After the tour, I returned to the mechanic and told him that while I was excited about the building’s similarity to a wall, I saw no resemblance to a ship even after having seen the roof. He then started pointing to the facade, showing me several openings and the corner curve. Annoyed by my scepticism, he told me that one day, as he worked away in his shop, he saw an old man on the other side of the road getting out of his car and looking amusedly at the building. Curious, the mechanic crossed the street and asked the man if he was lost. The man, it turned out, was Fawzi Itani, one of the architects who had designed the building. Itani, the mechanic tells me, explained the idea of the ship, The Queen Mary. He also told him that the building was built quickly because of problems between the brothers. I smiled knowingly, telling him I had heard about the brothers and their quarrel about the plots. “The building used to be beautiful,” the mechanic continued wistfully. “But during the war, it became filthy. One apartment was used as a brothel, and the rest were occupied by an extended family seeking refuge. In those years it was yellowish, never pink. It was recently painted pink by the developers of nearby plots, who want to beautify the surroundings of their million dollar projects,” he added. “Did you see how narrow it gets at the end?” he asked excitedly. I nodded and thanked him for his time and for allowing me to access the site.

Urban Forms of Production

The systems that produce our urban environment are usually most evident in these abandoned residual spaces. These spaces are created as “leftovers” in a process of policy development at the macro-scale. They include changes in zoning laws, infrastructure planning, and the development of generic building laws. In addition, these abandoned plots may be created from private macro-scale deals and remain in the city as privately owned and abandoned residual spaces as a result of land deals, the carving up of larger sites, or the slicing through of plots according to inheritance laws. These “awkward” residual spaces, which are privately owned but abandoned in a dense city with no breathing space, usually result in a feeling of absence or ambivalence. While they are usually orphaned pieces of land, the manner in which they have come about is fascinating. The Grudge today is a testament that generic building laws that do not permit unique re-use of these spaces are obstructing fruitful opportunities. The building therefore is a tribute to the failure of planners to realise the effects of their macro-scale interventions in socio-political, economic, and built localities. As for this unique structure, which continues to exist grudgingly and also defiantly in one of Beirut’s most prime locations, only time will tell what will become of it.

[This essay is reproduced by permission from the edited volume: Collectifs MN and AMI, Beirut Re-Collected (2014) Beirut: Tamyras. The book is also available in French as Beyrouth, chroniques et détours. MN stands for Mashallah News, an online news platform available at www.mashallahnews.com]

It is very common nowadays to come across reports discussing the negative impact of the Syrian humanitarian crisis on the Lebanese economy as a whole. On the one hand, there have been several attempts to focus on the victims and their plight, rather than looking at the complex dynamics of humanitarian intervention in the country. On the other, many organizations tend to disguise or justify their own political agenda in their impact assessment reports and fieldwork analyses,[1] which are mostly quantitative and have little focus on the qualitative impact of their projects.

This article attempts to advance a grounded analysis of the social situation developed by the author, based on how people speak of and express their everyday living in times of emergency. For such reasons, the analysis should be read without confusing the professional choices and humane intentions of humanitarian workers on the one hand, and the reasons behind the shortcomings and failures of humanitarianism on the field on the other.

Brief Overview of Akkar’s Socioeconomic Conditions Prior to the Syrian Humanitarian Crisis

The humanitarian needs in Lebanon today are undoubtedly huge, for both Syrian refugees and the Lebanese host communities. Akkar’s community, known to be one of the poorest communities in Lebanon, has largely felt the pinch of the increasing influx of Syrian refugees, particularly since August 2011. Families in Akkar, with an average size of 4.7 individuals (higher than the national average), constitute 20.5 percent of the entire Lebanese population. They maintain a particular sociocultural structure[2] that engendered a Lebanese–and not only foreign–stereotype that the region is “primitive.” Akkar also has the highest poverty rate in the country, amounting to 63.3 percent [3] of its population.

The region has been historically neglected and registers the worst household conditions in Lebanon after Hermel. The majority of Akkar’s villages receive electricity from Electricité du Liban, but not all houses are connected to the electrical grid. In addition, the region ranks last in residential accessibility to the public water supply, despite its natural water resources; running water is taken from artesian wells or private water networks. With no garbage collection system provided by the municipality or private contractors, there are many solid waste burning sites and dumps in public spaces. Public transportation is lacking and car ownership is very low, rendering schools, hospitals, and basic services difficult to access. Local inhabitants, hence, say that political candidates buy votes by promising new roads, which are rarely maintained. Health insurance is predominantly accessed through people who decide to join the army, which is the most stable source of income for a large part of the population. In fact, those employed in the military sector (14.8 percent) constitute a larger number than those employed in the trade sector.[4]

The economic and employment conditions of Akkar further worsened after the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon, and again later due to the destruction of the Nahr al-Bared [Palestinian refugee] camp in 2007. The battle between Fatah al-Islam and the Lebanese Army resulted in many casualties and injuries among civilians and army members, causing several disabilities.[5] The effects of both wars had a big impact on revenue in the region. Businesses recorded a 91.5 percent reduction in income due to closures or damages to shops. This has led to decreased productivity and reduced purchasing power of consumers.[6]

In general, Akkar was largely excluded from most national and international emergency funds donated to rebuild and rehabilitate the war-stricken areas. Transportation costs have also been widely underestimated by humanitarian entities working in Akkar to provide aid to the Syrian refugees. In interviews conducted between August 2012 and February 2013, many newcomers were still complaining about their ability to pay for their own transportation and mobility, despite the introduction of home-deliveries of food and other relief items by NGOs–even complaining about their ability to reach such organizations. According to the accounts collected for the present research, this often prevented them from getting oil, food kits, medication, and other help they are entitled to receive. Local families and long-time Syrian migrants with vehicles often provide the service informally.

The downturn in the area is mainly a result of the closure of the Lebanese-Syrian border. This put an end to the option of getting cheaper goods from Syria through the long-lasting tradition of smuggling, which had already been restricted by the previous conflicts of 2006 and 2007. In addition, the presence of Syrian workers in dire need of work was used as a pretext by most local and national employers to push for lowering the wages of the local workforce.[7] According to some Lebanese political leaders,[8] this “worsened the security situation,” without actually specifying how and why.

In addition to these socioeconomic conditions, there is also a political context for the region that comes into light. Hamed, from the village of Bellanet al-Hisa, describes the days of liberation from the “Syrian unjust oppression” (to use his own words) in April 2005. One month after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the so-called “Cedar Revolution” (14 March 2005) broke out, leading to the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanese territories. The local population in Halba demolished the statue of Hafiz al-Asad erected in the 1990s in the main square of the town. “I had never seen the people of my town so relieved before”, said Ahmed, from Halba. Likewise, a couple of elderly men indicated the place where the center of the Syrian secret services used to be located (markaz al-mukhabarat al-suriyya). This shows the noticeable political weight and history of the Syrian regime's presence in the area, adding more layers to Akkar’s social context.

The current economic deterioration of Akkar–and all of Lebanon–either ascribed to external powers or to internal factors, has often been used by NGOs to shake off criticism of their operations and as a self-legitimizing tool to intervene.

The Emergence of Humanitarian Structures in Akkar 

The majority of the interviewed faith-based NGOs operating in Akkar were mainly Sunni Muslim. They focused on the provision of charity services to orphans, low-income recipients, the disabled, and other vulnerable categories. Today, twenty-two Islamic NGOs are part of the Islamic Coordination Unit (’I’tilaf). For the most part, they use a faith-based approach to the provision of services, and have been working in the region for a long time (mainly since the 1990s).[9] For them, aid provision to Syrians becomes “just one event in the history of their social services in the country.”[10]

For example, the head of an Islamic NGO[11] complained about the fact that international organizations always had more resources, but did very little in the area, compared to the constant domestic efforts to improve the region in non-emergency times as well.

Apart from the absence of systematic literature around Akkar, municipalities are never mentioned by the local community in relation to provision of basic services. In contrast, the actions of the central state are often invoked in everyday accounts. While some of the present needs are not preventable, dismal lawlessness and widespread insecurity stem from the structural weakness of the Lebanese state in asserting its presence in the region. Such feelings of abandonment, lack of control, and economic precariousness are generally considered to contribute to feeding the militia culture and, thus, engendering recurrent outbursts of violence.[12]

Many humanitarian organizations have therefore abandoned previous local development projects in the Lebanese areas less targeted by the Syrian migration flow,[13] and have switched their operational agenda from development to humanitarian efforts in order to “neutrally” engage with the Syrian crisis.[14]

In order to help the area sustain the influx of refugees, some of the first measures used by NGOs were cash payments to local families, and the refurbishment and improvement of housing to enable them to host newcomers and provide free accommodation to refugees. Similarly, NGOs started providing relief supplies such as mattresses, heaters, and other winterization kits to local households, insofar as they were hosting Syrian refugees. By doing so, they were aiming at empowering the new and old inhabitants of Akkar, in a bid to compensate for past state and non-state neglect suffered during peace time and the absence of political interests in this region in comparison to the south of the country (which has been occupied by Israel between 1978 and 2000).

The sudden proliferation of NGOs in the area, while conceiving of themselves as socially necessary, is a matter of controversy in the local community. “I think they all came here now because they’re going to increase their funding thanks to the war in Syria. They would have not moved a single finger for us otherwise. Have you ever seen them around before?!” said Ghassan, who owns a car repair garage in Halba, with resentment.

The goal is not to generate resentment in the local community, declares Ana in the interview conducted at the UNHCR Protection Section in Qubayyat on 11 December 2012. “To be honest,” she added, “the number of programs addressing both groups are still few, but we are making progress.” By contrast, a representative of War-Child Holland, interviewed in October 2012, mentioned several schools and programs addressing both Lebanese and Syrians, in operation at that time. Despite these controversial opinions, past neglect should carefully guide humanitarians in the planning of the ongoing programs.

To their credit, NGOs have increasingly channeled resources through Lebanese public services. For example, healthcare has seemingly improved for both Lebanese and Syrians. Amal, from al-Raqqa, who was resettled in al-Bahsa, said, “After two years in this tent, there is finally a mobile clinic I can benefit from.” Nonetheless, aid was initially allocated only when the Syrians arrived, especially starting in early March 2012, according to the interviewees. However, the Lebanese residents felt once again that they were not the humanitarian priority. The local community's disaffection and mistrust towards the institutions, which had been developing throughout the past decades cannot be eradicated now. The humanitarian industry certainly cannot sweep away years of state neglect. It could nonetheless at least avoid drawing up its plans as though it was operating in a social void, empty of past and present frictions, which are in turn materially fueled by the way aid itself is distributed and people get selected.[15]

The humanitarian response has apparently failed to alleviate tensions. It instead initially inflamed them, by allocating most of the visible part of aid (household items, food vouchers, survival kits) exclusively to Syrian refugees. In the initial stage, some NGOs even denied aid to Palestinians, who had mainly fled the heavily bombarded Yarmouk camp, under the pretext that they are usually covered by UNRWA services. As a result, a practitioner working for an international NGO in Tripoli maintained having been witness to tensions arising between Syrian Palestinians and Syrian citizens.

While ending the violence is not one of the principles of humanitarian organizations, their intervention should at least not fuel tensions. In this sense, NGOs have been historically unable to identify local capacities for peace[16] and draw on them to trigger betterment. This is partially because of the high turnover of humanitarian workers and the scarce attention in maintaining records in an already unstable and ephemeral social environment—as will be shown later.[17]

In this regard, eligibility criteria have been a moot point. Newly designed programs for Syrians and Lebanese, as indicated by a UNHCR Protection Officer interviewed on 6 February 2013, are increasingly reflecting the moral logic of humanitarianism according to which the beneficiaries would be addressed through assigning a single victimized moral identity. Nonetheless, even homogenized categories of beneficiaries would still give birth to internal frictions, which carry the diversified weight of social abandonment, war trauma, and deprivation. But, according to international and local witnesses to the Syrian humanitarian crisis, practitioners ignore such diversification.

Local Hospitality: A Controversial Issue

Lebanese host communities are said to be no longer able to absorb new flows of refugees in their homes. According to field observations, hospitality is mostly provided when relying on financial assistance in the form of remittances or cash payments by NGOs. “I think it has not been a good move to pay families to host Syrians,” said Sarah, who works for an international secular NGO based in Qubayyat. “We basically made them dependent on people that are not independent themselves and we can only arrange the accommodation for them just for one year. What are they going to do next? What have we changed by doing so?”

Walid, in Halba, during a field visit in November 2013, said that he was fed up with the worsening economic situation, and that the impact of NGOs had not changed the direction of the crisis, as it was not even initially meant to do that. “It is not like before. There used to be empathy (ta‘atuf), now it’s disappeared. Everyone wants just to get rid of all them.” Najwa, a baker in Halba, even thought that Hafiz al-Asad’s times were better on the whole. Past regional misery always tends to be experienced as more tolerable than the ongoing one.

Syrian refugees are not living in official and logistically organized refugee camps–whose implementation has so far been refused by the Lebanese government[18]–and are therefore scattered across different regions in Lebanon as guests of households or as rent payers. It is generally widespread among Lebanese to sometimes use the idea of hospitality as a moral tool to exhibit the dignity of Akkar’s people and their great values. A segment of Syrian refugees see hospitality as an expression of the great empathy of Akkar’s people towards the Syrian cause, which had deep historical roots in the years of Assad's military presence in the region.

According to some people in al-‘Abdeh, Bebnin, Wadi Khalid, Halba, and al-Bahsa, local hospitality can be depicted, instead, in terms of greediness tout court, as it ends up being an economic opportunity for local families. In this way, they tend to represent this Lebanese region as bearing an inherently negative view towards Syrians. They are said to take advantage of the displacement of new refugees to increase the housing market prices and exploit a cheap workforce, expressing their racism and moral superiority towards Syrians and taking revenge of the past years of Syrian oppression.

A further tension emerges between the newly arriving refugees and the Lebanese communities. While the latter consider themselves hosts, the former develop a sense of conditionality of their presence, as long as they are willing to be exploited by local people. The common feeling that can be deduced after field research is that the Syrian newcomers related differently to the determinism of getting humiliated and objectified, in being passive beneficiaries of humanitarian assistance and cheaper workers. Taking livelihoods from outside and resettling outside their country still seem to represent factors of flawed moral dignity, which, to them, is currently difficult to rehabilitate. Among Syrian newcomers, frustration is the tangible consequence.

Either way, through media representations and NGOs’ reports, hospitality has become the demonstrative tool par excellence conveying an ethical judgment: Akkar as greedy or bountiful.

It is hard to draw clear lines around the theme of hospitality and ascertain how many families host for free and how many of them get money to host–these finances are mostly granted by international NGOs (like the Saudi Tayba Association located in Halba). This is the reason why it is much more important to consider what the idea of hosting produces in Lebanon’s everydayness and how it has changed people’s daily interactions. This is an aspect the mass media has focused on the least.

In this respect, it is worth noting that many spoke of “unwilling hospitality,” as put forward by scholar Jacques Derrida,[19] stemming from official discourses that portray the Syrian refugees’ presence as an “existential problem for Lebanon.”[20] The unintentionality of coping with those people who have “overstayed their welcome” is slightly compensated by services provided to the local community, in addition to the increased financial income that a small segment of the Akkar community is able to gain, due to the presence of refugees and aid actors.[21]

Hospitality, for example[22], now increasingly coexists with insecurity. “I don’t let my child play in the street with others. I don’t know who they are, and who can see them. I’m afraid he’s gonna get kidnapped or raped. We don’t feel free and safe. I got a dog to watch out for my tent because I mistrust everyone here,” said a Syrian woman resettled in Bebnin.

[Part Two of this article will address "Emerging Rifts Between Providers and Receipients of Humantiarian Aid", "The Social Responsiveness to the Modalities of NGO Implementation", as well as "Findings and Recommendations."] 

[This article was originally published by the Civil Society Knowledge Centre, Lebanon Support on 24 March 2014. The full citation should be: Estella Carpi, “The Everyday Experience of Humanitarianism in the Akkar Villages”, Civil Society Knowledge Center, Lebanon Support, 24 March 2014. [online] http://cskc.daleel-madani.org/paper/everyday-experience-humanitarianism-akkar-villages]

Notes

[1] Too often, humanitarian workers tend to respond to critical analyses in a highly defensive manner, and, thus, resorting to mere ethical apology of their projects. This is a reminder of how humanitarianism, as Didier Fassin has noticed, aprioristically legitimizes itself. See Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2002). The rare exposure of the humanitarian apparatus to external criticism is due to the infrequent negotiation of its presence in a given territory or the implementation of its programs, in that it takes for granted that intervention possesses a moral rationale per se.

[2] Roula Abi-Habib Khoury, Rapid Assessment on Child Labour in North Lebanon (Tripoli and Akkar) and Bekaa Governorates (Beirut: USJ and ILO, 2012), 25.

[3] It is worth recalling here that twenty-eight percent of the Lebanese population is considered poor and eight percent extremely poor. See Aicha Moushref for Mada Association, UNDP, Handicap International and EU Humanitarian Aid, Forgotten Akkar, Socio-Economic Reality of the Akkar Region (2008), 5.

[4] Khoury, 25.

[5] FAO, Damage and Early Recovery Needs Assessment of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (2006).

[6] Moushref, 19.

[7] Note that all personal names have been changed to comply with privacy protection policies.

[8] With Syrian migrant workers being an easy scapegoat for generalized social distress, many impoverished Lebanese say they are obliged to “secure protection” by themselves, by often making the nature of personal matters confessional. Likewise, raids by security forces, curfews, and micro-level violence against Syrians are on the increase.

[9] This thinking is easily identifiable in former Energy Minister and current Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil’s public speeches. See, for example, https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/racism_and_indifference_bassil_as_an_example_ (accessed: 13 January 2014).

[10] The director of the coordination unit of the Islamic NGOs called I’tilaf was interviewed in Tripoli on 3 February2013. More information can be found at http://www.nna-leb.gov.lb/ar/show-news/17676/تقرير-تلاف-جمعيات-غاثة-النازحين-السوريين-اعدادهم-فاقت-التوقعات-ونعمل-ضمن-الامكانات-المتاحة (accessed: 21 February 2014).

[11] Interview conducted by the author with the Kuwaiti Education Association in Tripoli, 14 January 2013.

[12] Interview conducted by the author at Dar al-Fatwa, Halba, 21 November 2013.

[13] Despite the clearly deteriorating security situation in Lebanon, it is noteworthy that Akkar villages are historically less exposed to violent clashes, if compared to the reality of Irsal or Tripoli, which are highly affected by the Syrian conflict in terms of security.

[14] Among them, Taiba Association, a Saudi NGO in Halba, which reformulated its programs under a new name to meet Syrians’ needs (Interview conducted on 14 December 2012). The majority of the faith-oriented organizations based in Akkar, previously addressing orphans and the vulnerable in the area, stopped most their programs for the Lebanese community, to cope with the expenses needed to finance aid to Syrians, whose cause is the priority on the political agenda of their foreign donors (mainly Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia). Several of them have been created ad hoc, with the only goal of providing support to Syrian refugees, in their wait for the Assad regime’s departure.

[15] This often happens owing to the way donors channel funds, showing the perpetual priority of emergency plans in relation to more challenging development programs.

[16] See http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/17538 (accessed: 13 January 2014).

[17] Such an issue has first been foregrounded by Mary B. Anderson, Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace or War (Boulder, Co.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999).

[18] The approach of international NGOs providing services to refugees in North Lebanon to the whole issue seems to be the following: treating the country as a mere satellite of the Syrian events, rather than as a longtime theatre of buried tensions that would just find their way to come to the fore and renew their modalities and fields. This idea is suggested by the description of the Syrian crisis in official discourses as merely “imported” or as an external “spillover” troubling Lebanon.

[19] The Lebanese government refuses the construction of refugee camps, as it does not desire to generate the same dreadful situation of Palestinians, whose right to return is still denied; their naturalization is opportunistically denied as well, in the name of the ideological refusal of conceiving Palestinians in Lebanon as permanent citizens. Needless to say, the naturalization (tawtin) of Palestinians would trigger further demographic issues within the country.

[20] Jacques Derrida and Anne Defourmantelle, Of Hospitality (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000).

[21] Talk held by Lebanese Ambassador to the United States Antoine Chedid at the Wilston Center in Washington DC, 29 October 2013, http://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/humanitarian-crisis-impact-syrian-refugees-lebanon (accessed: 13 January 2014).

[22] For instance, aid providers usually need local drivers, housing structures for themselves, retailers selling goods to be distributed, and other working staff employable in their field.

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating about Islam and reflects a wide variety of opinions and approaches. It does not reflect the views of the Critical Currents in Islam page or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to cci@jadaliyya.com by Saturday night of every week.]

Art and Science

Islam the opera: curtain up on Clusters of Light about life of prophet Muhammad A musical theater production on the life and teachings of Prophet Muhammad has debuted in Sharjah featuring several notable Arab singers. Tours are planned for Malaysia, Turkey, and Paris.

Saudi Artists Cautiously Push against Redlines AP reports on the use of art by Saudi modern artists to express frustrations on sensitive topics less confrontationally.

Shedding a Light on Islamic Art’s Great Treasure An Islamic art exhibition called “Nur: Light in Art and Science” inspired from Seville, Spain is on display in the Dallas Museum of Art. Pieces include objects from private and public collections.

Why some Muslim countries won’t screen ‘Noah’ Omar Sacirbey writes on the banning of a new Hollywood film, “Noah” based on the story of Noah’s Ark in many Muslim countries. He explains their objection over the visual depiction of prophets through tradition and scripture.

Muslim Minorities and Minority Muslim

New York Drops Unit That Spied on Muslims The NYPD has shut down a secretive program aimed at surveilling Muslim neighborhoods. This departure from post-9/11 intelligence gathering is credited to the department’s new commissioner William J. Bratton.

New group aims to conduct census of Muslim Americans The newly formed US Council on Muslim Organizations has announced its intention to conduct census report to encourage political participation.

'Living On Borrowed Time,' Said Kenyan Muslim AP reports on the ongoing violence in Kenya, including several assassinations of Muslim leaders after last year’s attack on a Nairobi mall by al-Shabab.

A small town in West Virginia responds to Anti-Muslim Sentiment Omar Gharba reports on a West Virginia Islamic Center and Muslim community’s experiences of vandalisms and anti-Muslim sentiment.

Crimea’s Tatars Condemn Annexation, Seek Autonomy The leaders of a minority group within Crimea, the Tatars called on the international community to recognize them as an autonomous group and rejected Russia’s annexation of the region.

Le Pen targets halaal and kosher food: French National Front to stop Muslim and Jewish pupils having pork-free school dinners Kashmira Gander reports on French far-right party leader Marine Le Pen’s announcement that schools will be prevented from offering religiously acceptable meals to Muslim and Jewish students.

Texas terror suspect planned mosque attack, officials say Michael Muskal writes on a foiled plan in Houston by a man wanting to rob an armored vehicle, kill an officer, and shoot people praying in a mosque. He discusses the man’s ideological motivations to create a different society called a “Pre-Constitutionalist Community.”

Plan for 'Sharia-compliant' student loans to get more Muslims into university Graeme Paton reports on the British Universities Minister’s announcement of a new plan to offer interest free loans to encourage Muslims to go after higher education degrees.

Unspeakable violence against Muslims in Burma Several attacks on Rohingya Muslims in Burma have gone unrecognized by the government, which has banned humanitarian organizations that have treated victims of these attacks.

Muslims in the armed forces: A proud tradition Jamie Merrill discusses the history of Muslims serving in the British armed forces and the more recent increase in the number of Muslim recruits.

Successful Muslim Women at the White House Hadeer Nagah writes on a forum hosted by the White House and the Muslim Public Affairs Council on Muslim women contributions to the United States titled “Beyond the Ceiling: Groundbreaking Voices of American Muslim Women.” Seventy successful Muslim women representing the fields of STEM, business, government, and communications were present.

Political Islam

The Muslim Democracy Steven Cook writes on Turkey’s Erdogan and his ruling AKP and their turn for a more “illiberal and authoritarian” regime. He questions the model of democracy that Turkey had played according to the Obama administration.

One dead, 529 convicted: a story of judicial revenge in Egypt Gert Van Langendonck reports on the sentencing of 529 Muslim Brotherhood supporters to death in Upper Egypt for the death of a police officer. He explains that the background of the judge ruling in the case offers insight into verdict and the lack of protests following the sentencing is a result of fear by people in Mattay, not approval.

Britain Orders Inquiry Into Muslim Brotherhood in London Prime Minister David Cameron ordered an inquiry into the Muslim Brotherhood. This investigation is aimed to determine whether the group is operating and planning violent attacks from London.

Safe in exile, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood leaders now risk irrelevance Louisa Loveluck explains that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood leadership in exile have the opportunity to review lessons from Morsi’s time as president. Loveluck also warns that while they enjoy relatively more freedom in exile, they maintain little control over their membership in Egypt and have few links to those on the ground.

Congratulations, You Have Been Martyred! Michael Peck writes about online games where “jihadists” fight and destroy their enemies and points out that they are Iranian and Saudi. These low tech games produced by the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) organization suggest, according to Peck, that the chosen enemies in these games is a departure from other jihadist games online which tend to fight against the West.

Piety and Practice

Alexandria Declaration on Women Rights in Islam A declaration of Women’s Rights in Islam from the “Women’s Issues: Towards a contemporary Islamic Ijtihad” international conference, organized by civil society groups and the Bibliotheca Alexandria. The declaration embraced five basic premises and covered issues on a woman’s human and social value, legal personality, family, education, labor, personal security, and public action.

Malaysia's Islamic endowments set to venture into shares, bonds Al-Zaquan Amer Hamza writes that Malaysia’s awqaf or endowments has made plans to turn to equities and bonds from real estate donations to ensure better returns by expanding the donor base. This possibility comes after roundtable discussions on how to modernize awqaf.

Commercial Bank of Kuwait to convert to Islamic banking Reuters reports on the Commercial Bank of Kuwait’s shareholders approving a plan to convert the bank into an Islamic lender.

FGM Is an Act of Terrorism – Not an Act of Islam In a blog featuring an excerpt from his upcoming book, Qasim Rashid writes that Islam does not permit FGM, contradicting popular myths. Rashid cites Islamic traditions and decisions by religious authorities to explain why he equates FGM with terrorism.

Projects, Papers and Books

The Limits of Muslim Liberalism Zaheer Kazmi’s essay questions the purpose of liberal Islam, which he sees failed at curbing radicalism and hindered open debate making many conflicts worse. Instead, he sees that Muslim liberals despite their diverse views have encouraged a binary discourse, placing Muslim militancy and radicalism opposite Muslim liberalism.

The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror Robin Yassin-Kassab reviews Arun Kundnani’s study on anti-Muslim hysteria in the United States and the United Kingdom and the possible political and social implications of policy and discourse targeting Muslims.

Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an Juliane Hammer reviews and critiques Denise Spellberg’s book on Thomas Jefferson and other early founders of the United States and their attitudes towards Islam.

 A historic Christian Armenian town situated just a mile from the Turkish border in northwest Syria, Kessab is now among the war’s many casualties. On the morning of 21 March, the town was seized by opposition fighters from three Islamic militant groups: Jabhat al-Nusra, Sham al-Islam, and Ansar al-Sham. For Armenians around the world, the event conjured memories of past traumas as one of two remaining Armenian areas that survived the Armenian Genocide of 1915 was depopulated. The last remaining Armenian village in Turkey, Vakıflı, located across the border, is now a safe haven for some of Kessab’s former residents. Three weeks after the capture of Kessab, the event continues to take on a life of its own as various factions in the conflict seek to instrumentalize the tragedy to construct their own versions of reality, a phenomenon that could be called Syria’s Rashomon effect.

[View of Kessab and Surrounding Environs (Photo courtesy of Stefan Winter)]

Kessab was relatively quiet over the last three years but has new value as a launching point for an opposition campaign against the coastal town of Latakia, which lies within the regime’s Alawite heartland. Militants call this campaign al-Anfal (“The Spoils”), a label taken from a chapter title of the Quran connoting the hope of defeating Asad against changing odds after a recent opposition defeat in Yabrud near Damascus. Since the uprising, Kessab’s grassroots militias took up arms to repel militants who sought to enter the mountains. The morning of the raid, Turkey opened the border allowing militias to cross into Syria perhaps to tip the balance against recent Asad gains in the south. However, many Armenians, including the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) and subsequent Armenian activists quickly linked Turkey’s role in Kessab three weeks ago to the 1915 Armenian Genocide—an event commemorated later this month on 24 April.

While dismissed by the opposition, Armenian fears are not completely baseless. Some Islamist opposition militias carry their own unique brand of takfiri sectarianism evidenced by videoed beheadings and forced conversions of Shiites and Christians. Events like the depopulation of Kessab do little to assuage Armenian fears of annihilation that remain alive after a century. Although guerilla groups are often in conflict with one another, they have in common attacks Christian villages, conversion of churches into militia headquarters as in Raqqa, desecration and looting of religious objects, kidnapping and forcibly converting Christians to Islam, and summarily executing minorities and even fellow Sunni Muslim fighters by mistake in the streets. Yet, aside from the removal of a cross from a church rooftop, there was no mass destruction in Kessab when it was captured. 

[Photo of Alleged Cross Destruction Within a Church in Kessab]

The Armenian community continues to protest Kessab’s capture. The #SaveKessab campaign launched via social media contains many important facts about Kessab, but the nature of circulation on the internet also afforded the spreading of erroneous information. True, the current depopulation of Kessab echoes two other evacuations in the last century—1909 and 1915—and Turkey was involved in each instance. But what has not been clarified is that although eighty people were reported as killed in the raid by Asbarez, an Armenian news service, only two casualties are confirmed as Armenian to date. While those deaths are important, diaspora Armenians continue to publish exaggerated articles claiming “a NATO-backed second genocide” is taking place in Kessab. Other Armenian news services have offered more balanced coverage, The Armenian Weekly focused on the two thousand Armenians evacuated to Latakia where they are sheltered in the Virgin Mary Mother of God Armenian Church and given humanitarian assistance by the Armenian Red Cross. The news service has also focused on the search for ten missing Kessab Armenians who never made it to Latakia.

So, why did Armenians evacuate Kessab?  Here it is useful to examine al-Nusra’s capture of the Aramaic-speaking town of Maaloula outside Damascus in September 2013—a place of little to no strategic military value. Symbolism trumped strategy in Maaloula as the Mar Taqla monastery, named after an early Christian saint who fled Roman persecution interned within its walls, was seized and thirteen of its nuns were held captive for three months. The nuns were released on 9 March after Qatar reportedly ransomed them for sixteen million dollars. Over the last two years, the depopulation of Christians in Homs (reduced to ten percent of its original prewar size), Maaloula, and Kessab have magnified existing fears that Syria’s Christians may not survive Syria’s war.

[Kessab Armenians attend mass after arrival in Latakia]

Considering the deep connections between Armenian communities over several centuries, many recently exiled residents who fled Kessab were internally displaced Armenians from Aleppo who fled the fighting in August 2012. Now triple exiled, these refugees huddle in the Armenian Church in Latakia on the coast awaiting their fate, joining over seven million displaced Syrians internally and regionally. Certainly, the disappearance of two thousand Armenians in Kessab may mean little numerically in the larger tragedy of 140,000 dead over the last three years. What it does offer is another way of viewing a conflict that threatens to erase century-old communities that comprise Syria’s mosaic of over sixteen religious and ethnic communities.

A Brief History of Syria’s Armenians

When the conflict began three years ago, I was in the process of writing a history of Syria’s early Armenian community. The Armenian community in Syria is divided between a smaller minority of Armenians (arman qadim) who arrived during the Cilician Kingdom of Armenia which fell in 1375 and a majority of Armenians who are descendants of refugees from the Genocide. Aleppo—a major deportation hub during World War I—houses most of Syria’s Armenian population. Despite the ongoing presence of Armenians in Syria Fawwaz Tallo, a Syrian opposition figure, erroneously asserted, “Kessab is a Syrian town and not Armenian. The Armenians are guests whom we received one hundred years ago on our Syrian land, and today we liberate our land.” Tallo’s claim is pure hyperbole that seeks to alienate Armenians from Syria’s broader history during a time of national struggle. Historical documents tell a different story—Kessab is among the most ancient Armenian settlements in the entire region and among the last to survive the ethnic cleansing and wars of the last century.

As I write this essay, placed on my desk are Ottoman fiscal records (called Mufassal Tahrir Defteri) that document the steady growth of Armenians from the sixteenth century forward as they fled a rebellion (celali) in the east where Armenians lived and crop failures brought on by the Little Ice Age in the 1590s. The Armenian community was quite visible in sixteenth century Aleppo as the historic Christian Judayda quarter took shape in the city, eventually housing nearly a quarter of the city’s population by the eighteenth century. That same survey charts Kessab’s expansion in the first decades of the sixteenth century:  1526: twenty-six families, 1536: thirty families, 1550: sixty-one families. As violence intensified in the Ottoman Empire, beginning with the Hamidiye Massacres (1894-1896), Armenians fled more frequently to nearby Syrian lands.

During the genocide, Syria housed the killing fields where mass unmarked graves can be located along the deportation route in Ras al-‘Ein, Raqqa, Der ez-Zor, and Shaddadeh. As Der ez-Zor lay in ruin after three years of war, it was hard to forget that almost every Deri has an Armenian “hababah” (“grandmother” in the local dialect) and therefore have familial links to events of 1915. After World War I, Syria was overrun with refugees numbering 100,000 Armenians by the 1920s. Originally refugee camps, Armenian neighborhoods developed in Suleymaniyah, Azziziah, and Maydan (Armenian: “Nor Kyugh”) in Aleppo, while the old harat al-arman outside Bab Sharqi in Damascus still sports the original barakat design of the Armenian refugee camp with stucco walls and tin roofs.

In 1928, Armenians were naturalized as Syrian citizens by French colonial powers with the hope of thwarting nationalist stirrings during an election year. The result of French meddling with the Armenian minority was a category historian Keith Watenpaugh calls “not quite Syrian.” In an environment of colonial “divide and rule” policies, Syria’s minorities were considered collaborator classes while the Sunni bourgeoisie agitated for independence from French rule. Early experimentation with liberal democracy showed some signs of political inclusion as Armenians were elected to the constituent assembly. During the instability of the 1960s and subsequent ascendancy of Hafiz al-Asad, Armenians showed a decline in political participation that continues today.

Analyst Andrew Tabler adopted the regime’s myths when he told NPR “[Syrian Christians get] very good business contracts, positions in government and the Syrian military….They get preferential treatment and protection of their places of worship.” In this line of thinking, Armenians and other Christians are protected minorities who reaped financial and political benefits from the state. Yet the facts don’t support this claim entirely. Armenians were seldom elected to parliament and when they were present in government they held appointed rather than elected positions. As recently as 2012, Bashar al-Asad appointed a woman, Dr. Nazira Farah Sarkis, as Minister of the Environment. One could read this singular appointment in 2012 as an effort to garner the support of Armenians during a period of protracted fighting when Armenians took the formal stance of neutrality during the uprising.

The myth of minoritarian rule as beneficial to minorities has had devastating effects for everyday Syrians, who are targeted for reprisal as the primary collaborators with the Assad regime when, in reality, every community has been coopted to some degree within complex webs of collaboration that bear a distinct colonial design. Importantly, the minority myth detracts from the highest proportional beneficiaries of the regime, for, as Bassam Haddad’s research as shown, Sunni entrepreneurs are the backbone of the new bourgeoisie created under Bashar al-Asad’s rule over the last decade. Sunni elites have historically obtained higher and more influential offices in both Asad governments as Defense Minister (Mustafa Tlas), Prime Minister (Mustafa Miru), Foreign Minister (Faruq al-Shar’), and Vice-President of Foreign Affairs (‘Abd al-Halim Khaddam). It is important to bear in mind, for every accusation that minorities are regime collaborators, Sunni complicity is being erased. To ignore this fact is by omission upholding a sectarian discourse.

The invisibility of Armenians historically in Syrian politics is paradoxical considering the century-old durable political institutions—clubs, political parties, churches, and social committees—that have long survived in the shadows under both Asads. One would surmise that Armenians would have been predisposed to political participation, but the numbers show that they did not flourish under the authoritarian model. Instead, they voted with their feet, leaving Syria to avoid conscription and to look for better economic opportunities. In fact, historian Simon Payaslian has shown that the Armenian population dropped from 100,000 in the 1960s to 58,000 on the eve of the 2011 uprising underscoring how drastically the community has declined under authoritarianism.

While Hafiz al-Asad was hostile toward Turkey, Bashar al-Asad forged close ties that eventually stifled freedom of speech for Armenians on the subject of the Armenian Genocide. Those of us on the ground experienced intimidation in the form monitoring of our writings and emails, the banning and confiscation of books from bookstore shelves, and harassment by the secret police of authors who published on the Armenian Genocide. Under Hafiz al-Asad, Armenian processions for 24 April commemorations featured deafening displays of drumming and chants, Bashar al-Asad ordered more quiet displays of mourning with a quiet procession only within the church walls and Armenian cemetery in the years before the uprising. The policies of 2005-2011, stood in stark contrast to the encouragement Syria’s Armenians now have to criticize Turkey showing how Armenian speech is silenced or fostered at the whim of Syrian foreign policy.

Taking cues from the Lebanese civil war, Syria’s Armenians have maintained an official stance of “positive neutrality” since the revolt began in March 2011. This strategy has largely preserved Armenian areas of Aleppo while other areas in a state of rebellion were flattened by Syrian forces.  The strategy saved Armenians in Lebanon, but studies have shown that it also marginalized them when it came time to forge the Ta’if peace agreement in 1989.

Kessab:  Syria’s Rashomon Effect

The Opposition’s Story

After capturing Kessab, the conquering militias launched a slick public relations campaign uploading numerous videos on YouTube showing unscathed Armenian churches and gentle interactions with remaining elderly inhabitants. One photo circulated frequently by pro-opposition activists on Facebook featured an elderly Kessab Armenian woman carried by an opposition fighter captioned “Is this a terrorist?” In yet another video, we are given a tour of one of Kessab’s churches by a man with immaculate English as he imagines how each area of the church was used by the vacated residents. At one point, he grabs a Bible erroneously telling the viewers that it is written in Aramaic, but his larger point is that the Bible has not been destroyed by the fighters. The video shows “fixable” damage to the church’s plaster walls, attributed to the fighting between regime forces and rebels currently underway. The tour guide mentions at one point that the video was created specially “for Kim,” a reference to American reality TV star Kim Kardashian.

[A Widely-Circulated Image on Social Media Asks: Is This the Face of a Terrorist?]

The Armenian Diaspora’s Story

In an attempt to draw international attention to the plight of Kessab, the Armenian diaspora quickly latched onto the #SaveKessab viral Twitter and Facebook campaign to place international attention on Turkey just weeks before Armenian Genocide commemoration day on 24 April. After a century of denial by the Turkish government of the killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians during World War I, genocide recognition continues to be the top priority for the Armenian Diaspora composed of its victims. While many facts about Kessab were correct, amid the internet frenzy, activists circulated erroneous photos falsely claiming that Armenians a large number of Armenians had been murdered in the assault and shared faulty claims by Armenian celebrities Kim Kardashian and Cher that a second genocide was taking place in the town. Kardashian’s perspective on Kessab was amplified by the press when she retweeted these charges: “Please let's not let history repeat itself!!!!!! Let's get this trending!!!! #SaveKessab#ArmenianGenocide” despite the fact Armenian deaths in Kessab remained undocumented at that point. Kardashian’s involvement in particular put her on the radar of opposition activists who slandered her as an Asad supporter although she never made any specific reference to the regime. A punned headline from the Daily Beast read “Kim Kardashian Butts Into Syria’s Civil War,” yet Cher retweeted something far more caustic when she wrote “Please check out what’s going on in Kessab, Syria. Innocent Christians and Armenians being killed by Turks #SaveKessab.” None of these high profile figures have retracted the misinformation that left opposition activists fuming at the double standard of calling what happened in Kessab a genocide while staying silent on Aleppo, Homs, and other parts of Syria decimated by war.    

In the days after Kessab’s capture, an image of a mutilated woman on a bed with a cross shoved down her throat that circulated months ago among Syrian Christians on Facebook resurfaced during the #SaveKessab campaign. Snopes published the image with a clip from the original Canadian film by special effects filmmaker Remy Couture to verify that the woman featured was a gore film actress not a Kessab Armenian. Surely, this was not the first internet hoax, but with distrust of the Armenian position in Syria’s war, opposition activists quickly rushed to discredit what they called “Armenian lies” about Kessab and promote their own hashtag #SaveAleppo as a counterpoint to the #SaveKessab campaign. At this point there are several emotionally-charged videos that capture the civilian toll of ongoing barrel bombings in Syria’s northern city to deflect attention given to Kessab.

[Facebook Profile Image for the #SaveKessab Campaign]

The Armenian Catholicos’s Story

On 9 April, the hyper-reality of internet discourse on Kessab was corrected by the Armenian Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia his holiness Aram I in Antelias, Lebanon. His interview with Civilnet was a reissuing of an earlier position formulated by the Armenian leader two years ago. He stated, “What happened in Kesab (sic.) must not be isolated from the rest of the Syrian conflict.” With this statement, his holiness put a kibosh on efforts of the Armenian diaspora to situate the events in Kessab only within the realm of Turkish-Armenian relations. He added, “Syrian Christians and Muslims have accepted us as part of their society, they shared with us their homeland, and we became an inseparable part of Syrian society, and in the last decades after the Genocide, we actively participated in the building and rebuilding of Syrian society...We believe that the Syrian conflict must be solved through a political process; the conflict must be “Syrianized” and also the process aimed at the solution of this conflict must be Syrianized.” His Holiness Aram I reiterated the position of “positive neutrality” when he stated, “As a community, we should not associate ourselves with any given regime, political ideology, or person, they are provisional…we remain attached to the supreme interests of Syria.” The statement was quickly translated into Arabic in hope that opposition activists would not prejudge all Armenians for the sins of a few.

The Syrian Regime’s Story

Many Armenians have understood the unleashing jihadists onto a surviving Armenian village a stone’s toss across the border as an attempt to finish what was started in 1915. Armenian fears were aggravated by a recent video showing militias crossing the Turkish border absent any Turkish border police. These fears have been capitalized on Syrian state media positioning the regime as protector of Armenians. Pro-regime commentators have made overt connections between the depopulation of Kessab and the 1915 genocide, stating “this attack on Kassab [sic.] is a reflection of Erdogan’s anger towards Armenia’s stand against his terrorism in Syria, and a reminder of the 1915 massacres and the historical Turkish animosity towards the Armenians.” Such statements have exploited Armenian fears for regime support. Even a military-garbed Lebanese artist, Ali Barakat, known for his anthems to Hizbullah fighters quickly launched a music video to support the regime’s campaign called “Seal Your Victory in Kessab.” While the song is just a variation of an earlier tune he wrote for the campaign in Yabrud, it attempts to harness anger and fear over Kessab as the regime works to repel opposition forces from Latakia province.

Turkey’s Story

Armenians cannot take the blame alone for Syria’s Rashomon effect, the Turkish press presented itself as the rescuers of Kessab’s Armenians offering them safe haven in Turkey. Hürriyet reported on two sisters, Sirpuhi and Satenik Titizyan, both in their eighties who were “rescued” claiming “they were now in “paradise.” Escorted by opposition fighters into Turkey, the elderly sisters stated, “Farmers and officials in the Turkish town are now taking care of their guests.” However, a very different account appeared when the women were interviewed in the Armenian Istanbul-based Armenian daily Agos. After arriving to Vakıflı, the last remaining Armenian village in Turkey in the Musa Dagh Mountains—a place known for its heroic resistance against deportation during the Armenian Genocide—journalist Lora Baytar reported that “ten bearded men entered and ransacked their home, saying that they were told not to be frightened and that the men were speaking Turkish, not Arabic. The two women reported that they were deported to the Turkish border, even though they told the men that they wanted to leave for the Syrian port city of Latakia.” As for their reaction to living in Turkey, rather than refer to it as “paradise” the women offered something less praising saying that “they needed to go “somewhere” because nobody was left there (in Kessab).” The women then compared relocation to Turkey to a morsel of bread. “If there is only one morsel of bread left in the entire world, we will eat that too.”

Instead of a story of rescue Agos told one of two women forcibly removed from Syria wherein Turkish-speaking militants played the role of perpetrator. In both accounts, the women related handing over their house keys to “bearded men” while Agos offered details about the ransacking of their home in Kessab. When the Agos interview was reprinted in yet another venue, Aydınlık, the interview was reframed as “Syrian Armenians Declare War Crimes of Erdoğan” sending a clear message, from its perspective, of who was to blame for the depopulating of Kessab.

While #SaveKessab intended to draw attention to the dramatic depopulation of Kesab and Turkey’s role in the event, as a social media campaign, it fell prey to “hoaxes” that typically spread viral on the internet—think Bonzai Kitten. Making Kardashian the fall girl for misinforming the public about Kessab merely highlighted the way in which celebrities rather than experts are looked to as purveyors of knowledge in an environment of anti-intellectualism. After all, the mainstream media quoted Twitter, Facebook pages of pro-opposition activists, lobbyists, and celebrities in search of the Kessab story which is hardly rigorous journalism.

While the internet has its own ability to produce gullible consumers, history shows there is a reason why such fears are easily stoked within the Armenian community. Images of sectarian murder have spread virally on state and social media paralyzing minority communities into submission to not only the Asad regime but to political interests more broadly. Turkey also got involved in the game—as did opposition activists—to dismiss sectarian concerns that were chalked up to mere hype. There was little effort to acknowledge what the loss of Kessab meant to the Armenian community and why its capture would produce such internet hysteria. The state sought to capitalize on the outrage over Kessab as it launches its campaign against opposition forces in Latakia province. Kessab is yet another manifestation of the Syria conflict’s Rashomon effect as each faction works to produce their own reality to gain support amid a hopeless political stalemate.

The Lambs of Kessab: A Requiem

Kessab is a place where Syria’s Armenians including myself summered for the celebration of the Virgin Mary during the heady days of August. I remember the lines of lambs outside a small chapel in a field in one of Kessab’s villages where people assembled for the sacrifices to the Virgin. Forty slaughtered lambs were converted into ten cauldrons of piping lamb and wheat porridge called “harisa” cooked over open wood fires and spooned out to the community. The long nights of celebration until daylight infused with nostalgia—a word that unites the Greek word for “homecoming” with that of “pain”—the longing for village life in Turkey lost to a crippling diaspora. Centered on the church, the heart of the summer ritual was the blessing of the grapes performed by the Armenian Archbishop of Aleppo. The grapes were symbolically harvested by the Archbishop while Kessab’s Armenians returned to their homes to cut their own vines after the ceremony.

During my last visit to Kessab during the celebration of St. Mary, we danced to the cool breeze late night in the fields near blood-stained front steps of the church where lambs were slaughtered earlier that day. Bits of a tail, tufts of wool, and pools of blood were left to soak into the soil before the Virgin’s chapel in a field near Kesab’s Eskuren village. The zurna, a double-reed wind instrument, hummed a familiar tune and the drum kept us on step as Armenians from all parts of Syria gathered hands, or more specifically pinkies, in a circle dance. Over the last decade, Kessab was noticeably overrun by Saudi tourists who summered there to escape the summer heat in the Gulf. We all noticed the two Saudi men, visibly without their families—a sign they thought the gathering inappropriate for loved ones—appear in the circle to dance with us. One man kept bullying the zurna player to play debka, an Arabic circle dance with a very different beat. Even though the instrument was familiar to the man, the rhythm, an Armenian tamzara, was completely foreign to him. The musicians refused to comply and kept playing Armenian tunes anyway.

I think about that episode today, the power dynamics laid bare in the exchange that seem more meaningful today: the failure on the part of the Armenian musician to accommodate the demands of outsiders suggesting he thought they should not be there, and the inability of the Saudi men to understand just what they were witnessing beside the church that night. For both parties, there was a failure to recognize the other. To the Armenians, the men were invaders and a threat to ritual. To the Saudi men, we were just a group of Armenians dancing in a field in Kessab. But to us, Kessab held intangible value as an artifact from a medieval Armenian kingdom that once ruled over this place and memory of village life before the great catastrophe that we reenacted every August. 

The spring 2011 issue of the Arab Studies Journal was published around the time that the revolutions, uprisings, demonstrations, and protests spread across North Africa and the Middle East. The actions of individuals, communities, citizenries, and populations have challenged archaic and problematic narratives whose time has long since passed. While the global media’s fascination has somewhat dissipated, the various protest movements and uprisings, and their consequences, continue to reverberate throughout the Arab world. Though they do not address the revolutions and demonstrations directly, the four articles in this issue of ASJ attend to how historical and political narratives resonate with events in the Middle East and North Africa today.

Nadia Latif traces the transformation of the roles of Palestinian camp refugees in Lebanon in Palestinian nationalist narratives. Latif argues that regional and global political transformations over the last three decades have transformed Palestinian refugees from symbols of revolutionary struggle to signifiers of victimhood. Stacy Holden outlines the theatrics of Sultanic authority and French colonial rule in ‘Alawi Morocco by tracing the symbolic and performative aspects of the ‘Id al-Kabir sacrifice. She shows that such public rites as the Great Sacrifice provided a means of popular participation in monarchical institutions that could make or break an individual Sultan as well as systems of colonial rule. Mona Harb and Lara Deeb explore the production of an Islamic milieu in Lebanon by focusing on Hizballah’s efforts to organize notions of culture (thaqafa) and nature. Prashant Keshavmurthy offers an interpretation of the preface to Muhammad ‘Awfi’s Lubab al-Albab, the biographical dictionary of Persian language poets completed in 1221 CE. Keshavmurthy argues that ‘Awfi anticipated and challenged the notion that “temporal distance” from a text’s empirical origins could facilitate rather than impede its understanding.

The book review section of this issue attends to the materiality of cultural production and consumption, and attunes us to local and global politics, and the power of economic interests. The reviews focus on books with such diverse subjects as nineteenth-century Tunisia, masculinity in a Uyghur community in Xinjiang China, the US military’s devastating sieges of al-Falluja in 2004, and the scholarly networks of eighteenth-century polymath Murtada al-Zabidi. Many of the books reviewed examine the connections between neoliberalism, state violence, colonialism, and anti-colonial nationalism, while others explore the contested terrain of culture. 

Content:

Articles

Culture as History and Landscape: Hizballah’s Efforts to Shape an Islamic Milieu in Lebanon
by Mona Harb and Lara Deeb

Fellahin, Fida'iyyin, Laji'in: Palestinian Camp Refugees in Lebanon as Autochthons
by Nadia Latif

Pomp and Circumstance: Royal Symbolism and the ‘Id al-Kabir Sacrifice in Morocco
by Stacy Holden

Finitude and the Authorship of Fiction: Muhammad ‘Awfi’s Preface to his Chronicle, Lubab al-Albab (The Piths of Intellects)
by Prashant Keshavmurthy

Book Reviews

Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion
Edited by Laleh Khalili and Jillian Schwedler
reviewed by Paul Amar

Redeploying the State: Corporatism, Neoliberalism, and Coalition Politics
by Hishaam D. Aidi
reviewed by Agnieszka Paczynska

Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa
by Richard C. Keller
reviewed by Lawrence W. McMahon

Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900
by Julia A. Clancy-Smith
reviewed by Omar Cheta

The World of Murtada al-Zabidi (1732–91): Life, Networks, and Writings
by Stefan Reichmuth
reviewed by Dahlia E. M. Gubara

Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective
by Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab
reviewed by Stephen Sheehi

Down a Narrow Road: Identity and Masculinity in a Uyghur Community in Xinjiang China
by Jay Dautcher
reviewed by Kelly Hammond

Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice
by Samia Mehrez
reviewed by Elliott Colla

Beirut Bereft: The Architecture of the Forsaken and Map of the Derelict
by Photographs by Ziad Antar, text by Rasha Salti
reviewed by Sarah A. Rogers

Beaches, Ruins, Resorts: The Politics of Tourism in the Arab World
by Waleed Hazbun
reviewed by Adel Ait-Ghezala

Inside Fallujah: The Unembedded Story
by Ahmed Mansour
reviewed by Dahr Jamil

The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism
by Erez Manela
reviewed by Maggie Clinton

The Claims of Culture at Empire’s End: Syria and Lebanon under French Rule
by Jennifer M. Dueck
reviewed by Samuel Dolbee

For Better, For Worse: The Marriage Crisis That Made Modern Egypt
by Hanan Kholoussy
reviewed by Omnia El Shakry

هذه ليست عبارة فارغة من المعنى. ذلك أن الكلام يمكن أن يتعطل ويفقد معناه وأن يتوقف نهائياً. يمكن أن تجدي نفسك في وضع تكونين فيه غير قادرة على الكلام، أو لا تجدين العبارات الملائمة والكلام المناسب. أما أن يُعطِّل السجّان كلامك، لا أحد غير السجان، فهذا أمر آخر يصعب وصفه. حين يتعطل الكلام فجأة وأنتِ في منتصف العبارة، حين تكون شفتاك مفتوحتين لتنطقي بالكلام لكن سماعة الهاتف تتوقف عن الإرسال لأن السجان أوقف الكلام، عندها تعلق الكلمات في حلقك، ولا يعود لخروجها أي معنى لأنها لا تصل للطرف الآخر.

والطرف الآخر لا يبعد عنك إلا بضع سنتمرات لكنك غير قادرة على الوصول إليه، لأنه موجود في عالم آخر، عالم الجدران والأسلاك والحيطان والرقابة، عالم السجن والسّجان، عالم مغاير في معالمه ومفاهيمه وفي التجربة والمشاعر والأفكار. إن الطرف الآخر يقف أمامك، ترينه ويراك، لكنك لا تتمكنين من لمسه ولا هو أيضاً، ولا تصله كلماتك ولا تصلك كلماته، يحدث هذا حين تتوقف سماعة الهاتف الذي يوصل بينكما عن الإرسال ليتحول الهاتف إلى حاجز بدل وسيلة اتصال. 

تحل ابتسامةٌ بدل الكلام في محاولة منك ومنه لتخفيف وطأة الصدمة، الصدمة التي تتكرر كل أسبوعين حين تقررين ألا تنشغلي خلال الزيارة بعقارب الساعة المعلقة على جانب الحائط، في طرفه الأعلى من جهة اليسار، فأنت حضرت للكلام وليس للانشغال بعقارب الساعة، قررت ألا تنشغلي بها، تلك الساعة اللعينة، الإلكترونية التي تركض الأرقام الحمراء داخلها كل الوقت لتذكرك بأن الوقت يمضي. تنشغلين عنها أحياناً لاندماجك بالمحادثة وأحياناً لتخرجينها من وعيك كي لا تسيطر هي عليك وعلى الموقف، فتجدينها فجأة توقفت عن العمل لتؤكد أن الوقت انتهى، في تلك اللحظة، في تلك الثانية التي يعلق بها الكلام، يتعطل الكلام.

هذا الأسبوع مرت ببالك خاطرة تشابه المكان والزمان واختلاف المكان والزمان، كم هي بيروت قريبة من حيفا جغرافياً وكم هي بعيدة. هي أقرب المدن وأبعدها. وهو الأمر كذلك مع السجن. كم هو قريب منك يقف على بعد خطوة، إلا أن الحاجز الزجاجي الذي يفصل بينكما كل من جهة يجعله بعيداً.  هو على مرمى خطوة لكنك لا تقدرين أن توصلي له الكلام الذي تريدين ولا المشاعر ولا الأفكار، لأن الساعة اللعينة تتحكم ليس بالوقت فقط لكنها تتحكم بك وبحياتك.

بيروت والسجن والمنفى والغربة والواقع المركب. مشاعر وأفكار وواقع عجيب. 

جلستِ اليوم في كرمل حيفا ونظرتِ بعيداً، للأفق. كان هناك جبل يتوضّع ممتداً بالعرض يحيط بالبحر من أمامك يطوق خاصرة البحر ليشكل معه خليجاً يكون هادئاً أحياناً وهائجاً في أحيان أخرى، والأمر لا يتعلق هذه المرة لا بالاحتلال ولا بالحدود وإنما بطبيعة الكون. 

جلستِ هناك تتأملين الجبل الممتد أمامك وفكرّت، كم هي جميلة مدينتي، هناك ترين عكا تلوح قبل الأفق، عكا توأم حيفا التي تختلف عنها شكلاَ وتضاريسَ لكنها توأمها المرابط قربها كامتداد لها. لن ندخل غب إشكالية البيضة والدجاجة: فل عكا ولدت قبل حيفا؟ أم حيفا ولدت قبل عكا؟ فكلاهما أختان متلازمتان. أما الوجع الأكبر فهو الأخت الغائبة خلف الجبال، تلك المدينة التي ذهبت أحلامنا إليها ليلاً ولم تعد من هناك حتى عندما استيقظنا.

مجد حقق الحلم، حقّق حلمنا جميعاً، حلماً لم نقدر على تحقيقه بالخيال فحققه هو بالواقع.

إذن التابو يكسر، والقيد يكسر. لكن ماذا عن قيد السجن والسجان؟ كيف ومتى سيُكسر؟

مشاعر وأفكار تدور في رأسكِ وأنت تجلسين هناك تتأملين البحر الأزرق الصافي لدرجة أنك تخيلت أنك من على حافة الجبل تقدرين أن تشاهدي ما بداخله. أزرق تبعثرت على سطحه سفن كثيرة اليوم بشكل جمالي رائع، بحر ينتهي بجبل، بجبل خلفه مدينة أحببتها لكنها لم تعرفك لتحبك. بقي نظرك معلقا هناك عند الجبل وأفكارك معلقة خلفه الى أن رن جرس الهاتف. الرقم المرسوم على الشاشة لم يترك لديك مجالاً للتفكير، إنها مكالمة كنت بانتظارها.

آلو.. رددتِ وابتسامة تعلو شفتيك،

وابتدأ الكلام...    

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Syria and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Syria Page Editors or ofJadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to syria@jadaliyya.com by Monday night of every week.]

International and Regional Perspectives

The Roots of Crisis in Northern Lebanon Raphael Lefevre provides a detailed report on the causes behind the heightened tensions in Northern Lebanon, and concludes with concrete measures to decrease them.

Lebanon and the Syrian refugee crisis Lana Asfour provides an overview of the political, economic and social tensions in Lebanon and concludes that : “The prolonged conflict in Syria continues to test the stability of the Lebanese state, and constitutes a more serious threat to its sovereignty and independence than previous, post-civil war confrontations.”

Stopping Russia Starts in Syria Anne-Marie Slaughter advocates for a US intervention in Syria, where “the US must demonstrate its readiness to shoulder the full responsibilities of power. Striking Syria might not end the civil war there, but it could prevent the eruption of a new one in Ukraine.”

Al-Qaeda Is Dead, Long Live Al-Qaeda Jean-Pierre Filiu writes: “The key to understanding current jihadi dynamics is not which group Zawahiri is prepared to bless or banish but which forces tolerate or fight the ISIL.”

The Syria Factor in Iraqi Kurdish Politics Wladimir Van Wilgenburg explains: “In Syria, Barzani pursues a policy geared to the same goals that he pursues in Iraq: protecting Kurdish interests in the war while simultaneously squeezing out his rivals and strengthening his own relations with Turkey.”

Refugee Crisis 

The Everyday Experience of Humanitarianism in Akkar Villages (Part One) Estella Carpi’s report on the implosion of humanitarian assistance in Akkar and the “ethnicization” of the needs and services provided to the Syrian refugees.On the Struggle of Syrian Refugees in Lebanon Moe Ali Nayel meets with Syrians in Arsal and Zahle  and reports on the harsh conditions they face living in the refugee camps.

Plongée dans un camp de réfugiés syriens de la Bekaa Elizabeth Longuenesse reports on four initiatives undertaken in the camp of Jarrahiyeh that seeks to foster autonomy to meet the refugees’ needs for energy and education.

Syrian refugees cling to stability in Iraq Ali Al-Arian reports on the life conditions inside Domiz refugee camp in Iraq, where, unlike other camps in the region, refugees seem to have found “relative stability”. 

Syrian Narratives

Jadaliyya Co-Editor Bassam Haddad on NPR’s Worldview, Addressing Syria’s Presidential Elections In the below interview with Worldview airing on National Public Radio (NPR), Jadaliyya Co-Editor Bassam Haddad discusses the recent announcement, its broader context, and possible implications.  

 #SaveKessab, #Save Aleppo, and Kim Kardashian: Syria’s Rashomon Effect Elyse Semerdjian writes a useful piece on the recent developments in majority-Armenian town of Kessab and what the recent #SaveKessab campaign and its critics reflect about the discourses on this minority.

Syria's starving civilians struggle to survive in bombarded cities Martin Chulov explains how “relentless bombardment has destroyed opposition strongholds. For those trapped inside, the choice from Assad is stark: submit or die”.

Druze Sheikhs Protest in Sweida Tobias Lang explains why “few Druze have so far participated in the protests against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and the Sweida region has accordingly been spared the worst of the civil war, even though fighting seems to have increasedrecently.”

The Syrian Opposition’s Bleak Outlook Yezid Sayigh explains that “the Syrian National Coalition is living on borrowed time. Unless it can develop credible political leadership and effective administration inside Syria, the outlook for those trying to make it succeed looks bleak”.

The Armenians and Syriacs of Syria: Tale of a Lonely Homeland Rustom Mahmoud offers a geopolitical analysis comparing the two groups’ stance and says ”Armenians find themselves closer to the axis that is lead by Iran, and has to do with the conflict and bitter feeling toward towards Turkey.” [...] “The Syriac, in contrast, do not have any motivations to organize their political choices on basis of political regional equations.”

New Syrian Islamic Council repeats the patterns of old Hassan Hassan says that one of this new organization’s features is that it “has combined three otherwise irreconcilable Islamic currents under one canopy: Sufis, Muslim Brotherhood and Sururis.”

Syria’s Thousand Miles of Red Tape Alsharq al-Awsat says “even Syrians who have escaped their war-torn country into Turkey continue to have their lives dominated by the Syrian regime's far-reaching bureaucracy”

Khaddam: I am Part of the Regime and Ready to Stand Trial The former Syrian Vice President “Abdulhalim Khaddam challenged the regime to reveal a file of corruption that may convict him or any of his relatives,” reports the Syrian Observer

The Sham Legion: Syria’s Moderate Islamists Raphael Lefevre and Ali El Yassir argue that the formation of the group is a significant development because “until its formation, only more conservative and Salafi-oriented brigades had managed to merge into ideologically coherent countrywide alliances, such as the Islamic Front.”

Homs

Syria negotiator says Homs once again a 'theater of death'Reuters reports that “in recent months, government forces have recaptured several rebel-held areas and border towns, closing off rebel supply routes from Lebanon and securing the main highway leading north from Damascus towards central Syria, Homs and the Mediterranean.”

What Would the Fall of Homs Mean? Aron Lund examines the military developments in Homs, saying that “even if the Old City were to fall, it would not mean the end of the insurgency in Homs Province. The opposition still has strong support throughout the Sunni countryside.” 

Inside Syria

Homs Emerges as Turning Point in Shaping Syria’s Future Anne Barnard, reporting from Homs, contends that “if the government is victorious here, it will control a devastated landscape, a physically fragmented and socially divided city where many community bonds, not just houses, have been destroyed.”

Aleppo: What’s Left Behind Reporting from Aleppo, Hannah Lucinda Smith claims that “the people who had been terrorizing the city have gone, but there is barely a city left to terrorize any more.”

Warring Factions Bring Chaos to Syrian Civilians Issam Abdulhamid says “tensions between Syrian rebel forces stationed in civilian areas are causing problems for residents, who say they risk being caught in crossfire or regime strikes.”

West Aleppo faces unending assault reports Edward Dark, a pseudonym for a resident in Aleppo (translation by Sibel Utku Bila”.

Tal Malouhi Back to Adra Prison According to All4Syria, activist Tal “Malouhi was held again under the directives of Major General Ali Mamlouk” (Update translated by the Syrian Observer)

Syria: who can you trust in Manajir? Carl Drott says ISIS is terrorizing citizens in Manabij, to make sure they do not support Kurdish YPG.

 Aleppo Civilians in Rebel Areas Left Without Public Services Khaled Hajjo speaks with Osama Abu Zeid from the Aleppo Civil Defense Units (CDUs), a year-old organization in  Aleppo which “concentrates on the grim yet indispensable tasks in a city under fire: “‘rescuing the injured, extricating corpses and extinguishing fires.’”

Kafr Nabl Publisher: 'End of Assad Control Began a Revolution of Consciousness'“In the first of a two-part interview, Salloum tells Syria Direct’s Raneem Qubatrus that this editorial independence “‘is the definition of both freedom and responsibility, but there’s also potential to drift toward irresponsibility and chaos.’”

Review: Return to Homs - the capital of Syria's revolution destroyed Mark Boothroyd reviews Talal Derki’s film on Syrian goalkeeper Basset Sarout and media activist Ossama Al Homsi’s return to the country.

Syria's Dagestan ruled by the sword of ISIS Suhaib Anjarini reports on the village of Deir Foul, “the last remaining gathering of Syrians of Dagestani descent” [...] which “has fallen under the control of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and their brutal policies.”

Killing Spurs the Living to Continue Revolution  Souad Khibiyeh for The Syrian Observer  interviews Abu Hassan, who was nicknamed the “father of the martyrs” after he lost his three sons to the revolution.

The Children of Yarmouk Miss You (Video) Children singing a song in which they express their support to Syrians across Syria and those in neighboring countries. 

Arts and Social Media

Good Media, Bad Politics? New Media and the Syria Conflict In his lengthy report for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, James Harkin asks: “Given that new media was supposed to be such an accessory to Syria’s early rebellion, is it possible that it contributed to its undoing?"

 Syrie : «Derrière chacune de ces clés, il y a une vie brisée» Photograph Bradley Secker’s project called “Syrian Nabka” presents pictures of hands holding keys, those of Syrian refugees in Turkey,

Syria crisis: Uplifting letters of hope“Young Somali refugees living in the world's largest refugee camp, in Kenya, have sent letters of encouragement to Syrian refugee children who have also had to flee their homeland.”

Testimony of Loyalty Directed by Hassan Altanji, produced by Reaction and supported by Bidayyat, “this is the story of the artist Hassan Hassan, as it is the story of thousands of detainees in Syria, whether Palestinians or Syrians.”

Photoblog: Saraqeb’s Walls Document the Different Stages of the Revolution A photo gallery curated  by the Damascus Bureau. 

Forging Unity in Syria With Music Mat Nashed features Damascene band “Ana”

A Displaced Syrian Woman Turns Unfinished Building into Joyful Kindergarten The Damascus Bureau explains how “there are no statistics detailing the number of women currently working in Syria, since most of the work they do is in the informal economy.”

Les quatre journalistes otages en Syrie ont été libérés Abducted since June 2013, Didier François, Edouard Elias, Nicolas Hénin and Pierre Torres were released last week.

Photoblog: Kafr Nabel’s Walls Are Painted with Fresh Life“After Kafr Nabel experienced severe destruction and its walls were covered with obscene scrawls that were an affront to common decency, a group of local youth came together to rejuvenate the walls and bring colour and life back to certain neighbourhoods as part of an initiative they called “Aish” (Life).” Damascus Bureau’s Youssef al-Ahmad features their art  in this photo gallery. 

Policy and Reports

Exclusive: U.N. Docs Expose Assad's Starvation Campaign in Syria reports John Hudson, for Foreign Policy.

Violence against Women, Bleeding Wound in the Syrian Conflict  The aim of the report is to shed light on the range of violence and violations affecting Syrian women in the context of the conflict.” 

A Special Report on Aleppo Central Prison: The Execution and Fatal Starvation Of Dozens of Prisoners A report by the Violation Documentation Center in Syria.

Syria: Aleppo civilians under attack“The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is appalled by a sharp escalation of violence in the northern city of Aleppo, where parties have in recent days carried out indiscriminate attacks against civilians and deliberately prevented them from obtaining basic necessities.” 

Economy and Agriculture

Slums and the Syrian Revolution Rustum Mahmoud notes that “the poorest in Syrian society had the least level of political participation”

Damascus Merchants Reveal Reason Behind Central Bank Policies Iqtissad says “the Syrian Central Bank has decided to raise the dollar exchange rate for financing imports to 162 Syrian Pounds.” (translated by the Syrian Observer)

PM Says Economic, Trade Ties With China to be Bolstered According to  Syrian government paper Tishreen, “Halqi says Syria will be rebuilt by Syrian hands with the support of friends” (translated by the Syrian Observer).

Accommodation Prices Skyrocket in Damascus According to the Damascus Bureau “the past two years have witnessed a mass exodus from the war-torn Damascus countryside to the centre of the capital and to other, safer, areas” 

Drought, Corruption, and War: Syria’s Agricultural Crisis Aron Lund provides an overview of one of the underlying cause of the uprising, the social crisis, worsened by a massive drought in the countryside.

Events

« Syrie, la Révolution orpheline » de Ziad Majed. Orpheline, mais créatrice et debout Ziad Majed will discuss his book “Syrie, la Révolution orpheline (‘Syria, the orphaned revolution’)” for an event prepared by Souria Houria, on April 27. 

Studying, Researching, Teaching, Representing: The Arab Uprisings Three Years On (28 April, George Mason University)  George Mason University and the Arab Studies Institute will host a panel discussing knowledge production about the Middle East region. 

Resources 

Young Syrian Activists“Young Syrian Activists is a non-partisan movement that aims to project the voices of young activists to the international community in a variety of ways. We aim to put the spotlight firmly on the personal choices these individuals have been forced to make in the face of crisis.” 

Arabic 

ثلاثملاحظاتعلىمقارباتسيمورهيرشوروبرتفيسك
Yassin Al-Haj Saleh provides 3 notes on the articles of Seymour Hersh and Robert Fisk, 

(1) أصواتمنيرموك: سورياوفلسطين، النضالواحد
Joseph Daher converses with Tariq Ibrahim, a Palestinian-Syrian from Yarmouk living in exile.  

شهادةوفا
Bidayat’s video about the story of Hassan Hassan and of thousands of Syrian and Palestinian detaineesin Syria.  

اليرموكاشتقلكياخيا♥
The people of Yarmouk sing for the displaced residents of the camp and ask them to come back because “Al-Yarmouk Misses you Khayya”.  

نشطاءمدينةالرقةيطلقونحملةلإنقاذالمدينةمنداعش
Activists in al-Raqqa launch a campaign to save the city from ISIS. 

!أسيرةحررهاالثوارفي"صفقةالراهبات" ثماعتقلوها
Basel al-Jneidi about the story of Yasmin Benshi, who was imprisoned by the armed Islamists after being freed from the prisons of the regime during the nuns trade deal.

 !الأساطيرالثلاثبينالمعارضةونظامالأسد
Mohammad Nimr talks to Haytham Mannaa and writes about Mannaa’s views on the current status of the opposition and the regime. 

الكتابةفيظلالدكتاتورية
Halim Yousef on writing in the shadows of dictatorship. 

تحتخطّ النكبةالسورية
Rateb Shaabo on the Syrian catastrophe. 

الحلالأخيرفىسوريا
Abdel Halim Qandil provides his “last solution for Syria”.  

سميرةخليل
Samira Khalil is a peaceful Syrian political activist who was arrested by an armed group in December 2013 in Duma. Her whereabouts are still unknown. 

الموسيقيالسوريسعيدميرخانينجزحلمهويرحل
Mohammad al-Attar writes a beautiful eulogy for the Syrian musician Said Mirkhan, who passed away in London recently, after fulfilling his dreams. 

[”A Profile from the Archives“ is a new series published by Jadaliyya in both Arabic and English in cooperation with the Lebanese newspaper, Assafir. These profiles will feature iconic figures who left indelible marks in the politics and culture of the Middle East and North Africa.]

First name: Samira

Last name: Azzam

Date of birth: 1927

Date of death: 1967

Nationality: Palestinian

Category: Author

Profession: Writer

Samira Azzam

• Born in Acre on 13 September 1927.
• Studied elementary school in Acre, and high school in Haifa at "Takmilyet Al-Rahibat."
• At the age of sixteen, she worked as a school teacher.
• Started publishing articles in Palestine newspaper in the early 1940s and used the alias "Coastal Girl."
• Displaced to Lebanon with her family in 1948 (during the Palestinian Nakba). They lived in a town called Falougha for several months, and then moved to Beirut.
• Left for Iraq and joined the girls school in the city of Hillah where she worked as a teacher for two years.
• In 1952, she worked in Sharq Al-Adna radio station (Near East radio channel) based in Cyprus as an apprentice broadcaster and a writer for the program Women's Corner. When the radio station moved to Beirut in 1954, Samira also moved there and was in charge of the daily program With the Morning.
• Received a work contract with Baghdad Radio in 1957 after Sharq Al-Adna radio station was discontinued. She only lasted in her new job for eight months.
• Got married to AdibYousef Hasan on 24 December 1959.
• Went back to Iraq in 1959 after the collapse of the monarchy and worked again in Baghdad Radio. However, it wasn't long before the new republican regime banished her, along with her husband, to Beirut on the charge of hostility to the ruling regime.
• Wrote in the Iraqi newspaper Al-Shaab (The People) during her stay in Baghdad, where Badr Shakir Essayyab was one of the editors.
• Worked at the Franklin Institution for Translation and Publishing after she came back to Beirut. During this period, she wrote for Sawt Al-Mar'a (Women's Voice) and Dunia Al-Mar'a (Women's World) magazines.
• Was one of the activists in "Committees of Arab Ladies" which was formed in Beirut after the war of 5 June 1967 to help refugees. She was one of the leading persons who worked to launch Palestinian radio broadcasting.
• Died of a heart attack on 8 August 1967 in a car heading for Amman. She was buried in Beirut. 
   

Publications

• Little Things (1954 – stories)
• The Big Shadow (1956 – stories)
• And Other Stories (1960 – stories)
• The Clock and the Man (1963 – stories)
• The Festival Through the Western Window (1971 – stories)
• Echoes (2000 – stories)

 
Translated Books

• Candida (Bernard Shaw – 1955)
• An American in Europe (Wordsworth – 1956)
• Pavilion of Women (Pearl Buck – 1958)
• East Wind: West Wind (Pearl Buck – 1958)
• American Short Stories (Ray West – 1960)
• When We Lost Satisfaction (John Steinbeck – 1962)
• Stories of Heroes (Alice Hazelton – 1963)
• The Art of Television (William Kauffman – 1964)

Click here to read "The Wheel Inflator" from Little Things by Samira Azzam
 

   
[Samira Azzam and Badr Shakir Essayyab and Abdul Wahhab Al-Shaikhli.
Source: the Kuwaiti magazine Al-Arabi]

[The Clock and the Man – a short film based on a short story by Samira Azzam starring: Mahomood Shalabi, Anat Hadeed, Samia Qazmooz Bakri, and Muhammed Bakri; directed by Ghazi Abu Bakr]

يوميات طاهر عبد الحميد الفتياني وإضاءات على الحياة والمجتمع العربي في القدس خلال الحرب العالمية الثانية 

الحلقة الثانية

[اضغط/ي هنا للحلقة الأولى]

 تناولت الحلقة الأولى من هذه الدراسة والتي نشرت في العدد الثاني عشر من حولياتالقدس (شتاء 2011) أوضاع مدينة القدس خلال الحرب العالمية الثانية استناداً ليوميات المقدسي طاهر عبد الحميد الفتياني، وقد عرَّفت باليوميات وصاحبها، وعرضت للأحوال العامّة التي سادت المدينة خلال الحرب، ولانقسام الشارع الفلسطيني تجاه تأييد إحدى القوتين المتحاربتين، كما تناولت علاقة فئة من النخبة الفلسطينية بحكومة الانتداب البريطاني خلال هذه الفترة.  تستكمل هذه الحلقة البحث وتتناول مواقف طاهر الفتياني من ورؤيته لثلاثة من شخصيات حزب الاستقلال(1)، رشيد الحاج إبراهيم (1889-1953) وعوني عبد الهادي (1882-1970) وعجاج نويهض (1896-1982)، كما تتناول علاقته مع أحد المقربين من الحزب، أحمد حلمي عبد الباقي باشا(2) (1882-1963). 

يناقش العرض الآتي مواقف الفتياني هذه في إطار تحليلي للعلاقات المتشابكة بين شخصيات النخبة الفلسطينية في فترة الحرب العالمية الثانية، فيبحث في موقف المعسكرين الفلسطينيين، معسكر الحسينيين أنصار الحاج أمين الحسيني، ومعسكر المعارضة، أتباع راغب النشاشيبي وحزب الدفاع، وشخصيات حزب الاستقلال هذه، من القوى المتحاربة، المحور والحلفاء، والموقف من التحالف مع إحداها.  ويضيء العرض جوانب من الدعم الإعلامي والشعبي الذي قدّمه الاستقلالي عجّاج نويهض للمجهود الحربي البريطاني، كما يضيف تفاصيل واسعة حول مساعي الاستقلاليين هؤلاء لتشكيل قيادة جديدة للحركة الوطنية، بديلاً عن قيادة اللجنة العربية العليا، التي كان يرئسها المفتي، والذي كان لاجئاً في أوروبا، متنقلاً بين إيطاليا وألمانيا (4)، وبعيداً عن الساحة الفلسطينية.(5)  وقد اعتبر الحسينيون هذه المساعي مؤامرة من الحكومة الانتدابية، مما عمّق بالتالي الخلاف والتنافر بين هؤلاء الاستقلاليين وبين الحسينيين.  يكشف موقف الاستقلاليين الثلاثة هؤلاء الانقسام الفكري الذي حصل داخل جماعة حزب الاستقلال، فعلى عكس موقفهم المؤيد لبريطانيا وحلفائها ضد المحور، وقفت شخصيات أخرى من مؤسسي الحزب وأركانه، مثل عزة دروزة وأكرم زعيتر ومعين الماضي، ومعهم الاستقلالي السوري نبيه العظمة، والذي كان له دورٌ أساسي في تأسيس الحزب بفلسطين، ضد بريطانيا(6)، وتابعت هذه الشخصيات، وبروح التأييد والمؤازرة، مساعي المفتي للحصول على معاهدة مع دولتي المحور تضمن استقلال البلاد العربية، وإلغاء الوطن القومي اليهودي، مقابل مساعدة المحور في حربه ضد بريطانيا، وبقي هؤلاء منفيون خارج فلسطين، ولم تسمح بريطانيا بعودتهم، رغم عفوها عن العشرات من المنفيين والفارّين.

خلفية عامّة

لقد امتازت فترة الحرب العالمية الثانية باستمرار الانقسام في صفوف النخبة الفلسطينية، وهو انقسام بدأ سطحياً في السنوات الأولى للانتداب البريطاني، ولكنه أخذ وضعاً عميقاً وحاداً خلال المرحلة الثانية من الثورة العربية الكبرى، (تشرين ثاني 1937 إلى كانون أول 1939)، حيث شاعت اغتيالات المعارضين للمفتي من قِبَل أنصاره، وأيضاً حين وافق حزب الدفاع على الكتاب الأبيض الذي أصدرته الحكومة البريطانية في 17 أيّار 1939، بعد فشل مؤتمر المائدة المستديرة، الذي عقد خلال شهري شباط وآذار 1939، بالتوفيق بين الصهاينة والعرب، انسجاماً مع موقف الأمير عبد الله بن الحسين، وقابل ذلك رفض المفتي وأنصاره الكتاب، حيث اعتبروه قاصراً عن تحقيق الأماني القومية للشعب الفلسطيني. 

شهدت الحرب العالمية الثانية وقوف معسكر المعارضين مع بريطانيا وحلفائها، وتقديم دعمهم لجهودها الحربية من خلال الإعلام، ومن خلال تشجيع العرب على التطوع في صفوف الجيش البريطاني والمشاركة في القتال معه، قابل ذلك رفض المفتي للتطوع مع الجيش البريطاني، ووقوف أنصاره في الكتلة الحسينية ضد الحلفاء في هذه الحرب، ومساندتهم لدولتي المحور، ألمانيا وإيطاليا، ولجهودهما الحربية.  يؤكد المؤرخ الأمريكي هيروفتز(7) أن السياسيين الفلسطينيين انقسموا بين أغلبية تقف ضد بريطانيا وأقلية تدعمها، ويقول أن أعضاء حزب الدفاع ضاعفوا جهودهم كي تعتبرهم الحكومة البريطانية في فلسطين الناطق الوحيد باسم الفلسطينيين، الأمر الذي لم يحصل كون الحكومة كانت تأمل بكسب تأييد الحسينيين لها، لذا فهي، حسب رأيه، لم تسع مطلقاً من كل قلبها لنزع الثقة بالحاج أمين، أو لدعم واحدٍ من خصومه المحليين.  في المقابل، كان الحاج أمين والحسينيون قد حققوا نصراً سياسياً على الحكومة الانتدابية من خلال تفعيل حملة، بمساعدة حيوية من إيطاليا وألمانيا، ضد بريطانيا، وقد أطلق الحاج أمين في مواجهة أنصار بريطانيا حملة ضد التطوع في صفوف الحلفاء، نجحت، كما يقول هيروفتز (8)، في جعل أعداد المتطوعين العرب قليلة للغاية، (9)وقد كان المفتي واعياً تأثير الدعاية البريطانية في الرأي العام الفلسطيني، وقد حذّر زعماء دولتي المحور استخدام الإنجليز للمراوغة والمسايرة مع العرب من أجل ضمان دعمهم لمجهودها الحربي ضدهم(10)حاول المفتي خلال عامي 1940 و1941، وخصوصاً بعد فشل حركة الكيلاني (أيّار 1941) ضد الإنجليز في العراق، إشعال الثورة ثانيةً في فلسطين، ولكن مساعيه لم توفَّق(11)، وفي داخل فلسطين وقف الحسينيون موقفاً رافضاً لدعم الدعاية للحلفاء في صفوف الفلسطينيين، ولم يسمح زعماء العائلة وأنصار المفتي لأحد من أتباعهم بالانضمام لمؤسسات الدعاية البريطانية خلال الحرب (12)مثل الإذاعة الفلسطينية (هنا القدس)(13)، وإذاعة الشرق الأدنى (14)، ومجلة هنا القدس ومجلة المنتدى. (15)

        شهدت فترة الحرب تغيراً في موقف عدد من مؤسسي وقادة حزب الاستقلال من حكومة الانتداب البريطاني، وهم عجاج نويهض، وكان قد بقي في فلسطين خلال الثورة، ولم يتعرض لإجراءات العقاب البريطانية بعد أن اقترب خلال هذه الفترة من حزب الدفاع وزعيمه راغب النشاشيبي، ورشيد الحاج إبراهيم وعوني عبد الهادي، اللذان سمح لهم الإنجليز بالعودة لفلسطين بعد انتهاء الثورة الفلسطينية،(16) وحسب ما دوّنه الثلاثة في مذكراتهم وذكرياتهم (17)عن هذه المرحلة فإن الوضع اقتضى الوقوف مع بريطانيا وحلفائها ضد ألمانيا وحليفتها إيطاليا(18)، وكان هذا الموقف مطابقاً لموقف رجال حزب الدفاع الذين حاججوا بأن الحرب ليست حرباً عسكرية فقط، بل هي تتعلق بالقيم العالمية(19)، فالمعسكر الأول (الحلفاء) مثّل الديمقراطية والحرية في حين مثّل المعسكر الثاني (المحور) العدوان والاستعباد(20)، وكان من الطبيعي حسب نويهض والحاج إبراهيم أن يوقف حزب الاستقلال نشاطه السياسي بانتظار ما ستسفر عنه الحرب، وعلى أمل أن يعيد البريطانيون النظر في سياستهم في فلسطين، بما يضمن حقوق الفلسطينيين ويمنع ضياع وطنهم.  وحسب هيروفتز فقد أخذ هؤلاء الاستقلاليون يلعبون دوراً في المجال الاقتصادي والبنكي،(21)كما أخذوا سياسياً الدور الذي فشل حزب الدفاع العربي في تحقيقه، وهو حشد الفلسطينيين خلف بريطانيا وجهودها الحربية.  وتأتي هذه المواقف على نقيض مواقف الحاج أمين الحسيني، والذي فشل البريطانيون في إقناعه بالموافقة على الكتاب الأبيض (1939) كأساس لحل القضية الفلسطينية، وفي جلبه لمعسكرهم ضد الألمان والطليان.  لقد بدأت علاقات الغزل بين المفتي والألمان منذ صعود هتلر للحكم ووقوفه ضد اليهود في ألمانيا، ومع تصاعد الثورة الفلسطينية الكبرى وجد المفتي نفسه في المعسكر المعادي للإنجليز والمساند للثورة المسلّحة ضدهم دون مواربة، ثمّ ساهم بفاعلية وقوة في حركة رشيد عالي الكيلاني ضد الإنجليز في العراق سنة 1941، وكان الألمان قد وعدوا بدعم الثورة، ولكن دعمهم لم يرق للمستوى اللازم لتحقيق النصر على الإنجليز، إلاّ المفتي شرع بالاتصال بالزعيم الألماني هتلر منذ وجوده بالعراق، فكان من الطبيعي أن يميل خلال الحرب للمحور المناهض للإنجليز.

الاستقلاليون في مذكرات الفتياني

 يدوّن الفتياني في يومياته تفاصيل عديدة حول الاستقلاليين الثلاثة وصديقهم أحمد حلمي باشا، ويتتبع أخبارهم ويعلّق على نشاطاتهم ومواقفهم السياسية.  وفي حين يبدي تفهماً لمواقف الأخير، ويتعاون معه في مسائل كثيرة، إلاّ أنّه يكتب بلغة ناقدة للثلاثة الآخرين، فيصف رشيد الحاج إبراهيم بأنَّه "الوطني المحترف ذو الوجهين"(22)، ويقول أنّ عوني عبد الهادي غير جدير بالثقّة، ويتبع ذكر عجّاج نويهض بعبارة "المأسوف على وطنيته".  ويلاحظ بأنّ تسجيلات الفتياني تبيِّن أنّ عجّاج نويهض لم يكن ناشطاً في العمل السياسي مع زملائه الاستقلاليين كرشيد الحاج إبراهيم وعوني عبد الهادي خلال فترة الحرب هذه، ويتفق هذا ما أورده عزة دروزة في مذكراته عن انحياز نويهض لراغب النشاشيبي والتصاقه الوثيق به وميله لجماعة المعارضة منذ  1937­­(23)،  وهو أمر يؤكده نويهض نفسه(24). ويعتقد دروزة أن عجاج قد انزلق مع الدفاعيين انزلاقاً خطيراً حين شجّع في شهر تشرين الثاني 1937 فكرة تشكيل لجنة عربية عليا تحلّ محل اللجنة التي حلتها حكومة الانتداب(25)، والتي كانت برئاسة الحاج أمين.  أما عن موقف الكتلة الحسينية من هؤلاء الرجال، فقد عدّ الحسينيون ومنهم طاهر، كل المعارضين للحاج أمين بمثابة منافقين وخارجين عن الصفّ الوطني، وتعاملوا مع نشاطاتهم ومشاريعهم السياسية من هذا المنطلق.

 تمثّلت مساعي الاستقلاليين، ومعهم أحمد حلمي باشا، في تأسيس هيئة سياسية جديدة تمثّل الفلسطينيين وتنظِّم العمل الوطني، واقترحوا على الحسينيين استبدال زعمائهم الغائبين بآخرين من المقيمين في فلسطين، بيد أن الحسينيين رفضوا التعاون في تشكيل مثل هذه الهيئة ففشلت جهود الاستقلاليين.  حاول الاستقلاليون بعد ذلك، وبمبادرة من أحمد حلمي باشا، تأسيس حزب جديد، ولكن مساعيهم لم تتبلور عن شيء، وحاولوا أخيراً عقد مؤتمر وطني عام بالقدس من خلال الغرف التجارية الفلسطينية، ولكن الحسينيين قاطعوا المؤتمر وأفشلوه.

رشيد الحاج إبراهيم والسعي لتأسيس قيادة فلسطينية جديدة

كتب الفتياني في يومية الجمعة 5 آذار سنة 1943 م (29 صفر سنة 1362 هـ) عن لقائه في مكتبة مصطفى الطاهر(26)بيافا برشيد الحاج إبراهيم، وهو لقاء يتم لأول مرة في فلسطين بين الرجلين بعد عودتهما من المنفى، ويبدو من أقوال الفتياني أنّ علاقة ما ربطتهما حين كان الفتياني في حيفا، وأنّه لم يشاهده منذ ذلك الوقت.  يهتم الفتياني بتدوين ما سمعه وعرفه عن نشاط رشيد السياسي، فيورد تفاصيل حول مشروع كان الأخير يعمل من أجل إنجازه، وهو تأليف هيئة قيادية جديدة في فلسطين، فيقول بأن رشيداً قد أسرّ "للأستاذ مصطفى الطاهر بأن (الزعماء) و(أولي الأمر) رأوا تأليف هيئةٍ سياسيةٍ عربيةٍ عليا من الوفد الفلسطيني الأخير الذي كان سافر إلى لندن للمفاوضة(27)، وأعضاؤه هم: راغب النشاشيبي، يعقوب الغصين، عوني عبد الهادي، موسى العلمي، فؤاد سابا، الدكتور حسين الخالدي، وعبد اللطيف صلاح، على أن ينتخب أشخاص بدلاً من ألفرد روك المتوفّى، وأمين التميمي وجمال الحسيني المعتقلين الآن في روديسيا.  ويشاع بأن رفيق التميمي سيحل محلَّ أخيه، وأن نافذ الحسيني سيحل محل جمال." 

يتابع الفتياني أخبار مساعي رشيد، فكتب في يوميةالثلاثاء9 آذار سنة 1943 م (3 ربيع الأول سنة 1362 هـ) أن مصطفى الطاهر جاء عنده قبل الظهر، وذهب وإياه إلى مكتبة فلسطين العلمية... وفي الطريق التقيا بعلي حيدر الحسيني الذي أخذ يحدثهما "باهتمام عن مشروع (تأليف الهيئة العربية العليا)، فقال أن رشيد الحاج إبراهيم اجتمع في أريحا بعدد من رجالات عائلة الحسيني وعرض عليهم فكرة بعث الهيئة من جديد فوافقوه مجاملة على فكرته، وقالوا له نحن لا نعارض في الفكرة ولكننا لن نشترك.  وكان اقترح عليهم تعيين شخص من عائلة الحسيني بدلاً من الأستاذ جمال فقالوا له: ليست المسألة مسألة عائلية ولا مسألة وراثة، ونحن احتراماً لذكرى الغائبين لا نريد تعيين أحد بدلاً منهم. ومن أراد العمل فهذا المجال واسع أمامه."  ويستنتج الفتياني من هذا "أن عائلة الحسيني لن توافق على المشروع الذيهو في نظرها حكومي من أوله إلى آخره. [التوكيد مضاف]"   ويتابع الفتياني أخبار اجتماع رشيد بالحسينيين في أريحا، فيكتب في اليوم التالي (الأربعاء 10 آذارأن عبد الله نمر(28) زاره وحدّثه عن الاجتماع، "ومما قاله لي أن إميل الغوري كان أبو القضية وأمها هناك... وأن ثابت درويش أيضاً قد اشترك في المحادثات."  ويبدو أن هذا لم يعجبه فيعلق ساخراً بأنّه "لم يبق إلا كلاب الحي ليحلفوا بالطلاق".

تستمر متابعة الفتياني للقضية، فيكتب في يومية الجمعة 19 آذار 1943 م (13 ربيع الأول 1362 هـ) مبيناً ارتباطها بالإنجليز، إذ يلتقي في ذات اليوم بتوفيق صالح الحسيني، شقيق جمال والقائم بأعمال رئيس الحزب العربي، وقد أخبر توفيق طاهراً أن المستر جايلز، رئيس دائرة الاستخبارات البريطانية في فلسطين، "استدعاه إليه وأطلعه على صورة فوتوغرافية لمنشور كان وزع في القدس وفيه دعوة إلى مقاطعة الفكرة التي دعا إليها رشيد الحاج إبراهيم وماتت في مهدها. وقال له أن هذا المنشور وضع بإيعاز منكم، فأنكر توفيق أفندي كل شيء، وقال نحن لا علم لنا بهذه الحركة من أولها إلى آخرها."  فرواية الفتياني هذه تؤكد اعتقاده واعتقاد الحسينيين بأن الإنجليز خلف مساعي رشيد لتأسيس قيادة جديدة في فلسطين.  وفي يومية الجمعة 9 نيسان سنة 1943 م (4 ربيع الثاني سنة 1362 هـ) يورد الفتياني تفاصيل أوسع حول فشل مشروع رشيد الحاج إبراهيم، وأنّه كان يتم بالتنسيق مع الحكومة، فيكتب عن لقاء جمعه والشيخ صبري عابدين (29)في الزاوية النقشبندية بأحمد حلمي باشا، ويقول أن الأخير "تحدث والشيخ صبري ملياً عن جهود رشيد الحاج إبراهيم في ’تجديد‘ الحركة الوطنية في البلاد ومساعيه المختلفة مع الحكومة (30)وبعض’الزعماء‘ لتأليف الحزب دون أن يصادفه التوفيق."  ويعود في يومية الجمعة 25 حزيران 1943 م (22 جمادي الثانية 1362 هـ) للحديث عن مساعي رشيد، ويكتب عن لقائه برفيق بك التميمي، شقيق أمين التميمي، ويقول أنّه قضى عنده أكثر من ساعة يتحدثان في الشؤون الحاضرة.  "وقال لي أن أحمد حلمي باشا ورشيد الحاج إبراهيم زاراه وأنه دار البحث حول إيجاد تشكيلات وطنية في فلسطين لإنعاش الحركة الوطنية."  وواضح من أقوال الفتياني هذه أنّ أحمد حلمي باشا كان داعماً لمساعي رشيد.

تؤكد مصادر تاريخية أخرى التغير في موقف رشيد الحاج إبراهيم من بريطانيا، وتعاونه معها خلال الحرب، بعد عودته من منفاه في جزر سيشل،فقد شارك في الترويج لها خلال الحرب.  كتب يوسف حنا (31)حرر جريدة فلسطين في كانون الثاني 1941 في مجلة هنا القدس، وهي مجلة دعائية أصدرتها إدارة محطة الإذاعة الفلسطينية ومكتب الإعلام العام التابع لحكومة الانتداب خلال الحرب، مقالة حول تحت عنوان العرب وبريطانيا(32)ضمنها مقابلاته مع عددٍ ممن أسماهم "رجالات العرب في فلسطين وشرق الأردن"، وقد استطلع آراءهم في الحالة العامة آنذاك، "على ضوء الانتصارات البريطانية في الصحراء الغربية"، مدعياً أنّه كان لهذه الانتصارات صدىً مستحباً في نفوس العرب".  كتب يوسف حنا واصفاً لقاءه برشيد الحاج إبراهيموملخصاً رأي الأخير بالانتصار البريطاني في ليبيا وأنّه "حاسم، وأنَّه جاء فوق ما كان يتوقعه الناس،" وأوضح حنّا أنّ رشيد على خبرة فعلية بموقع بردية الليبي، وهو "يعتبر أن نجاح الانكليز فيها دلَّ على مهارة حربية لم تترك شكاً في تفوق الإنكليز في الفنون العسكرية، فضلا على ما لهم من تفوق في القوى والموارد." ويستطرد بأنّ رشيداً "يرى أن سقوط طبرق مضمون، لأنها دون بردية مناعة، وبعد سقوطها ينفتح الطريق لأخذ بني غازي، ويصبح للإنكليز الخيار في التقدم للاستيلاء على باقي البلاد في الحال، أو ترك ذلك إلى وقت آخر يعيونه هم.  ويختم حنّا أقوال رشيد بذكر رأيه بأنّ "انتصار الانكليز في ليبيا هو إنقاذ لعرب تلك البلاد وفاتحة عهد جديد لهم من الحرية المنشودة والاستقلال الذي يصبو إليه كل عربي واستعادة لمجد العروبة وحضارتها. وهو يرجو أن ينال العرب جميعاً من الانكليز وخاصة عرب فلسطين جميع مطالبهم الوطنية، وأن يستقروا وإياهم على أساس أخير للتفاهم، ودوام الصداقة."(33)

يعكس مصدران آخران جوانب أخرى من شخصية رشيد الحاج إبراهيم، فمقابل الصورة السلبية التي يظهرها العرض السابق حول توجهات الأخير السياسية،  يعكس مصدر آخر صورة مختلفة للرجل، ففي مذكرات المحامي الحيفاوي حنّا نقارة نعثر على صورة إيجابية عن النشاط السياسي والفكري لرشيد.  يرسم نقارة لرشيد صورة الشخصية الوطنية غير الطائفية والحكيمة(34)، ويدوّن بعضاً من نشاطاته في حقل العمل الوطني الاقتصادي والسياسي.  يقول نقارة أن رشيد انضم عضواً مؤازراً للنادي الأرثوذكسي في حيفا حين أرادت قيادة النادي الخروج من الإطار الطائفي والانفتاح على أتباع الديانات الأخرى.(35)  كما أنه ألقى محاضرات في النادي ضمن سلسلة المحاضرات التي كان ينظمها للأدباء والمثقفين والسياسيين. (36)وعمل رشيد رئيساً لصندوق الأمة العربية وقد عقد اجتماع في سنة 1946 لتأسيس فرع للصندوق في حيفا.(37)  ويشير نقارة لدور رشيد الحاج إبراهيم في تأسيس الجبهة القومية في حيفا أواخر سنة 1945، حيث عقد اجتماع تأسيسي في مكتب المحامي الاستقلالي صبحي الخضراء حضره رشيد وإميل توما وصلاح الدين العباسي والشيخ نمر الخطيب رئيس جمعية الاعتصام والشيخ محمد مراد رئيس جمعية الإخوان المسلمين.

أمّا المصدر الثاني فهو يوميات خليل السكاكيني، حيث يذكر في يومية الخميس 7 آذار 1946 أنّ أحمد حلمي باشا ورشيد الحاج إبراهيم زاراه في المساء ليسلِّما على عيسى العيسى الذي كان في ضيافته، ويقول السكاكيني "فهمنا من رشيد الحاج إبراهيم أن ولده شهر السلاح عليه وهو سكران، فما كان من الأب إلاّ أن أطلق الرصاص عليه، فجرح جرحاً بليغاً. فنقل الآن إلى المستشفى في حالة سيئة، وأما الأب فيروح ويجيء كأن لم يقع شيء.  إن ذا لعجيب."(38)

أحمد حلمي باشا(39):

دوّن الفتياني أخبار أحمد حلمي ونشاطاته السياسية في يومياته، واهتم بصورة خاصّة بأخبار محاولة الباشا تأليف حزب سياسي جديد في فلسطين، فكتب في يومية الثلاثاء  30 آذار 1943 م (24 ربيع الأول 1362 هـ) ما قيل له من "أن أحمد حلمي باشا بدأ تفكيراً جدياً في تأليف حزب في البلاد. وقد كان في يافا منذ أيام حيث عقد اجتماع في دار بنك الأمة العربية حضره بعض أعوانه، ومنهم رشاد الشوا، ودعي مصطفى الطاهر لحضوره فلم يكن في يافا."  ويكتب في يومية الاثنين 5 نيسان 1943 م (30 ربيع الأول 1362 هـ) أن اسحق الشاكر [الحسيني]، جاء عنده وأنكر "الإشاعة القائلة بأن أحمد حلمي باشا يريد تأسيس حزب، فقد قابله وقال له الباشا أن كل ما يقوله الناس لا صحة له ولا أستطيع أنا تكذيبه."  وأضاف اسحق الشاكر لمعلومات الفتياني "أنّ حزباً جديداً من الشباب سيؤلف في فلسطين قوامه إبراهيم الشنطي، وفريد السعد، الذي استقال من منصب القائمقام منذ شهرين، وخلوصي الخيري، الذي سيقدم استقالته قريباً ليتفرغ للاشتغال في الحقل السياسي!"  وحسب الشاكر فإنّ "هذا الحزب ­­هو صنيعة الحكومة." 

ويكتب الفتياني في يومية الجمعة 4 حزيران 1943م (2 جمادي الثانية 1362 هـ) حول تصريح أدلى به الملك عبد العزيز آل سعود يؤيد فيه الحق الفلسطيني، فيذكر أنَّ من بين الذين أبرقوا إلى القنصلية السعودية لشكر الملك أحمد حلمي باشا وصبحي الخضراء وعوني عبد الهادي وعمر الصالح البرغوثي والشيخ سعود العوري والشيخ موسى البديري والشيخ صبري عابدين والشيخ محمد علي الجعبري ورشدي الشوا.

تتوثق العلاقة بين الفتياني والباشا وتزداد حميمية، ويقرر الفتياني تنظيم لقاءٍ ترويحيٍّ وحفلة شاي لأصدقائه في دير الكريمزان في بيت جالا يوم الجمعة 18 حزيران 1943 م (15 جمادى الثانية 1362 هـ) على شرف مهدي بك مصلح مدير الأمن العام في الحجاز، والذي كان يزور القدس، وفي يوم الثلاثاء 8  حزيران سنة 1943 م يمر الفتياني على أحمد حلمي باشا لدعوته، وقد وعده الباشا بتلبية الدعوة إذا لم يسافر إلى عمان. ويجد الفتياني عنده عيسى البندك فيعلق بالتساؤل: "ماذا يصنع هذا الخاسر؟"(40)

يتابع الفتياني تدوين أخبار المدينة، ونشاطات سياسييها، ومنهم الباشا، فيكتب في يومية الأربعاء 9 حزيران سنة 1943 م أنّه وصل صباحاً للقدس زعيم حزب الوفد المصري مصطفى النحاس باشا، ويلاحظ أنّ استقباله في محطة القدس كان فاتراً، "والمستقبلون يعدون على أصابع الأيدي، بينهم أحمد حلمي باشا و[عبد الحميد] شومان ومحمد يونس [الحسيني] وفريد السعد والشيخ [يعقوب] البخاري والشيخ صبري عابدين ومصطفى وخليل بدر الأنصاري وموظفو القنصلية،" ويتبع ذلك بذكر أنّ النحّاس حلّ في فندق الملك داوود، وأنّه سيقضي ثلاثة "أيام في فلسطين وسيزور يافا غداً، وبعد غد المسجد الأقصى."

وفي يوم الخميس 10 حزيران 1943 م يزور الفتياني أحمد حلمي بعد أن كان قد مرّ بالقنصيلة السعودية، وعلم من قنصلها الشيخ عبد العزيز الكحيمي ما أغضبه، إذ أنّ الأخير دعا الضيف السعودي مهدي بك مصلح إلى مأدبة غداء ظهر ذات اليوم في دار القنصيلة، كما دعا إليها مصطفى بك الخالدي وراغب النشاشيبي وقناصل العراق وإيران وتركيا وأحمد حلمي باشا وروحي عبد الهادي [وعوني] عبد الهادي والشيخ عبد الحميد السائح قاضي القدس، وعمر الصالح البرغوثي ونجيب أبو الشعر وعيسى البندك، مستثنياً الفتياني والشيخ يعقوب البخاري(41).  وقد اعتذر القنصل بأنه لم يدع الرجلين لضيق المكان في القنصلية، ويقبل الفتياني هذا العذر، ولكنه يحتج بإنّه أولى من عدة مدعوين، فقد "كان في مقدوره أن يستغني عن [نجيب] أبي الشعر أو [عيسى] البندك أو عمر الصالح؟" ويختم تعليقه على المسألة بالقول "إنني في كل يوم أشعر بغرابة أطوار هذا الرجل ورعونته وصغر عقله."  وحين يقابل الباشا يشكو له "من سوء تصرفات الشيخ الكحيمي وغرابة أطواره،" ويبدو أن الباشا لم يكن هو الآخر سعيداً بتصرفات القنصل إذ أنه يوافقه عليها جميعاً.  ويستطرد الفتياني بالقول أنّه ذكر "للباشا أن القنصل سيرأس حفلة لنقابة الممثلين في جمعية الشبان المسيحية!" ويعلّق مستغرباً "فما دخل القنصل المسلم في التمثيل وفي دخول أكبر دار للتبشير في الشرقين الأدنى والأوسط؟"(42)

يتطرق الفتياني في يومية الجمعة 18 حزيران إلى اللقاء الذي جرى في دير كريمزان، حيث قضى المدعوون(43)بعض الوقت، ويكتب أنِّ الباشا أخذ بعض أغصان من شجرة الفستق لتركيبها في بيارته. وحين اجتمعوا في بيت الفونص منصور، صاحب المكان، "شربنا القهوة، ونعمنا بأطايب الطبيعة، وحدثنا الباشا عن ذكرياته في سيشل، وحاول القاضي [عبد الحميد السائح] أن ينتقد الحالة في الحجاز فامتعض مهدي بك وحمل عليه."  ويذكر في ذات اليومية أن مدير شؤون الشرق الأوسط في وزارة المستعمرات بلندن جاء إلى القدس في الأيام القليلة الماضية وقابل الباشا وراغب النشاشيبي وشبلي الجمل ونافذ الحسيني، ويضيف بأنّ الباشا كان "صريحاً معه كل الصراحة."  أي أنّه عبّر عن الموقف الوطني دون مواربة أو رياء.  ويضيف الفتياني أنّ ثلاثاً من الشخصيات السياسية اعتذرت عن مقابلة المسئول البريطاني، "وهم موسى العلمي لغيابه عن القدس وعوني عبد الهادي ويعقوب فراج لمرضهما."   وفي ذات اليومية يكتب الفتياني عن ما أبلغه إيّاه عمُّه داوود، نقلاً عن لسان محمد يونس الحسيني، والذي كان يعمل مع أحمد حلمي باشا، أن الأخير يحبه كثيراً، وأنّه يريد أن يسند له وظيفة (سكرتير صندوق الأمة).  ويعقّب بنقل رأي عمِّه بأنَّ العمل مع الباشا أضمن من العمل بالتدريس في المدرسة الإبراهيمية، والذي كان معروضاً عليه، ولكنه يستدرك بالقول أنّ الباشا لم يفاتحه في هذا الموضوع.

يعود الفتياني لموضوع الحزب الجديد فيوضِّح في يومية الجمعة 25 حزيران 1943 م بناءً على معلومات استقاها من مصطفى الطاهر أنّ قوام الحزب الجديد الذي سيؤَلَّف في فلسطين "أحمد الشقيري وفريد السعد ورشاد الشوا! وستكون له فروع في مختلف أنحاء فلسطين."  وعلى ما يبدو فإنّ أحد هذه الشخصيات لم يكن محبوبة من قبل طاهر، فيحاول تحريض الباشا حين التقى به يومالأربعاء 30 حزيران سنة 1943 م (26 جمادي الثانية سنة 1362 هـ) على رشاد الشوا، فكتب: "مررت بعطوفة الباشا أحمد حلمي وحدثته كيف أن رشاد الشوا الذي يريد أن يؤسس حزباً ويستغل اسم عطوفته لبث الدعاية لنفسه وللترويج لحزبه."  ويتحدث الفتياني في نفس اللقاء مع الباشا، وبوحي من حديث عمّه السابق، حول صندوق الأمة مقترحاً إعادة إحيائه، ولكن الباشا يقول له بصراحة "أن الوقت لم يأن بعد وسيجد الفرصة المناسبة لتجديد شبابه."  ويبدو أن الباشا لم يعلّق على مسألة رشاد الشوا وتأليفه لحزب جديد، وانتقل بالحديث ليبثّ للفتياني ألمه من صهره عبد الحميد شومان، "وكيف أنه دائماً يطعن فيه ويحمل عليه حملات قاسية حتى أنه وهو في دمشق حمل بشدة على الباشا، فاستنكر بعض الحضور، وكانوا مدعوين لتناول الطعام معه فأبوا أن يجتمعوا به."  ويضيف الفتياني بأنّ الباشا حدثه بمرارة عن إبراهيم الشنطي وشوكت حماد "وذلك لمناسبة مقال افتتاحي نشره إبراهيم في "الدفاع" مجد فيه بطولة شومان وجعله من أبطال التاريخ."

تظهر يوميات الفتياني استمرار علاقة التعاون والاحترام المتبادل بينه وبين الباشا، ففي يوم السبت 10 تموز 1943 م (7 رجب 1362 هـ) يزور الفتياني الباشا في مكتبه، ويعطيه بياناً كان طلب منه إعداده "بشأن تجديد نشاط صندوق الأمة"، ويقول أنّه أعجب به.  ويتناول الفتياني في اللقاء إمكان جعل المدرسة الإبراهيمية، والتي كان الفتياني قد قرّر التدريس بها، تحت إشراف الجمعية الخيرية الصلاحية التي يرأسها الباشا، أو أي جمعية خيرية أخرى يرى تأليفها تحت إشرافه، "وذلك ليتسنى للمدرسة أن تنال المساعدة الحكومية التي تقدمها إدارة المعارف للمدارس التي تعمل تحت إشراف جمعيات خيرية."  يبدي الباشا استعداده لتقديم كل ما تريده المدرسة من خدمات ويبلغ للفتياني "أنّ الجمعية الصلاحية أو أية جمعية أخرى هي تحت تصرف الخدمة العامة."  وتواعد الرجلان على اللقاء وبحضور مدير المدرسة، نهاد أبو غربية، في يوم الاثنين للبحث في الموضوع.  ويتابع الفتياني التدوين حول موضوع المدرسة فيكتب في يومية الثلاثاء 13 تموز سنة 1943 م (10 رجب سنة 1362 هـ) أنه التقى والأستاذ نهاد أبو غربية بالباشا،  "وكان عنده ثابت الخالدي ونجل شقيقته (نجل الدكتور حسين الخالدي) وتحدثت مع الباشا بشأن المدرسة الإبراهيمية فوافق على أن تكون تحت إشراف الجمعية الخيرية الصلاحية، وهي مؤلفة من الباشا وجميل وهبة ومحمد عبده حلمي ومحمد يونس الحسيني، وسيقدم الأستاذ نهاد كتاباً إلى الباشا باعتباره رئيساً للجمعية يطلب فيها أن تكون [المدرسة] تحت تصرف الجمعية."

تزداد قوة العلاقة بين الرجلين، فيكتب الفتياني في يوميةالخميس 9 أيلول 1943 م (9 رمضان 1362 هـ) عن زيارته للباشا، والذي قال له "بعد حديث طويل عريض، أنه يريد تأليف حزب جديد من الدهماء(44)هو حزب الشعب"، وحيث أن الفتياني مقرّب من الدائرة الحسينيّة، يطلب منه الباشا أن يجس نبض المجلسيين معللاً طلبه بأنّه "بغير تعاونهم لا يحصل على النجاح المقصود."  ويجيء ذكر إميل الغوري، ونافذ الحسيني، فيعد الفتياني بأنه سيجس نبضهما، وسيتحدث معهما في الموضوع ويوافي الباشا بالنتيجة.  يستطرد الحديث بين الرجلين فيتطرق الباشا لزيارة عمر الصالح البرغوثي له، إذ جاءه يطلب منه تأليف حزب، محتجاً بأنه "لا يصح السكوت الآن"، ويستفيض الباشا في شرح ماضيه ومواقفه السياسة، "وكيف أن الحكومة والمعارضين، حاولوا حمله على العمل في الميدان السياسي، فأبى".

يتابع الفتياني الموضوع فيلتقي صباح الجمعة 10 أيلول 1943 م (10 رمضان 1362 هـ) إميل الغوري في أحد مقاهي القدس، ويحدثه بالتفصيل عما دار بينه وبين الباشا،  "واتفقنا على زيارته للبحث معه بالتفصيل حول فكرته التي يريدها، وهي تأليف حزب الشعب العربي."  ويذهب الرجلان فعلاً يومالسبت 11 أيلول سنة 1943 م (11 رمضان سنة 1362 هـ) عند الباشا، والذي يعيد لإميل ما كان قاله للفتياني يوم الخميس.  "وقد لحظنا إخلاصاً في كلامه ورغبةً في العمل، وهو يرى أن يشترك جميع عناصر الأمة في الحزب خوفا من المقاومة الخارجية والدسّْ، وقال أنّ بعض الخوارج الذين سيدعون (بلا نِفس) إلى الحزب سيخرجون حينما يرون أنفسهم بلا نصير."  ويعلِّق الفتياني على فكرة الحزب فيقول "أما أنا فأخشى أن يصير هذا الحزب كطنجرة الشوربة أو كبرج بابل... وأن تتصادم العناصر المختلفة فيه فلا نخرج بنتيجة."ولا يتوقف الفتياني عند حد التعليق، بل يمر ظهراً بتوفيق صالح الحسيني، القائو بأعمال رئيس الحزب العربي، ويشرح له ما جرى باللقاء بينهم الثلاثة، وينقل إلى يومياته رأي توفيق بأنّه "لا يرى بأساً من مداراة بعض العناصر، ولكنه [توفيق] يتساءل: ’هل نضمن الباشا من أنّه لن يؤثر عليه أشخاص كانوا وما زالوا يلازمونه كالظل أمثال عيسى البندك وعوني عبد الهادي؟‘" ويتفق الرجلان على الإجتماع لبحث الموضوع "غداً مساءً حوالي الساعة الثامنة في منزل توفيق صالح الحسيني. وأن يكون الحضور كل من السادة: توفيق صالح، رجائي [الحسيني]، مصطفى ونافذ وعلي [محي الدين] الحسيني، إميل الغوري، جميل الشهابي، عبد الرحيم الطوبجي، الشيخ صبري عابدين والعبد الفقير لله."

   يستمر الفتياني في سرد الأحداث المتعلقة بقضية الحزب ومسألة تأسيس هيئة تمثيلية، فيروي أنّه في يوم الأحد 12 أيلول سنة 1943 م (12 رمضان سنة 1362 هـ) استدعاه أحمد حلمي باشا وأبلغه أنه ذهب أمس السبت مع الدكتور سامح بك الفاخوري وقابل سعيد بك الحسيني، "فقال له هذا أنه يرى أن أفضل هيئة تمثل البلاد هي تجديد نشاط الوفد الفلسطيني، على أن يعين أعضاء بدلاً من الغائبين أو الذين ماتوا.  فإميل الغوري يعين بدلاً من فؤاد سابا، ورفيق التميمي بدلاً من أمين بك، ونافذ بدلاً من جمال.. وهكذا.."  وقد علّق الباشا رافضاً ما طرحه سعيد الحسيني ومعللاّ ذلك بأنّ "هذه الفكرة لا يمكن تطبيقها لأنه لا يستطيع التجانس مع أمثال عبد اللطيف صلاح وراغب [النشاشيبي] وعوني [عبد الهادي]"،  وقد أخذ الفتياني على عاتقه إبلاغ رأي الباشا إلى جماعة الحسينيين.  ويعود الفتياني للتعليق على فكرة الباشا بتأسيس حزب جديد، فيقول "أما فكرة الباشا فأعيد القول بأنها فكرة لن يقبل بها المخلصون منا.  إذ كيف نشتغل مع عيسى البندك أو عوني. وأساس العمل المنتج هو التجانس فأين التجانس؟"  وفي نفس اليوم يقضي الفتياني بعض الوقت مع إميل الغوري، ويتفق وإياه أن يقابلا في اليوم التالي جميل أفندي الشهابي والشيخ صبري عابدين، وهما من الكتلة الحسينية، ليبحثا معهما في الموضوع.

يتوجه الرجلان في اليومالتالي (الاثنين 13 أيلول 1943 م – 13 رمضان 1362 هـ) لمنزل الشيخ صبري عابدين، وحسب رواية طاهر: "تحادثنا فيموضوع الباشا، والحزب الذي يريد تأليفه، وهو [الشيخ صبري] يرى أن قبول البلاد بتأليف حزب جديد معناه قبولها بإلغاء اللجنة العربية العليا، ورفض العمل في حزب إلا على أساس التجانس."  ويتابع الفتياني وإميل جولتهما فيذهبا إلى بيت صبحي الشهابي، والذي"كان رأيه مماثلاً لرأي الشيخ صبري إنما كان أعمق تفكيراً وألين عوداً، وأكثر لباقة."   ويستكمل الفتياني سرد تفاصيل تطور القضية، فقد كان وإميل الغوري متفقين في ذات اليوم على اللقاء في مقهى ’المختار‘ ليذهبا سوية إلى دار توفيق صالح الحسيني "حيث نعقد اجتماعاً بحضور نافذ وعلي ومصطفى محي الدين ورجائي.. ولكن جاءني في المساء الحاج فائق الأنصاري، موفدا من قبل السيد توفيق يقول أنه لا لزوم للحضور هذه الليلة.."  ويستنتج الفتياني من ذلك "أن القوم لا يريدون التفاهم، وأن توفيق صالح حينما اندفع في الكلام وتحمس كان لا يمثل إلا نفسه فقط."  وصدفة يجتمع عند العصر عبد الرحيم الطوبجي بعبد السلام، شقيق طاهر، ويقول له: "سلِّم على الفتياني وقل له أن يخيِّط بغير هذه المسلَّة"، ويعلّق الفتياني على هذه الرسالة بأنّه فهم منها مغزى حديث كان قد دار بين عبد الرحيم وتوفيق صالح وعلي الحسيني.  أي أنّ الحسينيين لا يريدون بحث الموضوع ويعتبرونه منتهياً، ولا يريدون للفتياني أن يقوم بمساعي متعلقة به.  ولعلّ ما يرويه يضيء لنا طريقة الحسينيين في اتخاذ القرارات، وابتعادهم عن أسلوب الحوار الديمقراطي والمفتوح.  ويعزز هذا الاستنتاج ما ذكره الفتياني في يومية الثلاثاء 14 أيلول 1943 م (14 رمضان سنة 1362 هـ) حيث يذكر لقاءه بإميل الغوري وقد أبلغه الفتياني بأنّه سيقابل توفيق الصالح الحسيني في ذات اليوم، وأخذ الاثنان يعللان "سبب العدول عن الاجتماع الذي تقرر عقده ليلة أمس في دار أبي صالح.. وبالفعل ذهبت عند أبي صالح في الحرم فقال لي-وعبد الرحيم الطوبجي يسمع ما يقول- إن قومه لا يرون من الفائدة في الظروف الحاضرة الانشغال بالسياسة أولا لأنهم لا يتجانسون بأية حال معالمارقين أمثال عيسى البندك وعوني عبد الهادي وعمر الصالح، وثانيا لأن الحكومة لا تسمح بأن يشتغل أحد خلافاً لرغبتها."

تستمر العلاقة بين الفتياني والباشا رغم فشل مساعي كسب الحسينيين لصالح فكرة تأليف حزب جديد، ويتعاون الفتياني مع الباشا، بناءً على طلب الأخير، في كتابة رسالة احتجاجية على تصريح للرئيس الأمريكي روزفلت أرسله والمستر كوردل هل والمستر مورجانتو إلى المؤتمر الصهيوني السادس والعشرين الذي عقد في الولايات المتحدة، واقترح الباشا إرسال الاحتجاج إلى قنصل أمريكا العام في القدس، وكان ذلك يوم الأربعاء 15 أيلول 1943 م (15 رمضان 1362 هـ)، ويقول الفتياني أن صحته كانت على غير ما يرام، فوعده بإعطائه نص الاحتجاج في الغد، وهو اليوم الذي يتناول فيه الفتياني طعام الإفطار الرمضاني في بيت الباشا بحضور القنصل السعودي،الشيخ عبد العزيز الكحيمي، والشيخ يعقوب البخاري، شيخ الزاوية البخارية، والدكتور حسين الخالدي، رئيس بلدية القدس المعزول، والدكتور محمد الداودي ومحمد يونس الحسيني والدكتور منصور قدارة.  يقوم الباشا بإرسال الكتاب، ويأتيه الرد من القنصل الأمريكي، وفيه "ينكر أن هذه التصريحات سياسية ويقول أن الباشا أساء فهم مضمون الرسائل الشخصية"، وقد طلب الباشا من الفتياني "أن يعلق على كتاب القنصل بكتاب آخر نبعث به إليه، فوعدته إلى يوم السبت."  ويقوم الفتياني في يوم السبت 25 أيلول 1943 م (25 رمضان 1362 هـ) بإعطاء أحمد حلمي باشا الرسالة التي طلبها، ويقول الفتياني أنّه أكد "في الرسالة تحيز المستر روزفلت لليهود، وذكرت أن’الوطن القومي اليهودي‘ هو السبب في كل ما لحق بالبلاد من نكبات... فكيف يقول القنصل أن رسالة روزفلت لا دخل لها بالسياسة، بينما هي تتدخل في صميم السياسة."  ويستطرد الفتياني في سرد أخبار أحمد حلمي باشا، فيقول أنّه "ذاهبٌ اليوم إلى الرملة مع الدكتور عبد الوهاب عزام لتناول طعام الإفطار على مائدة يعقوب بك الغصين، وذكر لي الباشا أن إميل الغوري زاره في الأسبوع الماضي وقال بأنه سيتباحث مع جماعته الحسينية بشأن تأليف حزب سياسي للعمل المشترك، بعد رمضان،" ثمّ يعلّق ساخراً: "أي حينما يطلع البطيخ."

تدل متابعة الفتياني لموضوع التشكيل الجديد للقيادة الفلسطينية أنّ مساعي رشيد وأحمد حلمي لم تتوفق، فيتابع مساعيهما لعقد مؤتمر وطني بالقدس، فيكتب في يومية الجمعة 13 تشرين الأول 1943 م (14 ذي القعدة 1362 هـ) أنّ الباشا استدعاه إلى البنك العربي، وحين قابله وجد عنده رشيد الحاج إبراهيم، "تحدث إليَّ الباشا طويلاً عن المؤتمر وأغراضه وكيف أنه عمد إليه بعد أن أعرض الحسينيون عن معاضدته، وقال أنه يريد أن يسير في طريقه مهما كانت العقبات، ثم أطلعني على كتاب بعث إليه إميل الغوري بالنيابة عن المجلسيين، وفيه يقول أنهم يقبلون أن يشتغلوا مع الباشا على شرط ألا تكون هناك أية علاقات مع دولة أجنبية (يعنون بذلك الانكليز)! وأن يكون كل مرجع في الأبحاث مكتب السكرتارية."  ويعلّق الفتياني بالقول: "وإذا علمت أن إميل الغوري هو السكرتير أدركت كل شيء."  وواضح من هذا الاشتراط بأنّ الحسينيين أرادوا الهيمنة على الكيان المقترح، وقد فهم الدكتور حسين الخالدي هذا الأمر، إذ يضيف الفتياني بأنّ هذا الشرط جعله "يرغي ويزبد ولا يقبل الاشتغال أو الاشتراك في العمل الوطني الجديد."  يورد الفتياني تفاصيل أخرى تتعلق بالمقترحات والنقاشات حول تشكيلة الجسم الجديد فيقول أنّه "بحث في من يخلف الأموات والغائبين، فانتخب الحسينيون محمد الراغب بدلاً من جمال [الحسيني]، ويوسف صهيون بدلاً من الفرد روك، وإميل الغوري بدلاً من [جورج] أنطونيوس، ورفيق التميمي بدلاً من أخيه أمين بك، ورشيد الحاج إبراهيم بدلاً من عزة دروزة.  ويبقى منصب الرئاسة شاغراً."  ويعلّق الفتياني على هذه الأسماء بالقول أنَّ انتخاب محمد رفيق الراغب الحسيني "هو الشيء المضحك المبكي في القضية.  فهل أصيب الحسينيون بعقم حتى رشحوا هذا الشخص؟ وهل يستنكف علي أو نافذ أو إبراهيم سعيد عن العمل في اللجنة الجديدة؟"  ويضيف الفتياني أنَّ راغباً النشاشيبي فوتح في موضوع الاشتراك في اللجنة الجديدة، فكان أن أصَّر على أن يكون لحزبه أربعةٌ من الممثلين، ويستنتج الفتياني بأنّ معنى هذا الاشتراط "أنه لا يريد أن يشتغل."

يلتقي الفتياني يوم الجمعة 22 تشرين الأول 1943 م (23 شوال 1362 هـ) بالباشا، فيبلغه الأخير أنه قابل منذ أسبوع علي بك الحسيني في بيته، ويعرب عن رأيه بأنّه لا فائدة ترجى من العمل الوطني مع علي بك ومع جماعته الحسينية، ويبلغ الباشا طاهراً بأنّه عازم على تأليف حزب من الدهماء من الشعب، فيسأله طاهر: "وكيف يمكن العمل بلا تجانس؟"  ويستطرد الفتياني في سرد تفاصيل الحوار، فيذكر أنّه جاء أثناء اللقاء عوني بك عبد الهادي، ويدور بين الثلاثة حديث طويل عن ضرورة العمل، وضرورة عدم التهاون في العمل الوطني.  وينتهي اللقاء بأن يذهب الباشا وعوني بك إلى فندق الملك داوود لمقابلة الأستاذ محمود أبو الفتح(45)، ويعتذر الفتياني "لأن هذا المتلون امتدح اليهود في العام الماضي.. وأقيمت له حفلة في نادي الصحفيين اليهود وكانت حوله جماعة من الحور العين... فسال لعابه وأظهر ألمه لأنه لا يجيد التكلم باللغة العبرية ووعد الحاضرين بأن يكلمهم بلغتهم في العام المقبل."

يتبين من يوميات الفتياني أنّ الباشا كان راغباً في استمرار العلاقة والتلاقي بينهما واستمرار العمل معه(46)، وأنّه كان مستعداً لتقديم المساعدة للفتياني حتى لو كان ذلك بإصدار وثيقة مجانبة للحقيقة.(47)  كما يتبين أن الفتياني كان يتابع أخبار الباشا حتى الاجتماعية والعائلية منها. (48)

عوني عبد الهادي

 لم يكن عوني عبد الهادي خلال حياته السياسية على انسجام مع الحاج أمين الحسيني، فلم يكن يعتقد بقدرة الحاج على قيادة الحركة الوطنية، كما لم يكن راضياً عن طرقه في التعامل مع الآخرين، وفي إدارة العمل الوطني،(49)وعلى ما يرويه عزة دروزة فإنّ قيادة عوني عبد الهادي لحزب الاستقلال والتنافر بينه وبين الحاج أمين منع الانسجام بين الأخير وبين الحزب، وإلى وقوفه ضده ومحاربته له دون هوادة.  في المقابل فإنّ المفتي وأنصاره، كما تدل تعليقات كتبها محمد اسحق درويش، ابن أخت الحاج أمين وكاتم سرّه ويده اليمنى، في مذكراته المخطوطة(50)لم يكونوا يثقوا بعوني عبد الهادي، ويروي درويش ما يفيد بأنّ عوني كان على استعداد للتفريط بالقضية، ففي إحدى هذه التعليقات يكتب درويش حول لقاء جمع البريطاني هوار رامبولد، أحد أعضاء لجنة بيل التي اقترحت تقسيم فلسطين سنة 1937، وكان صديقاً للأمير محمد علي ولي عهد مصر، وحاييم وايزمن مع عوني عبد الهادي، أثناء مرور وايزمن في مصر سنة 1938، وفي الحديث بين عوني ووايزمن، "قبل عوني أن يبلغ عدد اليهود في فلسطين 40% ووافق وايزمن"، وقد أعلن رامبولد الاتفاق في لندن بواسطة أعضاء مجلس اللوردات وطلب حل قضية الهجرة وفلسطين على هذا الأساس.  ويقول درويش أنّه لما بحث مع عوني في هذا الموضوع "قال أنا لم أوافق ولكنني سكت".  وقد اتهم أنصار المفتي عوني بإضفاء غطاء قانوني على صفقة بيع وادي الحوارث، وقد نشرت جريدة الحسينيين الجامعة العربيةبتاريخ 10 نيسان 1935 هذا الاتهام الصريح.(51)  ويكتب درويش في مذكراته ما يؤكد هذا الاتهام.(52)  كما أنّه ينعى على احتجاجه واعتراضه على اغتيال اثنان من عائلة ارشيد في أيار 1938، واغتيال حسن صدقي الدجاني من قبل الثوار، على اعتبار أنّ هذا يعمّق الانقسام بين الفلسطينيين ويشغلهم بقتل بعضهم البعض، بينما يعتبر درويش أن قتل المعارضين للثورة أمر مشروع.(53)

يظهر عوني في يوميات الفتياني، كما يتبين من العرض السابق، خلال حديثه عن مساعي أحمد حلمي باشا لتشكيل جسم سياسي جديد، ولا يظهر في هذه اليوميات أن الاحتكاك بين الرجلين كان كثيراً أو متعمداً، فالفتياني يتطرق لعوني خلال متابعته للأحداث السياسية في القدس، ولنشاطات رجالها السياسية، فيظهر ذكره مثلاً في يومية الثلاثاء 24/11/1943 م(54)، في معرض حديث الفتياني عن وجود الأمير عبد الله بن الحسين في القدس، وأنَّ عدداً من الوجوه كانوا "مدعوين عنده في فندق الملك داوود حيث تناولوا طعام العشاء،" ويذكر من  بينهم عوني عبد الهادي، ويتبع اسمه بعلامة التعجُّب(55).  ويتابع الفتياني أخبار عوني فيكتب في يومية السبت 19/1/1944 م عن مشاركته في وليمة الغداء التي أقامها شاكر بك الداودي في القدس على شرف نوري باشا السعيد رئيس الوزارة العراقية، وقد استقى خبر الوليمة من علي محي الدين الحسيني والذي كان من بين المدعوين، وقد صادفه الفتياني في القدس قادماً من أريحا.  ويسرد الفتياني أسماء أشخاص آخرين ممن حضروا الوليمة فيذكر راغب النشاشيبي وحلمي باشا وموسى العلمي وحسين الخالدي ويعقوب الغصين ورفيق التميمي وعمر البرغوثي، ويعلّق على الأمر فيقول: "فهمت أنه دعي أعضاء الوفد الفلسطيني إلى لندن أو من ناب منابهم... ولكن ما معنى أن يدعى عمر الصالح؟ وما محله من الإعراب!؟  هذا الأول وثانياً كيف سمح علي محي الدين، وهو الوطني المتطرف، لنفسه أن يجتمع بنوري السعيد ومن حوله راغب النشاشيبي وعوني وعمر الصالح! حقاً لو فعل غيره هذا العمل لعد خائناً متطرفاً."  ويدل هذا التعليق على تساوي عوني عبد الهادي براغب النشاشيبي، الخصم التاريخي للحاج أمين والحسينيين، عند طاهر الفتياني، كما يدلّ هذا على اعتباره جميع المذكورين خارجين عن  الصف الوطني.

مؤتمر الغرف التجارية

سعى الاستقلاليون لعقد مؤتمر للغرق التجارية الفلسطينية، وكانوا يأملون أن ينتج عنه حراك سياسي يؤدي إلى إعادة تنظيم الحركة الوطنية داخل فلسطين، وإعادة تشكيل القيادة السياسية، وقد عمل على تنظيم هذا المؤتمر عوني عبد الهادي، ورشيد الحاج إبراهيم وكان رئيساً للغرفة التجارية في حيفا، وأحمد حلمي باشا.  كتب الفتياني في يومية الخميس 12 تشرين الثاني سنة 1943 م (13 ذي القعدة 1362 ه) واصفاً المؤتمر:

اليوم عصراً انعقد مؤتمر الغرف التجارية العربية الخامس عشر بحضور مندوبين من جميع أنحاء فلسطين، ودار البحث حول مواضيع اقتصادية ووطنية، أما الاقتصادية منها إلغاء النقط، وتسهيل المواد الخام للمستهلكين العرب، وإلغاء ضريبة الحرب والخ.. وأما المواضيع الوطنية فالدعوة إلى مؤتمر عربي تعنى لجنته التنفيذية بتنفيذ مقررات المؤتمرات العربية السابقة، وأن يكون أعضاؤها من اللجنة العربية العليا والوفد الفلسطيني إلى لندن وغيرهم ممن تنتخبهم الأمة، وألقيت فيه خطب عن الأراضي والهجرة وصندوق الأمة.  أما المجلسيون فواضح أنهم لا يؤيدون هذا المؤتمر ولا ينظرون إليه نظرة وطنية.

هذا وقد حضر المؤتمر المذكور عدا أعضاء الغرفة التجارية، عوني عبد الهادي، ومغنم مغنم، وعيسى البندك، وتكلم عوني عن الكتاب الأبيض والهجرة."

ثمّ يعلّق على موضوع الهجرة فيقول: "وعلى ذكر الهجرة نشرت البرقيات أن وزير المستعمرات قد سمح لأكثر من ثلاثين ألف يهودي بالهجرة إلى فلسطين، وذلك على قدر ما تتحمل البلاد وقد احتج المؤتمر لدى الحكومة على هذا السماح."

ويعود الفتياني يوم السبت 14 تشرين الثاني 1943 م (15 ذي القعدة 1362 ه)الشيخ صبري عابدين من المرض "فقد مضى عليه بضعة أيام وهو يشكو الزكام،"ويتحادثانفي موضوع مؤتمر الغرف التجارية، واللجنة العربية الفلسطينية المزمع تأليفها على أنقاض اللجنة العربية العليا.  ويستهجنانترشيح محمد رفيق الراغب الحسيني لمنصب عضو اللجنة بدلاً من جمال الحسيني.  وكان من رأي الشيخ عابدين أن أحسن ما في المقررات: تنفيذ مقررات المؤتمرات السابقة والتقيد بها.

ولا يفوت الفتياني أن يدوّن في يومية الاثنين 23 تشرين الثاني 1943 م (24 ذي القعدة) أنّ من المضحكات التي سمعها في ذلك اليوم هي "أن اللجنة التحضيرية التي ألفت الدعوة إلى مؤتمر وطني والتي قوامها رجال الغرفة التجارية العربية وأصحاب الصحف العربية قد وجهوا الدعوة إلى جمال الحسيني وأمين التميمي! ... بواسطة إميل الغوري في مكتب فرج الله(56)... وهم يقصدون بذلك رفع العتب.  فحيث أن الحزب العربي الفلسطيني لم ينتخب من يحل محل جمال وأمين التميمي... لذلك وجهوا الدعوة... على اعتبار أن ينتخب الحزب من يمثل هذين الشخصين في المؤتمر المزعوم."

عجاج نويهض والإذاعة الفلسطينية

 كانت الإذاعة الفلسطينية وإذاعة الشرق الأدنى، والتي أُنشئت خلال الحرب لبث الدعاية للإنكليز، مسرحاً للتناقضات الداخلية بين أعضاء النخبة الفلسطينية، فحزب المفتي اعتبر العمل في الدعاية للمجهود الحربي البريطاني خروجاً عن أصول الوطنية، فيما اعتبره آخرون ضرورة من الضرورات وفرصة لخدمة القضية والشعب (57)ويشكل تولي عجاج نويهض، أحد مؤسسي حزب الاستقلال، إدارة القسم العربي فيها مسألة تستوجب التأمل، كون الحزب رفع خلال نشاطه السياسي شعار مقاطعة الحكومة الانجليزية وعدم التعاون معها في أية مجال، كما أنّ الحزب لم يكن يشجِّع العمل مع الحكومة، ونستحضر في هذا السياق موقف أكرم زعيتر خلال وجوده في تركيا فارّا من بطش الإنجليز، إذ رفض عرضاً ألمانياً لإدارة الإذاعة العربية في أثينا، معللاً ذلك بأنّه لا يقبل التكليف إلاّ من جهة عربية، وحسب عباراته: "فذلك أدعى للكرامة وأبقى من أن يجعلني في وضع الموظف عند الألمان"، فهل يمكن اعتبار موقف عجاج خروجاً عن مبادئ الحزب، وهل كانت دوافعه للعمل مع الحكومة في الإذاعة ذات بعد وطني؟

تولي عجاج لمنصب مراقب القسم العربي في الإذاعة

عمل عجاج مديراً للقسم العربي في محطة الإذاعة منذ عام 1940 وحتّى عام 1944، وهو يروي في مذكراته قصة عمله هذه بطريقة توحي بأنّه دوافعه للعمل كانت وطنية صرفة، وأنّه عمل على خدمة القضايا العربية، دون أن يتورط بدعم الإنجليز خلال الحرب.  على أنّ البحث الدقيق في المصادر التاريخية يبيِّن قصة مختلفة، ويبيّن أنّ نويهض خدم الدعاية البريطانية خلال الحرب بكل إخلاص.

يقول نويهض أن المنصب عرض عليه بعد نشوب الحرب العالمية الثانية بقليل، أي في أكتوبر 1939 تقريباً، ويدّعي أنّه تشاور مع عشرة من إخوانه الذين كانوا في القدس وعلى رأسهم أحمد حلمي باشا وعوني عبد الهادي(58)في تلك الفترة قبل أن يوافق على العمل ويضع شروطه لذلك.[59]  وتتلخص هذه الشروط فيأن يكون للقسم إدارة حرّة مستقلة، وفي بناية مستقلة لوحده؛ أن يتمتع بحرية تامّة فيما يتعلق بالموظفين تعييناً وتبديلاً؛ أن يكون للقسم ميزانية سخيَّة؛ وأخيراً أن لا يكون أية رقابة على ما يذاع.  ويقول أن الحكومة في البداية رفضت شروطه، ولكنها في النهاية رضخت وقبلت وعينته.  وفي البداية كان نويهض مسئولاً عن البرامج الإخبارية والسياسية والفكرية، والشاعر إبراهيم طوقان مسئولاً عن البرامج الأدبية والفنيّة، ثمّ أصبح نويهض مسئولاً عن جميع القسم بعد استقالة إبراهيم.

تقدّم يوميات الفتياني ومصادر تاريخية أخرى رواية مختلفة عن رواية عجاج حول عمله في الإذاعة، فإلى جانب وجود تناقضات فيها، تروي هذه المصادر قصّة مختلفة حول خلافه مع إبراهيم طوقان، واضطرار الأخير للاستقالة، كما أنّها تبيِّن أنّه أدار الإذاعة والمطبوعات بما يخدم المصالح البريطانية خلال الحرب. 

تناقضات رواية نويهض

من حيث التناقضات، وبالإضافة لما ذكر سابقاً عن تناقض رواية استشارة العشرة مع حقيقة غياب الاستقاليين عن البلاد، فإنّ نويهض يناقض الحقيقة حين يتحدث عن حرية تامّه له في العمل دون رقابة حكومية، فهو يؤكد أنّ الحكومة أولت اهتماماً كبيراً للإذاعة، وخصوصاً مع تقدّم هتلر في الحرب، مما دفعها لتغيير المدير البريطاني واستبداله بآخر، وهي أنشأت الإذاعة أصلاً خلال ثورة 1936 لتحقيق أهدافٍ سياسية(60)ثمّ أولتها عناية كبيرة خلال الحرب الثانية للرد على دعاية المحور القادمة لفلسطين من إذاعتي باري الإيطالية، وبرلين الألمانية.  فلا يمكن والحالة هذه لها أن توافق نويهض على شرطه بعدم مراقبة ما يذاع.  يضاف لهذا أن واحدةً من مهام نويهض نفسه كانت مراقبة الصحف العربية الصادرة في فلسطين، فهو اتخذ لقب "مراقب البرامج العربية والنشر"(61)، وهذا يعني أنّه كان مسئولاً عن منع نشر ما يضرّ مصالح الإنجليز.  يؤكد هذا الأمر ما ذكره نويهض في معرض حديثه عن خلافه مع المسئول عن القسم الإنجليزي من الإذاعة، المستر مكنير، واجتماع السكرتير العام للمندوب السامي بهما لفضَّ الخلاف.  ففي هذا الاجتماع ذكر عجاج للسكرتير أنه عربي يدعو للأمّة العربية، وينادي بحريتها، ويطالب باستقلالها، "وأنا أخدم في القسم العربي على هذا النحو مما يتساوق مع المصلحة البريطانية الحربية،"(62)ولهذا فهو يستغرب لماذا يضع مكنير العراقيل في طريقه.  وقد خاطب السكرتير العام المستر مكنير مؤكداً على أهمية الإذاعة للحكومة البريطانية: "إنّ دار الإذاعة الفلسطينية تتعلق بها مصالح بريطانية من عسكرية وسياسية وغيرها، والإذاعة يجب أن تسير سيراً حسناً."(63)

قصة الخلاف بين نويهض وطوقان

فيما يتعلق باستقالة إبراهيم طوقان وعلاقة نويهض بها، فقد خصّص الأخير جانباً من ذكرياته عن العمل في الإذاعة لمسألة خلافه مع إبراهيم طوقان،(64)وروى أنّ الذي بادر بالعداء والمشاكسة هو إبراهيم، لأنّه "لم يرتح إلى مجيئي للإذاعة، وصار يعرب، رحمه الله، عن استيائه هذا بطرقٍ مختلفة."  ويقول نويهض أن إبراهيم كان يسعى لدفعه للاستقالة من الإذاعة من خلال مضايقته.  ولكن كان إبراهيم هو الذي قدّم استقالته في النهاية، وقد اختلفت وتضاربت الأقوال، على ما يقول نويهض، حول سببها.

تختلف رواية المصادر التاريخية عن رواية نويهض.  فيروي طالب مشتاق في مذكراته (65)عن معرفته بحدوث خلاف بين عجّاج نويهض والشاعر إبراهيم طوقان، ويقول أنّ صديقه جلال زريق، وكان موظفاً في القسم العربي من السكرتيرية العامّة في حكومة فلسطين، راجعه يوماً وهو في القدس وأبلغه بأنّ إبراهيم فُصل من عمله في دار الإذاعة "لخلاف نشب بينه وبين عجاج نويهض، مدير القسم العربي بدار الإذاعة،" وطلب زريق من مشتاق تأمين عمل لإبراهيم في العراق، الأمر الذي لبّاه مشتاق، إذ عُيِّن إبراهيم أستاذاً للّغة العربية في إحدى المدارس الثانوية، ولم يمكث إبراهيم طويلاً في بغداد إذ مرض وعاد لنابلس ليموت وهو في ريعان الشباب. 

مصدر آخر تناول الموضوع كان السيرة الذاتية لفدوى طوقان، شقيقة إبراهيم، فهي تتحدث عن خروج أخيها من عمله بالإذاعة، وكانت تعيش مع أسرته في القدس، فتقول أنّه حدث في أكتوبر 1940، وأنّه كان نتيجة لاحتجاجات اليهود ضده بعد أن اتهموه بترويج اللاساميّة من خلال أحاديثه الإذاعية، وتنقل ترجمةً لأقوالٍ نشرتها الصحف العبرية الصهيونية تحتج على ما أذاعه عن السموأل، الشاعر اليهودي الذي اختلف مؤرخو الأدب العربي حول وجوده أصلاً وحول علاقته المزعومة بامرئ القيس، ثمّ تقول بأن "الحكومة الإنكليزية  ناقشته الحساب، فردّ عليها رداً علمياً ومنطقياً".  أمّا تفاصيل السبب الذي أدّى لإقالة إبراهيم من العمل، فهي تذكر اشتداد الرقابة على الإذاعة خلال الحرب، حيث "قام بعض المشرفين عليها من منافسيه العرب بالتحريض عليه لدى السلطات البريطانية، وقام الدس، وكان دسّا ً لئيماً فاتهم بتسريب الدعاية في برامجه ضد الحلفاء.  وأقيل من مصلحة الإذاعة الفلسطينية ليأخذ منافسه مكانه."(66)لا تذكر فدوى تفاصيل عن الدسّ ضدّ أخيها، ولا اسم الشخص العربي الذي اختلف أخوها معه، ولكن يمكن الاستنتاج أنها تتحدث عن عجّاج نفسه كونها تقول أنّه أخذ مكانه في العمل، وهو ما كان مع عجاج الذي تولّى مهام إبراهيم بعد إقالته.

تؤيد رواية أوردها اسحق درويش في مذكراته المخطوطة رواية فدوى طوقان، وتوضح طبيعة الدسّ الذي جرى ضد إبراهيم طوقان.  يقول درويش في ملاحظة دونّها في بغداد بتاريخ 27 رمضان 1359 هــ، 29/10/1940 م:

في كتاب الاعتبار لأسامة بن منقذ قصة شخص وجد عقد لؤلؤ بينما كان يطوف في الكعبة، وأعاده لصاحبه، وكان بينهما علاقة ودية، ووفاءً بالعهد.  اتخذ إبراهيم طوقان هذه القصة موضوعاً يلقيه على الأطفال، ودعى الشخص الذي أعاد عقد اللؤلؤ أميناً، وصاحب العقد الذي وفى لمن وجده وفاءً.. وقدَّمها ليلقيها...

مكر عجاج له بعض إلقائها، وأوهم السلطة أن المقصود من هذه القصة الاشادة بفضائل السيد محمد أمين الحسيني."

وقوف عجاج نويهض مع الإنجليز خلال الحرب العالمية الثانية

 تدل الوثائق التاريخية دلالة قاطعة على أن نويهض أدار الإذاعة والمطبوعات بما يخدم المصالح البريطانية خلال الحرب(67)وفيما يلي بعض الدلائل: 

 حسب المحامي حنّا نقارة، كان عجاج نويهض وعباس العقاد يذيعون خلال الحرب خطابات لصالح بريطانيا، "مما أثار استهزاءنا بهذه الإذاعات الكاذبة.  إذ كانت بريطانيا في نظرنا رأس الحية، ولا يهمنا من سيقضي على هذه الحيّة الرقطاء".(68)

 شارك نويهض في الاجتماع الذي عقده المندوب السامي في دار الحكومة بالقدس لعدد من الوجهاء الفلسطينيين وقادة المجتمع(69)من أمثال رؤساء بلديات القدس وغزة ورام الله والناصرة والخليل والرملة ويافا وعكا، وحضره بالاضافة للمندوب السامي القائد العام للقوات البريطانية في فلسطين، وقد بحث المسئولان البريطانيان فيه مع المشاركين في مشروع تطوع عرب فلسطين في الجيش البريطاني، ووسائل تشجيع العرب على التطوع في صفوف الجيش البريطاني.  

 كما استقدم نويهض الكاتبين والأديبين المصريين عباس محمود العقاد وعبد القادر المازني من أجل إلقاء كلمات مؤيدة لبريطانيا ومناوئة لألمانيا وإيطاليا،(70)ونشر خطاباتهما في الكتاب الذي أعده هو بنفسه ونشره في القدس عن القسم العربي في دار الإذاعة الفلسطينية، أي على نفقة الحكومة البريطانية، تحت عنوان حديث الإذاعة.(71)وقد اعتبر عجاج في تقديمه للكتاب أن أحاديث الكتاب تمثل "حظاً طيباً من الانتاج الفكري لرهطٍ كريمٍ من علماء العرب وأدبائهم وأديباتهم، لا في فلسطين وحدها، بل في الأقطار العربية المجاورة من سوريا ومصر ولبنان."(72) فهو الذي استقدمهما وهو الذي اختار أحاديثها للكتاب وهو الذي امتدح هذه الأحاديث، فماذا قال العقاد والمازني؟

دارت الأفكار الأساسية التي تضمنتها أحاديث العقاد والمازني حول حتمية انتصار بريطانيا والحلفاء الذين يمثلون معسكر الخير، وحتمية هزيمة ألمانيا وإيطاليا اللتان تمثلان معسكر الشر، وأن هناك توافقاً ثقافياً ونفسياً بين العرب وبريطانيا.  ويجدر الإشارة هنا إلى موضوعين أساسيين حول هذا الموقف.  الأول أنّه يأتي مخالفاً لموقف زعامة الحركة الوطنية الفلسطينية ممثلة بالحاج أمين ومعسكره، والذين شكلوا في بغداد حزباً سرياً مؤيداً للمحور، أطلقوا عليه "حزب الأمة العربية" وهدفه تحرير البلاد العربية من نير الاستعمار، والعمل على توحيدها فيما بعد (73)  والثاني أنه أغفل موقف بريطانيا في صراع الفلسطينيين مع الحركة الصهيونية.

اعتبر العقاد في حديثه(74)المعنون ب"الحرب بعد اثني عشر شهراً وستة أسابيع"، والذي بثته الإذاعة بتاريخ 13 رمضان 1359 هـ، الموافق للرابع عشر من تشرين الأول 1940 ميلادية، أنّ التفكير العقلي، القائم على الحكم على الأشياء والحوادث بمقدار ما لها من النتائج والدّلالات، بعيداً عن الفرقعة والضجيج، يقود إلى أنّ انتصار بريطانيا حتمي لأنّها تمثل قيمة الحرية، والنصر هو "للحرية لا محالة"، وقال العقاد في حديثه أنَّ هزيمة ألمانيا أكيدة لأنها تمثل "القوة الغاشمة والسطوة البهيمية"، ووصف الإيطاليين والألمان بأنّهم "ثمانين مليوناً مطبوعين على التسليم للحكومات...  مجردون للقتال."(75)وهوّن العقاد من الانتصارات الألمانية والإيطالية خلال السنة الأولى من الحرب، والتي أثارت حماسة في صفوف العرب المعادين لبريطانيا وسياستها في فلسطين، فاعتبر انتصارهم مرّة على عشرة ملايين، ومرة أخرى على ثلاثة ملايين، ومرة ثالثة أو رابعة أو خامسة على أربعين مليوناً غير مستعدين..."ليس بالأمر الرائع، وليس بالفتح الغريب."(76)وأجرى حساباً للخسائر والأرباح بيّن فيه أن ألمانيا أكثر خسارة من بريطانيا، ففي البحر مثلاً "خسر النازيون أكثر من نصف أسطولهم الحربي، فأصبحوا الآن في صف الدول الثالثة أو الرابعة في القوة البحرية...  أمّا البريطانيين فربحوا خمسين مدمرة أمريكية، واشتروها بأجرة الجزائر التي كانت لهم في البحار الغربية، فكان ربحهم ربحين، لأنهم رفعوا عن كاهلهم أعباء الدفاع عن تلك الجزائر، وأضافوا إلى قوتهم في البحر تلك السفن، التي كانت مشغولة بالحراسة هناك." (77)أمّا في الفتوح الأرضية، "فالنازيون قد أصابوا منها الكثير، واستفادوا من خيراتها ما كانوا مفتقرين إليه.  ولكنها فائدةٌ إلى حين.. ثم تواجههم المشكلات تلو المشكلات، من تلك الأمم الجائعة المسلوبة، فلا هم قادرون على إطعامها، ولا هم قادرون على قمعها وإرهابها، مع اليأس والجوع."(78) وتحدث العقاد عن صفات هتلر فوصفه بأنه رجل كاذب متبجح، وادعّى أنَّ كل مخلوق من الشعبالألماني هو "نيَّةُ حربٍ حيَّةٍ تمشي على قدمين."(79)

أخبار عجاج والإذاعة في يوميات الفتياني

ينسجم حديث الفتياني عن عجّاج نويهض مع الاستنتاجات التي أوردناها أعلاه، حيث نلمس في هذا الحديث موقفاً ناقداً للرجل، وتعبيراً واضحاً عن عدم الرضا عنه، ففي يومية الجمعة 8 كانون الثاني 1943 يكتب الفتياني: "صافحني عجاج نويهض بحرارة، وقال لي أنّه كان يريد ان يزورني منذ شهر في المشغل، وكنت أظن لحسن نيتي أنّه يريد أن يبحث معي في مسألة الكليشهات (80)ولكني مع الأسف شممت من كلامه أنه يريد تشغيلي في محطة الإذاعة."   وفي يومية الاثنين 11 كانون الثاني من نفس العام كتب يقول: "زارني اسحق أفندي الشاكر الحسيني ومكث عندي أكثر من ساعة، وعلمت منه أن أبا سلمى (عبد الكريم الكرمي) سيترك العمل في محطة الإذاعة الفلسطينية ليشتغل محامياً في حيفا بالاشتراك مع أحد المحامين، وقد أصيب بالقريفة من كثرة ما رأى وتحمَّل من الأستاذ نويهض." 

يتابع الفتياني أخبار الإذاعة وما يدور من أمور بشأن موظفيها العرب، فيكتب يوم السبت 24 نيسان 1943م(81)أنه تمّ اختيار "محمد أديب العامري مساعداً لمراقب البرامج العربية والنشر في محطة الإذاعة الفلسطينية (أي مساعداً لعجاج نويهض) وقد أثنت عليه جريدة الدفاع حين نشرها هذا الخبر، ثناءً عاطراً.  كما عُيِّن أمين أبو الشعر مراقباً للنشر العربي في محطة الشرق الأدنى، وهو المنصب الذي كان عرض علي منذ بضعة أشهر ورفضته."  وكتب الفتياني في يومية الجمعة 13 آب 1943 م (12 شعبان 1362 هـ) "وحدثني أمين يونس العجب العجاب عن أعمال عجاج نويهض وتصرفاته. وعجاج يتناول الآن اكثر من 120 جنيهاً مرتباً شهرياً. ولم يكتف بهذا المبلغ الباهظ بل طلب الزيادة. ولكن الحكومة وقفت له بالمرصاد ولوحت له بأنها تريد الاستغناء عنه. فاعتذر وتراجع ورضخ للأمر الواقع."  كما كتب في يومية الأربعاء 29/12/1943 م (82)"علمت من السيد ياسين الخالدي أن الأستاذ عجاج نويهض مدير البرامج العربية في محطة الإذاعة قدم استقالته، أو بعبارة أصح أوعز له بأن يستقيل لأن الحكومة ضاقت به ذرعاً، وقد عين الأستاذ محمد أديب العامري خلفاً له.  وتنفس الناس الصعداء لزوال الكابوس عنهم.  وكان يتقاضى مرتباً يبلغ أحياناً إلى الثمانين جنيهاً."  ويكتب في الخميس 3/2/1944 عن تعيين "عزمي النشاشيبي مدير المطبوعات في يافا وتل ابيب مراقباً للبرامج العربية في محطة الإذاعة الفلسطينية خلفاً لعجاج أفندي نويهض الذي أرغم على الاستقالة."  ثمّ يؤكد الفتياني في يومية السبت 19/2/1944 م أن عزمي النشاشيبي "قبل مؤخراً أن تسند إليه وظيفة مراقب البرامج العربية في محطة الإذاعة الفلسطينية براتب 800 جنيه في العام على أن تعد له الإذاعة بيتاً وسيارة تاكسي."  ويكتب في يومية الثلاثاء 11 نيسان 1944 أنّ جريدة الدفاع ذكرت أن عزمي النشاشيبي مراقب المطبوعات في يافا وتل ابيب قد عين مديراً للبرامج العربية في محطة الإذاعة الفلسطينية خلفاً للأستاذ المأسوف على وطنيته عجاج نويهض.

خلاصة

 أضاءت هذه المقالة جوانب مهمة من العلاقات التي سادت بين أعضاء النخبة الفلسطينية في مدينة القدس، وعرضت التغير في مواقف الاستقلاليين عوني عبد الهادي ورشيد الحاج إبراهيم وعجّاج نويهض من بريطانيا، وقبولهم بدعمها خلال الحرب ضد دولتي المحور، ألمانيا وإيطاليا.  كما عرضت لجهود أحمد حلمي باشا ورشيد الحاج إبراهيم لتشكيل قيادة محلية، بدل القيادة المنفية خارج البلاد، ولكن الحسينيين أفشلوا هذه المساعي.  ودرست المقالة مواقف عجّاج نويهض خلال عمله بالإذاعة، ودعمه للدعاية البريطانية خلال الحرب.

[يعاد نشرها ضمن اتفاقية شراكة وتعاون بين جدلية وحوليات القدس.اضغط/ي هنا للحلقة الأولى]

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Egypt and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Egypt Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to egypt@jadaliyya.com by Sunday night of every week.]

Three Ways Egypt's Elections Could Still Surprise
Bassem Sabry says, “While Egypt's elections and trajectory might seem settled, there are still ways for something remarkable to happen.” 

US, EU Reset Egypt Policies
Wael Nawara says, “The United States shipping Apache helicopters to Cairo, and the European Union decision to monitor coming presidential elections in Egypt, are signs that the US and EU are switching their Egypt policies.”

Egypt’s Military Companies Flirt with Solar Energy
Isabel Esterman presents the ways in which the military can profit from investing in solar energy.

Population Growth in Egypt: More People, More Problems?
Ahmed Wagih offers empirical analyses on the demographic challenges that face Egypt.

A Cry for Rationality
Amr Hamzawy calls for Egypt’s elites to take a different stance than allying with the state.

Shorouk Publishes Details of Sabbahi's Electoral Platform
EgyptSource reports on Hamdeen Sabbahi’s electoral platform.

The Revolt of the Periphery
Maged Mandour argues, “An important yet neglected dimension of the Egyptian revolution is Egypt's position as a peripheral country, the connection between its elites and the heart of capitalism. Egypt’s geo-strategic position makes it important.”

Egypt's Diversity Test
Sarah el-Sirgany argues that the military-backed regime is imposing a single religious and political identity to represent all Egyptians.

Egyptians Still in Search of Political Messiah
Wael Eskandar says, “Despite their hopes, Egyptians will not find a leader with the power to effect the deep structural reform Egypt needs to move forward.”

Sisi Pulls a No-Show in First TV Campaign Ad
Mada Masr reports on al-Sisi’s first televised presidential campaign advertisement.

Egypt, Turkey and Iran: Exchanging Roles in a Tumultuous Middle East
Fadi Elhusseini writes on the regional importance of Egypt, Turkey, and Iran in light of the ongoing shifts in the region.

Sabahy’s Challenge
Nervana Mahmoud analyzes the presidential candidate’s Hamdeen Sabahy’s stance on the economic and social spheres in Egypt.

US-based Company Workers Assaulted, Besieged in Alexandria
Jano Charbel reports on oppression and abuse of workers in a United States-based plant in Alexandria.

On the Politics of Energy Price Hikes
Isabel Esterman says, “Proposed energy price increases send a strong message to consumers but have little impact on state budget.”

Crossing Over to Sinai
Omar Ryad writes on the state’s inefficiency in dealing with Sinai.

Egypt’s Liberal Parties Face an Unpromising Future
Scott Williamson argues the liberals’ alliance with the coalition that overthrew Morsi on 3 July 2014 was a gamble that did not benefit them.

The Road to Hell in Egypt
Tarek Radwan sheds light on the military-backed regime’s coercive practices against civilians, academics, and activists.

Reporters Accuse Egypt Police of Using Live Ammunition in Protests
Shadi Rahimi writes on riot police’s use of live ammunition against protests in Cairo University.

When it Boils Down to Nasserism
Jared Malsin says, “Both presidential candidates are running with a Nasserism card, but what kind of Nasserism?” 

Egypt's Forgotten 600 Years
Hani Atalla sheds light on the history of Copts in Egypt, and the contributions the community has offered in the fields of philosophy, religion, art, and culture.    

Egyptian Women Campaign for Larger Role in Parliament
Sarah El-Rashidi says, “A number of Egyptian women's rights activists are campaigning to increase female representation in parliament ahead of this year's elections.”

Critical Citizenship for Critical Times
Maha Bali “reflects on critical thinking, citizenship, and what contribution higher education might make to Egypt’s future during these turbulent times.”

In Arabic:

الجيش والسياسة
Fahmy Huwaidy writes on the re-emergence of Egypt’s military into the political sphere.   

المنيا والفتنة الطائفيّة في مصر
Safaa Saleh says, “The political turmoil following the ouster of Mohammed Morsi last July has been felt the hardest in Minya in Upper Egypt, where Muslim-Christian violence is becoming frequent.” 

مرحلة جديدة من تزييف الوعى
Arm Hamzawy reflects on the distortion and bias in Egypt’s major media outlets.  

سيناء.. عبور بلا عبور
Omar Ryad writes on the state’s inefficiency in dealing with Sinai.

ضجيج الناصرية فى الانتخابات الرئاسية
Amr Khafaga argues that the “Nasserist” rhetoric publicized by both presidential candidates, al-Sisi and Sabbahi, is merely noise that will dissipate once the elected president faces real challenges.  

«أنا ضد الإعدام»
Reem Sa’ad responds to the initiative against the death penalty.  

!أين الله؟
Sameh Qasim compares the censorship of literary publications practiced by the current regime and Mubarak’s rule. 

رأسمالية ترگيب الزراير
Arm Adly writes on the set backs of the economic system that has been reinforced in the last decade of Hosi Mubarak’s reign.

Recently on Jadaliyya Egypt:         

علم السياسة في مصر: التاريخ والتوجهات
Mohamed Soffar writes on the evolution of the study of politics in Egypt. 

[The following press release was issued by The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions on 24 April, 2014.] 

ICAHD, in conjunction with Rabbis for Human Rights/Shomrei Mishpat, The Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center, and The Society of Saint Yves, The Catholic Center for Human Rights, and together with the Palestinian village council of Ad-Dirat- Al-Rfai’ya located in the southern district of Hebron, West Bank, has submitted a petition to the Israeli Supreme Court to remove the planning authority in Area C of the West Bank, including the authority to demolish Palestinian homes, out of the hands of the Israeli military and restore it to the Palestinian Authority. The Court will hear the case of Monday, April 28, 2014. 

Background: Palestinian planning commissions survived the 1967 war, but without warning or “immediate military necessity,” the Israeli Military Commander in 1971 issued Order 418, which abolished them and placed all planning in the hands of the military, where it remains today. During the Oslo peace process Israel agreed to restore that authority in Area C to the Palestinian Authority, but this was never done.

Our case argues that Order 418 created a separate but discriminatory planning regime that, by removing any representation of the Palestinian population, renders criminal almost all new building by Palestinians, who have no choice but to build without permits and thereby risk demolition. This stands in clear violation of Article 64 of Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an Occupying Power from extending its legal system into an occupied territory. Moreover, the Respondents – the Israeli Minister of Defense, the IDF commander of the West Bank, the head of the Civil Administration and its High Planning Council – illegally took the planning authority and rights granted to the Protected Population by the Fourth Geneva Convention, transferring them to the military. What’s more, they formally brought Israeli settlers into the planning process and structure. Sixteen local committees exist in Area C for local settlement councils, but not one Palestinian village council in Area C has a local planning committee. 

Our appeal raises for the first time before the High Court the issue of forced transfer of Palestinians within the Occupied Territories as a result of the planning failure and practice of house demolition – some 30,000 homes and livelihood structures demolished since 1967. The effects of demolitions or threats of demolitions are devastating, and the political agenda of “Judaizing” is blatant: Less than 1% of Area C is designated for Palestinian development, compared to the 70% of Area C for the settlements. Overall our appealraises the fundamental question: Why does the Civil [Military] Administration interfere in the first place in the planning and construction issues of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories?

For more information, please contact:

Jeff Halper, ICAHD Director, at +972-(0)54-303-9170, or <jeff@icahd.org>

Rabbi Arik Ascherman, President and Senior Rabbi; Rabbis for Human Rights, at +972-(0)50-5607034 or <ravarik@rhr.israel.net>. 

- See more at: http://www.icahd.org/node/546#sthash.YBaN7NHN.dpuf

This is a selection of what you might have missed on Jadaliyya last week. It also includes a list of the most read articles and roundups. Progressively, we will be featuring more content on our "Last Week on Jadaliyya" series.
 

• Let Us Now Praise Murderous Men; Lebanese Presidential Candidates, Considered
• Inhabiting a Grudge
• On Power Cuts, Protests, and Institutions: A Brief History of Electricity in Beirut (Part One)
• كامل نص الدستور السوري الجديد الذي تسلمه بشار الأسد
• من قصة النقل المشترك لمدينة بيروت: باصاتٌ ومترو في محطة الأحلام
• Teaching Arabic in the US after 9/11
• Three Poems by Ahmad Shamlou
• Foucault, Fanon, Intellectuals, Revolutions
• The Confiscation of Armenian Properties: An Interview with Umit Kurt
• On the Struggle of Syrian Refugees in Lebanon
  

• Last Week on Jadaliyya (April 14-20)
• Egypt Media Roundup (April 21)
• Turkey Media Roundup (April 22)
• Arabian Peninsula Media Roundup (April 22)
• Critical Currents in Islam Media Roundup (24 April)
• Syria Media Roundup (April 26)

• (2) إضاءات على الحياة والمجتمع العربي في القدس خلال الحرب العالمية الثانية
• Samira Azzam: A Profile from the Archives
• Syria Media Roundup (April 26)
• وتعطلت لغة الكلام
• Historical Narratives, Contemporary Events: Arab Studies Journal Spotlight (Spring 2011)
• Jadaliya Co-editor Noura Erakat and Ali Abunimah Weigh In on Fatah-Hamas Unity Agreement in The New York Times
• علم السياسة في مصر: التاريخ والتوجهات
• #SaveKessab, #Save Aleppo, and Kim Kardashian: Syria’s Rashomon Effect
• Critical Currents in Islam Media Roundup (24 April)
• The Everyday Experience of Humanitarianism in Akkar Villages (Part One)
• Inhabiting a Grudge
• Let's Go to Guantanamo! An On-the-Ground Perspective on the 9/11 Trial
• The Confiscation of Armenian Properties: An Interview with Umit Kurt
• ICAHD Finland Interviews Jadaliyya Co-Editor Mouin Rabbani
• Notes sur l'élection présidentielle algérienne
• New Texts Out Now: Reinoud Leenders, Spoils of Truce: Corruption and State-Building in Postwar Lebanon
• Arabian Peninsula Media Roundup (April 22)
• Jadaliyya Co-Editor Bassam Haddad on NPR’s Worldview, Addressing Syria’s Presidential Elections
• On Power Cuts, Protests, and Institutions: A Brief History of Electricity in Beirut (Part One)
• Turkey Media Roundup (April 22)
• Egypt Media Roundup (April 21)
• Last Week on Jadaliyya (April 14-20)
• Three Poems by Ahmad Shamlou

 A historic Christian Armenian town situated just a mile from the Turkish border in northwest Syria, Kessab is now among the war’s many casualties. On the morning of 21 March, the town was seized by opposition fighters from three Islamic militant groups: Jabhat al-Nusra, Sham al-Islam, and Ansar al-Sham. For Armenians around the world, the event conjured memories of past traumas as one of two remaining Armenian areas that survived the Armenian Genocide of 1915 was depopulated. The last remaining Armenian village in Turkey, Vakıflı, located across the border, is now a safe haven for some of Kessab’s former residents. Three weeks after the capture of Kessab, the event continues to take on a life of its own as various factions in the conflict seek to instrumentalize the tragedy to construct their own versions of reality, a phenomenon that could be called Syria’s Rashomon effect.

[View of Kessab and Surrounding Environs (Photo courtesy of Stefan Winter)]

Kessab was relatively quiet over the last three years but has new value as a launching point for an opposition campaign against the coastal town of Latakia, which lies within the regime’s Alawite heartland. Militants call this campaign al-Anfal (“The Spoils”), a label taken from a chapter title of the Quran connoting the hope of defeating Asad against changing odds after a recent opposition defeat in Yabrud near Damascus. Since the uprising, Kessab’s grassroots militias took up arms to repel militants who sought to enter the mountains. The morning of the raid, Turkey opened the border allowing militias to cross into Syria perhaps to tip the balance against recent Asad gains in the south. However, many Armenians, including the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) and subsequent Armenian activists quickly linked Turkey’s role in Kessab three weeks ago to the 1915 Armenian Genocide—an event commemorated later this month on 24 April.

While dismissed by the opposition, Armenian fears are not completely baseless. Some Islamist opposition militias carry their own unique brand of takfiri sectarianism evidenced by videoed beheadings and forced conversions of Shiites and Christians. Events like the depopulation of Kessab do little to assuage Armenian fears of annihilation that remain alive after a century. Although guerilla groups are often in conflict with one another, they have in common attacks Christian villages, conversion of churches into militia headquarters as in Raqqa, desecration and looting of religious objects, kidnapping and forcibly converting Christians to Islam, and summarily executing minorities and even fellow Sunni Muslim fighters by mistake in the streets. Yet, aside from the removal of a cross from a church rooftop, there was no mass destruction in Kessab when it was captured. 

[Photo of Alleged Cross Destruction Within a Church in Kessab]

The Armenian community continues to protest Kessab’s capture. The #SaveKessab campaign launched via social media contains many important facts about Kessab, but the nature of circulation on the internet also afforded the spreading of erroneous information. True, the current depopulation of Kessab echoes two other evacuations in the last century—1909 and 1915—and Turkey was involved in each instance. But what has not been clarified is that although eighty people were reported as killed in the raid by Asbarez, an Armenian news service, only two casualties are confirmed as Armenian to date. While those deaths are important, diaspora Armenians continue to publish exaggerated articles claiming “a NATO-backed second genocide” is taking place in Kessab. Other Armenian news services have offered more balanced coverage, The Armenian Weekly focused on the two thousand Armenians evacuated to Latakia where they are sheltered in the Virgin Mary Mother of God Armenian Church and given humanitarian assistance by the Armenian Red Cross. The news service has also focused on the search for ten missing Kessab Armenians who never made it to Latakia.

So, why did Armenians evacuate Kessab?  Here it is useful to examine al-Nusra’s capture of the Aramaic-speaking town of Maaloula outside Damascus in September 2013—a place of little to no strategic military value. Symbolism trumped strategy in Maaloula as the Mar Taqla monastery, named after an early Christian saint who fled Roman persecution interned within its walls, was seized and thirteen of its nuns were held captive for three months. The nuns were released on 9 March after Qatar reportedly ransomed them for sixteen million dollars. Over the last two years, the depopulation of Christians in Homs (reduced to ten percent of its original prewar size), Maaloula, and Kessab have magnified existing fears that Syria’s Christians may not survive Syria’s war.

[Kessab Armenians attend mass after arrival in Latakia]

Considering the deep connections between Armenian communities over several centuries, many recently exiled residents who fled Kessab were internally displaced Armenians from Aleppo who fled the fighting in August 2012. Now triple exiled, these refugees huddle in the Armenian Church in Latakia on the coast awaiting their fate, joining over seven million displaced Syrians internally and regionally. Certainly, the disappearance of two thousand Armenians in Kessab may mean little numerically in the larger tragedy of 140,000 dead over the last three years. What it does offer is another way of viewing a conflict that threatens to erase century-old communities that comprise Syria’s mosaic of over sixteen religious and ethnic communities.

A Brief History of Syria’s Armenians

When the conflict began three years ago, I was in the process of writing a history of Syria’s early Armenian community. The Armenian community in Syria is divided between a smaller minority of Armenians (arman qadim) who arrived during the Cilician Kingdom of Armenia which fell in 1375 and a majority of Armenians who are descendants of refugees from the Genocide. Aleppo—a major deportation hub during World War I—houses most of Syria’s Armenian population. Despite the ongoing presence of Armenians in Syria Fawwaz Tallo, a Syrian opposition figure, erroneously asserted, “Kessab is a Syrian town and not Armenian. The Armenians are guests whom we received one hundred years ago on our Syrian land, and today we liberate our land.” Tallo’s claim is pure hyperbole that seeks to alienate Armenians from Syria’s broader history during a time of national struggle. Historical documents tell a different story—Kessab is among the most ancient Armenian settlements in the entire region and among the last to survive the ethnic cleansing and wars of the last century.

As I write this essay, placed on my desk are Ottoman fiscal records (called Mufassal Tahrir Defteri) that document the steady growth of Armenians from the sixteenth century forward as they fled a rebellion (celali) in the east where Armenians lived and crop failures brought on by the Little Ice Age in the 1590s. The Armenian community was quite visible in sixteenth century Aleppo as the historic Christian Judayda quarter took shape in the city, eventually housing nearly a quarter of the city’s population by the eighteenth century. That same survey charts Kessab’s expansion in the first decades of the sixteenth century:  1526: twenty-six families, 1536: thirty families, 1550: sixty-one families. As violence intensified in the Ottoman Empire, beginning with the Hamidiye Massacres (1894-1896), Armenians fled more frequently to nearby Syrian lands.

During the genocide, Syria housed the killing fields where mass unmarked graves can be located along the deportation route in Ras al-‘Ein, Raqqa, Der ez-Zor, and Shaddadeh. As Der ez-Zor lay in ruin after three years of war, it was hard to forget that almost every Deri has an Armenian “hababah” (“grandmother” in the local dialect) and therefore have familial links to events of 1915. After World War I, Syria was overrun with refugees numbering 100,000 Armenians by the 1920s. Originally refugee camps, Armenian neighborhoods developed in Suleymaniyah, Azziziah, and Maydan (Armenian: “Nor Kyugh”) in Aleppo, while the old harat al-arman outside Bab Sharqi in Damascus still sports the original barakat design of the Armenian refugee camp with stucco walls and tin roofs.

In 1928, Armenians were naturalized as Syrian citizens by French colonial powers with the hope of thwarting nationalist stirrings during an election year. The result of French meddling with the Armenian minority was a category historian Keith Watenpaugh calls “not quite Syrian.” In an environment of colonial “divide and rule” policies, Syria’s minorities were considered collaborator classes while the Sunni bourgeoisie agitated for independence from French rule. Early experimentation with liberal democracy showed some signs of political inclusion as Armenians were elected to the constituent assembly. During the instability of the 1960s and subsequent ascendancy of Hafiz al-Asad, Armenians showed a decline in political participation that continues today.

Analyst Andrew Tabler adopted the regime’s myths when he told NPR “[Syrian Christians get] very good business contracts, positions in government and the Syrian military….They get preferential treatment and protection of their places of worship.” In this line of thinking, Armenians and other Christians are protected minorities who reaped financial and political benefits from the state. Yet the facts don’t support this claim entirely. Armenians were seldom elected to parliament and when they were present in government they held appointed rather than elected positions. As recently as 2012, Bashar al-Asad appointed a woman, Dr. Nazira Farah Sarkis, as Minister of the Environment. One could read this singular appointment in 2012 as an effort to garner the support of Armenians during a period of protracted fighting when Armenians took the formal stance of neutrality during the uprising.

The myth of minoritarian rule as beneficial to minorities has had devastating effects for everyday Syrians, who are targeted for reprisal as the primary collaborators with the Assad regime when, in reality, every community has been coopted to some degree within complex webs of collaboration that bear a distinct colonial design. Importantly, the minority myth detracts from the highest proportional beneficiaries of the regime, for, as Bassam Haddad’s research as shown, Sunni entrepreneurs are the backbone of the new bourgeoisie created under Bashar al-Asad’s rule over the last decade. Sunni elites have historically obtained higher and more influential offices in both Asad governments as Defense Minister (Mustafa Tlas), Prime Minister (Mustafa Miru), Foreign Minister (Faruq al-Shar’), and Vice-President of Foreign Affairs (‘Abd al-Halim Khaddam). It is important to bear in mind, for every accusation that minorities are regime collaborators, Sunni complicity is being erased. To ignore this fact is by omission upholding a sectarian discourse.

The invisibility of Armenians historically in Syrian politics is paradoxical considering the century-old durable political institutions—clubs, political parties, churches, and social committees—that have long survived in the shadows under both Asads. One would surmise that Armenians would have been predisposed to political participation, but the numbers show that they did not flourish under the authoritarian model. Instead, they voted with their feet, leaving Syria to avoid conscription and to look for better economic opportunities. In fact, historian Simon Payaslian has shown that the Armenian population dropped from 100,000 in the 1960s to 58,000 on the eve of the 2011 uprising underscoring how drastically the community has declined under authoritarianism.

While Hafiz al-Asad was hostile toward Turkey, Bashar al-Asad forged close ties that eventually stifled freedom of speech for Armenians on the subject of the Armenian Genocide. Those of us on the ground experienced intimidation in the form monitoring of our writings and emails, the banning and confiscation of books from bookstore shelves, and harassment by the secret police of authors who published on the Armenian Genocide. Under Hafiz al-Asad, Armenian processions for 24 April commemorations featured deafening displays of drumming and chants, Bashar al-Asad ordered more quiet displays of mourning with a quiet procession only within the church walls and Armenian cemetery in the years before the uprising. The policies of 2005-2011, stood in stark contrast to the encouragement Syria’s Armenians now have to criticize Turkey showing how Armenian speech is silenced or fostered at the whim of Syrian foreign policy.

Taking cues from the Lebanese civil war, Syria’s Armenians have maintained an official stance of “positive neutrality” since the revolt began in March 2011. This strategy has largely preserved Armenian areas of Aleppo while other areas in a state of rebellion were flattened by Syrian forces.  The strategy saved Armenians in Lebanon, but studies have shown that it also marginalized them when it came time to forge the Ta’if peace agreement in 1989.

Kessab:  Syria’s Rashomon Effect

The Opposition’s Story

After capturing Kessab, the conquering militias launched a slick public relations campaign uploading numerous videos on YouTube showing unscathed Armenian churches and gentle interactions with remaining elderly inhabitants. One photo circulated frequently by pro-opposition activists on Facebook featured an elderly Kessab Armenian woman carried by an opposition fighter captioned “Is this a terrorist?” In yet another video, we are given a tour of one of Kessab’s churches by a man with immaculate English as he imagines how each area of the church was used by the vacated residents. At one point, he grabs a Bible erroneously telling the viewers that it is written in Aramaic, but his larger point is that the Bible has not been destroyed by the fighters. The video shows “fixable” damage to the church’s plaster walls, attributed to the fighting between regime forces and rebels currently underway. The tour guide mentions at one point that the video was created specially “for Kim,” a reference to American reality TV star Kim Kardashian.

[A Widely-Circulated Image on Social Media Asks: Is This the Face of a Terrorist?]

The Armenian Diaspora’s Story

In an attempt to draw international attention to the plight of Kessab, the Armenian diaspora quickly latched onto the #SaveKessab viral Twitter and Facebook campaign to place international attention on Turkey just weeks before Armenian Genocide commemoration day on 24 April. After a century of denial by the Turkish government of the killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians during World War I, genocide recognition continues to be the top priority for the Armenian Diaspora composed of its victims. While many facts about Kessab were correct, amid the internet frenzy, activists circulated erroneous photos falsely claiming that Armenians a large number of Armenians had been murdered in the assault and shared faulty claims by Armenian celebrities Kim Kardashian and Cher that a second genocide was taking place in the town. Kardashian’s perspective on Kessab was amplified by the press when she retweeted these charges: “Please let's not let history repeat itself!!!!!! Let's get this trending!!!! #SaveKessab#ArmenianGenocide” despite the fact Armenian deaths in Kessab remained undocumented at that point. Kardashian’s involvement in particular put her on the radar of opposition activists who slandered her as an Asad supporter although she never made any specific reference to the regime. A punned headline from the Daily Beast read “Kim Kardashian Butts Into Syria’s Civil War,” yet Cher retweeted something far more caustic when she wrote “Please check out what’s going on in Kessab, Syria. Innocent Christians and Armenians being killed by Turks #SaveKessab.” None of these high profile figures have retracted the misinformation that left opposition activists fuming at the double standard of calling what happened in Kessab a genocide while staying silent on Aleppo, Homs, and other parts of Syria decimated by war.    

In the days after Kessab’s capture, an image of a mutilated woman on a bed with a cross shoved down her throat that circulated months ago among Syrian Christians on Facebook resurfaced during the #SaveKessab campaign. Snopes published the image with a clip from the original Canadian film by special effects filmmaker Remy Couture to verify that the woman featured was a gore film actress not a Kessab Armenian. Surely, this was not the first internet hoax, but with distrust of the Armenian position in Syria’s war, opposition activists quickly rushed to discredit what they called “Armenian lies” about Kessab and promote their own hashtag #SaveAleppo as a counterpoint to the #SaveKessab campaign. At this point there are several emotionally-charged videos that capture the civilian toll of ongoing barrel bombings in Syria’s northern city to deflect attention given to Kessab.

[Facebook Profile Image for the #SaveKessab Campaign]

The Armenian Catholicos’s Story

On 9 April, the hyper-reality of internet discourse on Kessab was corrected by the Armenian Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia his holiness Aram I in Antelias, Lebanon. His interview with Civilnet was a reissuing of an earlier position formulated by the Armenian leader two years ago. He stated, “What happened in Kesab (sic.) must not be isolated from the rest of the Syrian conflict.” With this statement, his holiness put a kibosh on efforts of the Armenian diaspora to situate the events in Kessab only within the realm of Turkish-Armenian relations. He added, “Syrian Christians and Muslims have accepted us as part of their society, they shared with us their homeland, and we became an inseparable part of Syrian society, and in the last decades after the Genocide, we actively participated in the building and rebuilding of Syrian society...We believe that the Syrian conflict must be solved through a political process; the conflict must be “Syrianized” and also the process aimed at the solution of this conflict must be Syrianized.” His Holiness Aram I reiterated the position of “positive neutrality” when he stated, “As a community, we should not associate ourselves with any given regime, political ideology, or person, they are provisional…we remain attached to the supreme interests of Syria.” The statement was quickly translated into Arabic in hope that opposition activists would not prejudge all Armenians for the sins of a few.

The Syrian Regime’s Story

Many Armenians have understood the unleashing jihadists onto a surviving Armenian village a stone’s toss across the border as an attempt to finish what was started in 1915. Armenian fears were aggravated by a recent video showing militias crossing the Turkish border absent any Turkish border police. These fears have been capitalized on Syrian state media positioning the regime as protector of Armenians. Pro-regime commentators have made overt connections between the depopulation of Kessab and the 1915 genocide, stating “this attack on Kassab [sic.] is a reflection of Erdogan’s anger towards Armenia’s stand against his terrorism in Syria, and a reminder of the 1915 massacres and the historical Turkish animosity towards the Armenians.” Such statements have exploited Armenian fears for regime support. Even a military-garbed Lebanese artist, Ali Barakat, known for his anthems to Hizbullah fighters quickly launched a music video to support the regime’s campaign called “Seal Your Victory in Kessab.” While the song is just a variation of an earlier tune he wrote for the campaign in Yabrud, it attempts to harness anger and fear over Kessab as the regime works to repel opposition forces from Latakia province.

Turkey’s Story

Armenians cannot take the blame alone for Syria’s Rashomon effect, the Turkish press presented itself as the rescuers of Kessab’s Armenians offering them safe haven in Turkey. Hürriyet reported on two sisters, Sirpuhi and Satenik Titizyan, both in their eighties who were “rescued” claiming “they were now in “paradise.” Escorted by opposition fighters into Turkey, the elderly sisters stated, “Farmers and officials in the Turkish town are now taking care of their guests.” However, a very different account appeared when the women were interviewed in the Armenian Istanbul-based Armenian daily Agos. After arriving to Vakıflı, the last remaining Armenian village in Turkey in the Musa Dagh Mountains—a place known for its heroic resistance against deportation during the Armenian Genocide—journalist Lora Baytar reported that “ten bearded men entered and ransacked their home, saying that they were told not to be frightened and that the men were speaking Turkish, not Arabic. The two women reported that they were deported to the Turkish border, even though they told the men that they wanted to leave for the Syrian port city of Latakia.” As for their reaction to living in Turkey, rather than refer to it as “paradise” the women offered something less praising saying that “they needed to go “somewhere” because nobody was left there (in Kessab).” The women then compared relocation to Turkey to a morsel of bread. “If there is only one morsel of bread left in the entire world, we will eat that too.”

Instead of a story of rescue Agos told one of two women forcibly removed from Syria wherein Turkish-speaking militants played the role of perpetrator. In both accounts, the women related handing over their house keys to “bearded men” while Agos offered details about the ransacking of their home in Kessab. When the Agos interview was reprinted in yet another venue, Aydınlık, the interview was reframed as “Syrian Armenians Declare War Crimes of Erdoğan” sending a clear message, from its perspective, of who was to blame for the depopulating of Kessab.

While #SaveKessab intended to draw attention to the dramatic depopulation of Kesab and Turkey’s role in the event, as a social media campaign, it fell prey to “hoaxes” that typically spread viral on the internet—think Bonzai Kitten. Making Kardashian the fall girl for misinforming the public about Kessab merely highlighted the way in which celebrities rather than experts are looked to as purveyors of knowledge in an environment of anti-intellectualism. After all, the mainstream media quoted Twitter, Facebook pages of pro-opposition activists, lobbyists, and celebrities in search of the Kessab story which is hardly rigorous journalism.

While the internet has its own ability to produce gullible consumers, history shows there is a reason why such fears are easily stoked within the Armenian community. Images of sectarian murder have spread virally on state and social media paralyzing minority communities into submission to not only the Asad regime but to political interests more broadly. Turkey also got involved in the game—as did opposition activists—to dismiss sectarian concerns that were chalked up to mere hype. There was little effort to acknowledge what the loss of Kessab meant to the Armenian community and why its capture would produce such internet hysteria. The state sought to capitalize on the outrage over Kessab as it launches its campaign against opposition forces in Latakia province. Kessab is yet another manifestation of the Syria conflict’s Rashomon effect as each faction works to produce their own reality to gain support amid a hopeless political stalemate.

The Lambs of Kessab: A Requiem

Kessab is a place where Syria’s Armenians including myself summered for the celebration of the Virgin Mary during the heady days of August. I remember the lines of lambs outside a small chapel in a field in one of Kessab’s villages where people assembled for the sacrifices to the Virgin. Forty slaughtered lambs were converted into ten cauldrons of piping lamb and wheat porridge called “harisa” cooked over open wood fires and spooned out to the community. The long nights of celebration until daylight infused with nostalgia—a word that unites the Greek word for “homecoming” with that of “pain”—the longing for village life in Turkey lost to a crippling diaspora. Centered on the church, the heart of the summer ritual was the blessing of the grapes performed by the Armenian Archbishop of Aleppo. The grapes were symbolically harvested by the Archbishop while Kessab’s Armenians returned to their homes to cut their own vines after the ceremony.

During my last visit to Kessab during the celebration of St. Mary, we danced to the cool breeze late night in the fields near blood-stained front steps of the church where lambs were slaughtered earlier that day. Bits of a tail, tufts of wool, and pools of blood were left to soak into the soil before the Virgin’s chapel in a field near Kesab’s Eskuren village. The zurna, a double-reed wind instrument, hummed a familiar tune and the drum kept us on step as Armenians from all parts of Syria gathered hands, or more specifically pinkies, in a circle dance. Over the last decade, Kessab was noticeably overrun by Saudi tourists who summered there to escape the summer heat in the Gulf. We all noticed the two Saudi men, visibly without their families—a sign they thought the gathering inappropriate for loved ones—appear in the circle to dance with us. One man kept bullying the zurna player to play debka, an Arabic circle dance with a very different beat. Even though the instrument was familiar to the man, the rhythm, an Armenian tamzara, was completely foreign to him. The musicians refused to comply and kept playing Armenian tunes anyway.

I think about that episode today, the power dynamics laid bare in the exchange that seem more meaningful today: the failure on the part of the Armenian musician to accommodate the demands of outsiders suggesting he thought they should not be there, and the inability of the Saudi men to understand just what they were witnessing beside the church that night. For both parties, there was a failure to recognize the other. To the Armenians, the men were invaders and a threat to ritual. To the Saudi men, we were just a group of Armenians dancing in a field in Kessab. But to us, Kessab held intangible value as an artifact from a medieval Armenian kingdom that once ruled over this place and memory of village life before the great catastrophe that we reenacted every August.