Peace in the Middle East

Bharat Dogra

The Middle-East has for long remained a region which needs special attention for checking local violence as well as violence which can spread to a much wider part of the world. While this region includes mainly the West Asian region, given the special importance of neighbors Egypt and Turkey for this region, a wider regional category of the Middle-East is often defined to include these two countries as well.

As we see this region today, we see the highly distressing situation of several countries destroyed badly by war, civil war and invasions - Syria, Iraq and Yemen being the worst affected. Iran had also suffered the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Lebanon has suffered much in civil war. Kurd minorities in four nations have faced a lot from time to time. These have time and again been being used by big powers for their self-interest and then abandoned to their fate in a callous way. Altogether about five million lives have been lost due to war and civil war in the Middle-East region in the period after the Second World War; many more have suffered serious injuries, displacement and loss of livelihood.

Despite worldwide attention being focused on them for long periods, the prospects of the Palestinian people have worsened in recent times. Long pending issues of minorities like Kurds have remained unresolved. Democracy in most parts of the region, notwithstanding the 'spring' movements, has been on decline and internal tensions have been increasing in some of the most important countries of the region including Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Secularism is not even on the agenda of many countries. Old animosities - like Shia-Sunni divide - appear to be getting worse at the regional level. Very dangerous terrorist sectarian groups have emerged, and their activities can easily spill over to other parts of the world.

This region has emerged as one of the biggest importers of highly destructive weapons. The possibilities of such weapons reaching the hands of terrorist groups are high. One country of the region—Israel- already has nuclear weapons - two or three others may be in the race for acquiring such weapons in future. In addition, Turkey already has stocks of US/NATO nuclear weapons, and there has been much concern regarding these in recent times of coup attempts and deterioration of Turkey-US relations.

Two invasions by the USA were highly destructive for invaded people but also unleashed new extremely destructive forces. Another much discussed invasion may have even worse impacts. Not only are old rivals (Iran and Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel, Syria and Israel) more hostile than before, there are in addition new hostilities of the kind one could not have foreseen earlier (Saudi Arabia and Qatar).

Due to the enormous concentration of fossil fuels (oil and gas) in the region, there are high-level global actors who see a big stake in the region, and unfortunately often influence it in ways which increase the chances of violence, war, massive arms imports. These outsider actors, instead of contributing to resolving internal conflicts, often aggravate them and hence are seen as a major problem and not a solution. It is increasingly recognized that some of the western interventions, seen even from the narrow viewpoint of self-interest, had very harmful impacts while the impact on local people was much worse. Writing on the 16th anniversary of the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the USA and its allies, Paul Waldman wrote recently in the Washington Post ( March 20 2019-article titled 16 Years Back We Invaded Iraq, and What Did We Learn?), “It turned out to be the worst foreign policy disaster in American history, with more than 4500 American dead, 32000 wounded , trillions of dollars spent , and a region thrown into chaos with the rise of the Islamic State just one of the eventual consequences, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died.”

Availability of easy money from oil and gas exports has helped  powerful persons  and forces in this region to amass wealth and pursue life of extreme luxury, contributing also to ecological ruin. They have an important stake in prolonging fossil fuel consumption in world, while protecting the earth from ecological ruin needs extremely heavy cuts in fossil fuel consumption (and production) and the GHG emissions associated with this.

The excess of wealth associated with fossil fuel exports has led to neglect of more balanced development and diverse livelihood base. If the world succeeds in its much-needed aim of reducing fossil fuel consumption drastically, several Middle-East countries will have to grapple with new economic challenges as well. The search for more balanced development and diverse livelihoods should not be delayed any further.

Peace is essential in this region both to avoid very large-scale distress as well as to create the stability necessary for new initiatives in diversifying economy and ensuring balanced economic development. War in this region is even more destructive than other areas because of fires breaking out in the world’s biggest deposits of fossil fuels. Their adverse polluting impacts can travel a very long distance to many countries beyond the region.

Hence while peace, stability and balanced economic development are very important for people of this region, the rest of the world also has a very important stake in it. An agenda of peace, democracy, secularism (or at least inter-faith tolerance), balanced and diversified economic development with higher levels of economic, social and gender equality can ensure that even in the midst of declining demand for fossil fuel exports from the region, the people of this region can move towards a happier and more secure future. At the same time, the global threats of GHG emissions and terrorism will also be reduced considerably. All this may be tough to achieve, but it is possible.

The various close linkages among the forces of peace, balanced economic development, social (including gender) equality, social harmony and environment protection should be recognised at all levels. These forces and value systems favorable to them should be promoted in a big way.

In societies hostile to each other internal hostilities also tend to be high because of the overall mindset of animosity. Hence levels of domestic violence can also be very high. By establishing such linkages, a much wider support for peace, non-violence and social equality efforts can be secured. Similarly, once there is a base for more balanced economic development, this can be used to spread the message of social equality, gender equality, social harmony and peace as well. And all these efforts can together contribute to more space for environment protection.
There is a critical role here for spreading social values which are conducive to all this. This is a task to which the thoughtful people of this region should devote full attention, with adequate help from like-minded friends from outside the region. The United Nations and philanthropic organisations can also make a significant contribution.

The writer is a freelance journalist who has been involved with several social movements and initiatives.

Frontier
Dec 21, 2019