How easy it is to put hatred on a map
Our guilt in this sectarian game is obvious. We want to divide
our potential enemies
By Robert Fisk
03/03/07 "The
Independent" - -- -- Why are we trying to divide
up the peoples of the Middle East? Why are we trying to chop
them up, make them different, remind them - constantly,
insidiously, viciously, cruelly - of their divisions, of their
suspicions, of their capacity for mutual hatred? Is this just
our casual racism? Or is there something darker in our Western
souls?
Take the maps. Am I the only one sickened by our journalistic
propensity to publish sectarian maps of the Middle East? You
know what I mean. We are now all familiar with the colour-coded
map of Iraq. Shias at the bottom (of course), Sunnis in their
middle "triangle" - actually, it's more like an octagon (even a
pentagon) - and the Kurds in the north.
Or the map of Lebanon, where I live. Shias at the bottom (of
course), Druze further north, Sunnis in Sidon and on the coastal
strip south of Beirut, Shias in the southern suburbs of the
capital, Sunnis and Christians in the city, Christian Maronites
further north, Sunnis in Tripoli, more Shias to the east. How we
love these maps. Hatred made easy.
Of course, it's not that simple. I live in a small Druze enclave
in the west of Beirut. But my local grocer and my driver are
Sunnis. I suppose they have no business to be in the wrong bit
of our map. So do I tell my driver Abed that our map shows he
can no longer park outside my home? Or that the Muslim publisher
of the Arabic edition of my book The Great War for Civilisation
can no longer meet me at our favourite rendezvous, Paul's
restaurant in east Beirut, for lunch because our map shows this
to be a Maronite Christian area of Beirut?
In Tarek al-Jdeidi (Sunni), some Shia families have moved out of
their homes - temporarily, you understand, a brief holiday, keys
left with the neighbours, it's always that way - which means
that our Beirut maps are now cleaner, easier to understand. The
same is happening on a far larger scale in Baghdad. Now our
colour-coding can be bolder. No more use for that confusing word
"mixed".
We did the same in the Balkans. The Drina Valley of Bosnia was
Muslim until the Serbs "cleansed" it. Srebrenica? Delete "safe
area" and logo it "Serb". Krajina? Serb until the Croats took
it. Did we call them "Croats"? Or "Catholics"? Or both on our
maps?
Our guilt in this sectarian game is obvious. We want to divide
the "other", "them", our potential enemies, from each other,
while we - we civilised Westerners with our refined, unified,
multicultural values - are unassailable. I could draw you a
sectarian map of Birmingham, for example - marked "Muslim" and
"non-Muslim" (there not being many Christians left in England -
but no newspaper would print it. I could draw an extremely
accurate ethnic map of Washington, complete with front-line
streets between "black" and "white" communities but The
Washington Post would never publish such a map.
Imagine the coloured fun The New York Times could have with
Brooklyn, Harlem, the East River, black, white, brown, Italian,
Catholic, Jew, Wasp. Or the Toronto Globe and Mail with French
and non-French Canadian Montreal (the front line at one point
follows the city Metro) or with Toronto (where "Little Italy" is
now Ukrainian or Greek), and colour the suburb of Mississauga
green for Muslim, of course. But we don't draw these Hitlerian
maps for our societies. It would be unforgivable, bad taste,
something "we" don't do in our precious, carefully guarded
civilisation.
Passing a book stall in New York this week, I spotted the
iniquitous Time magazine and there on the cover - and this might
truly have been a 1930s Nazi cover - were two cowled men, one in
black, the other largely hidden by a chequered scarf. "Sunnis vs
Shi'ites," the headline read. "Why they hate each other." This,
naturally, was a "take-out" on Iraq's civil war - a civil war by
the way, that America's spokesmen in Baghdad were talking about
in August 2003 when not a single Iraqi in his worst nightmares
dreamt of what has now come to pass.
Buy Time magazine, dear reader, turn to page 30, and what will
you find? "How to Tell Sunnis and Shi'ites Apart." Helpful, uh?
And after this, are columns of useful, divisive information.
"Names," for example. "Some names carry sectarian markers... Abu
Bakr, Omar and Uthman ... men with these names are almost
certainly Sunni. Those called Abdel-Hussein and Abdel-Zahra," (I
have never in met an "Abdel-Zahra" by the way) "are most likely
Shi'ite." Then there are columns headed "Prayer", "Mosques",
"Homes", "Accents" and "Dialects", even - heaven spare us -
"cars". The last, for those readers not already reeling in
disbelief, tells us which car stickers to look out for (spot a
picture of Imam Ali and you know the driver is Shia) or which
licence plate (Anbar province registrations, for instance) means
a probable Sunni driver.
Thanks again. I don't know why the American military doesn't
just buy up this week's edition of Time and drop the lot over
Baghdad to help any still ignorant local murderers with
easy-to-identify targets. But will Time be helping us to
identify America's deeply divided society (who has most rubbish
in their gardens in Washington, which bumper stickers to look
for in Dearborn, Michigan)? Will they hell.
I, too, am guilty of playing these little sectarian games in the
Middle East. I ask a Lebanese where he or she comes from, not to
remember the mountains or rivers near their home but to code
them into my map. But I easily come unstuck. The man who tells
me he comes from the Lebanese south (Shia) turns out to live in
the southern Druze town of Hasbaya. The woman who tells me she's
from Jbeil (Christian) turns out to be from the town's Shia
minority. Oh, if only these pesky minorities would go and live
in the right bit of our imperial, sectarian maps.
And we go on talking to our Sunni monarchs in the Middle East -
we listen to their raving about the "Shia crescent" - no wonder
we hate Shia Iran so much. And we go on dividing and scissoring
up the lands, and printing more and more of our racial maps and
I do wonder most seriously if we wish to promote civil war
across this part of the world, and you know what? I rather think
we do.© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
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