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COMMENTARY
October 15, 2005
Bloody borders
Today, Iraq votes to approve or reject a Constitution written by elected delegates, that would, if it prevails, make that country the first credible democracy in the history of the Arab peoples. It is, potentially, a great milestone.There is no question this Constitution will be overwhelmingly supported, in the popular vote. It must pass region by region, however, and we wait to see whether Iraq’s Sunni community, which had most to lose by the fall of Saddam Hussein, will buy into it. They must freely embrace a future in which they have lost direct control over oil-rich territories, and their numbers are insufficient to dominate the government. Democracy is democracy, after all: it paints by number. Across the Arab world, the result will be watched with mixed feelings. Iraq is predominantly Shia, and Arab. The rest of that world is predominantly Sunni. Saddam was presented for many years as the “New Saladin” -- the conquering hero of the Sunni Arabs, the one leader who didn’t always lose, in confrontations with non-Arabs. The hunger for democracy is real, but almost everywhere effectively suppressed. And democracy in Iraq comes as an apparent setback to Sunni Islam. Moreover, insofar as mostly state-supported imams continue to preach that democracy is the work of the devil, Arabs must view the election in Iraq as a duel between religious and civil authority. Let us suppose that the Constitutional referendum goes well. Let us suppose, as optimistically, that this allows a popularly-elected government to emerge in Iraq that is strong enough to defend against the Islamist terrorists, and can eventually annihilate them. And let us indulge my own considered view (which I share with the Islamists themselves), that Iraq is the front line, the centre of action, the primary objective of the Islamist project to found a “new Caliphate”. Does it follow that, with defeat in Iraq, their back is broken? Unfortunately, no. The struggle will then persist, and probably escalate, at the peripheries -- at the “bloody borders of Islam”, as Samuel Huntington famously called them, noting that there were long-term, violent conflicts in almost every location in the world where an Islamic culture comes into physical contact with any non-Islamic culture. (He has been much condemned for this observation, but it is the factual truth.) In the last several weeks, there have been pronounced escalations of the Islamist “insurgencies” in, particularly, southern Russia and Indonesia. The insurgency in southern Russia was never confined to Chechnya, and is not an independence struggle of any sort, notwithstanding fond reports in Western media. From the beginning, the Islamists’ goal was, in their own words, “To spread a crescent of fire across the Caucasus, from the Black to the Caspian Sea,” and thereby advance the boundary between Islam and what the Islamists consider to be Christendom, moving it further in the direction of Moscow. The well-reported explosion of terror attacks this week in Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino-Balkar, were merely the most visible moment in a campaign that ignited last December, when Islamists were able to obtain large inventories of weapons after successful raids on Russian drug-control operations. The terrorists have, in the course of the last year, been able to perform suicide raids and hostage-takings in every one of the seven Muslim-dominated “republics” of the North Caucasus. Their techniques are those honed in Iraq, and the terrorists themselves have been moving freely, not only across internal Russian frontiers, but also the external ones. Many of those killed are not local people at all, but from Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and farther afield. Likewise, the well-reported recent suicide bombings in Bali were merely one incident in a larger Islamist escalation in Indonesia, that is going unreported except, cursorily, in Australia. Bali is a favoured target because it is the one large island in Indonesia that was never converted to Islam. It remains Hindu. But muffled reports continue to come in from across the archipelago. In Aceh recently (where the tsunami hit hardest last December), “militants” have chosen the Ramadan season to mount violent raids on surviving discos and bars. Two dozen Christian churches have been attacked, at Bekasi and elsewhere in western Java, along with several “liberal” mosques in the city of Cianjur. At Probolinggo in eastern Java, the Islamists hit a Western medical aid mission, and a couple more Christian churches. Protestant missionaries report the persistence of the murderous Jihad against old Christian settlements in remote parts of Sulawesi, and the Meluku islands, in an operation that ties up with the Islamist insurgency in the southern Philippines. One runs out of space. The paradox, here, is that there continues to be more real hope of defeating the Jihad in Iraq -- for neither the continuing appeasement of Islamists in Indonesia, nor the thuggish methods of the Russian army, are likely to prevail against them. Naïve as may seem, the building of a new, secular democratic order from the ground up, as in Iraq, has more of a chance. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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