This book speaks to the plight of
the Sunni middle class diaspora that is now two million strong and has little
prospect to return to their homeland.
This is a fact on the ground that has been ignored in media coverage and
it will not get better.
Recall that the aftermath of all
modern conflagrations is a massive movement of peoples away from sectarian danger. The end of the second war saw many millions
of Europeans displaced, mostly Eastern European Germans who had no hand in the
war itself but were still uprooted from deep into Russia . A counter flow of Poles was also initiated by
the Russians to secure their borders at the time. Many other movements took place at this time.
Similar flows took place during
the Korean and Vietnam
conflicts and the Palestinian flow is still raw because surrounding states
refuse to settle these populations.
That Iraq has failed to make
repatriation attractive as yet is a serious problem. Yet as it all settles down, perhaps this will
all have a somewhat happy ending. Germany ’s
example is there for all to see and it can be done easily. A handful of new Sunni towns in the Sunni
Triangle with high-rise complexes and two million are happily housed. Security is assured and a major economic
counter weight to Bagdad is also created.
Eclipse of the Sunnis:
Power, Exile and Upheaval in the Middle East
by Deborah Amos:
review
Sameer Rahim on a heartrending book about the plight of millions of
refugees, Eclipse of the Sunnis by Deborah Amos
By Sameer Rahim 6:30AM BST 21 Jul 2010
Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq ,
I doubt many people in Britain
knew the difference between a Sunni and a Shia. But since the civil war began
in 2003, there has been considerable curiosity about the complexity of
religious and political divisions in the Arab world.
In Eclipse of the Sunnis, the American journalist Deborah Amos
describes how nearly two million mainly Sunni Iraqis have fled their country
since the Americans and British invaded seven years ago. Her title references a
now famous theory proposed by King Abdullah of
Jordan that since the war a “Shia crescent” of influence has developed
from a newly emboldened Iran
through Shia-ruled Iraq , Syria and Hizbollah in Lebanon .
Abdullah contrasted these radical forces with the settled (some might say
pliant and undemocratic) Sunni states such as Jordan ,
Saudi Arabia and Egypt . The
message was designed as a rebuke to the US for unleashing a Shia revival
that would work against its interests.
Amos seems to accept this argument. Her research takes her to Damascus , the Syrian capital that has absorbed the bulk of
those fleeing the violence, as well as Amman and
Beirut . There
she speaks to former members of the Ba’ath party, ordinary Sunnis, Iraqi
Christians and others forced to flee from Shia militias or the general chaos of
their country.
These interviews present a heart-rending picture of refugees who are
the forgotten human cost of the invasion. Um Nour left Iraq when a
militant threw acid in her face. Her crime was being a Sunni married to a Shia.
Her husband abandoned her and she moved to Damascus , where she works as a prostitute in
a beauty salon. The only photograph the woman brought from Iraq , Amos
notes, was of a smiling Saddam Hussein, which she proudly displays on her
television. Another woman tells Amos that soldiers from a Shia militia came to Syria one summer, paid her for sex, and then
told her that if she ever returned to Baghdad
they would cut off her head.
Terrible as these stories are, Amos’s focus on the non-Shia victims of
the invasion leads her to idealise the Saddam era. She speaks to some actors
who had, apparently, flourished in the theatre before the invasion. But to
lament the censored theatre of the Ba’ath era when, as Amos admits, nearly
every Iraqi family now has a satellite dish on its roof, is peculiar.
A casual reader might also not register that much of the violence in
post-Saddam Iraq – certainly all suicide bombings – have been carried out by
Sunni insurgents or al-Qaeda and have targeted Shia mosques and markets. Or
that Shias make up 60 per cent of Iraq and so in a democracy will
have the lion’s share of power.
None the less, this book is worth reading for the varied opinions of
the Iraqi interviewees, which show that the invasion caused terrible losses but
also brought measurable gains.
The playwright Jawad al-Assady, an
exile from the Saddam era, felt relieved when he watched on television as
Saddam’s statue was pulled down. But when he returned, he could not believe
what had happened to his country: “This was a different city and a different
people. These were no longer the people I knew. This was not my memory.”
Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile and Upheaval in the Middle East
by Deborah Amos
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