In his weekly online column for Israeli protest movement Gush Shalom, Middle East commentator Uri Avnery puts the United States’s push for regime change in Syria — through the stalking-horse of Lebanon — in the context of Graham Green’s novel The Quiet American. “The central character is a high-minded, naive young American operative in Vietnam. He has no idea about the complexities of that country but is determined to right its wrongs … The results are disastrous.”
In his vanity and ideological crudeness, US President George W Bush is very much in the mould of Greene’s CIA agent, Alden Pyle. Bush hailed last week’s anti-Syrian demonstrations in Beirut as “a great movement of conscience … millions across the Earth are on your side … freedom will prevail in Lebanon”. The protests were immediately dwarfed by a pro-Syrian demonstration by between half a million and a million Lebanese, organised by the Shi’ite paramilitary group Hizbullah.
Significantly, the latter protests appear to have been more representative of ordinary Lebanese, while the Lebanese opposition seems a largely middle-class affair, adorned by beautiful young women in Armani sunglasses. At the same time Omar Karami, the Syrian-backed Lebanese prime minister who stepped down last week in the wake of opposition protests, has now been returned to power.
Bush and the neo-conservative ideologues who surround him picture the Arab Middle East as a Manichaean struggle between light and darkness, democracy and tyranny, roughly similar to the alignment of forces in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe before the collapse of communism. In reality, the Lebanese opposition leading the alleged “Cedar Revolution” may turn out to be little more than a figment of Bush’s imagination, like the huge crowds of ecstatic well-wishers that were supposed to welcome American troops to Iraq. Lebanon is less a state than a geographical expression, where Christians, Druze, Shi’ites and Sunnis co-exist in a kind of armed truce and where, 30 years ago, factional loyalties exploded into internecine violence that killed 100 000 people. Syria is almost as splintered, along regional, ethnic and religious lines.
There should be no illusions about Bush’s policy, which has less to do with installing “democracy and freedom” in Lebanon than with cementing US political and economic hegemony in the Middle East. Just as toppling Saddam Hussein was the principal foreign policy goal of Bush’s first administration, unseating the Ba’athist regime of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is the current objective. Forcing a humiliating withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon is one way of pressurising the insecure Assad. It is likely to be followed at least by economic sanctions and the freezing of Syrian assets abroad.
It is becoming increasingly likely that the US crusade in Iraq will result in the fragmentation of that unfortunate country into three different states, two of them hard-line Islamic theocracies. Likewise, US policy in Lebanon/Syria may well backfire, fuelling instability and a new round of murderous factional struggle in the region.
“It is easy to ignite a civil war, out of fanaticism or intolerable naivety,” Avnery concludes. “George Bush runs around the world hawking his patent medicines of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ in total ignorance of hundreds of years of history. Where [these] banners are hoisted over a crusade by an avaricious and irresponsible superpower, the results can be catastrophic.”
A place by any other name …
As illustrated by the renaming of Pretoria, the former heartland of Afrikaner power and now a bastion of new authority, a street or a town by any other name is not the same. It is not a matter of merely changing signs from “Welcome to Pretoria” to “Welcome to Tshwane”. Names carry with them identities, a sense of heritage and memory. Names are firmly bound up with power and with identity. As with language rights, attempts to change them can stoke more unease and instability than a myriad other policy shifts. It is one of the reasons the post-apartheid government moved slowly to alter names.
With 10 years in office bringing a new self-confidence, and as muni- cipalities and other spheres of government begin to try and stamp their authority on the physical environment, the lobby to change names is growing. It is a symbolic exercise of new power that is both right and inevitable.
As we report this week, about 57 000 names are up for amendment. Among the categories that must go are those that demean, such as Kafferspruit and Boesmanskraal. Changing names that are duplicated at home or borrowed from abroad can hardly inflame passions. And it is arguably more aesthetically pleasing to cross the Tubatse, than the Steelpoort river. Polokwane, too, glides off the tongue more comfortably than Pietersburg.
Some names, such as Mafeking and Magaliesberg, have been restored to pre-colonial forms. And we could suggest a few more colonial relics that ought to go, including Port Elizabeth, East London and even Cape Town (though it’s doubtful that the Xhosa term for the Western Cape, “iKoloni”, will pass the muster with the new mandarins).
Change there must be. But there is also good sense in retaining some of our difficult past, both because it is part and parcel of being a reconciled nation, and because we need reminding of what was, so that we do not tread there in future.