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L'Orient Le Jour, Lebanon

Shot Down at the Nexus of

Tyranny and Terror: Bhutto

“At the right moment - as though after making a brief desert crossing - the curses of both evil foes combine. It is well known that Pervez Musharraf - though an American ally - never ceased nurturing solid lines of communication with the most radical Islamist groups.”

EDITORIAL By Issa Goraieb

Translted By Kate Davis

January 1, 2008

Lebanon - L'Orient Le Jour - Home Page (French)

Beautiful. Luminous, elegant, with unimaginable class, even though the haughty silhouette had gotten a bit heavier in recent years. Intelligent, cultivated, charismatic as the most successful offspring of one of  the great political dynasties. But of all the assets that made up the strength of Benazir Bhutto, it was her courage, a courage that verged on recklessness - which will be remembered by history.

Was it an unshakeable faith in her lucky star, in a luckiness that was tragically absent Thursday in Rawalpindi? Or was it that superb unconsciousness that can bring the great to insolently defy their destiny? The fact is that by returning to her country after a long exile, by throwing herself into the crowds, the leader of the Pakistani opposition undoubtedly made an appointment with a death that was all but announced.

It was her turn to confront that terrible phenomenon that is hardly alien to the Lebanese. In our unfortunate country, politics has become, for years now, a very high-risk activity: risk that is very precise, well-known, understood and out in the open. That is something these men and women - who are courageous to the point of heroism or martyrdom - know quite well. But they continued anyway - and continue still - to defend their ideals of freedom, independence and sovereignty. In Lebanon, too, a former prime minister [Rafiq Hariri ] worried aloud more than once - in many parts of the world - that a formidable accumulation of hate was concentrated on his person; he was brutally eliminated as the others that have followed him - and the parallels don’t stop there.

That said, the Bhutto affair offers a brutal renewed relevance to a debate that alas, remains far from settled: It is a debate that revolves – inside not just one but three vicious circles – around that troubled relationship between tyranny and terrorism. Within this monstrous stranglehold, it is invariably democracy that gets steam-rolled under the helpless gaze of the international community.

First vicious circle: in societies dominated by misery, injustice and corruption, dictatorship inevitably leads to terrorism: a terrorism that is so devastating, from one end of this immense arc of crisis to the other, extending across the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East, that it finds a sacrilegious justification in religious faith. In a cruelly ironic backlash, the rise of terrorism feeds a repression that, in most cases, hardly troubles itself with democratic scruples and other human rights - and therein lies the second vicious circle.

But it is the third of these circles, however, that takes the top award for vice. At the right moment – as though after making a brief desert journey - the curses of both evil foes combine. It is well known that Pervez Musharraf - though an ally of the United States - never ceased cultivating solid lines of communication with the most radical Islamist groups.

Closer (too close) to us, the Baathist regime [Syria] paints itself in the eyes of the powerful as a precious and irreplaceable dam against the rise of fundamentalism. But with the nuance that the same groups it will not under any circumstances tolerate at home, it supports or at least manipulates on the territory of others. This is the sham that allows Syria, through the tender mercies of its henchman, to strip Lebanon of its institutions, one after the other, to better restore its past control. In response to this masquerade, Lebanon’s friends must cease being influenced by this deception, because Damascus benefits from the so-called terror vacuum that it uses to create the void in our country.

The case of Bhutto, Saturday’s sham election of the Assembly President [of Lebanon ], the threat of chaos made by more than one member of the [pro-Syria] opposition - none of this really helps bury this villainous year of 2007 as it deserves, this year of aberrations. May the next year be a triumph for law and reason.
 
igor@lorient-lejour.com.lb

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