Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm happy to welcome Adam Morrow back to the show.
He's a reporter for Interpress Service.
IPSnews.net And, uh, if you click on the Middle East section there, you will find his articles, Gaza Crossing Let's Trickle Through, and an op-ed, Experts Fear Israeli Design to Balkanize Arab States.
And we'll go back and do a little revisionist history there in the second segment.
Both of these pieces are written, co-authored with Khaled Maoussa al-Amrani, whose name I apologize for saying wrong.
Welcome back to the show.
Adam, how are you?
Good, good, thanks.
I'm glad to be back, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm very happy to have you here, and I'm doing great.
Thanks very much for joining us today on the phone from Cairo, Egypt.
So, Gaza.
What exactly is the latest news from Checkpoint Rafah?
Sure.
Well, there isn't much news to report, unfortunately.
If you remember, I'm sure your listeners remember that in April, Egypt's new foreign minister, Nabil al-Arabi, had made a bunch of promises about opening the border on a permanent basis.
And as I'm sure your listeners are also aware, the Rafah border crossing is the only means of entry or exit for the roughly 1.5 million people of Gaza who have been basically held in an open-air prison for the last four or five years between Israel and Egypt, both of which have closed their borders, definitively closed their borders in 2006 and 2007, respectively.
So the fate of Rafah, whether it's open or closed, basically determines whether or not these people will have access to the outside world and will be able to import badly needed humanitarian supplies.
And now you say that the border has now been, after some back and forth and each side closing the border and a little tit-for-tat thing, Hamas and the new Egyptian military government there, and some of these things, I think you indicate most of this has been ironed out, and that, am I right, that the way it stands now is that the crossing is now open for eight hours a day, six days a week?
That's right.
But to say that everything has been ironed out is inaccurate.
We have to be careful, because Nabil al-Arabi, as I said, Egypt's new foreign minister, had promised in April that the crossing would be opened on a permanent basis, the implication being that it would function like a normal international border, which allows commercial goods as well as passengers in and out.
Now, as it currently stands, only individual travelers are allowed to go in and out, and it's still impossible to get large shipments of commercial goods inside the Strip.
And as you know, especially since Israel's 2008-2009 war on the Strip, it's been in desperate need of building supplies, especially cement, in order to rebuild their destroyed infrastructure.
So if you remember, you also had on your show maybe a month or two ago, a friend of mine on, Ahmed El-Asi, who was trying to get a shipment of cement, if you remember, was trying to get a shipment of the first shipment of cement into the territory.
Yeah, he and Kenneth Keith.
No, they never managed to get in.
They had a lot of back and forth with the ministry.
So what you did have is you did have, following this promise by the foreign minister, on May 28th, it did open to passengers, and it did increase its working hours, as you mentioned.
Egypt eased the visa restrictions that were generally applied to Palestinians entering or Gazans entering Egypt.
But then it closed suddenly.
For a period of three days or so, it closed.
Egypt suddenly refused several Palestinians' entry, saying that they were on a list of people banned from travel.
It also set daily limits on the number of passengers who were allowed to come in, the number of Palestinians that were allowed to enter Egypt each and every day.
So what happened then was Egypt suddenly announced that because of technical reasons, the border would be closed without notifying the Palestinian side.
So then the Palestinian side of the border closed it unilaterally themselves to protest, as a form of protest against these new restrictions.
And then finally, I think, let's see, when was it?
I think it was on June 5th.
All of these minor issues were ironed out.
The border did open again to Palestinian travelers, to individual travelers.
But as I mentioned, traffic is still confined to individual passengers.
There's a 500 daily maximum on the number of Palestinians that can enter Egypt.
And as well, you still don't have major commercial goods going in, major commercial transactions allowed into the territory.
So not that much has changed.
And what you have now is a situation where a lot of people are saying, oh, well, they're saying, oh, the border's been reopened.
When in fact, that's not entirely true.
Not that much has changed.
You do have a couple hundred individual passengers going back and forth, but major commercial transactions, commercial commodities, big commodities, you know, building supplies, medical equipment and stuff like that, is still not being allowed in.
There have been a couple of exceptions in the cases of medical equipment.
But aside from that, it's totally controlled.
And it hasn't been opened to the extent that was promised by the foreign minister two or three months ago.
Well, yeah, I guess all I meant by smoothed out was that for the time being, the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip and the Egyptian government, they have an understanding whether it's what the people want or what, you know, those who believe in human dignity would like to see or whatever is kind of a separate question.
But then on that point, is Hamas pushing for a further opening of this crossing and for trade?
Of course.
I mean, Hamas is desperate to have the crossing function of any normal international border crossing would function, allowing in commodities as well as passengers without limits, without these daily limits that have been set by the Egyptian government.
Another interesting thing to note is that Nabil al-Arabi, the foreign minister that I mentioned before who had made these promises, has since actually been kicked upstairs, as it were, to the chairmanship of the Arab League.
That was announced maybe three weeks ago, something like this.
It was suddenly announced that he would be taking the place of Amr Moussa, who is the current president or the current secretary general of the Arab League.
So you will have a new foreign minister that will be announced, I think, just two days ago.
Egypt did announce the acting foreign minister, who is someone named Mohammed al-Arabi, and he is a former ambassador.
I think he served in ambassadorial positions in Germany and the U.S. in the past, and he is basically coming.
He is preparing to step in as Egypt's new foreign minister.
Now, what that means for the earlier promises that Nabil al-Arabi had made, nobody really knows yet.
But what's interesting is, in general, you have this new foreign minister being put in place post-revolution, making all of these very positive statements that were highly welcomed by the Egyptian public vis-à-vis opening the border, reestablishing ties with Hamas, and possibly reestablishing diplomatic relations with Iran.
And then, before any of these things were implemented, he was kicked upstairs to the Arab League, and you have a new person coming in.
So we don't really know exactly which direction Egyptian foreign policy is going to go in now.
Well, now, I guess, leaving aside the elections, which I think you told me before, people do reasonably expect that there will be elections of some form in September, that kind of thing.
But I wonder, for now, with the military council ruling Egypt, they must still be, I mean, I know they got rid of the most pro-American guys or whatever, the closest to Israel and to Hosni Mubarak in the United States, but the Israelis and the Americans must have an incredible amount of influence among the military officers who now are on the, quote-unquote, as far as we can tell, I think, Adam, temporary military council that rules Egypt.
Right?
Yeah, that's for sure.
Egypt has had a very long history under the Mubarak regime of very close military-to-military connection with the United States, from which it gets a large amount of military funding, military aid as well as economic aid.
Camp David Accords were signed in 1979.
So the military council is definitely very close to the United States.
I believe it was Sami Amin who was the chief of staff of the military, a very high-ranking member of the council, was actually in the United States when the revolution began on January 25th.
So this is a very important point.
This is a very big question.
How free is Egyptian policy under this new ruling council?
Hey, whatever happened to Omar Suleiman that the New York Times said Obama was outright saying, we want the head of the secret torture police to be the next dictator, and we're trying hard, we're pushing for him?
I think he's been brought up on charges.
I haven't really been following too closely.
There have been a whole host of figures associated with the former regime who are now facing charges, including the president himself and his funds.
I'm pretty sure that Omar Suleiman definitely has had some charges brought against him.
Is that a genuine thing, you think?
Or is this just for public consumption?
That's also a very good question, especially when it comes to Mubarak, because there's very strong pressures coming to the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia, not to prosecute him.
And much of the public, there have actually been big demonstrations in Tahrir Square in the last couple of months demanding the immediate prosecution of Gamal Mubarak and his funds and his cronies.
Well, that's kind of the tradition, right, is for the sovereigns to always support each other no matter what and never directly target each other.
In fact, it's been Israeli and American policy that's done the most to undermine that tradition, as their puppet is now finding out for the worse, I guess.
Right.
Well, I think it sets a really bad precedent for the other dictators of the region.
When they see one of their own really, truly going down.
It means they'll fight harder to hold on to what they got if they don't think that they can just get on a plane but that they're going to be prosecuted.
That's right.
That's right.
That the same fate awaits them as well.
This is true.
It was just announced yesterday that Mubarak is suffering from stomach cancer as well.
I don't know if that's true or if that's some kind of ruse as well, that they'll pull some kind of medical excuse to get him out of any true punishment.
I don't know, but there are definitely pressures to keep him from being prosecuted to the full extent of what he should be.
All right.
Well, now, so this is a good way to get back into and talking about what the Israelis and the Americans want for the future of Egypt.
It's your next article, Experts Fear Israeli Design to Balkanize Arab States.
Shades of David Wumser here.
Let's expedite the chaotic collapse and reduce what are now Muslim states left over from British rule into just warring tribal factions that can never oppose us.
Well, this is something that has a long pedigree in the Middle East.
This is something that most people of the Middle East were politically aware, realized that they've already been the victims of this kind of Balkan invading from the end of the First World War, when the Ottoman Empire was basically divided up by the colonial powers and broken up into these modern nation states that actually didn't exist before, you know, before 1918, 1921.
Yeah, it was all run out of Turkey before then.
Exactly, exactly.
It was all the Ottoman Empire under the Khalifa in Istanbul.
Exactly.
And there were different provinces, but this notion of individual states each being ruled by an individual ruler, that's something that's only less than 100 years old in the Middle East.
And people, like I said, those who are politically aware, completely understand that they've been the victims before of just this sort of Balkanization, and they fear that this Balkanization is still going on into the modern period, especially in the case of Iraq, for example, which is in the process of being broken into three different parts.
And, of course, Sudan is on the verge, southern Sudan is on the verge of announcing independence from the northern Khartoum government, and that's going to happen within the next week or two, which will officially break Africa's largest country, which is officially an Arab country, into two halves.
So people are fully aware of this possibility.
That war has been going on for a long time, but as you note in your article, the southerners were armed by the Israelis, and it's now the Americans in the UN who are pushing for southern secession, which, you know, I'm for secession in general, but as a divide-and-conquer strategy of imperial powers, that's something else, you know?
Right, right.
And you have the same sort of fears about Egypt itself, because as you've known since the revolution, before the revolution as well, but especially after the revolution, you've had a lot of these sectarian flare-ups in Egypt, between its Christian minority and its Muslim majority, and a closer examination of most of these flare-ups, where you would have churches being attacked and that sort of thing, a closer examination will reveal that these crimes weren't perpetrated by, you know, fundamentalist Muslims, as the media loves to try to portray it, but were in fact perpetrated by hired thugs, who are associated with elements of the former regime.
So you do have people in there with uncertain agendas, who are trying to rile up problems between the Egypt's Christians and Egypt's Muslims, who have traditionally lived in harmony for a thousand years.
There's not a history of pogroms or attacks, you know, mutual attacks between the two communities.
That's all a fairly recent phenomenon, and that has led to fears by some local analysts and politically involved people, that there's an agenda to break Egypt into a Muslim and a Christian half as well.
Yeah, well, and of course we're going to see Libya falling apart, and up against the wall there, NATO, either they're going to have to invade the place and sack Tripoli, or they're going to have to at least try to split the country in half, as you talk about.
Well, I'm not a Libya expert, but I will say it seems strange to me that NATO, which is the most awesome military alliance in the world, one would think that it would be able to do away with the Qaddafi regime within a matter of days.
So it does raise questions as to what their true intentions are.
And of course people also have a lot of questions about the nature of this revolutionary government out of Benghazi.
Sure.
Well, on the first point, I think there's just a limit to air power.
They've tried to kill him a few times now, killed his grandkids and stuff like that.
But I think if they could have the whole country, they probably would take it.
But then again, if they could have just the east, they'd settle for that.
And also, as you say, it could just be another example of helping break up and balkanize the Arab world to make it easier for the Israelis and the Americans to dominate.
After all, what's harder to deal with?
If you can't have a loyal dictator in Egypt, why not just have Egypt become a region instead of a state and just a bunch of tribal factions and political factions and whatever, and no one to run a military that could ever do anything?
Right.
Well, that would certainly, a situation like that or a scenario like that would certainly be much easier to control and to keep in line if they're busy fighting their own small sort of secondary wars between each other and keep them sort of in a state of perpetual chaos.
Well, but the people of Egypt, Christian and Muslim alike, must be hip to at least the idea that this could be going on.
And there's got to be a lot of nationalism and resistance to this kind of thing as well, right?
Well, one of the things that the Tahrir uprising and many of the demonstrations that followed it, a central theme of those demonstrations and the revolution was national unity.
So there definitely is an awareness amongst much of the public that there are efforts by, you know, behind the scenes efforts to drive a wedge between those two communities.
So people are aware.
I'd just like to say on another point about Libya, one of the sources in my article made a very good point.
And he is actually the head of a party called the Tawheed al-Arabi, which is Arabic unification.
The whole raison d'etre of the party itself is to reunify the Arab lands after they were balkanized in 1918.
And he basically says that the main aim, the reason behind the idea of breaking up Libya, prevent the unification of a single, you know, post-revolutionary region stretching from Egypt, basically, across Libya to Tunisia, a single unified Arabic area there that would be free of its dictators and free of Western diktats.
They don't want to see that.
They're afraid of that.
So what they want to do is basically draw a line through Libya and basically break up, prevent, stop at all costs that unification in northern Africa.
Sure, yeah.
I think disrupting the there's an Arab spring and it's working narrative was high on the list of priorities in the intervention in Libya.
It also kind of confuses the issue as to whether America is on the side of every single torture dictatorship in the region, less, I guess, Syria and Iran, or whether we're on the side of the little guy, which is important for the American TV audience.
Right.
Well, I'll tell you, this Arab spring thing has really, really shown up American hypocrisy for what it is.
I mean, it's really forced them to choose sides.
And it's really it's really forced them to show their hand, basically.
And as you can see, while they come down hard on places like Libya and Syria, they continue to prop up their their their dictators, their their loyal dictators in places like Bahrain, for example.
So, you know, Obama even called the Iranians hypocrites for supporting the protesters in Bahrain while they put down their protest movements.
It didn't even occur to him or his teleprompter riders that, hey, man, what kind of hypocrite are you are acting like the Iranian ayatollahs helping the king of Bahrain put down their protesters?
I mean, come on, man.
This is so obvious.
It's like when Rush Limbaugh said, yeah, we ought to round up all the Arabs and put them in detention camps.
FDR did it as though that's not what proves it was evil instead of that's what proves it's OK.
You know, these people are crazy.
It's like they can't even hear themselves.
It's something they've done all throughout the course of this occupation of Iraq, something that I've noticed where they're constantly accusing Iran of meddling in the region when they're actually occupying these countries and attacking them with drones and doing all of the stuff that they would then turn and turn to Iran, which is which is right next door.
I mean, you think Iran would almost have a right to sort of be involved in Iraq, considering it shares a long border with it and had fought an eight year long war with it.
And the fact that there's so many Shia in Iraq.
I mean, the Iranians, the reasons for intervening in Iraq seem far more justified than the U.S.
But Washington never tires of accusing these other other regional actors of doing exactly what it's doing.
Yeah.
I remember reading about some Marines trudging through some guy's farmland.
They ask him, hey, have you seen any foreign fighters around here?
And the old Iraqi man just says, you guys.
What do you think you are exactly?
All right.
Listen, man, we're very shocking.
We're all out of time and overtime, but I thank you very much for yours, Adam.
It's always great to talk to you.
Sure, sure.
Good to talk to you anytime, Scott.
Everybody, that's the great Adam Morrow, reporter for Inter Press Service.
That's IPS News Dot Net.
He co-authors his articles with Khaled Moussa al-Amrani and writes from Cairo, Egypt.
