Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World
by By Makiya, Kanan
Category: Political Science , International Relations , General

The first alarm about the brutality and totalitarian nature of Saddam Husain's regime was sounded eloquently in the widely praised international bestseller, Republic of Fear. Writing then under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil, Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi dissident in exile, exposed the premise and methodology of Saddam's Ba'ath Party and the power it wields over the state. Now - in Cruelty and Silence, writing for the first time under his own name, Makiya widens his scope to bravely - and certainly controversially - confront the rhetoric of Arab and pro-Arab intellectuals with the realities of political cruelty in the Middle East.Part One, a compelling example of the literature of witness, is a journey through cruelty told in the words of Khalil, Abu Haydar, Omar, Mustafa, and Taimour - the Arab and Kurdish heroes of this book. In a bid to place cruelty at the center of Arab discourse, the author fashions their testimony into stories, or metaphors for occupation, prejudice, revolution, and routinized violence. In 1991 Makiya entered Northern Iraq on a clandestine mission. He was the first person to bring the Ba'ath Party's campaign of mass murder known as the Anfal - a campaign comparable to those perpetrated by the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge - to the attention of the outside world. His account of the Anfal is contained in "Taimour" and it brings the journey through cruelty to a close.In Part Two, "Silence," Makiya links these tales of survival to an examination of the Arab intelligentsia's response to Saddam Husain and the Gulf War, showing that the flood of condemnation of the West for its handling of the crisis was barely matched by a trickle of protest over Saddam's brutal massacres of Arabs and Kurds. The words of intellectuals, he demonstrates, are separated by a gigantic chasm from those of the survivors. Makiya is sharply critical of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and also of the way the Gulf War was conducted and left unfinished by the Allied coalition. But he also argues that "anti-Zionism" and "anti-imperialism" have been turned by the Arab and pro-Arab intelligentsia into a "politics of silence" towards cruelty.In his exploration of these "landscapes of cruelty and silence," Makiya lays out the nationalist mythologies that underpin them. He calls for a new politics in the Arab world - a politics that puts absolute respect for human life, and revulsion at cruelty, above all else.