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Middle East Quarterly
Summer 2004
By Jonathan Eric Lewis
Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many have rightly
cited the Middle East's democracy deficit as one of the prime reasons
that the region has produced so much terrorism and political violence.
In a November 2003 speech to the National Endowment for Democracy,
President George W. Bush argued that while we should not expect
democratizing societies in the Middle East to be identical to
post-industrial America, there are some common features to what he
termed "successful societies." These include the limited power of the
state and its military, the impartial rule of law, a robust civil
society, property rights, religious freedom, and the rights of women.[1]
But if Washington is to be successful in fostering democratic change in
the Middle East and in promoting stability within states that have
ongoing ethnic conflicts, it must put linguistic freedom—the right to
freely speak and educate one's children in one's native language—on par
with other concepts such as women's rights and religious freedom. The
lack of linguistic freedom in much of the Middle East is part and parcel
of the region's general stagnation under archaic political systems.
Given the vast diversity of ethno-linguistic groups throughout North
Africa, Anatolia, the Levant and Mesopotamia, and the Persian Gulf, it
is striking that just three regional languages dominate the public
arena: Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. This is the legacy of
European-style nationalism in the Middle East: linguistic conformity has
been made a staple of national identity, as states still labor to
achieve a nineteenth-century European ideal of the nation-state.
There is nothing wrong with a state imposing a certain degree of
linguistic uniformity in order to achieve a measure of national
cohesiveness, such as the case in Israel where modern Hebrew acted as a
means of fostering a new, unifying national identity. However, when a
state's policy shifts from using a language as a means of fostering
national unity to a deliberate policy of denying or eradicating the
cultural identity of minority groups, it bodes ill for tolerance in the
polity as a whole. Such has been the case with the Assyrians in Iraq,
the Kabyles in Algeria, and the Kurds in Turkey. A proper balance would
allow simultaneously for a unifying national language, such as Arabic or
Hebrew, together with a legally protected right for all minority groups
to speak their native languages at home and to print material in these
languages for personal use without fear of state repression.
The ideal of linguistic conformity, however, is pervasive throughout the
Middle East although actual policies have differed from state to state.
Baathist Iraq, perhaps the most totalitarian of all the Middle Eastern
regimes and certainly the most violent, had an extremely harsh language
policy that conformed to its fascistic interpretation of Arab
nationalism. Algeria's Kabyles and Turkey's Kurds have also been
subjected to state pressures, and have reacted by developing political
movements that have resisted official language policy. By contrast,
Israel, through its laissez-faire linguistic policies, has defused some
of the resentment of its large Arabic-speaking minority. By according
official standing to Arabic, it has bought the acquiescence of a large
Arabic-speaking Muslim minority that has yet to come to terms with the
legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state.[2]
These four countries—Algeria, Iraq, Israel, and Turkey—provide different
models for the relationship between state power and linguistic freedom.
The Arabization policies of Iraq and Algeria ultimately foreshadowed
infernos of political violence. Turkey's language policies led to
internal destabilization, particularly in the primarily ethnic Kurdish
southeast. The linguistic policies of Israel have contributed to a
relative degree of internal stability. What this variation shows is that
there is a high correlation between the suppression of languages, the
suppression of dissent, and political violence. As U.S. policymakers
raise the flag of women's rights and religious freedom, they should
consider whether linguistic freedom, of the kind practiced in the United
States, isn't just as suitable for promotion in the Middle East.
Iraq as Babel?
While significant attention has been devoted to guaranteeing religious
pluralism in post-Baathist Iraq, particularly for the minority
Christians and the majority Shi'ites, scarce attention has been devoted
to the need for linguistic pluralism.
Iraq, upon independence in 1933, was a linguistically pluralistic state
whose inhabitants spoke Iraqi Arabic (in several local dialects),
Armenian, Assyrian, Judeo-Arabic, Kurdish, and Turkmen. Over the
remaining century, and particularly under Baathist rule (1968 to 2003),
Iraq became an increasingly Arab state in which Arabic enjoyed a
privileged and dominant status. Under Saddam Hussein, ethno-linguistic
minority groups such as the Kurds, Assyrians and Turkmen experienced
extreme persecution and were severely restricted in their ability to
speak and educate their children in their own language.
In the new Iraq, first steps have been taken to restore linguistic
pluralism. Article 9 of the transitional Iraqi constitution, promulgated
in March 2004, defines both Arabic and Kurdish as the two official
languages of Iraq and also guarantees the "right of Iraqis to educate
their children in their mother tongue, such as Turcoman [i.e., Turkmen],
Syriac, or Armenian, in government educational institutions in
accordance with educational guidelines, or in any other language in
private educational institutions."[3] The fact that this was agreed upon
by the Iraqi Governing Council should be seen as an underreported
victory of the Coalition Provisional Authority in its efforts to foster
a pluralistic polity, embracing not only Kurds but also Assyrians and
Turkmen.
Nevertheless, more needs to be done to guarantee the linguistic rights
of the Iraqi Shi'ite community. Najaf has long had a history of
linguistic pluralism with Shi'ites from Persia, Azerbaijan, Bukhara, and
Lebanon studying in the city's madrasas (Islamic schools). Indeed, from
the mid-eighteenth-century to the most recent decades, the majority of
Najaf's students were not Arabic-speakers at all. Historian Yitzhak
Nakash writes:
Iraqi Shi'is asserted that unlike intellectual activity at al-Azhar,
which was molded by the local culture and trends in modern Egypt,
activity at Najaf became less influenced by the city's indigenous Arab
environment and instead was dominated by a Persian spirit. The strong
Persian presence in the madrasa distanced Najaf from Baghdad, thereby
hindering the potential social and intellectual exchange between Sunnis
and Shi'is in Iraq. Foreign linguistic elements penetrated into the
Arabic dialect of Najaf, and the method of study became patterned after
the Persian.[4]
Given that the Grand Ayatollah 'Ali as-Sistani, the country's pivotal
power-broker, speaks Arabic with a Persian accent, there is an obvious
need for guarantees of linguistic pluralism for the ethnically diverse
Shi'ites who will be returning to Najaf for scholarship. While
Washington should not actively take part in intra-Shi'ite theological
disputes, it should use its leverage in Iraq to guarantee that speakers
of Persian and Persian-influenced Arabic are not discriminated against
in the public administration of Iraq.
Nowhere in the Middle East does the United States have a greater
opportunity to foster linguistic pluralism than in Iraq. The provisional
constitution, while theoretically protecting the linguistic rights of
Armenians, Assyrians, and Turkmen, will be but a piece of paper unless
its provisions for linguistic freedom are vigorously enforced by the
Iraqi judiciary. Washington further has the obligation to make sure that
the Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq do not abuse their newfound
freedoms to discriminate against non-Kurdish speakers, particularly
Assyrians, who fear that they will lose opportunities for bilingual
Arabic and Assyrian education. Given the strong correlation between the
persecution of ethno-linguistic minorities and state violence in Iraq,
policymakers should consider the status of linguistic pluralism as a
bellwether for Iraq's success in nation-building.
Overly Arabized Algeria
Algeria, although a member of the Arab League, is linguistically
diverse. A majority of the country's inhabitants speak Algerian-dialect
spoken Arabic. But Algeria's heritage includes Berber, Roman, Jewish,
Moor, Arabic, Ottoman, and French influences.[5] Both Tamazigh (Berber)
and French are spoken by large numbers of Algerians as first languages.
In the name of national unity and the consolidation of identity, the
state has pursued a policy of Arabization against both languages, which
has had dire consequences for the political stability of the country.
The first target of Arabization was French. During the long period of
French colonial rule from 1830 to 1962, many Algerians, particularly
members of the educated and urban classes, used French as a primary
language. Such was the degree of French linguistic influence on Algerian
society and politics that Algeria's first president, Ahmed Ben Bella, on
release from French prison, proclaimed his adherence to Arab nationalism
in French: "Nous sommes des Arabes!"("We are Arabs!")."[6] Ben Bella's
use of French to proclaim his anti-imperialism and Arab-Islamic
nationalism was paradoxical, for it was he who, as president (1962-65),
initiated the policy of linguistic Arabization in the country's primary
schools.
Arabization took a particular form. The leaders of independent Algeria
wished to link the country to the wider Arab world, which it regarded as
the cultural counter-weight to France. Hugh Roberts, vice-president of
the Society for Algerian Studies, has written:
The Arabisation policy was based on the premise that neither French nor
the colloquial Arabic and Berber spoken in Algeria could serve as the
language of education and administration. Its aim was accordingly to
make the modern literary Arabic, which had been developed as the lingua
franca of the Mashriq, the national language of Algeria.[7]
The promotion of this brand of Arabization gained momentum under
President Houari Boumedienne (1965-78), who declared a révolution
culturelle to accompany the country's radical economic and foreign
policies. Boumedienne's Arabization drive was intended to link Algeria
to revolutionary ideologies in the rest of the Arab world. But due to
the lack of native speakers of modern standard Arabic, Algeria imported
teachers from the Levant and Egypt, many of whom were sympathetic to
Islamism. Their teaching had an unintended consequence of strengthening
Islamism as an ideology in Algerian public life.
Also, because French remained the language of commerce, young educated
speakers of Arabic—the so-called Arabisants—did not command adequate
French for career advancement. These Arabisants gravitated to the study
Islamic law and literature at the university level, rather than the
francophone science and technology courses. This made them susceptible
to Islamist teaching.[8] The migration of lower class, rural Arabisants
into Algerian cities also played into the hands of Islamists. They would
become the shock troops of the Islamist insurgency of the 1990s.
Islamists still had to resort to French in order to recruit more
educated followers. One of the best-selling Islamist newspapers in newly
independent Algeria, Humanisme Musulman, was in French, not in
Arabic.[9] Likewise, La Cause, the diaspora newspaper of the Front
Islamique du Salut (FIS), an Islamist group, was published in French.
But the Arabic-French divide largely came to subsume the
Islamist-secular split, which itself resulted in part from forced
Arabization.
All of Algeria paid a price for Arabization, but it posed a direct
threat to the identity of the Kabyles. Numbering approximately 20
percent of Algeria's population and a disproportionately large number of
its intellectual class, Kabyles are a non-Arab, nominally Muslim
community. Their ancestral homelands of Greater and Lesser Kabylia
border the Mediterranean Sea. Kabyles speak Tamazigh, an Afro-Asiatic
language linguistically unrelated to Arabic, and they trace their
descent to the pre-Islamic Berber community indigenous to North Africa.
Kabyles played a significant role in the Front de Libération Nationale
(FLN), the Algerian nationalist movement that fought for independence
from France, only to be politically sidelined by the Arab-Muslim
elements within the FLN once independence was achieved in 1962.
Governmental restrictions on Tamazigh-related activity began immediately
upon independence. They included the abolition of the chair of Berber
studies at Algiers University in 1962 and the criminalizing of the
possession of Tamazigh dictionaries. After the cancellation of a lecture
on Berber poetry by Kabyle activist Moulaoud Mammeri in the Kabyle city
of Tizi Ouzou in 1980, a series of riots and demonstrations were
sparked, often termed the Tizi Ouzou Spring, leaving several hundred
dead or wounded. More recently, Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika,
in a nation-wide television address, termed Tamazigh "a factory of
division in national unity."[10]
The pressure has come not only from the state. Algerian Islamists have
likewise victimized the Kabyle community and are responsible for bomb
attacks against Kabyle music concerts and the kidnapping and eventual
murder of the famous Kabyle singer Matoub Lounes, who had told a Kabyle
newspaper that he was "neither Arab nor Muslim."[11]
Linguistic freedom has been one of the linchpins of the Kabyle political
movement. The Movement for the Autonomy of Kabylia (MAK, founded 2001)
is the most politically sophisticated of all the Kabyle ethno-linguistic
political movements. The MAK, partially led by Ferhat Mehenni, a Kabyle
singer-activist, advocates autonomy for Kabylia along the lines of that
enjoyed by the Catalonians, Flemish, Welsh, and Scottish peoples.[12]
The MAK boycotted the April 2004 Algerian presidential elections on the
grounds that Algiers has refused to recognize Tamazigh as an official
(rather than just a "national") language.
Algeria's Arabization policy has had repercussions for both Europe and
the United States. It has contributed to the growth of militant Islam
within the Algerian public sphere, fueling not only the Algerian civil
war but also the growth of a fundamentalist Arabisant Algerian diaspora
in both Europe and North America. More recently, continuing clashes
between the Kabyle minority and the country's security forces have
clouded Algerian-U.S. cooperation in the ongoing war on terror, as
Washington is reluctant to work with security forces responsible for
suppression of a peaceful minority.
Unfortunately, President Bouteflika is using a restrictive linguistic
policy to forge a national consensus. He seeks to reconcile Arab
nationalists and Islamists by refusing to grant broad linguistic rights
to the increasingly restless Kabyle minority. Arabization has become one
more prop of an authoritarian regime that refuses to engage in
much-needed economic and political reforms. The very least the United
States can do, to begin to move Algeria in the direction of those
reforms, is to stand on the side of linguistic diversity and urge the
regime to abandon Arabization. Otherwise, the number of Arabisant
Islamists will continue to swell into the next decade, and so too will
the resentment of the Kabyles.
Talking Turkish
Although Turkey is one of the most Western, and certainly pro-American
countries, in the Middle East, Turkey's language policy nevertheless
remains one of the harshest and most uncompromising. That policy has
become one of the prime impediments to Turkey's possible accession to
the European Union (EU). A recent report from the European parliament
that argued against Turkey's accession cited Ankara's treatment of its
linguistic minorities among the reasons for denying Turkey's entry.[13]
The policy in question is Ankara's denial of linguistic freedom for its
Kurdish minority.
To understand Turkey's harsh restrictions on speaking and publishing in
non-Turkish languages, it is necessary to recall the difficult
circumstances that faced the nascent Turkish republic at independence.
From the late Ottoman period onwards, the country's elite sought
acceptance in Europe by embracing European-style notions of the nation.
By a process of Turkification, they also sought to prevent the emergence
of alternative national identities. They had learned, from long and
bitter experience, that national groups under Ottoman rule could appeal
to European powers to support separatist aspirations. By this process,
the empire had lost most of its Balkan possessions.
The Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 ended the Turkish war of independence
against both European and Greek forces and gave birth to the secular
Turkish Republic. By its terms, Turkey had to recognize the rights of
non-Muslim minorities such as Armenians and Greeks to educate in their
own language. But these were small minorities whose national aspirations
were being realized outside of Turkey's borders. The danger, in the
minds of the Turkish-speaking elite, lay in Anatolia, among Muslim
minority groups within the Turkish Republic. What was to keep them from
making separatist demands? Turkey therefore successfully excluded their
linguistic rights from the treaty.[14] Indeed, such disparate
ethno-linguistic groups as the Albanians, Abkhaz, Arabs, Bosnians,
Chechens, Circassians, Kurds, and Laz are not officially recognized by
the state and have instead been subsumed under a monolithic Turkish
identi ty.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's adamant secularism, or Kemalism, has likewise
determined Turkish linguistic policies. As a means of breaking with the
Islamic past, not only did Atatürk abolish the caliphate, but he also
rid Turkish of Arabic and Persian elements, and replaced its Arabic
script with a Latin one. This policy was deliberately intended to lessen
the strength of Islam, by making the great body of extant religious
literature inaccessible even to literate Turks. In 1932, the newly
formed Türk Dil Kurumu (TDK), an organization devoted to promoting the
Turkish language and protecting it from foreign influences, excised
thousands of Arabic and Persian words from the new, modern Turkish
lexicon.[15] The degree of success of this process is evident in both
the generally high literacy rate among Turks, and the inability of the
vast majority of Turks to read Ottoman-script Turkish documents. But e
ven this success has not prevented the reassertion of Islam in Turkish
politics.
The real cost of Turkification, however, has been paid by the state in
its relationship with its Kurdish citizenry. Steven Kinzer of The New
York Times, an observer of Turkish affairs, correctly assessed that "by
banning almost every kind of Kurdish organization, the government made
it impossible for moderate Kurdish leaders to emerge."[16] One of the
most persistent demands of the mainstream Kurdish movement has been for
the freedom to use Kurdish in schools and the media, both of which have
been viewed with suspicion by Turkish authorities that rigorously adhere
to the indivisible and unitary character of the state. More recently,
the state has made some concessions, including the noteworthy granting
of permission by the Turkish authorities for Kurdish-language teaching
in private schools in Van, Batman, and Sanliurfa.[17] In June 2004,
Turkish state radio and television (TRT) began short broadcasts in two
Kurdish dialects, Zaza and Kurmanjy, as well as in Arabic, Bosnian, and
Circassian. There will likely be increasing demands for Kurdish language
classes in state-funded schools, and a growing demand by other
ethno-linguistic groups, such as the Circassians, for more linguistic
freedom than they have enjoyed to date.
Recent relaxations of government policy have been billed as concessions
to the EU. In particular, Ankara's stringent policies on the public use
of Kurdish have been a constant source of friction with the EU, as well
as international human rights organizations. At the same time, there may
be a realization in the Turkish political elite that past policies have
been counter-productive. Those past policies were inspired by a
nineteenth-century European ideal of linguistic conformity—an ideal that
even Europe has abandoned as dangerous and divisive. The United States,
however, has taken a less adamant stance on linguistic freedom in
Turkey. This is one issue on which Washington might amplify the message
coming from Brussels: Turkey will be stronger if it allows a greater
measure of linguistic freedom. Far from prompting political separatism,
such liberalization will tend to neutralize it.
Israeli Diversity
Israel, in contrast to its Muslim neighbors, has a comparatively open
and tolerant linguistic policy, allowing for its Arab, Christian,
Circassian, and Druze minorities to speak their languages both in public
and private without state reprisals, and to educate their children in
their native languages. Indeed, the state-subsidized educational system
of the Arab sector teaches the majority of its curriculum in
Palestinian-dialect Arabic.
Israel has neither a constitutional provision nor a law that
specifically articulates the state's language policy.[18] This affords
both central and local governmental authorities great flexibility in
shaping Israeli society's use of various languages in private and public
life and allows for the state to reshape its policies in relation to
both the ongoing conflict with its adversaries and the emerging
challenges to Hebrew-language dominance.
In order to comprehend Israel's relative degree of linguistic pluralism
within the context of the Middle East, one must take into account
several things: Israel's history of Jewish immigration and the rebirth
of Hebrew as a vernacular language for the country's Jewish citizens,
the granting to Arabic the status of an official language of the Jewish
state, Israel's laissez-faire attitude toward the country's Armenian and
Circassian minorities, and contemporary attempts to promote
bilingualism. Despite the rising numbers of Israel's Arab citizens
involved in terrorist activities—still an extremely small number in
proportion to the numerical strength of the Arab sector—Israel's policy
of linguistic tolerance has helped to stem the tide of radicalization of
its minority communities.
Hebrew, as the most widely spoken language and as the language of
government, has become to Israel what English is to the United States:
the language to be used by immigrants (whose native languages number in
the hundreds) so as to create a monolithic Israeli linguistic identity.
Given the importance of the rebirth of Hebrew as a vernacular for the
modern Zionist project, Hebrew has become the Israeli language, par
excellence. In the early years of the state, Hebrew primacy came at the
expense of the numerous languages spoken by Jewish immigrants,
particularly Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, and Judeo-Berber,
vernacular languages that were both discouraged and marginalized in the
new Hebrew-speaking society. (Speech in other European languages spoken
by immigrants, such German and Polish, was also discouraged.)
But the State of Israel's promotion of Hebrew as the dominant language
of its majority actually discriminated more against rival Judaic (and
European) languages than against languages spoken by the country's
non-Jewish minorities. Certainly Israel's Arab citizens are also
required to learn Hebrew in school. However, Arabic is an official
language of the Jewish state, a status it shares only with Hebrew. Not
only does Israel allow its Arabic-speaking citizens to maintain their
own linguistic identity, the government funds Arabic-language schools
for its Palestinian Arab citizenry. Likewise, signs in Israel are often
found in both Hebrew and Arabic, and there is no shortage of
Arabic-language newspapers and broadcasts.
Due to the growing demographic and numerical strength of Israel's Arab
citizens, it is conceivable that Arabic will become an increasingly
influential language in the Jewish state. This partially explains the
attempts by some Israeli political activists to press for a greater
Hebrew-Arabic bilingualism among Jews, a move with significant political
implications. The Swiss government, for example, has given financial
support for an Arab-Jewish bilingual school in Jerusalem.[19] Haifa
mayor Yona Yahav recently argued that "one of the barriers that
exacerbates the Jewish-Arab conflict is the language barrier," a clear
indication that he believes that an increased appreciation and
understanding of Arabic by all Haifa schoolchildren could help to lessen
the potential ethnic and political conflicts within the municipality.[20]
The effort to create a bilingual society in Israel will face many
obstacles, not least of which is the perception that Arabic is the
language of the enemy. There is also the fact that the million-plus
immigrants who arrived from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s have
differed from past Jewish immigrants. They have maintained their Russian
language, imparted it to the next generation, and supported cultural
activities in Russian. Over the past decade, Russian has emerged as a
second language of Israeli Jews, easily on par with Arabic in the media,
politics, and advertising.
In sum, Israel is more linguistically diverse than ever, and the absence
of linguistic legislation allows for a great deal of creativity and
flexibility. This laissez-faire attitude has served the state well,
compensating Arabic-speaking communities for other forms of perceived
social and political discrimination, and integrating large numbers of
Russian-speakers into society, even before they have mastered Hebrew.
Linguistic pluralism has been of crucial importance in strengthening
Israeli democracy, and in reinforcing a respect for political and
religious pluralism. It is no accident that the most vibrant democracy
in the Middle East is also the most tolerant of diversity in languages.
American Incentives
Whereas most people in the West take for granted the ability to speak or
publish newspapers in any language they wish, this very concept is still
viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility, in much of the Middle
East. Here the idea of exclusive nationalism, with its pressures for
linguistic conformity, still holds rulers and intellectuals in its
thrall. The "new Arab media" actually reinforce this trend. The leading
journalists and thinkers who dominate the Arab media tend to ignore
issues dealing with minority rights, particularly of those who are not
Arabic-speakers. They thus contribute to marginalizing ethno-political
groups whose primary vernacular is a non-Arabic language, be it
Armenian, Assyrian, Bosnian, Chechen, Circassian, French, Kurdish,
Persian, or Tamazigh.
This is where the United States can and should play a role. Just as
Washington has an interest in a democratic Middle East, it also has an
interest in a Middle East that respects linguistic freedom. Its absence
is usually a sign of a dangerously dysfunctional political system. So it
was in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where the oppression of Kurds and threats
to U.S. security went hand in hand. So it was in Algeria, where growing
Arabization led to civil war and the emergence of radicalized Islamist
cadres that have posed a clear danger to U.S. national interests. So it
was in Turkey, where a stringent policy against Kurdish contributed to
blocking Turkey's path to the EU, a clear U.S. interest and one that
President Bush, despite opposition from French president Jacques Chirac,
rightly promoted at the June 2004 North Atlantic Treaty Organization
summit in Istanbul.
Washington can help to promote linguistic diversity if it raises the
issue to the same level as religious freedom and gender equality. It
should use its not-inconsiderable influence to assure that the new Iraq
protects linguistic freedom and pluralism. Indeed, it is unlikely that
Iraq will break with its sorry record of abusing minorities, or achieve
even a semblance of democracy, without guaranteeing such freedom.
Washington likewise should urge Algeria to stop placating Islamists at
the expense of Kabyles. The United States also should work with the
European Union to create still more incentives for Turkey to liberalize
its linguistic policies, especially vis-à-vis Kurdish. This can only
strengthen Turkish democracy, which is not only important for U.S.
strategic interests, but which also provides a working model for other
regional states, notably the fledgling Iraqi polity. As for governments
at odds with the United States, such as Iran and Syria, their policies
toward language freedom, particularly against their Kurdish citizens,
should be monitored and reported, just as the United States monitors
their involvement in terrorism.
It is in America's long-term national interest for Washington to promote
linguistic freedom in a region stagnating under archaic economic and
political systems and generating totalitarian movements, religious and
secular, that are hostile to American national security. One way to do
that is to promote freedom of speech in its fullest sense. That means
not just the freedom to speak one's mind. It means the freedom to speak
whatever language comes most readily to one's lips.
Jonathan Eric Lewis is a New York-based political analyst and consultant
specializing in the history of Middle Eastern minority groups and their
political movements in the diaspora.
NOTES
[1] "President Bush Discusses Freedom in Iraq and Middle East," remarks
at the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington, D.C., Nov. 6, 2003,
at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106-2.html.
[2] I refer to Israel in its pre-1967 configuration.
[3] "The Law of Administration for the State of Iraq for the
Transitional Period," at http://www.cpa-iraq.org/government/TAL.html.
[4] Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi'is of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1994), p. 257.
[5] Hugh Roberts, "Historical and Unhistorical Approaches to the Problem
of Identity in Algeria," in Hugh Roberts, The Battlefield: Algeria
1988-2002 (London:
Verso, 2003), p. 142.
[6] Ibid., p. 139.
[7] Ibid., pp. 12-3.
[8] Martin Stone, The Tragedy of Algeria (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993), p. 52. See also James Coffman, "Does the Arabic Language
Encourage Radical Islam?" Middle East Quarterly, Dec. 1995, pp. 51-7, at
http://www.meforum.org/article/276.
[9] Michael Willis, The Islamist Challenge in Algeria: A Political
History (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 140-3.
[10] Le Matin (Algiers), Mar. 17, 2004.
[11] Stone, The Tragedy of Algeria, p. 213.
[12] Official website of the MAK, at
http://www.makabylie.info/index.php3?rep_rubrique=ahric7&page_centre=mak-pak-english.
[13] Reuters, Apr. 1, 2004.
[14] See "Treaty of Peace with Turkey Signed at Lausanne, July 24,
1923," at http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/1918p/lausanne.html.
[15] Martin Gani, "Euro-Turkish," The World & I, Feb. 2004, pp. 170-7.
[16] Stephen Kinzer, Crescent and Star: Turkey between Two Worlds (New
York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), p. 114.
[17] Associated Press, Apr. 2, 2004.
[18] Bernard Spolsky, "Multilingualism in Israel," Annual Review of
Applied Linguistics, vol. 17, 1996, at
http://www.biu.ac.il/HU/lprc/aral.htm.
[19] The Jewish Week (New York), Mar. 19, 2004.
[20] Jerusalem Post, Mar. 11, 2004.
This item is available on the Middle East Forum website, at
http://www.meforum.org/article/635
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
Middle East Quarterly
Summer 2004
By Jonathan Eric Lewis
Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many have rightly
cited the Middle East's democracy deficit as one of the prime reasons
that the region has produced so much terrorism and political violence.
In a November 2003 speech to the National Endowment for Democracy,
President George W. Bush argued that while we should not expect
democratizing societies in the Middle East to be identical to
post-industrial America, there are some common features to what he
termed "successful societies." These include the limited power of the
state and its military, the impartial rule of law, a robust civil
society, property rights, religious freedom, and the rights of women.[1]
But if Washington is to be successful in fostering democratic change in
the Middle East and in promoting stability within states that have
ongoing ethnic conflicts, it must put linguistic freedom—the right to
freely speak and educate one's children in one's native language—on par
with other concepts such as women's rights and religious freedom. The
lack of linguistic freedom in much of the Middle East is part and parcel
of the region's general stagnation under archaic political systems.
Given the vast diversity of ethno-linguistic groups throughout North
Africa, Anatolia, the Levant and Mesopotamia, and the Persian Gulf, it
is striking that just three regional languages dominate the public
arena: Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. This is the legacy of
European-style nationalism in the Middle East: linguistic conformity has
been made a staple of national identity, as states still labor to
achieve a nineteenth-century European ideal of the nation-state.
There is nothing wrong with a state imposing a certain degree of
linguistic uniformity in order to achieve a measure of national
cohesiveness, such as the case in Israel where modern Hebrew acted as a
means of fostering a new, unifying national identity. However, when a
state's policy shifts from using a language as a means of fostering
national unity to a deliberate policy of denying or eradicating the
cultural identity of minority groups, it bodes ill for tolerance in the
polity as a whole. Such has been the case with the Assyrians in Iraq,
the Kabyles in Algeria, and the Kurds in Turkey. A proper balance would
allow simultaneously for a unifying national language, such as Arabic or
Hebrew, together with a legally protected right for all minority groups
to speak their native languages at home and to print material in these
languages for personal use without fear of state repression.
The ideal of linguistic conformity, however, is pervasive throughout the
Middle East although actual policies have differed from state to state.
Baathist Iraq, perhaps the most totalitarian of all the Middle Eastern
regimes and certainly the most violent, had an extremely harsh language
policy that conformed to its fascistic interpretation of Arab
nationalism. Algeria's Kabyles and Turkey's Kurds have also been
subjected to state pressures, and have reacted by developing political
movements that have resisted official language policy. By contrast,
Israel, through its laissez-faire linguistic policies, has defused some
of the resentment of its large Arabic-speaking minority. By according
official standing to Arabic, it has bought the acquiescence of a large
Arabic-speaking Muslim minority that has yet to come to terms with the
legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state.[2]
These four countries—Algeria, Iraq, Israel, and Turkey—provide different
models for the relationship between state power and linguistic freedom.
The Arabization policies of Iraq and Algeria ultimately foreshadowed
infernos of political violence. Turkey's language policies led to
internal destabilization, particularly in the primarily ethnic Kurdish
southeast. The linguistic policies of Israel have contributed to a
relative degree of internal stability. What this variation shows is that
there is a high correlation between the suppression of languages, the
suppression of dissent, and political violence. As U.S. policymakers
raise the flag of women's rights and religious freedom, they should
consider whether linguistic freedom, of the kind practiced in the United
States, isn't just as suitable for promotion in the Middle East.
Iraq as Babel?
While significant attention has been devoted to guaranteeing religious
pluralism in post-Baathist Iraq, particularly for the minority
Christians and the majority Shi'ites, scarce attention has been devoted
to the need for linguistic pluralism.
Iraq, upon independence in 1933, was a linguistically pluralistic state
whose inhabitants spoke Iraqi Arabic (in several local dialects),
Armenian, Assyrian, Judeo-Arabic, Kurdish, and Turkmen. Over the
remaining century, and particularly under Baathist rule (1968 to 2003),
Iraq became an increasingly Arab state in which Arabic enjoyed a
privileged and dominant status. Under Saddam Hussein, ethno-linguistic
minority groups such as the Kurds, Assyrians and Turkmen experienced
extreme persecution and were severely restricted in their ability to
speak and educate their children in their own language.
In the new Iraq, first steps have been taken to restore linguistic
pluralism. Article 9 of the transitional Iraqi constitution, promulgated
in March 2004, defines both Arabic and Kurdish as the two official
languages of Iraq and also guarantees the "right of Iraqis to educate
their children in their mother tongue, such as Turcoman [i.e., Turkmen],
Syriac, or Armenian, in government educational institutions in
accordance with educational guidelines, or in any other language in
private educational institutions."[3] The fact that this was agreed upon
by the Iraqi Governing Council should be seen as an underreported
victory of the Coalition Provisional Authority in its efforts to foster
a pluralistic polity, embracing not only Kurds but also Assyrians and
Turkmen.
Nevertheless, more needs to be done to guarantee the linguistic rights
of the Iraqi Shi'ite community. Najaf has long had a history of
linguistic pluralism with Shi'ites from Persia, Azerbaijan, Bukhara, and
Lebanon studying in the city's madrasas (Islamic schools). Indeed, from
the mid-eighteenth-century to the most recent decades, the majority of
Najaf's students were not Arabic-speakers at all. Historian Yitzhak
Nakash writes:
Iraqi Shi'is asserted that unlike intellectual activity at al-Azhar,
which was molded by the local culture and trends in modern Egypt,
activity at Najaf became less influenced by the city's indigenous Arab
environment and instead was dominated by a Persian spirit. The strong
Persian presence in the madrasa distanced Najaf from Baghdad, thereby
hindering the potential social and intellectual exchange between Sunnis
and Shi'is in Iraq. Foreign linguistic elements penetrated into the
Arabic dialect of Najaf, and the method of study became patterned after
the Persian.[4]
Given that the Grand Ayatollah 'Ali as-Sistani, the country's pivotal
power-broker, speaks Arabic with a Persian accent, there is an obvious
need for guarantees of linguistic pluralism for the ethnically diverse
Shi'ites who will be returning to Najaf for scholarship. While
Washington should not actively take part in intra-Shi'ite theological
disputes, it should use its leverage in Iraq to guarantee that speakers
of Persian and Persian-influenced Arabic are not discriminated against
in the public administration of Iraq.
Nowhere in the Middle East does the United States have a greater
opportunity to foster linguistic pluralism than in Iraq. The provisional
constitution, while theoretically protecting the linguistic rights of
Armenians, Assyrians, and Turkmen, will be but a piece of paper unless
its provisions for linguistic freedom are vigorously enforced by the
Iraqi judiciary. Washington further has the obligation to make sure that
the Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq do not abuse their newfound
freedoms to discriminate against non-Kurdish speakers, particularly
Assyrians, who fear that they will lose opportunities for bilingual
Arabic and Assyrian education. Given the strong correlation between the
persecution of ethno-linguistic minorities and state violence in Iraq,
policymakers should consider the status of linguistic pluralism as a
bellwether for Iraq's success in nation-building.
Overly Arabized Algeria
Algeria, although a member of the Arab League, is linguistically
diverse. A majority of the country's inhabitants speak Algerian-dialect
spoken Arabic. But Algeria's heritage includes Berber, Roman, Jewish,
Moor, Arabic, Ottoman, and French influences.[5] Both Tamazigh (Berber)
and French are spoken by large numbers of Algerians as first languages.
In the name of national unity and the consolidation of identity, the
state has pursued a policy of Arabization against both languages, which
has had dire consequences for the political stability of the country.
The first target of Arabization was French. During the long period of
French colonial rule from 1830 to 1962, many Algerians, particularly
members of the educated and urban classes, used French as a primary
language. Such was the degree of French linguistic influence on Algerian
society and politics that Algeria's first president, Ahmed Ben Bella, on
release from French prison, proclaimed his adherence to Arab nationalism
in French: "Nous sommes des Arabes!"("We are Arabs!")."[6] Ben Bella's
use of French to proclaim his anti-imperialism and Arab-Islamic
nationalism was paradoxical, for it was he who, as president (1962-65),
initiated the policy of linguistic Arabization in the country's primary
schools.
Arabization took a particular form. The leaders of independent Algeria
wished to link the country to the wider Arab world, which it regarded as
the cultural counter-weight to France. Hugh Roberts, vice-president of
the Society for Algerian Studies, has written:
The Arabisation policy was based on the premise that neither French nor
the colloquial Arabic and Berber spoken in Algeria could serve as the
language of education and administration. Its aim was accordingly to
make the modern literary Arabic, which had been developed as the lingua
franca of the Mashriq, the national language of Algeria.[7]
The promotion of this brand of Arabization gained momentum under
President Houari Boumedienne (1965-78), who declared a révolution
culturelle to accompany the country's radical economic and foreign
policies. Boumedienne's Arabization drive was intended to link Algeria
to revolutionary ideologies in the rest of the Arab world. But due to
the lack of native speakers of modern standard Arabic, Algeria imported
teachers from the Levant and Egypt, many of whom were sympathetic to
Islamism. Their teaching had an unintended consequence of strengthening
Islamism as an ideology in Algerian public life.
Also, because French remained the language of commerce, young educated
speakers of Arabic—the so-called Arabisants—did not command adequate
French for career advancement. These Arabisants gravitated to the study
Islamic law and literature at the university level, rather than the
francophone science and technology courses. This made them susceptible
to Islamist teaching.[8] The migration of lower class, rural Arabisants
into Algerian cities also played into the hands of Islamists. They would
become the shock troops of the Islamist insurgency of the 1990s.
Islamists still had to resort to French in order to recruit more
educated followers. One of the best-selling Islamist newspapers in newly
independent Algeria, Humanisme Musulman, was in French, not in
Arabic.[9] Likewise, La Cause, the diaspora newspaper of the Front
Islamique du Salut (FIS), an Islamist group, was published in French.
But the Arabic-French divide largely came to subsume the
Islamist-secular split, which itself resulted in part from forced
Arabization.
All of Algeria paid a price for Arabization, but it posed a direct
threat to the identity of the Kabyles. Numbering approximately 20
percent of Algeria's population and a disproportionately large number of
its intellectual class, Kabyles are a non-Arab, nominally Muslim
community. Their ancestral homelands of Greater and Lesser Kabylia
border the Mediterranean Sea. Kabyles speak Tamazigh, an Afro-Asiatic
language linguistically unrelated to Arabic, and they trace their
descent to the pre-Islamic Berber community indigenous to North Africa.
Kabyles played a significant role in the Front de Libération Nationale
(FLN), the Algerian nationalist movement that fought for independence
from France, only to be politically sidelined by the Arab-Muslim
elements within the FLN once independence was achieved in 1962.
Governmental restrictions on Tamazigh-related activity began immediately
upon independence. They included the abolition of the chair of Berber
studies at Algiers University in 1962 and the criminalizing of the
possession of Tamazigh dictionaries. After the cancellation of a lecture
on Berber poetry by Kabyle activist Moulaoud Mammeri in the Kabyle city
of Tizi Ouzou in 1980, a series of riots and demonstrations were
sparked, often termed the Tizi Ouzou Spring, leaving several hundred
dead or wounded. More recently, Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika,
in a nation-wide television address, termed Tamazigh "a factory of
division in national unity."[10]
The pressure has come not only from the state. Algerian Islamists have
likewise victimized the Kabyle community and are responsible for bomb
attacks against Kabyle music concerts and the kidnapping and eventual
murder of the famous Kabyle singer Matoub Lounes, who had told a Kabyle
newspaper that he was "neither Arab nor Muslim."[11]
Linguistic freedom has been one of the linchpins of the Kabyle political
movement. The Movement for the Autonomy of Kabylia (MAK, founded 2001)
is the most politically sophisticated of all the Kabyle ethno-linguistic
political movements. The MAK, partially led by Ferhat Mehenni, a Kabyle
singer-activist, advocates autonomy for Kabylia along the lines of that
enjoyed by the Catalonians, Flemish, Welsh, and Scottish peoples.[12]
The MAK boycotted the April 2004 Algerian presidential elections on the
grounds that Algiers has refused to recognize Tamazigh as an official
(rather than just a "national") language.
Algeria's Arabization policy has had repercussions for both Europe and
the United States. It has contributed to the growth of militant Islam
within the Algerian public sphere, fueling not only the Algerian civil
war but also the growth of a fundamentalist Arabisant Algerian diaspora
in both Europe and North America. More recently, continuing clashes
between the Kabyle minority and the country's security forces have
clouded Algerian-U.S. cooperation in the ongoing war on terror, as
Washington is reluctant to work with security forces responsible for
suppression of a peaceful minority.
Unfortunately, President Bouteflika is using a restrictive linguistic
policy to forge a national consensus. He seeks to reconcile Arab
nationalists and Islamists by refusing to grant broad linguistic rights
to the increasingly restless Kabyle minority. Arabization has become one
more prop of an authoritarian regime that refuses to engage in
much-needed economic and political reforms. The very least the United
States can do, to begin to move Algeria in the direction of those
reforms, is to stand on the side of linguistic diversity and urge the
regime to abandon Arabization. Otherwise, the number of Arabisant
Islamists will continue to swell into the next decade, and so too will
the resentment of the Kabyles.
Talking Turkish
Although Turkey is one of the most Western, and certainly pro-American
countries, in the Middle East, Turkey's language policy nevertheless
remains one of the harshest and most uncompromising. That policy has
become one of the prime impediments to Turkey's possible accession to
the European Union (EU). A recent report from the European parliament
that argued against Turkey's accession cited Ankara's treatment of its
linguistic minorities among the reasons for denying Turkey's entry.[13]
The policy in question is Ankara's denial of linguistic freedom for its
Kurdish minority.
To understand Turkey's harsh restrictions on speaking and publishing in
non-Turkish languages, it is necessary to recall the difficult
circumstances that faced the nascent Turkish republic at independence.
From the late Ottoman period onwards, the country's elite sought
acceptance in Europe by embracing European-style notions of the nation.
By a process of Turkification, they also sought to prevent the emergence
of alternative national identities. They had learned, from long and
bitter experience, that national groups under Ottoman rule could appeal
to European powers to support separatist aspirations. By this process,
the empire had lost most of its Balkan possessions.
The Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 ended the Turkish war of independence
against both European and Greek forces and gave birth to the secular
Turkish Republic. By its terms, Turkey had to recognize the rights of
non-Muslim minorities such as Armenians and Greeks to educate in their
own language. But these were small minorities whose national aspirations
were being realized outside of Turkey's borders. The danger, in the
minds of the Turkish-speaking elite, lay in Anatolia, among Muslim
minority groups within the Turkish Republic. What was to keep them from
making separatist demands? Turkey therefore successfully excluded their
linguistic rights from the treaty.[14] Indeed, such disparate
ethno-linguistic groups as the Albanians, Abkhaz, Arabs, Bosnians,
Chechens, Circassians, Kurds, and Laz are not officially recognized by
the state and have instead been subsumed under a monolithic Turkish
identi ty.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's adamant secularism, or Kemalism, has likewise
determined Turkish linguistic policies. As a means of breaking with the
Islamic past, not only did Atatürk abolish the caliphate, but he also
rid Turkish of Arabic and Persian elements, and replaced its Arabic
script with a Latin one. This policy was deliberately intended to lessen
the strength of Islam, by making the great body of extant religious
literature inaccessible even to literate Turks. In 1932, the newly
formed Türk Dil Kurumu (TDK), an organization devoted to promoting the
Turkish language and protecting it from foreign influences, excised
thousands of Arabic and Persian words from the new, modern Turkish
lexicon.[15] The degree of success of this process is evident in both
the generally high literacy rate among Turks, and the inability of the
vast majority of Turks to read Ottoman-script Turkish documents. But e
ven this success has not prevented the reassertion of Islam in Turkish
politics.
The real cost of Turkification, however, has been paid by the state in
its relationship with its Kurdish citizenry. Steven Kinzer of The New
York Times, an observer of Turkish affairs, correctly assessed that "by
banning almost every kind of Kurdish organization, the government made
it impossible for moderate Kurdish leaders to emerge."[16] One of the
most persistent demands of the mainstream Kurdish movement has been for
the freedom to use Kurdish in schools and the media, both of which have
been viewed with suspicion by Turkish authorities that rigorously adhere
to the indivisible and unitary character of the state. More recently,
the state has made some concessions, including the noteworthy granting
of permission by the Turkish authorities for Kurdish-language teaching
in private schools in Van, Batman, and Sanliurfa.[17] In June 2004,
Turkish state radio and television (TRT) began short broadcasts in two
Kurdish dialects, Zaza and Kurmanjy, as well as in Arabic, Bosnian, and
Circassian. There will likely be increasing demands for Kurdish language
classes in state-funded schools, and a growing demand by other
ethno-linguistic groups, such as the Circassians, for more linguistic
freedom than they have enjoyed to date.
Recent relaxations of government policy have been billed as concessions
to the EU. In particular, Ankara's stringent policies on the public use
of Kurdish have been a constant source of friction with the EU, as well
as international human rights organizations. At the same time, there may
be a realization in the Turkish political elite that past policies have
been counter-productive. Those past policies were inspired by a
nineteenth-century European ideal of linguistic conformity—an ideal that
even Europe has abandoned as dangerous and divisive. The United States,
however, has taken a less adamant stance on linguistic freedom in
Turkey. This is one issue on which Washington might amplify the message
coming from Brussels: Turkey will be stronger if it allows a greater
measure of linguistic freedom. Far from prompting political separatism,
such liberalization will tend to neutralize it.
Israeli Diversity
Israel, in contrast to its Muslim neighbors, has a comparatively open
and tolerant linguistic policy, allowing for its Arab, Christian,
Circassian, and Druze minorities to speak their languages both in public
and private without state reprisals, and to educate their children in
their native languages. Indeed, the state-subsidized educational system
of the Arab sector teaches the majority of its curriculum in
Palestinian-dialect Arabic.
Israel has neither a constitutional provision nor a law that
specifically articulates the state's language policy.[18] This affords
both central and local governmental authorities great flexibility in
shaping Israeli society's use of various languages in private and public
life and allows for the state to reshape its policies in relation to
both the ongoing conflict with its adversaries and the emerging
challenges to Hebrew-language dominance.
In order to comprehend Israel's relative degree of linguistic pluralism
within the context of the Middle East, one must take into account
several things: Israel's history of Jewish immigration and the rebirth
of Hebrew as a vernacular language for the country's Jewish citizens,
the granting to Arabic the status of an official language of the Jewish
state, Israel's laissez-faire attitude toward the country's Armenian and
Circassian minorities, and contemporary attempts to promote
bilingualism. Despite the rising numbers of Israel's Arab citizens
involved in terrorist activities—still an extremely small number in
proportion to the numerical strength of the Arab sector—Israel's policy
of linguistic tolerance has helped to stem the tide of radicalization of
its minority communities.
Hebrew, as the most widely spoken language and as the language of
government, has become to Israel what English is to the United States:
the language to be used by immigrants (whose native languages number in
the hundreds) so as to create a monolithic Israeli linguistic identity.
Given the importance of the rebirth of Hebrew as a vernacular for the
modern Zionist project, Hebrew has become the Israeli language, par
excellence. In the early years of the state, Hebrew primacy came at the
expense of the numerous languages spoken by Jewish immigrants,
particularly Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, and Judeo-Berber,
vernacular languages that were both discouraged and marginalized in the
new Hebrew-speaking society. (Speech in other European languages spoken
by immigrants, such German and Polish, was also discouraged.)
But the State of Israel's promotion of Hebrew as the dominant language
of its majority actually discriminated more against rival Judaic (and
European) languages than against languages spoken by the country's
non-Jewish minorities. Certainly Israel's Arab citizens are also
required to learn Hebrew in school. However, Arabic is an official
language of the Jewish state, a status it shares only with Hebrew. Not
only does Israel allow its Arabic-speaking citizens to maintain their
own linguistic identity, the government funds Arabic-language schools
for its Palestinian Arab citizenry. Likewise, signs in Israel are often
found in both Hebrew and Arabic, and there is no shortage of
Arabic-language newspapers and broadcasts.
Due to the growing demographic and numerical strength of Israel's Arab
citizens, it is conceivable that Arabic will become an increasingly
influential language in the Jewish state. This partially explains the
attempts by some Israeli political activists to press for a greater
Hebrew-Arabic bilingualism among Jews, a move with significant political
implications. The Swiss government, for example, has given financial
support for an Arab-Jewish bilingual school in Jerusalem.[19] Haifa
mayor Yona Yahav recently argued that "one of the barriers that
exacerbates the Jewish-Arab conflict is the language barrier," a clear
indication that he believes that an increased appreciation and
understanding of Arabic by all Haifa schoolchildren could help to lessen
the potential ethnic and political conflicts within the municipality.[20]
The effort to create a bilingual society in Israel will face many
obstacles, not least of which is the perception that Arabic is the
language of the enemy. There is also the fact that the million-plus
immigrants who arrived from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s have
differed from past Jewish immigrants. They have maintained their Russian
language, imparted it to the next generation, and supported cultural
activities in Russian. Over the past decade, Russian has emerged as a
second language of Israeli Jews, easily on par with Arabic in the media,
politics, and advertising.
In sum, Israel is more linguistically diverse than ever, and the absence
of linguistic legislation allows for a great deal of creativity and
flexibility. This laissez-faire attitude has served the state well,
compensating Arabic-speaking communities for other forms of perceived
social and political discrimination, and integrating large numbers of
Russian-speakers into society, even before they have mastered Hebrew.
Linguistic pluralism has been of crucial importance in strengthening
Israeli democracy, and in reinforcing a respect for political and
religious pluralism. It is no accident that the most vibrant democracy
in the Middle East is also the most tolerant of diversity in languages.
American Incentives
Whereas most people in the West take for granted the ability to speak or
publish newspapers in any language they wish, this very concept is still
viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility, in much of the Middle
East. Here the idea of exclusive nationalism, with its pressures for
linguistic conformity, still holds rulers and intellectuals in its
thrall. The "new Arab media" actually reinforce this trend. The leading
journalists and thinkers who dominate the Arab media tend to ignore
issues dealing with minority rights, particularly of those who are not
Arabic-speakers. They thus contribute to marginalizing ethno-political
groups whose primary vernacular is a non-Arabic language, be it
Armenian, Assyrian, Bosnian, Chechen, Circassian, French, Kurdish,
Persian, or Tamazigh.
This is where the United States can and should play a role. Just as
Washington has an interest in a democratic Middle East, it also has an
interest in a Middle East that respects linguistic freedom. Its absence
is usually a sign of a dangerously dysfunctional political system. So it
was in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where the oppression of Kurds and threats
to U.S. security went hand in hand. So it was in Algeria, where growing
Arabization led to civil war and the emergence of radicalized Islamist
cadres that have posed a clear danger to U.S. national interests. So it
was in Turkey, where a stringent policy against Kurdish contributed to
blocking Turkey's path to the EU, a clear U.S. interest and one that
President Bush, despite opposition from French president Jacques Chirac,
rightly promoted at the June 2004 North Atlantic Treaty Organization
summit in Istanbul.
Washington can help to promote linguistic diversity if it raises the
issue to the same level as religious freedom and gender equality. It
should use its not-inconsiderable influence to assure that the new Iraq
protects linguistic freedom and pluralism. Indeed, it is unlikely that
Iraq will break with its sorry record of abusing minorities, or achieve
even a semblance of democracy, without guaranteeing such freedom.
Washington likewise should urge Algeria to stop placating Islamists at
the expense of Kabyles. The United States also should work with the
European Union to create still more incentives for Turkey to liberalize
its linguistic policies, especially vis-à-vis Kurdish. This can only
strengthen Turkish democracy, which is not only important for U.S.
strategic interests, but which also provides a working model for other
regional states, notably the fledgling Iraqi polity. As for governments
at odds with the United States, such as Iran and Syria, their policies
toward language freedom, particularly against their Kurdish citizens,
should be monitored and reported, just as the United States monitors
their involvement in terrorism.
It is in America's long-term national interest for Washington to promote
linguistic freedom in a region stagnating under archaic economic and
political systems and generating totalitarian movements, religious and
secular, that are hostile to American national security. One way to do
that is to promote freedom of speech in its fullest sense. That means
not just the freedom to speak one's mind. It means the freedom to speak
whatever language comes most readily to one's lips.
Jonathan Eric Lewis is a New York-based political analyst and consultant
specializing in the history of Middle Eastern minority groups and their
political movements in the diaspora.
NOTES
[1] "President Bush Discusses Freedom in Iraq and Middle East," remarks
at the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington, D.C., Nov. 6, 2003,
at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106-2.html.
[2] I refer to Israel in its pre-1967 configuration.
[3] "The Law of Administration for the State of Iraq for the
Transitional Period," at http://www.cpa-iraq.org/government/TAL.html.
[4] Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi'is of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1994), p. 257.
[5] Hugh Roberts, "Historical and Unhistorical Approaches to the Problem
of Identity in Algeria," in Hugh Roberts, The Battlefield: Algeria
1988-2002 (London:
Verso, 2003), p. 142.
[6] Ibid., p. 139.
[7] Ibid., pp. 12-3.
[8] Martin Stone, The Tragedy of Algeria (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993), p. 52. See also James Coffman, "Does the Arabic Language
Encourage Radical Islam?" Middle East Quarterly, Dec. 1995, pp. 51-7, at
http://www.meforum.org/article/276.
[9] Michael Willis, The Islamist Challenge in Algeria: A Political
History (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 140-3.
[10] Le Matin (Algiers), Mar. 17, 2004.
[11] Stone, The Tragedy of Algeria, p. 213.
[12] Official website of the MAK, at
http://www.makabylie.info/index.php3?rep_rubrique=ahric7&page_centre=mak-pak-english.
[13] Reuters, Apr. 1, 2004.
[14] See "Treaty of Peace with Turkey Signed at Lausanne, July 24,
1923," at http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/1918p/lausanne.html.
[15] Martin Gani, "Euro-Turkish," The World & I, Feb. 2004, pp. 170-7.
[16] Stephen Kinzer, Crescent and Star: Turkey between Two Worlds (New
York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), p. 114.
[17] Associated Press, Apr. 2, 2004.
[18] Bernard Spolsky, "Multilingualism in Israel," Annual Review of
Applied Linguistics, vol. 17, 1996, at
http://www.biu.ac.il/HU/lprc/aral.htm.
[19] The Jewish Week (New York), Mar. 19, 2004.
[20] Jerusalem Post, Mar. 11, 2004.
This item is available on the Middle East Forum website, at
http://www.meforum.org/article/635
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress