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    Freedom of Speech - in Any Language

    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

    --Boundary_(ID_nBnCcmQ+LbP1dyRUmuOD9g)--

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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