Ihsan Aktas
Today, the greatest injustices on earth are being committed against Arabs. Although all of us are used to the eruption of wars and civil wars in the Arab world, it is imperative to see the big picture, i.e., the gradual death of the Arab people. Behind the flamboyant stage constituted by the towers in Dubai and Saudi wealth, hundreds of people are being killed every day in the rest of the Arab world. Wars and civil wars have already become ordinary occurrences in the region to such an extent that statistical reports no longer record all the loss of life among Arabs.
Immediately after the Mavi Marmara incident, when Israeli commandos killed seven Turkish civilians in their raid on six civilian ships carrying activists from 50 countries in an attempt to break Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip, we as volunteers began to prepare a press announcement to protest against Israel, as most of the managers of the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH) were themselves taken captive on the ships. If the people who were killed by Israeli soldiers were Arabs, I thought, Israel might have gotten away with these murders. Yet, those who were murdered were Turkish civilians whose case was defended by the Turkish state. This was a tragic insight on the desperate condition of the Arab people.
As Israel’s bloody raids on Palestinian civilian camps under the leadership of murderous Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, also known as the “Butcher of Beirut” in Lebanon for his role as defense minister in the 1982 invasion that killed an estimated 20,000 people that year alone, demonstrated, the lives of Arabs have always been treated as insignificant by the world’s leading powers. Here is a limited list of historical incidents of the death of the Arab peoples:
lThe Lebanese Civil War lasted from 1975 to 1990 and resulted in an estimated 120,000 fatalities. The devastating Iran-Iraq War lasted from 1980 to 1988. Occupations of Afghanistan resulted in an ongoing civil war.
The Gulf War was followed by the Iraq War in which then US President George W. Bush’s neoconservative administration used the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an excuse and occupied Iraq and Afghanistan under the pretext of the war on terrorism.
The death of an estimated 1 million people in Iraq since the invasion of the United States condemned the occupied country to instability and chaos. Unrestricted by Western powers, Israel has continued to murder Palestinian civilians.
The civil war in Yemen, fueled by regional competition between Iran and Saudi Arabia, has resulted in the loss of uncountable lives and the destruction of the country as a whole.
Finally, the Arab Spring, which began as an honorable revolution against long-lived dictatorships, has gradually turned into a nightmare. A coup was realized in Egypt, Libya was divided into three parts and Syria is trapped in a devastating civil war.
While Turkey’s ongoing military operation in Afrin against the PKK terrorist organization-affiliated Democratic Union Party’s (PYD) People’s Protection Units (YPG) forces has been criticized by Western powers for weakening the war against Daesh, the United Nations appears indifferent to the Syrian regime’s ongoing aerial offensive in Eastern Ghouta, which began on Sunday and has killed at least 403 civilians. The Syrian regime’s war on civilians is still not at the top of the world’s political agenda. With reference to Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, “We lose and love does not win,” one can say, “Arabs die and no one wins.”
