bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1993) — Winter 1993 // Hiver 1993, pp. 41–43
The Gulf Within: Canadian Arabs,
Racism and the Gulf War by Zuheir
Kashmeri, Toronto, James Lorimer &
Company, Publishers, 1991, 132 pp.
Saddam’s War: The Origins of the
Kuwait Conflict and the International
Response by John Bulloch and Harvey
Morris, London and Boston, Faber and
Faber Limited, 1991, 210 pp., $7.99 (paper).
Reviewed by Michael Shenstone
Many of bout’s readers were probably directly involved in some way, at least marginally, in last year’s Kuwait crisis. This was so at headquarters, where dozens of units toiled to cope with the political, security, consular, administrative and public relations aspects of the situation, and scores of individuals served long hours on duty in the Operations Centre. It was equally true abroad, where posts all over the world had to deal with a stream of Ottawa enquiries and instructions for local démarches, as well as emergency security and visa arrangements, and enquiries from anxious Canadians and the like. Most members of the Foreign Service found themselves caught up breathlessly in the momentum of Canadian policy on the crisis, even if some personally questioned aspects of that policy.
But few in the Pearson Building or outside it were aware of the full domestic ramifications. The book by Kashmeri, a respected Canadian journalist who reported for the Globe for over a decade, is a salutary reminder to us all that in Canada there was another, darker side to the crisis, of which our society cannot be proud. The Gulf Within is a well-documented study of how numerous Canadian individuals and families of Arab or Muslim origin across the country suffered under the surge of emotion, bordering at times on war hysteria, which marked reactions in Canada to Saddam’s invasion, the despatch of Canadian forces, and stories of Arab terrorists poised to strike.
There followed a wave of racist hate calls and threats to Iraqi, Palestinian and other Arab Canadians; mosques were targeted; insults were proffered on the street; offensive graffiti appeared; children were harassed in school, and not always well protected by their teachers, and some were beaten up on the streets. The book documents these incidents vividly, and convincingly. They were widespread, although somewhat less in Quebec; the book points out that “most of the racist backlash that the Muslims of Montreal suffered came from English-speaking Montrealers”. Heavy-handed enquiries by local CSIS and RCMP agents often created panic among people from countries where security organizations were feared as instruments of torture and tyranny. A number of those questioned did not know enough English to understand fully what was happening, or what their rights might be.
Kashmeri cites laudable exceptions: school principals and local authorities who pleaded for tolerance; senior security officials who early on assessed the risk of terrorist attacks in Canada as low and who promised investigations of improper conduct by their subordinates; Premier Rae, who offered to help a constituent draft a letter of protest to the RCMP; and Joe Clark, who “expressed his concern at the few incidents that the media had written up”, ’, and finally agreed to meet six Canadian Muslim imams, even though, says the author, “the mandarins of External Affairs were opposed to such a meeting” arguing that “it would cause undefined problems”
At the meeting, the imams asked, among other things, for the appointment of Muslim ambassadors by Canada, to which Clark is quoted as replying bluntly that he would not appoint a Muslim ambassador to a Muslim country; “who would the ambassador be loyal to, Islam or Canada?” The author claims this as evidence of bias and asks rhetorically whether the same rule would be applied when appointing Christians to a Christian country or Jews to Israel. His question has since been answered
This is not an objective, dispassionate book. The author is himself profoundly opposed to Canadian policy in the Kuwait crisis, which he describes simplistically as a decision “to wage war against a foreign state thousands of miles away” ’, without mentioning the important inter-Arab and UN dimensions of the conflict. He also glides over the fact that Saddam himself helped to fan anti-Arab fears in Canada by calling on Arabs and Muslims everywhere to fight in his support.
Instead he speaks intemperately of Canada having “unleashed its security forces against Canada’s Arabs and Muslims”, and he says that even when the terrorist threat proved to be minimal, targeting continued “perhaps because the security forces were taking their cue from their political masters and the bureaucrats, especially from the Department of External Affairs, which was at the centre of policy-making during the conflict.” Or so he thinks.
But there are important lessons to be learnt from the book. Canada is not as tolerant, multiracial a society as we like to think; ugly passions lurk beneath the surface. Moreover our security authorities, despite basically enlightened leadership at the top, can be clumsy and unfeeling, to say the least, in dealing with new Canadians from minority groups. If and when Canada becomes embroiled in another Kuwait, perhaps in some quite different part of the world, all those who formulate our policy must remember that innocent and loyal Canadians may well become its victims.
The authors of Saddam’s War are journalists with considerable Middle East experience who write for Britain’s Independent newspaper. The book is a competently written “quickie”, obviously largely completed by December 1990 (as indicated by the dating of the introductory acknowledgements), but stretched to cover the end of hostilities on February 28, 1991. It starts with a handy chronology of events from the Iraqi Revolution of 1958, and contains much useful information, anecdotal and otherwise, on Saddam’s character and probable motives, and the interplay of events that led up to the conflict. This reviewer, for example, found of particular interest the explanation of Kuwait’s reckless expansion of its oil production beyond its OPEC quota, even at a lower world oil price. This move, motivated by its huge investment in down-stream oil activities which would profit by increased production, was one of the main factors which goaded Saddam into action, financially desperate as he was after the war with Iran.
But the book, despite its qualities, is not one of those which every student of the area must have on his shelf. It is poorly organized, so that given themes are hard to follow from chapter to chapter; some alleged statements of fact are given in too highly coloured terms to be wholly credible; and some of the analysis is flabby (the “ultimate dilemma” for the international community and the USA in the summer of 1990 is stated to have been “ to fight or to appease, to put preservation of the nascent new world order above all else, or to allow domestic anti-war pressures to dictate policy”). Certain of the book’s judgments are questionable, particularly in retrospect, such as that the mistaken USA raid on a big air-raid shelter in Baghdad, with its heavy civilian casualties, would “have repercussions in the Middle East for years to come”; or that because of European disagreements during the conflict, “it would be another decade at least before Europe again found the drive towards political cooperation and unity which it had shown in 1990”; or that “another casualty was the UN and its Secretary-General”
Still, Saddam’s War makes one think again about the complex causes and ambiguous outcome of the Kuwait conflict, which now seems so long in the past but is still so acutely relevant to the present. Incidentally, Canada’s role is nowhere mentioned, either in its military aspect, or in the form of the much-vaunted postwar peace proposals launched by the Prime Minister on February 8, 1991, in the promotion of which so many readers of bout were for a time engaged.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1993) — Winter 1993 // Hiver 1993, pp. 41–43. Read the rest of this issue →
