bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2016), pp. 25–27
« James Bond », mais peu d’instructions pour les utiliser. Nous nous retrouvions souvent dans l’impossibilité de reprendre la route, car elle se verrouillait toute seule et le pauvre chauffeur ne pouvait ouvrir les portes avec ses clés. Stationnée devant la mission, il lui arrivait aussi sans raison apparente de se mettre toutes sirènes hurlantes, ce qui indisposait les gardes de sécurité car cela les réveillait et les mettait dans un état d’énervement inquiétant.
Nos jeunes enfants avaient la chance d’évoluer dans un quartier particulièrement stimulant. En effet, on y trouvait les residences des leaders palestiniens les plus en vue du régime. Elles étaient protégées par des gardes armés jusqu’aux dents mais qui, le cœur tendre, se laissaient apprivoiser par les risettes de nos charmantes têtes blondes et leur distribuaient meme des bonbons.
Le soir de l’attentat du vol PANAM 103 au-dessus de Lockerbie, la section palestinienne de notre voisinage feta tres tard dans la nuit en tirant dans les airs a la mitraillette a balles réelles. Une tradition locale dangereuse et ma foi un peu stressante.
Le travail diplomatique sous la dictature « correctionniste » d’Assad-père n’était pas facile. Pas de medias libres, difficulté
Le travail diplomatique sous la dictat
n’était pas facile. Pas de medias I contacts, etc. Comme la plupart de
situation, nous passions beaucoup de confirmer
de rencontrer des contacts, etc. Comme la plupart de nos collègues étaient dans la meme situation, nous passions beaucoup de temps a essayer (sans succès) de confirmer des rumeurs. La principale portait sur l’état de santé du president. On le disait malade et toujours a l’article de la mort (mais il a pourtant survécu a mon affectation et n’a rendu l’âÂme qu’en 2000).
Les receptions diplomatiques servaient donc a verifier ces informations. On en ressortait avec d’autres rumeurs. J’en ai moimême fait le test. Ayant transmis un (faux) « scoop» a un autre diplomate au début d’une fête nationale, ma « nouvelle » fit le tour de la salle et me fut répétée, dans le plus grand secret, entre deux bouchées de dessert. Je n’ose imaginer le contenu des télégrammes (eh oui!) que les diverses capitales reçurent les jours suivants…
Les rapports avec les responsables syriens étaient tout a fait « langue de bois ». Nous avions toujours le meme interlocuteur qui, se sachant écouté par ses autorités dans son bureau, se limitait au strict minimum mais dans la plus grande civilité. Mes rapports pour Ottawa étaient donc souvent prepares avant nos rencontres car je savais déjà ce qu’il allait nous dire.
Nous couvrions aussi le Liban. Là, c’était une toute autre affaire. Beaucoup de contacts et autant de demandes de visa. Comme j’étais responsable pour ce pays, j’y allais assez souvent et je m’y plaisais. D’abord, le Français y était encore tres pratique. On y mangeait par ailleurs beaucoup mieux qu’à Damas. Il y avait aussi un superbe petit Musée phénicien sur le campus de l’Université américaine de Beyrouth.
Ce qui ajoutait du piquant a mes visites, c’est que nous pouvions parler au Hezbollah. Nous rencontrions leurs dirigeants. Un jour, avec un collègue de notre ancienne section du renseignement au ministère, nous nous étions rendus, pour rencontrer un porte-parole du mouvement, dans un bâtiment difficile a trouver dans le quartier chiite de Beyrouth, où nous
soupçonnions que des otages avaient été
ture « correctionniste » d’Assad-père libres, difficulté de rencontrer des nos collègues étaient dans la meme) de temps a essayer (sans succès) des rumeurs.
détenus. L’entretien dans une salle sans fenêtre au sous-sol avait certes été fort instructif et courtois, mais nous n’étions pas trop fachés de quitter…
Ce qui était tres bon pour mon ego de premier secrétaire étaient mes accès privilégiés au president de la République libanaise. Il s’était pris d’affection pour moi. Le fait qu’une de ses filles vivait a Montréal y contribuait sûrement. Il faut dire aussi que la presence étrangère juste après la guerre civile était limitée. Le chef de l’État devait se sentir bien seul dans ses appartements. Je le voyais donc assez souvent et cela facilitait notre travail.
Depuis mon depart de Syrie, un autre Assad a été mis au pouvoir. Il a mené son Présentation des lettres de créance au president Assad.
pays a la ruine et la desolation. Pour toute la region, c’est une irremediable descente aux enfers.
Ce ne sont que pertes en vies humaines et images de destruction. Le souk d’Alep a été ravagé et sa forteresse, en partie détruite ainsi que la Grande Mosquée. Des temples et autres vestiges ont été dynamités a Palmyre. La folie djihadiste est passée parlà.
De voir ces millions de pauvres gens qui trouvent refuge où ils peuvent et risquent leur vie pour tenter de survivre me bouleverse. Il est réconfortant de voir que le Canada fait sa part pour alleger leurs souffrances et leur procurer un avenir.
Notre fille est née alors que nous étions en poste en Syrie. Elle fut baptisée grecque-catholique dans une église du 4ême siècle a Maaloula, ce petit village où l’on parlait encore araméen. Elle ne s’en souvient pas mais nous, oui. J’espère qu’un jour nous pourrons retourner ensemble revoir les lieux de ses premières années, s’ils existent encore.
François LaRochelle a pris sa retraite en 2014. Arabisant, il a été en poste au Caire, a Vienne (OSCE) et a Bruxelles. A la centrale, il a surtout travaillé sur les enjeux lies au Moyen-Orient et a été directeur des relations avec le Cabinet. Sa dernière affectation était au Secrétariat de la politique étrangère et de la défense au Bureau du Conseil privé. Il reside main-tenant a Montréal où il fait du bénévolat auprès des immigrants et du vélo. Il écrit a l’occasion dans les journaux a propos du Moyen-Orient et est president de la section montréalaise de l’Association canadienne pour les Nations Unies.
Trade is as old as civilization, indeed it is far older. Excavations of old stone age sites will often unearth things like sea-shells or high quality flints or ochre paints that originated far away and must have been acquired in exchange with some other group. Otzi, the famous 5,300 year old “ice-man” whose frozen remains were found on the Austrian-Italian border with a miscellany of goods, may have been an itinerant trader.
Trade really came into its own with the emergence of urban civilization in Sumeria (i.e. lower Mesopotamia) around 3,000 BC. The flood plain of the Tigris-Euphrates valley is immensely productive for agriculture, but remarkably deficient in raw materials. Indeed, aside from mud (good for bricks, writing tablets and growing abundant crops) and reeds (good for boats, roofing and writing styluses), there is little else: no decent timber, no building stone, no metal ores. It was to their traders that the Sumerians turned to get these things and they wandered far and wide to do so: up the river valleys, into Syria and Anatolia, onto the Iranian plateau and beyond into Central Asia, down the Persian Gulf to the Arabian peninsula and the Indus valley and even to Egypt, then still a neolithic village society. In exchange for raw materials, they could offer processed agricultural products such as oil and wine and manufactured goods such as pottery and decorative metalware, but above all, the basis of Mesopotamian trade was textiles, of which five grades were made, ranging from utilitarian to very fine pieces indeed. Surviving cuneiform records show the scale of Sumerian cloth production industry — employing tens of thousands of workers and maintaining millions of sheep (possibly up to five sheep to every Sumerian). Much of the organization of the workforce and the production and distribution of these textiles and other processed goods seems to have been centered in local temple complexes. Organizing the raw materials, the labour, production and distribution of trade goods was facilitated by the developing elaborate record-keeping techniques, which evolved into a very adaptable writing system, as well as an urban-based political and social system — in short “civilization.”
Where trade went, complex political organization and eventually urban civilization would soon follow, as local entrepreneurs came to appreciate the advantages of establishing political mechanisms for controlling the supply of the raw materials sought by the foreign traders and the redistribution of the goods they brought in exchange. Market centres sprang up and grew into cities, literacy skills were quickly acquired as a tool for keeping accounts. Soon it was found to be more profitable to process the raw materials locally and to take over the quest for new sources and their transport back to the older urban centres. As the quest for raw materials widened, cities spread up to the middle and upper Euphrates and Tigris, into northern Syria, onto the Anatolian and Iranian plateau, down the Levantine coast and the Persian Gulf and to the Indus valley (from whence urban civilization spread into the Central Asian Stans”). Even the rapid emergence of civilization and literacy in Egypt may have been inspired by contacts with Sumer. These new centres, in turn, spread their commercial wings.
For example, the city of Ebla in northern Syria, near modern Aleppo, became a major textile producer. Some time around 2100 BC, it concluded a commercial treaty (perhaps the earliest trade policy instrument found) with Ashur in northern Iraq. Its terms included clauses protecting each state’s merchants in the other’s territory, as well as establishing special trade zones. These, however, were not free trade zones — their purpose, in fact, was to ensure Side of the Great Standard of Ur showing commercial activities.
merchants paid the taxes to both their home and host states! Two hundred years later, merchants from Ashur were active in central Anatolia, where they left behind an immense “paper-trail” of over 17,000 clay tablets recording their activities, mainly trading imported tin and textiles (both acquired from third parties) for local silver and copper.
One of the great legends of Mesopotamia is the epic of Gilgamesh which centres on a quest to obtain cedar from what is now Lebanon. Gilgamesh succeeded, but his successors soon had competition- from Egypt. One of the greatest and most enduring trading relationships from the unification of upper and lower Egypt around 3000 BC to the Assyrian conquest of the near east in the 9th century BC, was that between Egypt and the Lebanese city of Byblos — its Greek name. To its west Semitic inhabitants it was Gubla, the mountain — the source of its wealth — timber. Not all the timber was traded, the Byblians and their neighbours also built ships, and soon dominated the maritime trade of the eastern Mediterranean, opening up Cyprus — a rich source of copper — followed by Crete and the Aegean. Byblos also had its own sources of copper and became a terminus for the trade routes bringing the other component of bronze — tin — from what is now Afghanistan to the Mediterranean. Byblos and the other Phoenician port cities, which appeared in the late bronze age, also became manufacturing centres for textile production, metal work, glass production and ivory work.
The technological exchange was by no means one way. While the use of metals — gold, silver and copper — has ancient roots in the near-east, their earliest employment was more decorative than utilitarian. All three metals are relatively easy to extract and work, but none are terribly durable or hold an edge. Metallurgy spread at a fairly early date from Anatolia to the Balkans, and from there across the steppes north of the Black Sea and around the Caspian. Somewhere along the way it was discovered that alloying copper with arsenic created a harder metal that could take and hold an edge. The casting of practical tools and weapons became possible and by about 3,000 BC this technology was spreading very rapidly. The speed of this diffusion was helped by another technological advance — again originating somewhere in the barbarian north — the wagon. Wagons and metallurgy created societies of cattle herding pastoralists (their mobility soon enhanced with the domestication of the horse and the Bactrian camel) who exploited the metal resources of the southern Urals and Caucasus on an almost industrial scale. Workers of arsenical bronze, however, did not enjoy a very long life and a superior, and safer, alloy ingredient soon replaced it, tin.
Even compared to copper, sources of tin were remote from the civilized world — Cornwall, Spain, Bohemia, and what are now Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. To marry copper and tin therefore required the creation of complex networks of trade and exchange, of which little is known, as most of it involved pre-literate peoples. But clearly they were effective. By 2000 BC, bronze artifacts — often very utilitarian objects: kettles, sickles, and cauldrons (and, of course, weapons and armour) were in widespread use from the Baltic to the Persian Gulf and were eventually borne by bands of Indo-European cattle-herding smiths all the way through central Asia to China (Old Kingdom Egypt and the Indus Valley were two civilizations which were slow to adopt bronze tools).
In the late Bronze Age (circa 1600 BC), new traders appeared on the scene, the Minoans in Crete and the Greek-speaking Mycenaeans on the European mainland, whose high quality pottery is found all around the Aegean and along the Levantine coast and into the western Mediterranean basin. However, progress was not constant. Empires waxed and waned and when great kingdoms faltered, their lesser trading partners often fell off the edge. The collapse of Old Kingdom Egypt in the mid-3rd millennium BC had a catastrophic effect on proto-urban cultures of southwest Jordan, which suffered massive population decline and reverted to a pastoral economy. Around the same time, a similar fate seems to have befallen some of states which had grown up around the Persian Gulf, “east of Sumer”. The decline of the Sumerian states, at the expense of the Akkadians further up the Tigris and Euphrates, caused the trade routes to shift further north, favouring suppliers on the Iranian plateau and in the “Stans”.
Even more pronounced were the “dark ages” which ended the Bronze Age around 1100 BC. In Asia Minor, the Hittite Empire collapsed and the peninsula was over-run by peoples from the Balkans. Egypt and Assyria both went into serious decline and many Levantine cites were overrun by peoples from the interior or from the Aegean. In Greece, the collapse of civilization was so complete that the knowledge of (and likely the need for) writing was lost for almost 500 years. It has been suggested that one reason for depth of this depression was the advent of iron technology and the concomitant collapse of the copper and tin trade networks. Unlike the ingredients of bronze, iron ore can be found almost anywhere — Viking ship-repair crews even extracted it from the bogs of northern Newfoundland. Suddenly the far-ranging, almost global exchange networks that supplied the ancient world – civilized and barbarian alike — with bronze were no longer so vital. Self sufficiency in terms of metal became possible — if not total. Bronze continued to have its uses, some sources of iron were of higher quality than others and some people were better smiths, so over time a specialized trade in iron and steel would also emerge. But generally this involved a much more local trade and the great Eurasian bronze net-work withered away.
Interestingly one area which did not go under at the end of the Bronze Age were the trading cities of Phoenicia, which weathered the dark ages by developing new markets among the successor states to the north, south and east of them and taking over Mycenaean trade routes to the west. The Phoenicians seem to have dominated Mediterranean shipping until the re-emergence of Greek maritime commerce in the 8th century BC. The dark ages also saw the fruition to what was to be Phoenicia’s greatest contribution to the advance of civilization, more important by far, than its purple cloths and knock-offs of Egyptian decorative arts — the alphabet. Its origin is associated with Byblos/Gubla, which is appropriate as Byblos is also associated with papyrus, which it re-exported from Egypt. Papyrus was the medium most appropriate for cursive alphabetic writing. Indeed the name “Byblos” is simply the Greek word for papyrus and the root of the English word “bible”. Suddenly, literacy no longer required years of study and documents could be conveyed in a lightweight form, not on heavy clay tablets.
The Phoenician alphabet emerged around 1200 BC and was soon adopted by speakers of related west Semitic languages, the Arameans and the Hebrews. Soon its use spread to Cyprus and Asia Minor. As Phoenician traders spread west, to Greece, Italy and Iberia, they took and diffused their alphabet. By the 8″ century BC, it was adopted in a modified form (which included the creation of vowels) by the long-illiterate Greeks and the never-literate Etruscans. Again trade had stimulated urbanism — re-emerging in Greece and developing for the first time in Italy — and with it the need for a writing system. Both the Greeks and Etruscans soon became major traders. The former were usually rivals of the Phoenicians; the latter, able to exploit the rich mineral resources of the Apennine mountains were usually the Phoenician’s partners.
By the mid-9″ century BC, the cities of Phoenicia were having to pay tribute to the growing power of Assyria. The Assyrians wanted this in silver and gold and the Phoenicians found new sources for this and other metals in western Italy and southern Spain. While Assyrian tribute demands were heavy, the Assyrian Empire, which embraced the entire “fertile crescent”, and its successors the Babylonian and Persian Empires, created a huge market for Phoenician trade, one that endured for several hundred years and drew in goods from afar afield as Europe and India.
To secure its trade route to the west, Phoenician colonies were founded in Spain, in Sicily and in North Africa, and one of them, Carthage, near modern Tunis, came in its turn to dominate the western Mediterranean. Rival Greek colonies in the west soon followed. The Greeks came to dominate southern Italy, soon known as Magna Graecia, but the Phoenicians gained the upper hand in Corsica and Sardinia. Sicily was, in effect, partitioned. The Greek and Carthaginian presence stimulated the rise of urban life in all these regions. Aside from Phoenician or Greek colonies such as Carthage and Cadiz or Syracuse and Naples, we see local responses such in Tartessos in Spain and the Etruscan city-states in Italy — soon to be followed by the Etruscans’ Latin neighbours.
An important Greeks colony was Massalia (Marseilles) in southern Gaul, near the mouth of the Rhone. This gave Greek traders access to the river systems of Western Europe and to that region’s mineral, timber, agricultural and human resources. In Gaul, the Greeks competed with the Etruscans to quench the locals’ unquenchable thirst for wine. The Greek and Etruscan wine trade with Gaul proved highly lucrative to both sides. Reportedly, Greek traders could exchange a 30-litre amphora of wine for a slave — and both sides probably thought they’d got the best of the bargain. Needless to say, a successful Gallic war-lord who could capture lots of slaves would soon corner the source of bartered wine for thirsty warriors, giving him the means to capture yet more slaves and get even more wine or other luxury goods from the Mediterranean world.
Chieftains emerged in central Europe, whose power base rested on the control of key points along the river systems, by which trade penetrated the interior. One 6″ century BC Gallic lady in Vix, in what is now Burgundy (where the head-waters of the Rhone, Seine and Loire converge) was important enough to receive, probably as a diplomatic gift, an immense 200-litre bronze wine bowl, and all the associated paraphernalia for a mammoth Greek symposium (drinking party). Another chieftain on the upper Danube gained the help of technical advisors from the Mediterranean, who built him a set of Greek style mud-brick town walls (alas climatic realities soon washed away this proto-civic adornment.)
Unfortunately, some Gallic chieftains sought more direct access to Mediterranean luxuries. In the 4% and 3″ centuries BC, war bands crossed the Alps into the Italy and the Balkans, looking for loot or employment as mercenaries. The Etruscans suffered severely as a result, but one hitherto obscure Latin city state, while suffering a Gallic sack in 390 BC, weathered the onslaught and had, a little more than a century later come to dominate the entire peninsula. This new power was Rome. Over the course of the next four centuries it would expand out of central Italy to create a single state and a single market of 60 to 100 million people extending from the Tyne to the Tigris with a demand for goods and markets for its own that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea and to south Arabia, east Africa, India and even China.
Roger Lucy served as a Foreign Service Officer in External Affairs from 1971 to 2004, including in Chicago, Tehran, Oslo and Port of Spain. Over the years, he has contributed many articles to bout de papier on “dark-age diplomacy” and has in addition written a number of books and monographs on Canadian armoured vehicles for Service Publications.
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2016), pp. 25–27. Read the rest of this issue →
