Jamil Maidan Flores: Islamic Civil War? Prevent It Thru Dialogue
In the Middle East today, there’s so much to worry about. And there’s no way that a country in this part of the world can uncouple itself from events in the Middle East.
For instance there’s this news that the Arab League is forming a “response force” of 40,000 professional soldiers, some 1,000 of them belonging to the air force, 5,000 will be in the navy and the rest will be army. The force will be based in Egypt and commanded by a Saudi general.
It should be a good day when Arab nations can unite and work together for their own security. In fact this is the culmination of something they have done in concert: carrying out a campaign of airstrikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
The air bombardment changed the situation on the ground but not in the way intended. Houthis suffered casualties but were not stopped in their tracks. Civilians were killed, of course, and dwellings and buildings were reduced to rubble, leading to a humanitarian disaster. The happiest people about the airstrikes are the Islamic State fighters who recently inserted themselves into the Yemeni civil war.
Now the Arab League is out to institutionalize the Sunni force that intervened in Yemen, with the addition of big naval and army components. But this enterprise, billed as the Arab NATO, can’t be about Yemen any more.
There is already a UN Security Council resolution banning the sale of weapons to the Houthis and in various ways preventing them from inflicting any more damage to the country and its people.
The resolution demands that the Houthis withdraw from all the areas that they seized during the fighting. One of its most important provisions is the prohibition of the recruitment of children to serve as soldiers. With the resolution in effect, there should be space for the distribution of humanitarian aid and for the repatriation of foreign workers trapped in the fighting.
If the Houthis won’t comply, what will happen? The last thing that should happen is for Egyptian soldiers to intervene as planned before the resolution was passed. This is now a job for UN peacekeepers. And a sufficient number of them should already be on their way to Yemen.
The resolution was probably drafted by Jordan and approved by a Security Council meeting that it presided over. The Arabs should be happy.
But I’m worried because the 40,000 strong response force can only be about Iran. An Iran that leads an axis of five capitals: Teheran, Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus and Sanaa. An Iran that is about to receive an S-300 missile defense system that it is buying from Russia. An Iran that may, US Congress willing, be soon unshackled of sanctions and can acquire the best armaments that money can buy.
As each side builds up its capacity for war, the possibility of a widespread Sunni-Shiite conflagration increases. That potential conflict already has a billing as the Islamic Civil War. And I’m afraid that when it breaks out it won’t be confined to the Middle East. There could be bloody conflict wherever there are Sunni and Shiite communities within arm’s length of each other’s throat.
But let’s hope that the leaders of these communities have a lot more sense than the trigger-happy jihadists — Sunni and Shiite — already fighting it out in the Middle East. And let’s hope that in Indonesia, the police will do their job when the peaceful Shiite community is threatened by a mob driven to a murderous frenzy by some rabble-rouser.
And finally there should now be a move in the United Nations, or in any feasible forum, for a serious and sustained intra-Islamic dialogue toward a global modus vivendi between Sunnis and Shiites.
Jamil Maidan Flores is a Jakarta-based literary writer whose interests include philosophy and foreign policy. The views expressed here are his own.
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