Erik Moberg ©:
4. THE ASYLUM SEEKERS FROM AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ, A FIRST COMMENT
Afghanistan has, in fact, been a failed state for a
very long time. It has a population of about 26 millions and practically all of
these (99.7 %) are Muslims, and of these some 85-90 % are estimated to be
Sunnis and the rest Shiites. In the colonial era the country was exposed to
pressure from Russia on the one side and Britain on the other. From that
period, and for a number of years ahead, the country was a western-oriented
kingdom, although a shaky one. In 1929 the king was dethroned, and so was another
king in 1973. Then, in 1978, the regime became Soviet-oriented when the
communist party captured the power. Even this regime was however weak and
fragile. One reason was fights between fractions within the communist party,
another the guerilla activities, supported by Pakistan and parts of the western
world, of an association of Muslim jihadists or warriors called Mujahideen. This was in fact the first association of this kind
in modern times, but, as we will see later on, more ones would soon appear.
Anyway, the conflicts in Afghanistan escalated into a civil war and probably
about a million Afghans lost their lives.
In that situation the Soviet Union invaded the country
in 1979. The efforts to defeat the western-supported Mujahideen fighters, operating from strongholds in the
mountains bordering to Pakistan, and also supported by many volunteer Muslim
soldiers coming from other countries, failed however and finally, in 1989, the
Soviet Union withdrew. The war has, in fact, been characterized as the Soviet
Union’s Vietnam. It may be noted that this withdrawal came quite close to the
collapse of the Soviet empire itself–the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and
the empire in 1991. Anyway, after the Soviet withdrawal Afghanistan was almost
perpetually plagued by civil war until 2001. Here we may however leave
Afghanistan and its history for a while for focusing, rather, on an important
individual, namely the Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden.
Osama bin Laden, born in 1957, was rich and educated
in engineering, economy and administration. He also had strong religious
interests and was a devout Sunni Muslim. Immediately after the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan he went there for taking part in the warring against the Soviet
Union. Among others he helped in organizing the volunteer soldiers coming from
other countries, and, being an engineer, he also took part in the building of
roads and tunnels. And so, in 1988, he also took the first steps towards
founding what was to become al-Qaeda. After the Soviet withdrawal he
then returned to Saudi Arabia where he was received as a war hero. The harmonic
relation between bin Laden and his own country did however not last long. The
reason was Saudi Arabia’s reaction to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.
For understanding
that it may be beneficial to turn to Iraq and its history for a while.
Iraq has a population of about 34 million and
practically all of them (99 %) are Muslims. And among the Muslims the Shiites,
some 65-70 %, dominate. Then there is also an important ethnic division. Thus
about 8 millions of the total population are Kurds. Going then to the country’s history it was independent even before
the end of World War II and after the war it was at first, under the
pro-British king Feisal II, west oriented. Then, in 1958, a group of officers
ousted the king and took power. The officers could however not control
conflicts among themselves and in 1968 the relatively secular Arabic
nationalist Baath party took over. And so, in 1979, the strongman of that
party, Saddam Hussein, made himself dictator. Thereby the interesting, latest
history of Iraq started.
With large incomes from oil the country was a great
regional power and Saddam Hussein started modernizing the economy, industry and
education. The sharia law was abandoned
and women’s rights extended. In 1980, however, Iraq also attacked Iran. The
conflict between the two countries had several components. One was about the
waterway leading to the Persian Gulf, the final part of the Euphrates-Tigris
system, vital for Iraq but controlled by Iran. Another one about religion–Iran,
the dominating Shiite power since its revolution in 1979, was criticizing Iraq
for its secularism in general and for its maltreatment of its Shiite majority
in particular. Iraq’s attack on Iran was at first successful but in 1982 Iran
counterattacked and pushed deep into Iraq. The success of the counterattack did
not persist however; the war dragged on, and finally, in 1988, Iran, exhausted,
accepted a cease-fire. After the war against Iran Saddam Hussein tried to
persuade other oil-producing countries, and in particular Kuwait, to decrease
their production and thereby to increase the price of oil. He did however not
succeed and therefore, in 1990, invaded and annexed Kuwait.
And now we will return to Osama bin Laden. He had, we
remember, returned as a war hero to Saudi Arabia in 1989 and soon after that,
in 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. In that situation the Saudis, as well as others,
thought about the possibility that the Iraqi forces, unless stopped, might
continue into Saudi Arabia, and so the US president, George Bush (president
1989-93) initiated an international response. US forces together with other
western and Arabian troops were invited to Saudi Arabia where they assembled
close to the border to Kuwait. Then, in 1991, after Iraq’s refusal to withdraw,
they executed operation Desert Storm and drove away all Iraqi forces
from Kuwait. They stopped however at that and no efforts were made to go
further into Iraq and to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Now, the use of Saudi’s territory for stationing US
and other hated western troops prior to the attack was utterly disgusting for
Osama bin Laden. He first criticized the royal family harshly and then declared
his goal to overthrow it and create an Islamic republic. His Saudi Arabian
citizenship was withdrawn and, in 1991, he moved to the northern, mostly
Islamic, part of Sudan. (Sudan was by that time not yet divided into the two
states of Sudan and South Sudan). There he assisted in road building but also
turned into an important and dedicated terrorist and developed and strengthened
the al-Qaeda organization. And now the terrorist attacks of al-Qaeda also
started. In December 1992 a hotel in Yemen was bombed. In February 1993 a truck
bomb was detonated at the World Trade Center in New York. In August 1998 the US
embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were
bombed. In October 2000 a US warship was bombed. And so, on September 11, 2001,
the World Trade Center in New York and Pentagon in Washington D.C. were
attacked. All of this is important since here we meet, for the first time, a
Muslim warring organization which operates internationally over large areas.
With Mujahedin, the other organization we have met so far, it was not so. Its
activities were limited to Afghanistan and areas in Pakistan close to the
border to Afghanistan.
Before the last attacks mentioned above, in 1996,
Osama-bin Laden had however been expelled from Sudan–he was accused of having
taken part in a conspiracy to murder Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak–and returned to Afghanistan. And there, in 1994, a new
jihadist organization, the Taliban, had been created by Mullah
Mohammed Omar. The purpose–to fight the Afghani communists who remained
strong after the Soviet withdrawal–was successful, and Kabul, the capital, was
taken in 1996. But even so Mullah Omar, as a person, was very different from
Osama bin Laden. He was shy and withdrawn, his education was limited to the
Koran, and his militant activities were confined to Afghanistan and some
Pakistani areas close to Afghanistan. Because of all this his relation to bin
Laden, after the latter’s return to Afghanistan in 1996, was at first somewhat
restrained. Mullah Omar disliked, for instance, bin Laden’s and
al-Qaeda’s external, international activities. But that was to change. Their
relationship gradually improved even if bin Laden, by means of al-Qaeda,
continued his terrorist actions from Afghanistan. As we have seen above there
was an attack on US embassies in 1998, on a US warship in 2000, and so in 2001,
the 11th September attack on World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Immediately after these September attacks the US
president George W. Bush (president 2001-9) required the Taliban government to
hand over Osama-bin Laden and close all terrorist training camps in
Afghanistan. Then, and following the Taliban refusal, US air forces together
with NATO allies and Afghan ground forces in opposition to the Taliban attacked
and overthrow the regime. A large number of al-Qaeda activists, although not
bin Laden, were captured or killed. This was the first operation in a set of
activities that were to continue, and which George W. Bush called the war on
terror. After the toppling of the Taliban regime efforts to democratize the
country began and a new government, led by President Hamid Karzai, was installed.
And thereby a new era, though certainly not without its own serious problems,
in Afghanistan’s history began.
I will soon return to Afghanistan but prior to that
the development in, and related to,
Iraq should be dealt with. There, we remember, the Western powers, in 1991, had
executed Operation Desert Storm which however stopped at the border between
Kuwait and Iraq. The next important event is the invasion of Iraq in March 2003
by troops from the US, Britain and some other countries. The initiative came
from the US president George W. Bush and the attack was considered as a
continuance of the war on terror even if the main reason was the allegation
that Iraq had, and was hiding, weapons of mass destruction (biological,
chemical and nuclear). In spite of the failure of UN-inspectors to find any
such weapons the US, supported by Britain, still insisted that the weapons were
there. And so, ignoring the vetoes of France, Germany and Russia in the UN
Security Council, they attacked on their own. No weapons of mass destruction
were however found but even so the operation, at first, was considered
successful by President Bush. Saddam Hussein, after having been found in a
hiding hole, and many of his officials were captured and–in the same way as in
Afghanistan–efforts to turn Iraq into a democracy were initiated. But soon
various problems, to which I will return, emerged.
We have now followed the developments in Afghanistan
and Iraq until the western invasions in 2001 and 2003 respectively, both
initiated by George W. Bush. So let us now look at the further developments. I
will start with Afghanistan.
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