Gamal Nkrumah shifts gears from Syria to Iraq Blood and ink continue to flow from Syria's civil war and yet it was the enigmatic story of Iraq's fugitive Vice President Tarek Al-Hashemi, sentenced to death in absentia after a court found him guilty of running death squads, that hit the headlines on Sunday. Sadly, Shia and Sunni hostilities have hogged the media spotlight in recent weeks. Iraqis seem peculiarly prone to such hubris. There are those who yearn to see Iraq as a prosperous and peaceful demilitarised democracy free of sectarian strife. Politicians have once again reverted to the odious act of dangling the sectarian card in order to advance their political agendas. And, unscrupulous warlords and their marauding militias have taken full advantage of the chaotic situation. Iraq appears to be heading for a state of lawlessness all over again. Democrats and secularists have been sidelined and the sectarian spokesmen have taken to the pulpit and political podium. Shia Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki issued a death warrant for Hashemi. The latter has pleaded not guilty. The dawn raid on the military base in Dujali north of Baghdad is yet another cause for concern for Iraq. The bomb blast struck the oil rich enclave of Kirkuk in northern Iraq. The Kurds claim Kirkuk as a Kurdish city, even though Kirkuk has considerable Arab and Turkmen communities. It is in this context that the Saudi academic Abdel-Aziz Al-Tuweigri lamented in the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat that "the parameters of meaningful dialogue among Islamic sects needs to be properly defined. There are no great schisms between the various Sunni Muslim schools of thought�ê� the major sectarian, conceptual and intellectual differences are between the Sunni and Shia Muslims," Al-Tuweigri extrapolates. On a rather different note, Sudanese commentator Abdel-Aziz Hussein Al-Sawi wrote about the transformation of Arab political thought from Nasserism to political Islam. "Nasserism was a counter-revolutionary movement precisely because its accomplishments have denied it of the very accolade revolutionary. The haphazard praxis reduced Nasserism to a counter-revolutionary project that ultimately failed the very people it was supposed to serve," Al-Sawi concludes. These events were symptomatic of a wider problem. The Fretile Crescent and the Arabian Peninsula seem to be ripped apart by sectarian conflict. The spectre of sectarian strife not only afflicts Iraq but also Lebanon and Saudi Arabia and even tiny Bahrain. The Alawites constitute some 12 per cent of Syria's population and number around three million. Yet ending the Syrian civil war will be very difficult, indeed. Alawites, Christians and Druze minorities, not to mention secularist Sunni Muslims, would need to be given assurances that they will not succumb to the rule of a strict Wahhabist interpretation of Sunni Islam. In the long term a constitutional democracy guaranteeing freedom of religious affiliation and freedom of speech must prevail. There are many factors at play. And, it is up to the powers that be to see to it that no one group controls the political arena. "I am coming into this job with my eyes open and no illusions," the 78-year-old veteran Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi was quoted as saying in Al-Hayat. The Syrian National Council (SNC), too, is facing divisions and the power struggles within the SNC was reflected in the Arab media. Abdel-Baset Sayda replaced Burhan Ghalioun as leader of the SNC in June. In an opinion piece in the pan-Arab London-based daily Asharq Al-Awsat entitled "Turkey between two fires: The Iranian operations and Kurdish ambitions" Hoda Al-Husseini points out that Iraq has become the conduit where arms and ammunition and funds are channelled to Syria". Al-Husseini also highlights the fact that secret communications are renewed between Turkey and Israel in spite of disputes between the two countries over Syria. "Not so long ago, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan proudly proclaimed that Turks can now travel without visa restrictions to Iran, Syria and Lebanon. How things have changed," she cynically remarked. "Today the Iranian army chief considers Turkey an enemy country and the borders between Turkey and Syria are closed�ê� After 18 months of civil war in Syria, Turkey's problems have multiplied. There has been an onslaught of criticisms against Turkey and its regional policy and the impact on the domestic situation has raised concerns," Al-Hashemi warned. "A Western source suspects that relations between Turkey and Israel can be relatively quickly restored except that the respective foreign ministers of the two countries do not see eye to eye," she extrapolated. "The two men are hard-liners who espouse diametrically opposed views on Syria. They disagree on who should rule Syria in the post-Assad period. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu prefers to see the Muslim Brotherhood rule Syria after the fall of Al-Assad. This makes Israel extremely jittery, especially as it believes there are ample signs that the militant Islamists groups are gaining the upper hand among the ranks of the Syrian opposition forces." In the same paper Abdel-Rahman Al-Rashed takes a closer examination of Syria's supposed allies. In a provocatively entitled article "Did Iran and Hizbullah let down Assad?" the writer indicates that the Syrian government was hoping that Iran would militarily attack the conservative Sunni-ruled Arab Gulf states and that Lebanon's Hizbullah has largely resorted to lip service in support of Al-Assad. "Al-Assad had hoped that a war would break out in the Arabian Gulf and that Iran would come to the rescue of its Shia co-religionists in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. That has not come to pass. He was hoping that Iran would foment unrest in the Arab Gulf states," Al-Rashed contends. Yet another article in Asharq Al-Awsat is Bassem Al-Jesr's 'The Arabs' lost destiny' that appears to be highly critical of the outcome of the so-called Arab Spring. "Two years have passed since the first stirrings of the Arab Spring. And what we hear about Arab countries that have witnessed this phenomenon, and those Arab countries that have yet to experience the winds of change confirm three important points," Al-Jesr noted. "First, Islamist political parties managed to reach the pinnacle of power, or at least are participating with non-Islamist parties in power-sharing. Western powers have accepted this new phenomenon as a fait accompli," elucidates Al-Jesr. "Secondly, the Islamists themselves are divided and represent different ideological strands. There is much infighting among the rival groups contending for power. Thirdly, the Islamists are challenged by members of the civil society."
