The real roots of many major recent and current political events - the convulsions surrounding Iran's Islamic regime, the bloody troubles in neighbouring Iraq, the ethnic cleansing and mass murders in the Balkans, even numerous wars and uprisings from Palestine to Indochina - lie in a ceremony that occurred ninety years ago. This was the gathering in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, outside Paris, on 28 June 1919, when the representatives of the victors in the first world war dictated the terms of peace to the quivering representatives of Germany's Kaiser.

David A Andelman is the editor of World Policy Journal and the author of A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today (Wiley, 2007)

"The stillest three minutes ever lived through were those in which the German delegates signed the Peace Treaty", the New York Times correspondent Charles A Selden reported in next morning's newspaper. As American delegate George Louis Beer wrote in his diary, "Two German delegates [were] led like felons into the room to sign their doom. It was like the execution of a sentence."

But it was no less an execution for the billion or more innocent people in territories whose borders were so cavalierly rearranged by the delegates in the fraught months of negotiation that preceded this signing. For the document called the Treaty of Versailles dramatically transformed the world and set the stage for so many contemporary problems (see A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today [Wiley, 2007]). 

This treaty, largely forgotten even as the world has so frequently been forced to cope with its consequences, set up a new system of global governance. The victors in what was then known as the Great War were effectively empowered to maintain, indeed expand, a series of entrenched, though already fading global empires.

When the Allied powers arrived in Paris at the end of 1918, barely days after the Armistice that brought an end to hostilities was signed on 11 November, they proclaimed themselves "the world's government" for the period they were assembled in Paris. So for the next six months, the statesmen of the victorious powers -  America's Woodrow Wilson, France's Georges Clemenceau, Britain's David Lloyd George, Italy's Vittorio Orlando, even Japan's Viscount Sutemi Chinda - proceeded to redraw the map of vast stretches of the planet. They created a host of new nations with little understanding - and barely a nod to the wishes or desires, prejudices or fears - of the people who lived within the new boundaries they were marking with blurry blue pencils, often in the wee hours of the morning.

A legacy and a lesson

Also in openDemocracy on war and peace legacies:

Carl Bildt, "Europe's future in the mirror of the Balkans" (3 April 2003)

Patrice de Beer, "Versailles to al-Qaida: tunnels of history" (9 November 2007)

Dan Todman, "How we remember them: the 1914-18 war today" (11 November 2008)

Dejan Djokic, "Versailles and Yugoslavia: ninety years on" (26 June 2009)

As the peacemakers sought to dismantle the great empires that had challenged them on the battlefields - the Germans, Austro-Hungarians, and especially the Ottomans - they established a new world order with little real understanding of the consequences.

So Yugoslavia was created from a kaleidoscope of hostile religions, alphabets, languages and tribal passions in the most volatile corner of Europe (see Dejan Djokic, "Versailles and Yugoslavia: ninety years on", 26 June 2009) .

Germany was effectively pillaged by a reparations system, part of a Carthaginian peace; Japan was given free reign to do as it pleased in China, Korea and much of Asia. Both decisions set the stage for militarist resurgence in these defeated nations and, ultimately, for the second world war.

The mandate system awarded Britain control of Palestine, echoing the Balfour declaration's recognition of a Jewish right to a homeland in the entire territory of Palestine, with barely a nod to the native Arabs. A swathe of other nations was established in the middle east - from Iraq, Syria and Jordan (carved out of Mesopotamia), to a greater Lebanon seized upon by the French as its booty from the spoils of war.

Indeed it was the British - and their determined efforts to to break apart the Ottoman empire and cement control over vast stretches of the middle east - who were the most successful in forcing their will on their Allies in Paris. The efforts of Lloyd George and his most adroit team of diplomats and statesmen were designed to secure trade and military routes to their vast Indian empire, not to mention the rights to the newest strategic commodity, oil.

The Ottomans had played an important, and at the time little understood, role in the middle east. The Sunnis who ruled from the Sultan's palace in Constantinople (Istanbul) were a critical counterweight to the Shi'a of the Persian empire or indeed the Shi'a of much of Mesopotamia and the Gulf. With the Sunnis' power curbed, their ability to act as a restraining force on British, and eventually American, activities, especially in Iran, was effectively neutralised.

So it was not surprising that British interests would move with dispatch into the oilfields of the Persian Gulf, where they would eventually be challenged by American entrepreneurs as well. And Iran, especially its ruler Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, even before he assumed the throne in December 1925, would find a foreign power he was little able to control and on whose high-handed actions there was little restraint. By then, the Ottoman empire - that once stretched cross the middle east and north Africa, up through the Balkans, nearly to the gates of Vienna - was reduced to the small, rather powerless nation of Turkey. Britain was the force to reckon with across the middle east. So it should come as little surprise if today's rulers of Iran have replaced the United States with Britain as "the most evil" of Iran's enemies, as Ayatollah Ali Khamenei proclaimed during his Friday prayer message in Tehran on 19 June 2009.

The legacy of Versailles extends far beyond Iran, or Iraq, even the Balkans. It is a legacy of greed and hubris, ignorance and selfishness that should serve as a lesson for all governments, all statesmen who seek to impose their blinkered vision on other nations and other peoples.

My dear friends, colleagues and partners,

The condition of Georgia is grave, and change in the governance of my country is essential. In a time of great political momentum, I would like to address you - friends of Georgia living in free and democratic Nino Burdzhanadze is a leading Georgian politician who served as speaker of the parliament in Tbilisi from November 2001 to June 2008. 

She is chair of the Democratic Movement-United Georgia political party societies - in search of hope and understanding. Amid intense weeks of political protest in the streets of Tbilisi, and after extensive communication with the international community, I believe that there in a need to make even clearer both my personal position and the motivation of the current peaceful struggle of the Georgian people.

What is happening now in Georgia can be understood as the attempt to answer a question that has dominated our lives since the break-up of the Soviet empire: how can nations that emerged from under it build an indigenous, independent and democratic society?  

My own political biography has been a long engagement with this question. On two occasions I have been the speaker of the Georgian parliament and acting president of the country, I was among three leaders of the Rose Revolution of 2003 who supported the commitment of the Georgian people to create a better country.

During the five and a half years since then, I have discussed and explored many issues central to Georgia's future: the need for reform and for political unity, the importance of state-building, territorial problems, confrontation with aggression, and dozens of daily priorities. In a number of cases I made choices that harmed my political career, including compromises that seemed to show me to be indecisive and unprincipled; but all these decisions were aimed at one ultimate goal - maintaining the stability of Georgia. 

This is the experience that has brought me to my latest political stance and commitment.

The ground of protest

The view has been much heard from those working in international institutions that current political processes in Georgia have become too "radicalised" and are unhelpful in securing the country's stability - and that I am personally  to blame for that. It's healthy then to remember that only a few decades ago, during the Soviet regime, Georgia enjoyed an incomparable level of stability. There were no problems of territorial integrity, snap elections, conflict with neighbours, and the like.

This shows that stability alone is far from enough to guarantee the foundation of modern, civilised relations: democracy. After all, it was an illusive stability that led us all to the tragic events of August 2008, which vividly exposed the reality that there is neither democracy nor stability in Georgia.

Georgian society has learned a serious lesson since January 2008, when people and parties across the spectrum - and the international democratic community - chose stability to the detriment of democracy. There is no stability without democracy and there cannot be any.

At that time, I exhausted all my efforts as speaker of the Georgian legislative body in the effort to strengthen democratic institutions and "checks and balances". But when political processes started to move entirely in the opposite direction from true "democracy-building", I made the decision to break from the governmental team.  

This led me to the present point where, based on my experience and as one of the oppositon leaders, I carry on a peaceful political struggle for democracy in Georgia. I strongly believe that democracy first and "democracy today" - which is also the motto of my political party - is both the only path for overcoming the current political crisis, and the only guarantee of long-term stability in my country. 

Today, when the flashes of hope for a democratic future that were lit in 2003 have become dim, I - together with my political colleagues - protest against Georgia's authoritarian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and in favour of a stable and democratic Georgia.

Most of us protesting in the streets of Tbilisi about what is happening in Georgia were at one time supporters and allies of Mikheil Saakashvili. But this man has in the course of his presidency become tainted by power, narrowing gradually the constitutional rights and freedoms of Georgia's people in pursuit of a façade democracy in which power is wielded against the very people who are the source of his democratic mandate.

The grounds for our protest include the following six key points:

* The protest is not a matter of personalities; it is directed against the attempt to remodel Georgia's already authoritarian state and create an even more uncertain future. The essential requirement in response is to establish real democratic and pluralist institutions and processes, and accountability for political leaders. 

* The state's institutions are deprived of decision-making authority; all the decisions are made in a non-transparent way by a small coterie around president. This high level of concentration of power must change.

* The fraudulent conduct of elections is in violation of all international democratic norms and standards, and of Georgia's own constitution. President Saakashvili's fraudulent elections have led to the disqualification of Georgia from the category of "electoral democracies" cited by the respected international organisation Freedom House. This must end.

* The control of the interior ministry and security service gives the president total control over the public broadcaster as well as other national TV channels. This centralised mechanism for promulgating ideological propaganda is a denial of rights to the free flow of information and ideas. The place of Georgia in the "press freedom index" of Reporters Sans Frontieres has declined from 78 in 2003 to 120 in 2008.

* The control of the judicial system through the office of the prosecutor-general has allowed violation of the human rights of peaceful protestors, including many cases of police violence. There have also been even more serious incidents involving the murder of innocent people, which remain uninvestigated.

* The president's losing battle cost the lives of hundreds of Georgia's citizens and military personnel, victims of the president's fanatical ambition of obtaining a victory over the Russian army. This worthless military confrontation resulted in the loss of 20% of the Georgian territories, three new Russian bases on Georgian soil, tens of thousands of internally-displaced people (IDPs), and crucial damage to vital infrastructure. The war significantly dented Georgia's pro-western and Euro-Atlantic ambitions, split Georgian society, and lost the president the trust of Georgia's people. Such a political leader is unable to secure the future of Georgia, internally or internationally.

The reality-check

Again, I have been led to these judgments and my current position by personal and political experience. Perhaps until as late as April 2008 the parliament of Georgia had a real chance to become stronger as an institution and more independent of the executive branch - a body to which the members of government could be accountable and where if necessary the impeachment of the president could take place. But President Saakashvili, fully aware of this possible threat to his reign, did his utmost not to allow the parliament - and myself as speaker - to become a balancing authority to his totalitarian ambitions. 

This is a reality which, I believe, is not properly understood by some of you, Georgia's western friends. Perhaps this is because for so long in the post-2003 period, Georgia was deemed to be a democracy success-story. But when, for example, some western friends call on the Georgian opposition (including myself) to launch a dialogue with the government in one or other institution, it is clear that our partners may not grasp that there are no democratic institutions in Georgia and no state institution which are willing or able to protect the constitutional rights and freedoms of citizens. This is a country which has reached a dead-end for democracy.  

The failure to apprehend this reality, and the support that Mikheil Saakashvili still enjoys in the Euro-Atlantic community, is a source of increasing frustration among the Georgian population. Here, Georgia's friends need to look beyond the messages and signals that they are receiving from the government in Tbilisi and become aware of the flow of misinformation (and even worse, lying) of which they too, as well as Georgia's people, are victims. It is very important that they do so; for otherwise, this alarming tendency of frustration with the west may lead to drastic and regrettable changes in Georgia's political orientation, affecting the entire region as a result.

The historic choice

The Georgian people deserve to live in a free and democratic society. We must then realise that our country today is in this respect at a crossroads. We all - representatives of Georgian society and its political spectrum, as well as the international community - face a historic choice: accept the façade democracy which conceals a state of power and cannot ensure the country's stability, or support a decisive campaign for freedom and real democracy in Georgia. 

Along with my colleagues in opposition, aware of Georgia's political dynamics and the nature of Mikheil Saakashvili's methods and principles of running the state, I have come to believe that to engage in a peaceful, political battle for the future of the country is the only answer. Georgia will not be a stable country under undemocratic rule; the current president is taking the country in a dangerous direction; his removal is the precondition for the arduous process of creating a democratic order founded on the rule of law, good governance, an independent judiciary, a free media, responsible and accountable institutions, and free and fair elections.

We believe that our struggle cannot be left unheard by the international democratic community. As a result, in the midst of an intensive and often brutal political standoff, I appeal to you: look more closely at what is happening in Georgia, maintain your most valuable engagement is securing our national independence and territorial integrity, and continue to work for freedom and democracy in our country. 

With the shared hope of a better future,

Nino Burdzhanadze

Pakistan's cites are under assault. A series of bomb-attacks on spectacular or otherwise high-profile targets in Islamabad (the Marriott Hotel, in September 2008) and Lahore (the Sri Lankan cricket team and a police academy, in March 2009) has now been followed by the destruction of the Pearl Continental Hotel in Peshawar on 9 June. The campaign, part of the country's rooted political and security crises, can also be understood in symbolic terms.

Razi Ahmed studied politics and economics at the University of Chicago, and now works in Lahore. He writes frequently in Dawn Lahore's Queen's Road is a place of dense urban agglomeration. It starts from the city's bustling electronics wholesale market, passes a Salvation Army school, the pre-partition Ganga Ram hospital, the British visa office, a concentration of media and law offices, a popular cinema, relics of Hindu architecture, and the Red Cross office, before rounding off at Charing Cross, a site of popular protests and rallies opposite the Punjab Legislative Hall.

Here too lies the intended target of the gun-and-suicide attack of 27 May 2009 - the office of Pakistan's flagship intelligence agency, Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). The agency's building is adjacent to a police-station and the police's emergency-response centre, which were ultimately the locations hit. The incident left twenty-six people dead and over 250 wounded, debris, charred buildings, damaged hospitals, and many mangled cars, rickshaws, and electric poles.

The perpetrators of this and similar strikes deep into the urban maze of Lahore's city-centre are a nexus of al-Qaida, Pakistani Taliban, and local Punjabi militants who have adopted a "punishment" strategy designed - in an echo of powerful states's air-campaigns - to "(harm) enemy civilians in order to lower their morale and motivate them to force their governments to end the war." The militants' targets in this urban campaign of terror include key units of state and society, law-enforcement agencies, mosques, hotels, and individual political figures.

The arc of influence of these militants extends from the core Taliban badlands of North and South Waziristan to Lahore and Quetta; it is increasingly exerted through the group's proxies, such as the Punjab-based Lashkar-i-Taiba. The urban heartlands of Lahore, Islamabad, and Peshawar have become "trophy-targets" of militants seeking to punish the Pakistani state for its newfound resolve against terror. These cities represent the heart of national commerce and culture, as well as the key nodes of law-enforcement. This makes them all the more tempting to the militants.

The brutal assault on the Frontier region's sole deluxe hotel in Peshawar's busy Sadder district, executed in the same gun-and-suicide bombing pattern as Lahore's, inflicted a death-toll of eighteen, including United Nations officials, plus sixty injured. It too is part of this emerging pattern of multi-pronged attacks on state and society, in the service of pitiless urban punishment. The strategy is self-evidently "successful" in achieving its short-term objective of spreading chaos, but insofar as it is hardening the resolve of both state and citizens to protect their interests and livelihoods, it is ultimately self-defeating.

The blast-waves reaching across Lahore and Peshawar represent the spreading urbanisation of an internal war for so long fought in the militants' mountainous hideouts. But these are already landscapes of conflict, whose people have the resources to make sense of it and defy those who would intimidate them. Lahore's first suicide-bombing in January 2008 can also be seen as one moment of a history marked by invasions, the turmoil around partition, sporadic religious violence and national wars. Lahore, my city too, has always recovered.

Peshawar has had tougher luck. This conservative city served as the advance base for the United States-sponsored Afghan mujahideen operations against Soviet forces in the 1980s; once concluded with the Red Army's withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988-89, it remained a locus of jihadist ideology and fulmination, and has found a new role with the coming of another Afghan war in 2001. But this time round, the deep penetration of militants inside the city and across the Frontier make this latest protracted conflict both indigenous and more bloody.

There is no sign of the militant campaign on Pakistan's cities abating. It is crucial that the effort to sever the circuits of terror, intended to transform Pakistan's urban nodes into places of permanent insecurity, continues. Lahore and Peshawar can also resist by taking refuge in their legacy and identity as cities, rejecting violence in the name of shared public life.

Few people really understand what is happening there. It is hard to get an objective picture of events in such a complex place, home to more than 30 different ethnic groups speaking many different languages. In fact, it is all but impossible, even more so when the media propagate myths that are often completely absurd. 

Gudben - the myth

Gudben, a village in the Karabudakhkent District, has something of a reputation. People outside and inside Dagestan say that it is a ‘wahhabi' village. They'll tell you all sorts of stories about what goes on there. You get the idea that the village has been completely taken over by Islamic radicals, that they've more or less imposed sharia law there, as they did in the villages of Karamakhi and Chabanmakhi before the outbreak of the second Chechen war. They say that the women are all hidden behind veils and girls do not go to school, while the boys study in the Koranic school, where they are turned into future martyrs for Islam. At any rate, they're supposedly ready to take to the forests. Indeed, they say that Islamic fundamentalism has got such a foothold in Gudben that the doors of people's houses have two handles - one for men and one for women. It's not for nothing that a counterterrorist operation has been underway there since March.  

Islam does indeed play an important part in the life of Gudben. It is as an old village with deep-rooted religious traditions. Even during the Soviet years, local people stubbornly defended their right to believe and pray openly. The Dagestani authorities complained to Moscow that, "in the village of Gudben, in 1956, a group of religious fanatics, acting without permission, opened a mosque", and that "it is very hard to stamp out the relics of the past in people's minds and lives: the religious authorities forbid the young people from joining the komsomol and constantly undermine the communist ideology". (http://www.chernovik.net/news/245/MONOTHEOS/2007/10/12/3444)

People from Gudben were among the first Russian Muslims to make the hajj in the early 1990s. Salafist preachers were active in the village, and it certainly had its share of aggressive fundamentalists, though there can't have been too many of them, because when Shamil Basayev invaded Dagestan, they were swiftly dealt with by their own fellow villagers. The villagers gave them a beating, kicked them out of the madresa and made them promise that they would not under any circumstances help Basayev and his friends. In other words, the radicals were not the dominant force in the village. 

So how is it that 10 years later there is no secular education and even door handles are segregated according to sex? Or is this just hearsay?

Gudben - the reality

It's hard to say who thought up the story about the door handles. The doors in Gudben are extremely ordinary, with just one handle. As for the women, they are not hidden behind burqas, but wear long dresses and cover their hair with a scarf thrown over the shoulder. You don't see anyone smoking in the streets, and you certainly don't see anyone drunk. People here are serious about their religion, they stick to the rules, and pray five times a day.

There are over 12,000 people living in the village, and the locals say that four villagers have gone to join the insurgents in the forest. Just four, not hundreds or even dozens. When the ‘counterterrorist' operation began in March, the security forces, worried by the news that Gudben had been taken over by wahhabi fundamentalists, began picking out families who were not sending their children to school. They came up with a total of around 30 children who were not receiving any secular education. This is not a good thing of course. But to put it in perspective, Gudben is a big village, the families all have many children, and 30 children is a drop in the ocean.

As for the question of education, the real problem is not that there are children who don't go to school, but that even those who do go to school have no chance of getting a decent education. The teachers are recent graduates of the very same local school with precious little experience. They speak to the children in Dargin, but the textbooks are in Russian. The children learn to read out the syllables, but they don't actually understand what they're reading. They learn basic arithmetic, and that is about as far it goes.

The better-off families try and send their boys, especially their older sons, to boarding school or to relatives in the towns of Makhachkala, Buinak and Kaspiisk. If the boys have certificates proving that they've had nine years of schooling, schools in the towns usually reluctantly accept them into the sixth year and try to help them catch up, though they are probably more like third year students. Village families don't send their daughters away to study. There is not enough money to go around, and they need helping hands at home. While this is certainly sad, the same is true of many villages in the North Caucasus. 

Gudben is an ordinary village, old, with narrow winding streets that not every car can manage. But the streets here were not designed for cars. It has picturesque stone houses and a huge cemetery on the hill, from where you get an excellent view of the mosque, the same mosque that Gudben's fearless rebels built against Soviet atheism in the late 1950s. The village women and girls look exotic to urban-dwelling outsiders with their colourful headscarves and traditional clothes. It is a picturesque Dargin village high up in the mountains, a place with its own customs. The local life is full of interest. It would be good to make a documentary about it, to be able to show the daily lives of these people who want only to be left in peace to follow their traditions without the upset caused by endless ‘special operations'. 

Beard = wahhabi

"Young men with beards can't show their faces here", said a strongly-built man of around 40, shaking his head. "The security people, if they see a beard, that's it - they're taken into custody straight away. They don't touch the old people, but the young ones... best not to go out. People here prayed during the Soviet years. They prayed in secret, but they kept the religion alive. After the old regime collapsed, we started travelling all around Dagestan, preaching Islam, teaching Muslims who'd lost their knowledge. We had up to 400 people during the holy Ramadan month. We found mosques that had been turned into storehouses, cleaned them, and people began coming to them again...

"Later, at the end of the 1990s, this talk of ‘wahhabis' began, some sort of enemy. People became afraid of receiving us. Now life's become impossible. I get called a wahhabi, but I've not held a gun since I was in the Soviet army. I simply want to follow my beliefs. Yes, I practise pure Islam. Muslims need nothing except what the Prophet God sent and what's written in the books. But here we have fundamentalists like me, and traditionalists who follow the sheikhs. We all pray together, all go to the same mosque. It's shameful to say, but I don't wear a beard, though I should.  I should be setting an example. But the security people would only cause me grief. Look what happened to Saihadji Saihadjiev. He's the same age as me, not even a young man, and now he's left seven children behind. Who is going to bring them up? Two others were killed along with him. And me, I want to raise my children..."  

On October 21, 2008, just 10 kilometres away from Gudben, there was a clash between the insurgents and security forces. Five police officers, including a local policeman from Gudben, were wounded. The security forces surrounded the village and over the next four days detained about 40 local people. They were then sent to police stations in Kaspiisk and Makhachkala. There, they were questioned about the insurgents. Many were beaten, threatened, but they were released fairly quickly.

The villagers thought the incident was over. But on October 27, three Gudben residents, Saihadji Saihadjiev, Nustap Aburakhmanov, and Akhmed Hadjimagomedov, ‘disappeared'. Forty-four year-old Saihadjiev went that evening to pray at the mosque and never came home. Hadjimagomedov collected his daughter from school, then went to the mosque, and disappeared too. Abdurakhmanov was in Dagestan's capital, Makhachkala, at the time. He was abducted there. In all three cases relatives soon found eyewitnesses to confirm that the three men were taken away by law enforcement officials. On October 28, the families were told that the three men were killed during a ‘special operation' in Dagestan's Sergokalinsk district, while putting up resistance to law enforcement officers. The families' requests for the bodies to be handed back to them were rejected at first. Under Russian law, terrorists' bodies are not handed over to relatives. But Saihadjiev's father turned out to have connections in high places and after two difficult days, he and the other two families were able to get back their sons' bodies. They could see that they had been subjected to torture. 

Magomed Saihadjiev is 76. Taking his guests up to the second storey of his house he sits down, upright, his silver-white beard neatly combed. His wife Kistoman sits on the stairs, watching attentively, not saying a word, only shedding silent tears from time to time, shyly covering her eyes with the edge of her white headscarf.   

"My son left the house and drove to the mosque", Magomed says. "He entered the mosque. There was a white car waiting beside the mosque. When he came out again, the law enforcement people took him away. There were witnesses. We didn't have a clue about what was going on. There was just this report on the news, this special operation, three insurgents killed, and Saihadji among them. If it hadn't been for my connections we'd never have got his body back. He would've been buried somewhere and we'd never have known what happened. But they ended up having to hand over his body. When I saw what they'd done to my son... One of my relatives, Abdula Rasudlov, is a doctor. We called him, got him to examine the body and explain what he saw, and we filmed it all on video. I'll put it on for you to watch now..."

Magomed put on the recording. The screen showed a horribly tortured body accompanied by the doctor's calm and even voice. Broken bones, burns, bruising...

"We went to the prosecutors. We have a lawyer too... But there's no hope here. Our lawyer says that if we take the case to the European Court of Human Rights we would definitely win, because we have all the proof. But I heard this would take a long time... Do you know how long we'd have to wait, a year, two years? What, five whole years? Isn't there any way to speed things up? Please try to do something. You saw yourselves what they did to him? And for what? Saihadji spent his whole life doing nothing but good for others. He never caused anyone any harm. And then there was this shootout with the police, our local policeman got caught in it too. Then they came and took him and the two others away by way of punishment... Innocent people! He's left four sons behind. How are they going to manage now?" 

Saihadji's youngest son is two years and eight months old. His relatives say that the boy spends whole days sitting on the windowsill, waiting for his father, asking when papa will come home.

On the village outskirts, the big cemetery on the hill offers a wonderful view of the mosque, that same mosque which the villagers opened without permission more than fifty years ago. Saihadji is buried near the cemetery fence. His mother often visits the grave with her little grandson. While his grandmother prays, the little boy runs around, hiding behind the white stone gravestones.

He doesn't yet understand the meaning of death.

A visit by an American president to the Arab world might not in normal circumstances be of great importance to the majority of people in the region. There is still much suspicion towards the United States in the middle east, and this tends to be reflected in indifference to the appearance of a head of state of the country in its midst.

Karim Kasim is a researcher in development and political science at the American University in Cairo (AUC). He has been working on ICT for development in Lebanon, Egypt and elsewhere in the middle east. He is involved in a number of local initiatives, including youth work, activism, volunteer work and intercultural learning

Zaid Al-Ali is an attorney at the New York Bar and specialises in international commercial arbitration. He graduated from King's College London, the Sorbonne University in Paris and Harvard Law School

Among Zaid Al-Ali's articles in openDemocracy:

"Iraq: the lost generation" (7 November 2004)

"Iraq's war of elimination" (21 August 2006)

"The United States in Iraq: the case for withdrawal" (19 January 2007)

"Iraqis in freefall" (21 March 2007)

"Iraq: a wall to conquer us" (8 May 2007)

"Lebanon's Palestinian shame" (19 June 2007)

"What Obama means for Iraq" (13 November 2008)

"Lebanon: chronicles of an attempted suicide" (20 May 2009)But these are not normal times. President Barack Obama's persona had already engaged great interest among Arabs, but his address in Cairo on 4 June 2009 on the Muslim world and the "new beginning" he seeks to forge with it has captivated them. In more concrete terms, Obama's visit has reinforced what has been evident for some time: a feeling of hope that a president with his background will tilt American policy in favour of popular will and against oppression in Palestine, Iraq and the region as a whole. 

There is widespread agreement that the speech is unlikely to be followed by sudden changes; and indeed that no single individual - even the president - can decisively shift American policy. But a space has opened, and - as this brief article shows - Arab Muslims (as well those elsewhere) are filling it with their ideas.

Anticipation

In the days before the speech, Cairo residents were more concerned by the draconian security measures they were sure would be imposed on 4 June. As a result, many opted to stay at home. Yet even then, Obama's message - its timing, substance and likely reception - were very much on people's minds. 

"Turkey did not work, so he is trying Egypt", said Ashraf Qadah, a philosophy graduate. "I am afraid that it is going to be a speech that starts and ends in Cairo. Obama's address will be a public-relations matter that will go nowhere after Obama leaves the city", he added. 

Aseel, a young Iraqi, expressed little hope that things would change as a result of the visit and speech. Her logic was in part that "(Obama) chose to give his speech in Egypt, which is under the thumb of an aging autocrat who embodies the antithesis of hope and change".

Many Egyptians posed a question that reflected Aseel's concerns: namely which Muslim world is Obama going to speak to - Arab Muslim regimes, Muslim societies at large, or opposition political parties (especially those with Islamic inclinations)? Others were unnerved by the fact that the impending message was directed specifically towards Muslims - which set the target audience apart from the many religious minorities that exist throughout the Islamic world, many of whom share Muslims' animosity towards US policies.  This point is underlined by the event's location: Egypt is home to the largest Christian community in the Arab world.

But Adel El Zaim, a Lebanese-Canadian living in Cairo, insisted that the visit itself was a source of hope. The president "has not waited until the end of his mandate to launch a peace initiative, like George W Bush", he said. "The visit is also a milestone in the relationship between the United States and the Arab Muslim world. It will help build the lost trust between the two sides - a first step that must be followed by several others."

There is indeed some surprise at such an early move toward the Muslim world. "I know Obama's attitude towards the region has been quite positive - more so than I expected" said Maha Bali, a technologist at the American University in Cairo. Kismet El-Husseiny, an economics graduate, was more sceptical: for Obama it is an opportunity to make "small promises that are not too hard to keep, but will be delivered in a way that makes them impressive."

Reaction

Barack Obama's speech was broadcast live on dozens of channels throughout the middle east (and was reprinted in full in many newspapers the day after). Life went on: streets across the region were as ever filled with people, and traffic doesn't stop in Arab capitals. But large numbers did listen to or watch the broadcast, often grouped together in cafes or conference rooms. The event brought Arabs from Morocco to Iraq together and captured their attention in a way that is usually reserved for major sporting events - or the start of a war.

The reaction, more uniform than the anticipation, was greatly positive - though with questions about how much change Obama could really deliver. Abdullah, an academic in a Lebanese university, expressed the view that Obama's speech "is a historical opportunity for the Arab region. I wish that Arabs would take an initiative of their own to seize the opportunities that Obama is presenting. What he said is in line with our way of thinking and the initiatives he announced were inspiring." 

On the US president's efforts to build bridges between western and Islamic civilisations, Abdullah added that "Obama gave more credit to Arab and Islamic contributions than Arabs themselves do. He also delivered an important blow to Islamic fundamentalists: whereas previously many Arabs and Muslims were convinced that the west was no ally to them, Obama showed them that in him they have a friend". 

Yasmine, an employee of an international organisation in Beirut, was less impressed by the substance of the speech than by the fact that a president of the United States shared many of her own views and ideas. "We've heard all this before, but not from a president", she said.

What little criticism there was focused on the Israeli-Arab peace process. "He didn't call for the settlements [in the Palestinian territories] to be dismantled. He merely said that construction must stop. How can a Palestinian state be established if the settlements that are already there remain?" asked Hani, a Syrian economics graduate. "Obama has no leeway with the Israelis. They will force him to backtrack", said Samir, a Lebanese resident of Saudi Arabia. 

There is substantive agreement between Barack Obama himself and most of the Arab public that the true test of the speech is whether specific changes in US policy with regard to Palestine and the rest of the Arab Muslim world follow - including the commitments over Iraq. Abbas, a public official in Iraq, sums up the mood of the moment: "Obama's achievement for now is to have opened the door for much-needed change, and to contribute to the efforts of many in the Arab and Islamic worlds to encourage tolerance and understanding". 

What will these Arab voices think in six months' time? We hope to ask them and report on our findings.

The Filipina economist Solita Collas-Monsod delivered a grim warning last month when she revealed that the number of people living in poverty in the Philippines is growing, despite sustained economic growth and a rising GDP. Growing economic inequality looks all the starker in the midst of the world's second longest running internal conflict, the ongoing violence in the south of the country. The seemingly intractable internecine war, centred on the southern island of Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago, stems from a variety of historical grievances and modern injustices. It is anchored in centuries old religious conflict and yet hampered by the government's total failure to improve the lives of those most likely to be driven into the embrace of insurgency.

In the past fifty years, more than 100,000 people have lost their lives and more than two million have been displaced as separatist Muslim moros ("moors") of the southern Philippines waged a war of attrition - in their various organisational guises - against the post-colonial Philippines government. The roots of the conflict are deep. Islam gained a foothold in the southern Philippines long before proselytising Spanish Jesuits arrived in the 16th century, yet where the Spanish failed to subdue the troublesome southern islands, American imperialists of the late 19th century succeeded, sowing the seeds of a conflict as destructive as those in Northern Ireland and the middle east, yet one that has seldom made it into the spotlight of international scrutiny. Also on Mindanao in openDemocracy:

Ron May
"The quest for peace"
22 August 2007

Abhoud Syed M. Linga
"Determining factors"
13 July 2007

The "next Afghanistan"

It was during the turbulent years of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship when peaceful demands for independence snowballed into a fully fledged, bloody separatist war. The infamous summary execution of 28 Muslim military trainees in 1968 was the first catalyst, followed by the regime's declaration of martial law in 1972. The Tripoli Agreement, signed in 1976 between the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the government, was meant to build a satisfactory peace, but splinter groups soon emerged, first the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), then in 1991 the Abu Sayyaf group, founded by a former Afghan-Soviet war mujahideen and officially condemned by both MNLF and MILF. Its bloody campaign began in the early 1990s, with numerous attacks against Christian targets, including a cathedral in Davao in 1993. 

After the second "people power" revolution in fifteen years ousted Joseph Estrada in 2001, Gloria Macagapal Arroyo became the latest dynastic "trapos" (traditional politician) to head southeast Asia's oligarchic system sans pareil. Her government maintains a "search and destroy" policy against Abu Sayyaf while officially seeking peace with MILF.

It is backed by renewed US interest in the Philippines, historically an important piece for Washington on the Pacific's geopolitical chessboard. Post 9/11, that interest has taken on whole new dimensions. In 2002, it was revealed that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed - the suspected mastermind of 9/11, with links to numerous other high profile attacks - had lived, and according to Philippine police, planned attacks in Manila. Economic and military assistance focused on the southern islands of Mindanao and Sulu as the wider region became part of the second front in the "war on terror"; links between the MNLF, MILF, Abu Sayyaf and the Indonesian-founded Jemaah Islamayiah and al-Qaeda were probed; the United States Institute of Peace was drafted in to facilitate the peace process; and, in 2005, the region was labelled the "next Afghanistan" by a US embassy official in Manila. 

The years since 2003 have been peppered by on-off fighting and stalling peace talks, in limbo at present with little hope of a meaningful resolution before Arroyo's term expires in 2011. Chief among many sticking points is the contentious Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) on ancestral domain, a treaty which would cede territory, governance, distinction as a separate community and international recognition to the Bangsamoro (Moro homeland), yet has been ruled unconstitutional by a 2008 supreme court ruling. On top of that lie continual disagreements over the shifting composition of the "peace panel", allegations from the Philippine government of an overly sympathetic stance towards the Moros from international mediator Malaysia, continuing fighting between government and renegade MILF forces in central Mindanao, and the return to prominence of Abu Sayyaf with their capture of three Red Cross workers in January this year.  

Material considerations

Amidst the manifold problems that dog the peace process - from primordial claims of ethno-religious difference, to suppressed Moro identity and sovereignty, and continual wrangling over the MoA - one potent mixer, a recognized catalyst of conflict, is relatively sidelined: chronic poverty. 

In the 1950s, the Philippines was the most "advanced" capitalist country in southeast Asia. On its accession to the newly-formed ASEAN in 1967, its strong economy and industrial sector led many to see the country as a model for fellow members; by the 1980s, fifty percent of total income was in the hands of the top five percent. Gross inequality had grown engrained in the country, and little has changed since.

More than thirty percent of Filipinos currently live below the poverty threshold at which they cannot afford food combined with the essentials for life, with international estimates suggesting 44 percent earn less than $2 a day. Notably, last year's Social Protection Index produced by the Asian Development Bank saw the Philippines lag behind many of its neighbours, the bank stating that it had done "little in the way of major pro-poor targeted programs". Mark Dearn has written and researched for the Independent, Chunichi Shimbun and the Tokyo Shimbun.

He focuses on southeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific, with particular interest in separatist conflicts, minority rights issues and Islamist groups.

Bottom of the pile

At the bottom of the poverty pile lies Minadano, known as the country's "food basket", though wracked with hunger and want: it has been the poorest of the Philippines' three major island groups for almost a decade, with fifty per cent below the poverty line; all five regions of the island are in the ten poorest regions in the entire country; and within the island itself, the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM - the area created by the MoA) ranks as one of the two poorest regions.  

The Philippine Development Forum describes the rise in poverty in the ARMM between 1988 and 2006 as "alarming", going on to argue that "while income poverty alone does not automatically result in social unrest, international experiences have shown that an explosive political situation is created when poverty is combined with deprivation and injustice". Visiting head of the Delegation of the European Commission to the Philippines, Alistair MacDonald, told the Philippines National Enquirer last year that poverty, above religion and secessionism, is the root of the conflict: "When you look at some of the human development indicators for parts of Mindanao, things like health, nutrition, education, the Philippines should be ashamed to have such low levels of basic social indicators".

No peace without development?

Yet he, along with Arroyo, has taken the stance of "no development without peace": talking to the country in her 2008 State of the Nation Address, Arroyo laid blame for the failure to eradicate poverty in Mindanao on the conflict itself. MacDonald, while recommending the implementation of more government-led projects in Mindanao, argued that "without peace, development can't happen."  

None the less, with conflict and concomitant humanitarian disaster currently unfolding in central Mindanao, the US Agency for International Development's nobley-named "Growth with Equity in Mindanao" project has earmarked a $190 million aid budget, administered by the World Bank, for the five years to 2012. The EU has coughed up 10.5 million euros on Mindanao since October 2008 and 110 million euros in the past decade, while International Crisis Group reports that 40 aid projects focusing on conflict-affected communities are underway, backed by a wide array of funders, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and Japan.  

The possibility of development in conflict zones may be doubted by some in power, but a government spokesman did acknowledge in 2007 that poverty in Mindanao provides fertile recruiting grounds. Little wonder then at the success of the MILF's targeting of the unemployed with an instant payment of P20,000 (about $420) and the promise - whether kept or not - of further monthly remuneration. Nor the ability of Abu Sayyaf to continue to survive and recruit disillusioned young teenagers trapped in the cycle of poverty. 

While a record GDP growth of more than 7 percent in 2007 should have raised hope for the prospect of lifting millions out of poverty, impoverishment has only increased. And last month's pronouncements by Monsod, an economist with intimate knowledge of the Philippines' economic prospects, offer little hope within the current financial climate of a record 41 per cent year-on-year drop in merchandise export earnings, increasing food prices and projected rises in unemployment for the next three years. 

The Philippines government maintains that peace in Mindanao remains a priority for Arroyo, but others - from NGO workers to scholars - have expressed grave doubts, pointing to an ostensible lack of political will and Arroyo's own crumbling credibility after allegations of corruption and the outrageous "Hello Garci" electoral fraud scandal of 2005. If there really is a lack of political will, the portents are ominous. No development without peace, claims Arroyo, yet she lacks the political will to bring about peace, and thus no political will to alleviate the endemic, chronic poverty that besets Mindanao.. 

President Barack Obama is expected to address the Arab world by delivering a speech on 4 June 2009 in the most populous Arab state, Egypt. The event is important for the United States in two main ways: as a continuation of the slow work (begun to a degree in the president's visit to Turkey on 6-7 April) of rehabilitating the American image in the middle east, and as an attempt to give renewed momentum to the search for a peace agreement in Israel-Palestine that can win regional consent.

Robert G Rabil is associate professor of middle-east politics and director of graduate studies in the political-science department at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of Embattled Neighbors: Syria, Israel and Lebanon (Lynne Rienner, 2003) and Syria, United States and the War on Terror in the Middle East (Praeger, 2006)

Also by Robert G Rabil in openDemocracy:

"Lebanon, Syria, Iran: lessons of Sharm el-Sheikh" (11 May 2007)

"Lebanon divided" (7 August 2007)

"Hizbollah and Lebanon: the curse of a state" (21 May 2008)

The signals may be better than some analysts fear. The meeting between the US president and Israel's prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu on 18 May may have ended without any expression of support by Netanyahu for a Palestinian state, but it did hold out the prospect that Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations would resume.

What happened behind the scenes, however, was even more significant. This included Washington's message that it would establish a timetable for talks with Iran, and (confirmed in a message delivered from Israel to the Central Intelligence Agency chief Leon Panetta before Netanyahu's arrival at the White House) Israel's promise not to attack Iran's nuclear plants while the US was engaging with Tehran.

These developments suggest that the Obama administration is laying the ground for a comprehensive and ambitious middle-east policy that attempts to link the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict to a response to Iran's alleged nuclear-weapons efforts. This ambitious and complex agenda raises the question of whether crucial regional realities will allow the administration to set such a course before the policy can take a definite shape.

The Iran-Israel knot

The matter of Iran is crucial. Washington's concern about Iran's nuclear ambitions and its rejectionist middle-east policy long predated Barack Obama's arrival in the White House, but the president's nowrooz (Iranian new-year) message to Tehran on 19 March 2009 is clear indication of his belief that the predecessor administration's policy of "containment without engagement" was not working. Thus, Obama has been paving the ground for direct talks with Tehran following Iran's presidential elections, whose first round is held on 12 June 2009.

Besides attempting to engage Iran, the administration also looks to Syria as a potential vehicle in helping to reduce Iran's support of its proxies Hizbollah and Hamas, and thus neutralise Tehran's influence in the Levant. In line with this broad objective - and reflecting its inclusive policy outlook - the Obama administration has already considered a practical approach toward Syria premised on the objective of weaning Damascus from the Iranian-Hizbollah axis and resuming Israeli-Syrian peace negotiations. 

Jeffrey Feltman (assistant secretary of state for near-east affairs) and Daniel Shapiro (senior director of the National Security Council) have visited Syria twice to probe whether Damascus would play a constructive regional role on a range of issues: curbing the power of Hizbollah and Hamas, restoring political stability to Lebanon, checking jihadi infiltration into Iraq, and resuming peace negotiations with Israel. Washington, in return, would be prepared to mediate the peace negotiations and support a security mechanism under which Israel would relinquish the Golan heights to Syria. Washington would also play a role in supporting Syria's economic development.

Meanwhile, President Obama has been privately trying to build a momentum for peace by embracing an updated version of the Saudi-inspired Arab peace initiative, proposed initially in the Arab League summit in Beirut in March 2002. This could involve support for King Abdullah of Jordan's idea of formulating a comprehensive plan in which the Muslim world would recognise Israel - an initiative Netanyahu may find hard to resist if pressed by Obama to force a two-state solution on his government.

The regional challenge

The contours of the United States's emerging middle-east plan reflect impressive ambition. The plan may also appear, on closer examination, unrealistic - especially because the security concerns of some Arab countries are not yet fully accommodated.

Egypt, for example, strongly feels that the Obama administration should formulate a policy in concert with them to contain rather than engage Iran. In Egypt's view, Iran and its proxy Hizbollah have already made a key move by threatening Cairo's national security in its effort to sway regional politics in the direction of "resistance" against Israel and western influence in the region. In the wake of the arrest of a Hizbollah cell in Egypt that may (according to the Egyptian government) have been trying to carry out terror acts on its soil, Cairo has waged a furious and unprecedented propaganda campaign against Iran and Hizbollah. It's inconceivable that Egypt would genuinely support Obama's plan if its concerns about Iran are not addressed.

Syria too has its own strategic concerns, and Damascus's reluctance to sever its relationship with Iran or Hizbollah makes the idea of weaning Syria from either highly unlikely. Each link offers Syria a strategic depth in the region that was lost in the aftermath of the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon in 2005 and the fall of the Ba'ath regime in Iraq in 2003. In consequence, it is impractical to expect that Damascus might be able either to check Hizbollah's power in Lebanon or its regional reach.

What Damascus would prefer to do is to persuade Washington to engage Hizbollah (and Hamas) in addition to Iran, and act as a mediator among the three parties. In fact, this approach has been gaining traction in Europe among other circles. For example, Britain may list Hizbollah as a terrorist organisation, but this did not stop a Hizbollah parliamentary deputy from being invited to address members of the House of Commons in April 2009. 

The unintended consequence of generic engagement will no doubt alienate Binyamin Netanyahu's government, for its agenda goes against the grist of engaging Hizbollah or Hamas - neither of whom recognises Israel.

It is no less important for President Obama to repair Washington's strained relations with the Arab world than to unequivocally support human rights and civil-society organs there. Even more so how to mobilise the Arab world to bridge the divide between Hamas-controlled Gaza and Palestinian Authority-led West Bank.

The diplomatic test

The tense political landscape of the middle east means that the Barack Obama administration needs to formulate its comprehensive middle-east policy based less on a hopeful "grand plan" than on practical measures whose effect is positive and accumulative across the region. The idea of engaging Iran is sensible, but this should include a timetable with benchmarks that assess Tehran's intentions - in part to prevent what might otherwise become a crisis with Egypt, the Europeans and Israel over defining when "soft diplomacy" has run its course.

In the same way it is prudent to engage with Syria, but the Palestinian-Israeli track should have priority. For in contrast to the recent past, the resolution of the Israeli-Syrian conflict now goes beyond the Golan heights; it now involves Damascus's relationship with Hizbollah, Lebanon, Hamas and Iran. Israel, for its part, is more interested in neutralising the immediate threat from Hizbollah on its northern border by having Syria cut off the overland arms-supply route from Iran to the group's Lebanese heartlands.

President Obama faces a daunting challenge in helping to bring peace and stability to the middle east. The urgency of progress is - or should be - clear to all. The combination of the US president's leadership and communication skills and his practical policies could yet prove the difference between success and even greater regression. 

It feels like a very long time ago. Between a then and a now walls have been built. Not just one but many. The walls have also become higher, uglier, thicker and today the walls seem impossible to destroy.

Then, four years ago, we told each other that it couldn't get worse. The suffering couldn't become deeper. It was dark and bullets killed, young soldiers became murderers and family members disappeared.

And during this time of constant darkness and humiliation the Palestinian fractions gathered in mid-December 2004 to discuss a common future. At a conference hotel in the ghetto of Gaza the political leaders sat lined up like school boys to listen to Yvette Lillian Myakayaka-Manzini (Mavivi), vice president of the ANC women's department. Listen and discuss something important, the struggle against apartheid.

ANC speaker addresses Palestinian leaders and family men, Gaza 2004

They were all family fathers and Gaza residents. They were all confined behind high walls and accustomed to being humiliated by young boys and girls dressed in green from all the corners of the world.

They met in the hotel lobby, hugged each other and kissed each other on the cheek. This particular morning they congratulated each other on having successfully blown up a guard tower at the border crossing to Egypt.

But it soon became worse. What couldn't happen, the impossible, was possible. The next time we arranged a similar meeting the different fractions could no longer meet, they had become enemies. The international community had said no. The coalition government had sunk into civil war.

But first there was the presidential election after President Yasser Arafat. Abu Mazen became the new Palestinian leader.

Soon thereafter the world forced a democratic parliamentary election on the Palestinians in which everyone would participate, even Hamas. Palestine would finally become democratic and many Western countries helped finance the costs of the election process. In Ramallah the Fatah leadership tried to prevent Hamas' participation. But the world wanted something else. Bush had made up his mind. Democracy would be created at any price under the device that even a forced democracy is a democracy.Mats Svensson, a former Swedish diplomat working on the staff of SIDA, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, lives in the Occupied Territories.

Jimmy Carter and Carl Bildt were election observers. Carter spoke about a victory for democracy. Carter held a press conference with Bildt by his side. Bildt looked like a school boy beside Carter. He silently sat beside the ex-President and looked with admiration in his eyes at one of the world's most famous peace brokers.

But soon we got flies in the beaker and the dream about a two state solution translated into a de facto three state reality: Gaza, West Bank and Israel. The world had spoken. Carter and Bildt raised their voices but very few heard their calls...

But back to the meeting between Mavivi and a collection of family fathers from Gaza.

It was a day when one had agreed not to talk about Israel. Not speak about what the occupier had done in Jenin or what had happened in the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem. No, it really became a special day when everyone instead talked about South Africa, the struggle against apartheid and simultaneously linked it to what just happened or didn't happen in Gaza. Gaza was in the center.

Mavivi told the group that during the battle against white oppression in South Africa one had decided not to use violence against civilians. Civilians died, said Mavivi, but each time it was seen as a failure. The reason that we didn't use a strategy that was directed against civilians was simple, Mavivi continued. The ANC sought support from the surrounding world, wanted to break the isolation. "We were also seen as terrorists," said Mavivi. "The question we kept asking ourselves was how to break the isolation?"

"We soon reached an understanding of the outside world," said Mavivi, "that was based on the following thought. If a taxi driver in Stockholm doesn't understand the idea behind a suicide bomber then the Swedish government doesn't either. If an elementary school teacher in Paris doesn't understand it then the French government doesn't either. We had to gain an understanding from people all around the world, we needed their support. We could only get support if the taxi driver and the teacher understood and could stand behind our actions. The governments in Sweden and France were expressions of the people's wishes. We thought support comes from below and becomes a power only when one can unite behind it."

Mavivi, woman from South Africa, when the issue of suicide bombers comes up on the agenda, has already spoken for an hour. The conversation has flown, the fractions are open to each other and participated intensively. One had also spoken about the need for leadership and Ariel Sharon was compared to De Klerk and Yasser Arafat with Mandela. Other points on the agenda included the need to compromise and the truth and reconciliation commission that was established in South Africa, to forgive your enemy. To forgive your enemy led to intensive discussions. One nevertheless agreed that a peace agreement was necessary before one could begin to forgive. That two signatures were required before one could begin hugging and kissing on stage.

But it was when Mavivi brought up the strategic thinking behind suicide bombers that the discussion slowed down. One could discern a difference of opinion between the fractions.

The participant was silent when Mavivi as her last point spoke about the struggle in southern Africa and the need for unity, and unity behind a strategy. To work towards a common goal. ANC's struggle, the resistance, needed to be clear, visible and effective when the enemy was stronger, both financially and militarily.

Mavivi explained that "during apartheid in South Africa we were forced to work so closely to our enemy as if he or she was our brother or sister. We were forced to get to know our enemy, know what he thought. We needed to understand how he thought and above all know when our brother or sister, our enemy, changed his or her strategy. We always had to be one step ahead. To manage this we had to work, be close to him."

"And we succeeded," Mavivi continued. "We succeeded because throughout the struggle we maintained a high sense of morale. Our morale soon gave us wide international support. First came the support from the Scandinavian countries. Soon other countries followed and the white minority regime in Pretoria became increasingly isolated."

But equally important was the internal debate within the ANC. The debate had as its starting point to create unity behind the strategy. "Compromise therefore became an important guiding principle within the ANC. A strategy without unity was for us within the ANC a meaningless strategy that would only have benefited the oppressors," said Mavivi. "We strove to get everyone on the same boat, we made a common journey."

"We constantly faced difficult choices. Our leadership was spread across many countries. Moreover, many of our major leaders were in prison. But the debate was alive. The debate that was being held on Robben Island was also being held in study centers in Sweden, in Tanzania, in Kenya, in Namibia, everywhere. The island outside Cape Town was closed, the security high, but no one could shut out Mandela's message, his message about unity."

"Young and old had to unify, women and men soon created a common front. Communists, social democrats, liberals and conservatives signed onto a common platform. Equally important was that Muslims, Christians, Jews and Hindus united in the struggle against the oppressors. Everyone was included in the common battle against evil. Soon came the condemnation from the world's powerful leaders, and then the UN could also comply."

"The leadership was decisive in this drawn out struggle. We had a unique situation with a leader who stood for high morals, unity and long term thinking. Many of our leaders had been imprisoned for decades. They had been locked up for a complete life, many counted on dying behind high walls on an isolated island."

Mavivi was very clear during the whole conversation. She did not have any pointers. She just told her own story, South Africa's story. A story about struggle, about resistance, about a strategy, about unity. "I don't know," said Mavivi, "what is right in Palestine, I only know what was right for us. We listened to our friends. Our friends gave us good advice but our actions, our actions were our own. Had we listened to all the advice and followed them we would never have become free. The struggle against apartheid was our struggle."

She had finished speaking. I thought the conversation was over. I was wrong. Mavivi now turned to the highly placed Hamas representative and asked him to tell her about their strategy. Tell her about their strategy in the same way that she had told them about the ANC's.

But he was silent. The other leaders did not have anything to add either. Even Fatah's representative was silent. There was no common strategy. There was no common goal. At that time, creating unity in Palestine felt distant.

Mavivi, woman from South Africa, now says with a clear voice, "Comrades, you don't seem to have an enemy. Comrades, your enemy is yourselves and comrades, your struggle has not yet begun."

The Hamas representative remained silent for a while. His gaze was fixed and he gravely looked at Mavivi. Then he slowly and with a high voice said, "We will never forget the one who came to us in a time of deepest despair. Mavivi, when can you come back?"

***********************

We don't know if we should stay. Late afternoon on the beach in Bat Jam south of Tel Aviv. There is a cool breeze. Just a few middle aged men dare to take a swim. A couple play tennis on the beach. Dogs are being walked. The seafood tastes wonderful and with that a full white wine. It is fantastic to be here on a Sunday afternoon.

Then we hear the sound of choppers. Three helicopters slowly approach us from the north. We see the couple playing beach tennis stop briefly. They look up at the three large birds. They say something but continue playing before the birds have passed over their heads. Shortly thereafter come two more. Now no one reacts. Five helicopters carrying heavy rockets. Five rockets that are already aimed towards the south, to a small strip south of Tel Aviv, Gaza.

I have experienced this before, a few years ago. We were four people from Sida who sat on the beach. Four persons who had just arrived in Israel. We sat on the beach as the sun was setting. That time we also tasted the white wine while the helicopters began going in a kind of shuttle traffic towards Gaza with heavy weapons hanging underneath. Later we could read that one of the largest operations was being carried out against Gaza. At that time everything was new for us. Everything was unreal. Something happened within us when the sunset, the beautiful yellow and red horizon was traversed by heavily loaded helicopters.

Much has happened between these two occasions on the beach in Tel Aviv. Arafat is gone and Sharon is no longer the leader in Israel. Blair has completed his period as prime minister and Bush has been replaced. Hamas won the 2006 elections but soon had to leave Ramallah. We are speaking of a completely new political landscape in Israel, Palestine, the UK and the USA. Even Sweden has gone through large political changes and today finally has a foreign minister with a lot of knowledge about the Middle East.

But independently of the political landscape the helicopters have continued. There, nothing has changed, time has stood still. The most sophisticated weapons against a confined people who retaliate with suicide bombers and homemade rockets. The helicopter borne missiles almost always hit their target, the homemade ones almost never. Statistics from Israeli B'Tselem confirm this. But independently of weapon type, fear, sleepless nights and urgings of revenge are created.

The couple playing beach tennis nonchalantly looked up at the fighter helicopters. They were used to seeing helicopters carrying missiles. Here, a few miles from Gaza they temporarily felt safe, despite an uncertain future. Because neither the Palestinian nor the Israeli collective is supported by safety. The fear, the everyday presence of fear, or the more long-term future of fear is constantly there. One waits for a power, somebody who will have the ability to do the unexpected, the different. The power is sought in Israel, in the West Bank, Gaza or somewhere in another country. But today we do not see the slightest hint of this. Everything is predictable. The actors playing in this historic play know their parts. Refine them over time but within clearly defined borders. The unexpected move that everyone awaits does not come. No one dares or has the ability. The same applies to the international community. Governments fumble, foreign ministers fumble and everyone with responsibility today exhibit an enormous weakness and lack of initiative.

All we see are the meaningless fights. Walls of all kinds multiply, becoming higher and higher, and the costs in dollars, human lives, lost hope and psychological wrecks are countless. On a daily basis the newspapers have pictures from Gaza of masses of people who follow their relatives into the simple grave. The only thing we know is that soon the ground offensive will start again. Every freely thinking fellow being knows that this is a wrong and criminal act.

At the same time, we sit in the first stalls, on the beach as the sun sets in the distance. We eat our calamari and sip our wine. We are at a sufficient distance when something we do not understand zooms past. Something that moves between two points. We do not participate but we try to understand. We feel but do not know whether we feel the right thing. We do not know what to say, what to tell. We do not know how to make our friends understand. We do not understand ourselves. We do not know whether we should stay or leave.

The shape of the United States's new "AfPak" strategy is now clear. For Washington, the most serious problems posed by Afghanistan and Pakistan - the Taliban, al-Qaida, and associated tribal militants - arise from the Pashtun regions of both countries. Behind the rhetoric, the decision has therefore been taken to contain the violence to these areas. Shaun Gregory is professor in the department of peace studies at the University of Bradford, northern England, and head of the Pakistan Security Research Unit there. He is the author of Pakistan: Securing the Insecure State (Routledge, 2008)

Also by Shaun Gregory in openDemocracy:

"Pakistan on edge" (25 September 2006)

"Pakistan: farewell to democracy" (29 October 2007)

"Musharraf: the fateful moment" (16 November 2007)

"Pakistan's political turmoil: Musharraf and beyond" (27 August 2008)

"The Pakistan army and the Afghanistan war" (25 November 2008)

"Mumbai: Pakistan's moment of opportunity" (3 December 2008)

The car-bombing targeted against police and intelligence headquarters in Lahore on 27 May 2009 which killed at least twenty-four people - the latest in a series of attacks on the city, including on Sri Lanka's cricket-team and a police academy in March - shows how difficult the task will be. This larger strategic effort in turn has three parts:

* using military force to push back and weaken the insurgents to the point they can be contained by the Afghan and Pakistan armies

* stepping up nation-building efforts to win the battle for people's hearts and minds

* empowering the respective state structures to manage their own affairs consistent with western interests. 

On the Afghan side of the border the implementation of this policy is led by the United States. The combination of the military "surge" by Nato and the International Security Assistance force (Isaf), and the estimated 500,000 foreigners present in Afghanistan in nation-building roles, holds out the prospect of meaningful progress.

On the Pakistan side, however, the United States exists at one remove. The endemic insecurity revealed by the Lahore bomb (responsibility for which is claimed by Hakimullah Mehsud of the "Pakistan Taliban") indicates the scale of its task. Washington is reliant on implementing policy through the blunt tool of the Pakistan army - an army which does not share the US or Nato's strategic objectives for Afghanistan. On the contrary: for Pakistan, the Afghan Taliban remain the only players in the region able to advance its objectives: realising the end of the Hamid Karzai regime, forcing a significantly pro-Pakistan element into the Afghan government, and reversing (and in due course eliminating) growing Indian influence in Afghanistan.

The United States has therefore applied huge economic and military-aid pressure to push Pakistan's president (Asif Ali Zardari) and its chief-of-army-staff  (General Ashfaq Kiyani) towards meaningful military operations in Pakistan's Pashtun areas - operations Zardari and Kiyani are now selling as an unambiguous commitment to rooting out the terrorists and militants. The central question which consequently arises is whether this does signal the decisive shift in Pakistani thinking that the US and western governments have been pressing for. 

The lesson of Bajaur

A part of the answer to this can be found in the ruins of Bajaur, the northernmost agency of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). In the wake of the Marriott Hotel bomb-attack in Islamabad in September 2008, the Pakistani army launched military operations in Bajaur: the first serious and large-scale operations in the FATA.

The army, fearing casualties and uncertain of the loyalties of some of its soldiers, used air-strikes, helicopter-gunships, and artillery to pound militants' positions and to raze many villages and towns to the ground. In late February 2009, after more than five months of fighting, Major-General Tariq Khan helicoptered journalists to one such flattened town; there he declared that the Taliban had been defeated in Bajaur and that the rest of the FATA would be in Pakistan's hands by the end of 2009. Western diplomats, anxious to support Pakistani actions, heralded the holding of Bajaur as an important signal to militants elsewhere in the FATA and as a base from which the Pakistan army could expand operations against militant strongholds elsewhere in the agency (see "Has AfPak strategy led to civil war in Pakistan?", Times of India, 24 May 2009).

By late May 2009, three months later, the Pakistan military, from a few heavily fortified bases, continues to claim that it is winning its campaign. But in reality the army has not taken the offensive into other parts of the FATA; it has singularly failed to hold Bajaur; and the Taliban is back in de facto control of the agency.

The real measure of what has been achieved is the hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced from the region by the fighting. They have paid the price of this army "success" with the destruction of their homes, businesses, schools and clinics; as a result many of them feel as much antipathy to the Pakistan army as they do to the Taliban. Moreover, in these three months Mullah Fazlullah's Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammedi (TNSM, a core part of the Pakistan Taliban) has consolidated its hold of the Swat district in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP); forced a "peace deal" with the Zardari government; and moved outwards from Swat into the Buner and Dir districts, thus moving closer to Islamabad and to the strategically important Karakoram highway (see Patrick Cockburn, "Where the Taliban roam", Independent, 6 May 2009).   Among openDemocracy's many articles on Pakistan:

Ehsan Masood, "Pakistan: the army as the state" (12 April 2007)

Ayesha Siddiqa, "Pakistan's permanent crisis" (15 May 2007)

Anatol Lieven, "At the Red Mosque in Islamadad" (4 June 2007)

Maruf Khwaja, "The war for Pakistan"  (24 July 2007)

Ayesha Siddiqa, "Pakistan after Benazir Bhutto" (28 December 2007)

Fred Halliday, "The assassin's age: Pakistan in the world" (28 December 2007)

Maruf Khwaja, "Pakistan: dynasty vs democracy" (9 January 2008)

Irfan Husain, "Pakistan's judgment day" (22 February 2008)

Irfan Husain. "Pervez Musharraf: the commando who couldn't" (19 August 2008)

Paul Rogers, "Pakistan: the new frontline" (18 September 2008)

Paul Rogers, "The AfPak war: three options" (25 February 2009)

Paul Rogers, "A three-front war: Iraq, AfPak...Washington" (20 March 2009)

Nadeem Ul Haque, "How to solve Pakistan's problem" (24 April 2009)

Paul Rogers, "Pakistan: sources of turmoil" (30 April 2009)

Anatol Lieven, "Pakistan's American problem" (6 May 2009)

These developments - an affront to the Pakistani state, and a threat to Chinese interests which flow along the Karakoram, and the source of intense US pressure - combined to force Islamabad once again to act. The military operations now unfolding in Buner, Dir and Swat bear all the hallmarks of the Bajaur operation: air-strikes, helicopter-gunships and artillery dominate; villages and towns are being destroyed; and the United Nations estimates that more than 1.3 million people are fleeing the violence.

When taken together with all those previously displaced in the FATA and NWFP, at least 2 million internally-displaced persons (IDPs) may be in search of shelter, clean water and food. A relatively small number of inadequate camps has been put together by the Pakistani state and the UN to deal with them; much more is needed.

Two key decisions

Against this background Pakistan is steadily approaching two critical moments of decision.

The first is that President Zardari has committed Pakistan to extending these military operations into the FATA. In particular this will mean incursions into North and South Waziristan, the stronghold of Baitullah Mehsud's Tehrik-e-Taliban-Pakistan (TTP, another section of the Pakistan Taliban) and the base of Jalalluddin's Haqqani's "Afghan Taliban" network. This is also the area widely considered as "Al-Qaida Central". If this happens, it would signal a seismic shift in Pakistan's role in the "war on terror" and an equally seismic shift in its relationship with the Afghan Taliban (see "The Pakistan army and the Afghanistan war", 25 November 2008). 

In conducting large-scale military operations against the TTP and al-Qaida and its associates in North and South Waziristan, the Pakistan army would be making a move it has singularly failed to make in the eight years of the "war on terror". It would also confound the widely disseminated view that the army has neither the capability nor the motivation to act against these groups. This notion has, arguably, already been punctured by the air-lifting of Pakistani commandos to the Peochar valley in Swat, reportedly to surround the leadership of Mullah Fazlullah's TNSM.

Many analysts of Pakistan have been dumbfounded to see confirmation that the Pakistan army and the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency both knows exactly where these leaders are, and also has the means - without extensive US counterinsurgency training or re-equipment, which are not yet in place - to move against these groups. It begs the question why they did not do so years earlier. 

Perhaps even more important, Pakistani army/ISI operations in the "Waziris" will inevitably mean confrontation with the Haqqani network - the Afghan Taliban group widely understood to have the closest links with the Pakistan army through the ISI. It is also known to be the group - in the person of Jalalluddin's son Sirajuddin - which carried out the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul on 7 July 2008. The Pakistani military cannot engage this group without the volte-face revision of its Afghan strategy. 

The second critical (and interrelated) decision Pakistan faces - now being played out behind the scenes - is Pakistan's delayed private answer to the request being made by the United States to expand the US's unmanned "drone" operations into the Pashtun areas of northern Balochistan (to the south of the FATA and the NWFP). This area serves as a refuge for the Haqqani network, the TTP, and perhaps al-Qaida - a place of retreat in the event of any potential operations in the Waziris; but northern Balochistan is also the route of one of Nato's key logistic supply-lines.

Even more significant, the region is also the base of Mullah Omar and the Quetta shura - the "safe haven" from which Omar and the Afghan Taliban leadership have planned and organised the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan (with the tolerance or support of the Pakistan army and ISI, depending on the interpretation of the evidence).

A decision to expand the drone strikes into northern Balochistan (from where, at the CIA base at Shamsi, the drones in fact already mainly operate) would in effect give the United States freedom of the skies over the region. This would directly imperil the Quetta shura and the Afghan Taliban, who presently operate with impunity from this area.

Thus, if the Pakistanis do grant the US the right to extend the range of the drone strikes - even after allowing for the civilian casualties that often ensue, and the danger that the move would be widely seen as a further capitulation of Pakistani sovereignty to the United States - the results could be significant:  enhancing US military effectiveness, allowing Nato to better protect its supply-lines, and weakening the Afghan Taliban (though, again, at the cost of Pakistan's own Afghan strategy).

In a vice

Pakistan cannot postpone indefinitely the two "crunch" moments: it must decide whether to expand its military operations into the rest of the FATA (above all in to the Waziris) and whether to allow the expansion of US drone operations into northern Balochistan. In this sense the dynamics unfolding in Buner, Dir and Swat - where things are not all going the Pakistan army's way despite its up-beat rhetoric - are simply the overture to the main performance the United States has come to require of the Pakistanis as their contribution to the "AfPak" strategy (see Anatol Lieven, "Pakistan's American problem", 6 May 2009). 

This is undoubtedly a difficult period for the Pakistan army and ISI (whose own building felt the effects of the Lahore blast on 27 May). The Taliban's return to strength in Afghanistan, a weakening in Nato's resolve, and the element of desperation in the US "surge" strategy (in the sense that there will be few options if it fails) together have huge implications for the Pakistani army's calculus: the thinking in army headquarters must be that Pakistani objectives in Afghanistan are within reach only if US pressure can be borne, the Afghan Taliban can be protected, and the Pakistan Taliban contained. 

In this tight position, the Pakistani army may - just - glimpse open sea. If the humanitarian situation were to deteriorate too severely in the FATA/NWFP, and international pressure for a cessation of the Pakistani assault grew as a result, this could provide a context for Pakistan to argue that it can no longer prosecute the war. This could in turn allowing it to ease the pressure from the US and abandon the commitment to an assault on North and South Waziristan.

Asif Ali Zardari and the Pakistani army could face unpopularity for precipitating a deeper humanitarian crisis in the FATA/NWFP at the US's behest - but this very situation could create space for them to continue to decline the expansion of US drone-strikes into northern Balochistan. The more the fragile political agreement in Pakistan in support of counterinsurgency operations frays, the more likely would be such an outcome. The Lahore bombing is another grenade launched into this delicate political and security picture. Pakistan's state will continue to play its reduced hand amid urgent and pressing circumstances.