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Waddah Charara
Mogadishu 17 July, 2003 (Al-Hayat) - Following the ousting of the armed Palestinian organizations from Jordan in 1970-1971, one of these organizations' leaders, George Habash, "owner" of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is the mother organization of Ahmed Jibril's "General Leadership" organization and Nayef Hawatmeh's "democratic" organization, he called for an "Arab Hanoi." By making this call in 1971, after the failure of the Southern Vietnamese movement and the independence of South Vietnam, he was announcing the need of the independent Palestinian movement to find a refuge. The leader of the front and the planner of the hijacking to Jordanian airports was expecting the assumed Hanoi to protect the Palestinian movement and its organizations as a legitimate country recognized by the international community, especially the European countries, as well as to track down the munitions and armament sources and the training forces working in the "raging" part of their territories.
The call was obviously not taken into consideration. The Iraqi forces were busy fighting the Iraqi Kurds and taking control on the inside, as the effects of the royal era had not been eradicated yet. As for Syria, which had just finished from the divisions inside its "leader" party and the opposition of some of its "moderate" militaries to some of its "adventurous" others, was not ready for such as role. So Habash and his companions had to settle for a part of Lebanon that was sort of "moving sands" instead of the missing Hanoi.
Falling from Hanoi to Beirut involved a series of political incidents, which repercussions continue to this day. Asking for Hanoi, or dreaming of it, was an expression of a strong wish to start a political and military example that would be efficient, rational and public (or it was thought to be public). Hanoi was a representation of cooperation and creation in the resistance, between the base and the top, as to leave aside all the privileges and prepare for a community of justice, equality and independence.
This is how the Vietnamese appellation revealed the large gap between the Arab facts and the wished example. It was an excuse to set the conditions of the Arab contribution in the modern history. For instance, the example of the Stalin party was the fetus of the coming oppression, a small part of the "rehabilitation" military camps, the representation of a people fleeting from a unified socialist country, waiting for the predators to come and hunt them. Twenty-eight years following the liberation and unification, Vietnam is still a Southeastern lazy "lad" compared to the corrupted countries and communities. The resistance that the determined people promised to make after having vanquished the great American war machinery was not kept in the national, civil, political, cultural and economic life.
As for the Iraqi resistance today, following the current Palestinian resistance (the second intifada) and the "Lebanese" Islamic resistance, it does not fall from Hanoi, as the latter is forgotten due to what happened in Beirut, Kabul and Mogadishu, the "capital" of Somalia. While Beirut was, for a while, a Palestinian refuge that defended the Palestinian armed organizations, and Kabul one of the representations of the Islamic political quest in avoiding and hiding from the aspects of modernism, Mogadishu is an example for the pure political and human absence. On the Somali level, produced by Osama bin Laden and co-produced by Hassan Al-Turabi (Sudanese) and Moammar Gadhafi (Libyan), the "Islamic" resistance consisted of "killing Americans" (like Hassan Nasrallah said about the Jews).
Today, the Iraqi resistance is as similar. The murders and assassinations led by Al-Qaeda's armed Islamic movement-al-Falouja branch, or by the Iraqi Jihad-the Mohammedis-the Death Lovers- the Night Fantoms- the Martyr of Syria (Al-Hayat, July 15), knowing that they were related to Saddam's fedayees, private guards and tribe people, are nothing but murders. They do not reach for the issues tackled by the appellation Arab Hanoi.
Neither the Iraqi unity, nor their attachment to their national body, or the representation of their groups, or their ambitions, or their wish to revive their country, community and bodies, or their new involvement in the local and international environment, none of that is taken into consideration in the murders and assassinations that they call resistance. Hence, these claimed combatants, who kill for every American soldier 25 to 50 Iraqi civilians per day (according to Al-Safir correspondent in Baghdad), do not need a certain policy or a plan for a joint future.
This is what happened to bin Laden, Moammar Gadhafi and Al-Turabi in the starving Somalia in 1994. They are actually following fixed political Arab and Islamic steps. Suheil Idriss, author of Al-Adab (the ethics),says in this regard that the thousands of Arab volunteers who fought with the Iraqis and the millions of Arabs who went to the streets to celebrate the Iraqi and Palestinian victories, prove that the Arab patriotism is still there and that the Arab resistance did not and shall not end.
But the author, and other people such as the Moujahidin, missed the fact that the "resistance" is for those who have nothing, whether leaders or wandering public. When Lebanese people needed arbitrators to stop them from splitting up, they advised them to resist and kill each other. Today, Iraqis need someone to hold them from following the demons of murders and rebellion.
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