Understanding geopolitics is never easy, and it becomes more difficult when some Western media become lapdogs instead of watchdogs, by viewing it in monochrome and echoing their masters’ voice.
Journalists come under fire not only in war zones but even in their editors’ offices, as CNN global affairs correspondent Elise Labott, and her former colleague, award-winning Jim Clancy can attest.
Still reeling from the horrific mass murders in Paris, while we pay less attention to the murders in Mali, Yemen and the downing of the Russian airliner, it is easy to overlook the fact that we are facing not just acts of horror and terrorism, but conflict and war throughout the Middle East that is spilling into other regions, including Europe, be it through the mass exodus of victims of war or through vengeful acts of mass murder of civilians.
From the 1970s through to the 1990s most of the Arab and Muslim worlds were united in their defence of Palestine and the brutalities of occupation that led to so manyUN resolutions.
At the start of this millennium, the focus shifted to the growing animosity and conflict between Sunnis and Shiites from North and West Africa to the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, all the way to Pakistan and Afghanistan, as agents provocateurs fan the flames in a very bloody and brutal sectarian war.
The Sunnis make up around 85% of the world’s Muslim population, often leaving the Shiites as suppressed minorities in the Muslim world, a suppression that makes the predicament of the Muslims living in the West look by comparison like an awkward tea party among strangers.
Minority rights in the Muslim world are often suppressed to the point of members being denied their own Shiite or Sunni mosques, religious practice, trading licences, public positions and even ordinary jobs. Extremists have been known to gather up innocent members of rival sects to have them summarily executed. ISIS fighters are now laying toys along the roads in Syria where fleeing Shiites move, hiding bombs inside them to blow up Shiite children. For these vile extremists they are just infidels and consider Shiite lives worthless. Many of these Shiites are fleeing to Europe and Lebanon to avoid such unspeakable barbarity.
We are facing not just sporadic acts of terror but an outright conflict of regional and possibly eventually global proportions that is reaching us in Europe
Despite their overall minority, the Shiites form a majority in two states, Iran and Iraq, where the governments too are Shiite. Syria is largely Sunni but the government has been composed of the Alawite minority, a form of Shiism, but is secular not fundamentalist. If the secular government falls it might result in a genocide of Shiites, but some politicians are not thinking that far ahead.
In March, 2007, a historic meeting took place between the Sunni (Wahhabi) King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and the Shiite President Ahmadinejad of Iran. They promised a thaw in the cold relations between the two highly influential regional powers, but their expressed intentions did not translate into action.
When King Abdullah died last January, his successor, King Salman, a former Minister of Defence, formed a new cabinet.
When civil strife in neighbouring Yemen threatened to escalate to civil war, following the coup by the Shiite Houthis, who refused to participate in a unity government, the new Saudi king, whose personal wealth runs into billions, immediately set about forming an alliance of Sunni-controlled states to attack the Houthis in Yemen without any UN mandate.
In October 2014 US Vice President Joe Biden candidly said that US Sunni allies were responsible for funding and arming extremists in Syria. Syria of course is caught in the grips of a civil war between the government forces led by Alawite President Bashar Assad and Sunni rebels that have formed ISIS. There is currently great difficulty in identifying any rebel forces that may be considered “moderate”, especially in the light of these so-called moderates passing arms to the ISIS forces, which begs the question whether they are just a cunning masquerade and conduit for ISIS to get its hands on Western arms.
Back in West Africa, Muslim extremists staged an atrocious attack on a Mali hotelthat was hosting peace talks in the embattled nation. It is clear that we are facing not just sporadic acts of terror but an outright conflict of regional and possibly eventually global proportions that is reaching us in Europe.
It threatens to grow out of control as age-old sectarian violence and conflicts are revived and old wounds reopened, while regional and global powers seek to weigh in on the geopolitics in the region, in order to provoke, arm, and influence the delicate balance of power between factions, and to increase trade relations in the sectors of oil and armaments.
Meanwhile, people suffer on the ground, get displaced and lose their loved ones and everything they own and hold dear - only to be met with hostility and scorn on a foreign and lonely shore, as power mongers behind the scenes play with politics and people’s lives.
As the world tries to salvage the last vestiges of the international rule of law, the Palestinian people’s plight suddenly takes backstage, while Syria’s oil in its Israeli-occupied Golan Heights is drilled, with the drilling company actually referring to it on its website (www.afekoil.co.il/en/) as “billions of barrels of Israeli oil”.
Geopolitics indeed.
Some people are swimming in oil, while others are drowning in blood and the Mediterranean Sea.