Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World

by Kanan Makiya

Book Overview

Makiya first gives us the stories of Khalil, Abu Haydar, Omar, Mustafa, and Taimour--the Arab and Kurdish heroes of this book. Their testimony, revealing the true extent of occupation, prejudice, revolution, and routinized violence, is a compelling example of the literature of witness. He then links these tales of survival to an examination of the Arab intelligentsia's response to Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War, comparing the flood of condemnation...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393311414
• ISBN13: 9780393311419
• Release Date: April 1994
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Frightening, prescient study of Iraq under Saddam

Makiya achieves two goals in this 1993 book: he details the "rising curve of cruetly" in Iraq under the rule of Saddam Husein and more broadly throughout the Arab world, and he castigates Arab intellectuals for their silence on this topic. Even though it is 13 years old, this book is highly relevant today for people trying to understand the middle east. Makiya warns that "Sunni-Shi'i hatred is today [in 1993] the most virulent potential source of new violence," thus accurately predicting Iraq's current quandry. Iraq's Sunni minority will "fight to the bitter end before allowing anything that so much as smells of an Islamic reupblic to be established in Iraq. They see in such a state -- whether rightly or wrongly is irrelevant -- their own annihilation." I wonder if the Bush administration was aware of this viewpoint as it planned the invasion of Iraq. The book tackles the topic of cruetly through several first-person accounts, including a survivor of the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, an Iraqi arrested and interrogated by the secret police, and Kurdish witnesses to chemical attacks and mass deportations and shootings. The reader learns about the anarchy of the intifada, the brief and unsuccessful uprising against Saddam in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, where rebels resorted to wanton vengence-killing, and the returning security forces were paid cash bonuses for killing Shi'i males. Based on documents captured by Kurdish fighters, Makiya analyzes the efforts of the Iraqi regime to eliminate the Kurdish independence movement as a threat to B'athist hegemony, an operation code-named "Al-Anfal," a reference from the Koran to parceling out the spoils of war, which appears to have involved the razing of thousands of villages, as well as the killing of 100,000 non-combatants. The author also touches on violence against women, a widespread problem in the mid-east, and apparently a tactic that the Iraqi regime institutionalized as a strategy for dishonoring entire families. On their own, these stories are chilling, just like other historical accounts of terror and genocide. They are even more disturbing when one stops to consider the implications for peace and prosperity in the middle east today. Makiya notes that the "terrible force of memory...tends always to sow dragons' teeth in the shape of the children and survivors of the dead," and he warns that the legacy of Saddam Husain for Iraq may be a continuation of violence, terror, cruelty, and silence. In the second part of the book, Makiya takes Arab intellectuals to task for their support of Saddam during the Gulf War and for their wilful ignoring of the violence and terror that characterized his regime and that are all too prevalent throughout the middle east. Ideologies based on cultural nationalism, which ignore the importance of human rights, are "morally bankrupt," in Makiya's view. I found his arguments persuasive, although to be fair I have not read the writings of those he

A witness to horror and courage

This is one of the best books I have read all year. Ten years old, it is still agonisingly relevant. In its bearing witness to human cruelty, human indifference but also human courage, it is as unflinching, as passionate and as magnificent as the works of Primo Levi. Beautifully written, meticulously observed, focussed on people, not abstractions, it is a book that haunts me and will continue to do so for a long time to come. If you have any doubts at all about the rightness of invading Iraq, read this book. There will be no doubts left, only a terrible regret that the ousting of the Saddam regime was not done long, long ago.

A timely read...

As an arab-american familiar with the brutal insanity of Saddam Hussein's regime, I've always been puzzled by the Arab talking heads who routinely criticize the U.S. for it's targetting of Iraq. Makiya's writing was instrumental in helping me understand this in somewhat deeper terms than simple anti-americanism, though his insightful and revealing writing has only heightened my frustration.Regarding the current political climate: You can certainly question the U.S.'s motives, but if you find yourself struggling to find "smoking guns" vis-a-vis terrorism and WMDs to ethically support replacing Saddam's regime, look no further than this book.Beautifully written; there are points at which you will literally be moved to tears.

Iraq and the Mideast Conflict Today: Essential Reading

Kanan Makiya--an Iraqi-French dissident and intellectual--uses the personal experiences of those suffering under Saddam Hussein's brutality to explore what he calls the "cruelty and silence" that contemporary Arab intellectual and political culture has come to exhibit toward its own citizens in the Mideast. He criticizes the widespread misuse of Edward Said's "Orientalism" to justify a sense of unreflecting victimhood and automatic accusations of racism by the "West." Fully supportive of Palestinian rights, Makiya nonetheless questions whether the role of the PLO, so important in the formation of post-1967 Arab political consciousness, has served actually to enhance these self-defeating mechanisms--leading too many young Arabs to accept oppression and gross human rights violations by Saddam and other Mideast autocrats with silence, by constantly deflecting attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict instead. Of course, Makiya's book is a self-avowed polemic--using individual biographies to paint broad brush strokes about a range of very complex societies. But if the purpose of a polemic is to make one think, then Makiya's does so, eloquently. If there is a need for more self-cricism in the Arab "world" today--as well as the capacity to feel for the "other," whether Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish, Israeli or Palestinian, as well as women--then Makiya's polemic is an impassioned exercise in the very self-criticism he calls for. Makiya's motivation ultimately is not to accuse, but to call for freedom, human rights and democracy for all citizens of the Middle East.

A realistic perspective on Iraq

The book describe in gruesome detail what life is like in Iraq and much of the Arab world, for instance a woman whose husband was suspected of being anti-goverment who was tortured until it was determined she could no longer feel pain, and the killed. Or the day to day life in an Iraq prison, where beatings, starvation and living in squaler are not "torture." When they want to torture someone, it is far worse that that.The biggest crime is to disagree with the government. In Iraq Shiites, Kurds, Marsh Arabs and others are killed routinely. Yet intelligent people like Noam Chomsky and others feel that such behavior is justified because of "Arab pride" or cultural relativism.Makiya uses his sources as an Iraqi to describe the cruelty and then asks the question: why the silence? Since I have read the book I have seen many article berating the US for the embargo on Iraq. Yet the fact is that Iraq is exporting more oil now than before the embargo. The money is being used to continue the nightmare. At least it slows Saddam's ability to create weapons, for he would be sure to use them. This book is a welcome antidote from the steady stream of driviel from the academics.