Oslo and West Asia

By P. S. Suryanarayana

THE U.S. President, Mr. Bill Clinton, may have momentarily pulled a peace rabbit out of Uncle Sam's diplomatic hat at the recent emergency summit at Sharm-el-Sheikh on the specific aspect of an Israeli-Palestinian truce. However, the tentative truce has almost predictably remained a dead letter. Moreover, although Mr. Clinton is once again holding direct but separate talks with the leaders of the Palestinian Authority and Israel, Mr. Yasser Arafat and Mr. Ehud Barak respectively, at the present juncture, the outgoing U.S. President is surely racing against time to revive parleys for a new West Asian political order. Not only that. Gaining currency at the moment is the perception that Mr. Clinton is perhaps beginning to lower his diplomatic sights by seeking merely to goad Mr. Arafat and Mr. Barak towards a `political process' of settling the issue of the latest cycle of violence. While Mr. Clinton finds it difficult to fast-forward the larger West Asia `peace process', the stark reality is the dimming of the original spirit of the Oslo process itself. This will be a factor in the moods and methods of the next U.S. President in dealing with West Asia.

For nearly a decade, the Oslo process has been diplomatic shorthand for the dream of a peaceful resolution of Israel's various disputes with its Arab neighbours, principally the question of possible sovereignty for the Palestinians in their ``homeland'', where the present Jewish state had come into being several decades ago. A perceived congruence of the interests of the U.S. and the now-defunct Soviet Union had at that time brought Israel into being as a sovereign entity for a historically dispossessed Jewish community. The formula was a derivative of the fleeting period of give-and-take among the principal victors of World War II.

With Britain gradually bowing out as a lead player from the international stage in the 1950s and 1960s, the explosive issues of Jewish- Arab animosities - a defining feature of West Asian life since the creation of Israel - finally came to be addressed in a meaningful manner by the U.S. and a fast-fading Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s. Their joint activism later became an exclusive American responsibility in the ``unipolar world'' that came into existence with the demise of the Soviet Union. Prior to 1991, both the U.S. and the former Soviet Union had over time acquired allies and ``client states'' in West Asia. Therefore, as a ``neutral'' Norway facilitated an Arab-Israel dialogue in the early 1990s, the West Asian peace process, made possible in the first place by the U.S.- Soviet detente during a de-escalating phase of the Cold War, came to be known broadly as the Oslo process, after Norway's capital. Much of the Norway- faciliated talks took place in camera, and this has come to be reckoned as a key aspect of possible success in parleys.

The Oslo process as a phraseology has not been very much in vogue since the signing of a historic accord by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, under the overall auspices of Mr. Clinton in Washington in 1993. The accord itself was facilitated by the ``secrecy'' of the Oslo process, and Norway was prominently represented at the signing ceremony. The centrepiece of the agreement was a nominal self-rule if not entirely a notional one for the Palestinians. Several other significant West Asian developments, too, can be traced varyingly to the efficacy of the spirit of the painfully slow Oslo process. These are the 1998 accord at Wye Plantation on the Palestinian willingness to concede Israel's right of existence among other themes, the more recent evacuation of Israeli military units from southern Lebanon, Tel Aviv's self-proclaimed security zone, and the intermittent contacts between Israel and Syria. Egypt's separate peace deal over a diplomatic co-existence with Israel was brokered by the U.S. in 1979, and it was the result of a distinctive dynamic of post-Nasser Cairo's pragmatism that predated the emergence of the Oslo process. The Jordan-Israel interactions, too, have taken place without reference to pan-Arab issues in certain circumstances, but the Hashemite kingdom has been a key catalyst of the Oslo process.

In a twist of history, Jordan was first uneasy over the 1991 war by a U.S.-led international coalition, aided by some Arab states too on realpolitik considerations, against Mr. Saddam Hussein of Iraq over his annexation of neighbouring Kuwait. But Washington's triumph in that war impelled Jordan to back a new West Asia peace process which formally began with the Madrid international conference in October 1991. The Madrid meet, in one sense an aspect of the overall Oslo process, was the result of a felt American need to address the basic issue of Israeli occupation of Arab lands. By the early 1990s, the U.S. could not afford the irony of having liberated Kuwaitis from Mr. Hussein's suzerainty (both being Arabs) without applying this principle to the case of the Jewish occupation of Arab lands. The then U.S. President, Mr. George Bush, said he ``had asked the Soviets to co-sponsor'' the Madrid conference, which ``was one of the direct fruits of the Gulf War (against Mr. Hussein).'' But the underlying reality was that the fervour that Mr. Bush had displayed in evicting Mr. Hussein from Kuwait could have been sustained only on the understanding that Washington's Arab allies in that venture would receive as a reward some arm-twisting of Israel by the U.S. on the basic West Asian issues.

The logic of the claim about Washington asking a fading Soviet Union to co-sponsor the Madrid conference was presciently set out by Dr. Henry Kissinger, guru of the U.S. foreign policy of the old zero-sum games. The predominant U.S. strategy in West Asia during the Nixon presidency was ``to demonstrate that the Soviet Union's capacity to foment crises was not matched by its ability to resolve them.'' The limitations of the old Soviets in that region were first fully exposed in 1973. Dr. Kissinger notes that ``there was no evidence that the Soviet Union actively encouraged Egypt and Syria to go to war (against Israel in 1973)'' and that Anwar Sadat of Egypt ``told us (the Americans) later that Soviet leaders were pressing for a ceasefire from the beginning.'' In his account, ``nor was the Soviet resupply of its Arab friends remotely comparable in scope and impact to America's airlift to Israel.''

The bottomline in the Kissinger thesis is this: ``When the (1973) war ended, the Arab armies had fought more effectively than in any previous conflict. But Israel had crossed the Suez Canal (in Egypt)... American support would be needed (by the Arabs), first to restore the status quo ante and then to make progress towards peace. The first Arab leader to recognise this was Sadat... Even Syrian President Hafez Assad,... the one more closely tied to the Soviet Union, appealed to American diplomacy about the Golan Heights (captured by Israel)''. Obviously, the fundamental U.S.- Soviet disequilibrium of the Cold War era itself could be seen to have gradually given the U.S. a dominant access to the commanding heights of diplomacy in regard to West Asia. Seen in this perspective, Mr. Bush rewarded a fading Soviet Union with a role at the 1991 Madrid meet only on account of a shrinking Kremlin's tacit and open cooperation with the U.S. at the U.N. to wage the war against Mr. Hussein.

A possible future scenario now is that the U.N., rather than the post-Soviet Russia, may qualify as a partner for the U.S. in reviving what is left of the Oslo spirit if Washington stays engaged in West Asia as an `honest peace broker'. Although Russia is keen at present to renew its `peace' activism in West Asia, Mr. Arafat has already begun to ask for a U.N. peace force as a buffer between the Palestinians and the Jewish people.

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