Alastair Crooke: Armed resistance way to open up real dialogue

Alastair Crooke at an AUB lecture: Armed resistance way to open up real dialogue

Crooke: West is using language that is not meant to mediate but 'erode the Islamists' identity'

A long-time mediator between Islamist groups and the West and a former MI6 agent told an AUB audience on Thursday that armed resistance is the only logical response to the West's refusal to engage with Islamists with respect .

Alastair Crooke, the founder of Conflicts Forum--an international movement which engages with Islamist groups--and a former MI6 British intelligence agent who organized unofficial talks in 2005 between the United States/Europe and Hizbullah, Hamas and other Islamist movements, said that the West is currently using language with armed Islamist groups that is not meant to mediate but "erode, undermine and weaken the Islamists' identity."

"In this context, what should the Islamists' response be? The only way to deal with this is to resist. And resistance, armed resistance, may be one way to open dialogue," he said. "Ultimately, you need to refuse dialogue to get dialogue."

Crooke: Islamists' experience now is sumilar to that of blacks and civil rights movement

"Otherwise, if Islamists give up their arms before negotiating, then what do they have left to negotiate over?" he said. "There has to be pain from walking away from the negotiating table, in order for dialogue to be meaningful and successful. You need respect in order for negotiations to succeed."

Crooke gave the example of when Americans sat down with the Viet Cong to dialogue in the late 1960s, noting that the Viet Cong did not renounce violence before they reached a solution.

Crooke presented his views during a lecture entitled "Talking with Islamists: An overdue task or an exercise in appeasement?" Organized by the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs on January 17 in West Hall's Auditorium B, the lecture attracted a packed audience, a number of whom sat on the window sills of the room. Crooke's talk is the second of the Bill and Sally Hambrecht Distinguished Peacemakers Lectures at AUB, bringing ten prominent international mediators to AUB and Beirut over the coming two years to share their experiences with the AUB community and conflict-resolution practitioners and scholars in Lebanon and the Middle East.

IFI Director Rami Khoury introduced Crooke as an expert with a 30-year record history of dealing with armed groups and engaging with Islamists. Crooke is also a former special Mid-East adviser to European Union High Representative Javier Solana and was involved in facilitating various Israeli-Palestinian ceasefires during 2001-2003. Crooke was also instrumental in the negotiations leading to the ending of the siege of the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem. He has direct experience of conflict over a period of 30 years in Ireland, South Africa, Namibia, Afghanistan, Cambodia and Colombia and has coordinated several hostage negotiations. Crooke has written dozens of articles and contributed to television productions on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, political Islam and insurgency.

Crooke found parallelism between the West's approach to Islamists and its attitude towards blacks in the past, noting that Islamists are now demanding to be seen as human beings just as blacks did in the civil rights movement.

Crooke argued that the West's insistence on considering Islamists as untrustworthy, with no real and meaningful ideology is deeply rooted in colonialism. The language most Westerners use imply that when Islamists say they support democracy they don't mean it, but when Westerners do, it is sincere, he said.

The West is using language to empty the power and identity of Islamists. "This is not accidental," he said. "It is done to paint the Islamists as superficial, with nothing meaningful to say, and to make them look repellent and to turn the West against them."

But in fact, Islamists don't want to eliminate Western thinking, said Crooke. "They are offering a critique of Western society. It's not a critique of the Enlightenment but of what we've turned the Enlightenment into," he said.

Crooke argued that the Islamists are challenging the view of Western modernity, by saying that focusing only on individualism and materialism actually diminishes the individual, whereas focusing on the progress of the community promotes human values.

Although Crooke acknowledged that not all Islamists are interested in engaging with the West, he noted that those who do constitute "about 95 percent of Islamist groups: the mainstream and moderate ones, such as Hamas and Hizbullah."

"We need to escape from our conditioned thinking," he added. "Unless there is a moral awakening in the West, it will remain unchanged, conflict will continue, and no real dialogue will take place."

"Sadly at this stage, the West still cannot hear the other, and dialogue is still premature," he said. "So the only way is to continue refusing dialogue on these terms." --AUB