David Hirst - The Japan Times

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David Hirst

For David Hirst's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:

COMMENTARY / World

Jun 14, 2001

Pressure mounts for reform in Iran

TEHRAN -- Iranian President Mohammad Khatami's landslide victory in last week's presidential election is seen as a great boost for him and his reformist followers in the power struggle that pits them against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the hardline clerical establishment.

COMMENTARY / World

May 3, 2001

Arafat remains unbowed as his 'long march' continues

Veteran Middle East correspondent David Hirst was recently the first journalist to be granted an interview with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat since the intifada began.

COMMENTARY / World

Apr 19, 2001

Mideast raids fuel fear of regional conflict

BEIRUT -- It has long been feared that the Palestinian intifada would widen into a regional confrontation, and that South Lebanon would be the flash point from which it does so. With Israel's first deliberate attack on a Syrian military target in Lebanon since its 1982 invasion of the country, that confrontation could be getting under way. And Lebanon, resuming its former role as an arena for other people's conflicts, is now trapped -- in the words of its most sharp-tongued politician, Druze chieftain Walid Junblatt -- "between Hanoi and Hong Kong."

COMMENTARY / World

Feb 21, 2001

Unequal treatment in the Middle East

Beirut -- The Israelis have just elected a prime minister who, brought before the bar of international justice, would surely be judged a war criminal in the class of, say, Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb commander who is as firmly associated with the Srebrenica massacre as Gen. Ariel Sharon was with that of Sabra and Shatila during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Sharon calls Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat "a murderer and a liar," but in the runup to the elections, the liberal Israeli press gave full play to the deceit and brutality that have been the twin pillars of his own career. One of his likely coalition partners, Avigdor Liebermann, has spoken of burning Beirut, bombing Tehran and destroying the Aswan Dam. His ideas on the furtherance of the peace process make a total mockery of it. If any Israeli leader ever had the makings of a Western villain, the destroyer of U.S. interests in the region, it is surely Sharon.

COMMENTARY / World

Jan 20, 2001

Bush inherits his father's legacy in Iraq

BEIRUT -- Iraqi President Saddam Hussein rang in the new year with the largest military parade Baghdad had ever seen. Over 1,000 tanks rumbled through the capital. According to the opposition Iraqi National Congress, they were equipped with new engines and cooling systems, imported from Ukraine in defiance of international sanctions. There were new ground-to-ground and surface-to-air missiles. Some 60 helicopters took part, evidence of a greatly increased availability of spare parts and servicing capability.

COMMENTARY / World

Nov 9, 2000

Moderate Arab leaders under mounting pressure to take a tough line against Israel

CAIRO -- For Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, peace remains a "strategic option." At the latest Arab summit, he and other Arab rulers, rhetorically militant but deeply moderate in substance, did not give a passing thought to military coordination. They know that Arab armies are in no condition to match Israel's military might. But it is becoming less what the rulers want that counts; instead, what really matters might be thrust upon them by those they rule. As the conflict in Palestine escalates, the possibility of regional war is once again casting its shadow over the Middle East. In no Arab country does that provoke more anxious debate than Egypt, which, as the dominant Arab military power, would bear the brunt of any conflagration.

COMMENTARY / World

Oct 13, 2000

Will Arab fury translate into action?

BEIRUT -- In his workshop in suburban Beirut, Reef Hammoudi has been painting Israeli and American flags at the rate of 50 a day, so high is the demand from people demonstrating in support of the new Palestinian "intifada." He does them on nonabsorbant cloth just an hour or so before they are due for ritual burning because, he says, "I can't stand them in my shop and they disgust my clients."

COMMENTARY / World

Oct 8, 2000

Can Arafat turn Mideast violence to good?

BEIRUT -- With a few exceptions, the Israelis contend that the bloody tumult in Israel and the occupied territory has been instigated and stage-managed by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as a means of strengthening his hand in the faltering peace process.

COMMENTARY / World

Oct 4, 2000

Why the Arabs are rallying to Baghdad

DUBAI -- International civilian flights into Baghdad are turning into a stampede as one Arab country after another announces, or carries out, its intention of joining France and Russia in breaking the 10-year aerial blockade. This may not breach the essence of U.N. sanctions -- the restrictions on trade and the external controls on Iraqi finances -- but Iraq is not hiding its delighted conviction that it is a key breakthrough in that direction. According to Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, who welcomes every new arrival at Saddam International Airport, it marks "the beginning of the collapse of the embargo." Oil Minister Amer Rashid predicts that "sanctions will be eroded, disintegrated."

COMMENTARY / World

Aug 4, 2000

A decade on, Hussein remains a force

Special to The Japan Times UMM QASR, southern Iraq -- The Iraqi-Kuwaiti frontier officially ranks as one of the world's most dangerous flash points. But these days, the only threat to man or beast beneath a ferocious sun is the snakes and scorpions that inhabit these burning sandy wastes. "This is the world's most successful peacekeeping operation," said Ireland's Major Gen. John Vize, who commands the small United Nations force that observers and patrols it -- successful by the yardstick that his men have almost nothing serious to do.

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 28, 2000

Yasser Arafat draws the line

BEIRUT -- At one fraught moment during Camp David, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak reportedly warned Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat: "If we don't finish the job now, at the next meeting I will no longer be prime minister." To which the Palestinian leader retorted: "If I give in on Jerusalem, I will be killed and then you will have to negotiate with Ahmad Yassin," leader of Hamas, the militant Islamist group.

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 13, 2000

Will Arafat follow Sadat?

BEIRUT -- It will be something less than a miracle if U.S. President Bill Clinton does achieve the high purpose he has set himself in summoning Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to Camp David: an end to conflict between Arab and Jew in Palestine. After all, it won't be the first of its kind. When U.S. President Jimmy Carter brought Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat together in November 1978, he did so in conditions of high risk and low expectations -- just like those that prevail today.

COMMENTARY / World

Jun 14, 2000

Ripples from Assad's death will extend far

So the Lion of Damascus is, at last, no more. For some people, he has been an unconscionable time dying. I remember when, back in 1983, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and his loyalist guerrillas were fighting a desperate rearguard action against the Syrian Army in the northern Lebanese town of Tripoli. Arafat leaned over his desk and whispered conspiratorially that salvation was at hand: "The monster is dead," he said. He had just heard it from what he thought was an impeccable source. Stricken with leukemia, Syrian President Hafez Assad apparently did indeed approach death that time, and on at least one occasion since. But in the end, of the now rapidly diminishing gallery of aging Middle East autocrats, three were to go in quick succession before he did.

COMMENTARY / World

May 13, 2000

Democracy hangs in the balance in Iran

BEIRUT -- "For God's sake, tell me, is Islam a religion of violence or not?" begged a reader recently in the question-and-answer column of Musharekat, mouthpiece of the reformist forces headed by Iranian President Mohammad Khatami's brother Mohammad-Reza.

COMMENTARY / World

May 11, 2000

Dubai: the Mideast's global village

DUBAI -- Last month, Gen. Sheikh Muhammad bin Maktum, minister of defense of the United Arab Emirates, announced at a press conference that the Internet revolution and the "new economy" were coming to the government of Dubai. It was an incongruous spectacle, so traditional a figure, in distinctive black "dishdasha," delivering a pep talk like a wired and with-it corporate executive. As "synergy," "Internet-enabled solutions," "cycle-time reduction" and the like flashed across a screen behind him, he swore he would have his "e-government@dubai" Web site in place within 18 months, or "kick arse" if he didn't.

COMMENTARY / World

Apr 13, 2000

Tiny Qatar brings freedom of the press to the Arab world

QATAR -- On a recent visit to Qatar, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak wanted to satisfy his curiosity about something bothering him and most other Arab rulers. It was past midnight when he descended unannounced on the Jazeera TV station. His surprise was hardly less than that of staff still around at such an hour, and, turning reproachfully to Safwat Sharif, boss of Egypt's vast broadcasting empire, he was heard to exclaim: "All this trouble -- and from a matchbox like this."

COMMENTARY / World

Feb 13, 2000

Brinkmanship in the Mideast

BEIRUT -- When the Israeli-Syrian peace negotiations resumed in December, it was widely recognized that perhaps the greatest hazard they faced was the war of attrition between Hezbollah guerrillas and Israelis in occupied South Lebanon. The United States joined Israel in entreating Syrian President Hafez al-Assad to restrain the Iranian-backed Islamic resistance.

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