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Wake up Elaraby!

December 11, 2015 at 12:49 pm

The Arab League has finally woken up after a long slumber, almost reaching the point of death. We were on the verge of burying it, but the Arab League miraculously and suddenly, without any warning, was revived. We found the Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby protesting and speaking out against the entry of Turkish troops into Iraqi territory (despite the previous agreement made between the Turkish and Iraqi governments). The same man was silent over Russia’s invasion and occupation of Syria, as well as its killing of hundreds of innocent helpless Syrian children, elderly and women.

This same man also overlooked Iran’s infiltration of Iraq and its control of its land, its looting of its wealth and its influence in Iraq’s political decisions. Iran has effectively been governing Iraq through its representatives – both Nouri Al-Maliki and Haider Al-Abadi. Elaraby did not hear about the fierce war waged by Israel on our beloved Gaza, leading to the death of thousands of innocent civilians. It seems that no one told him about the blockade imposed on the Gazans, the closure of the Rafah crossing, or about the actions of the coup-led government in Egypt, including flooding Gaza with groundwater. He is also uninformed about Iran’s actions by means of the Houthis in Yemen and the on-going war in the country, or about the dirty role being played by the UAE and Al-Sisi’s government to aggravate the conflict in Libya, including sending weapons to retired General Khalifa Haftar to help him fight his own people.

Now, Elaraby has suddenly displayed false bravado and claimed that the Turkish forces violated Iraq’s Arab territories and went on to condemn these actions. It has been so long and we have missed these words coming from the Arab League, who in the past used such words against Israel’s repeated attacks on the Palestinian territories. However, those days are long gone and the Arab League no longer uses such words after it became mute and after its enemies became its friends and its friends its enemies. We are living in a time when all standards, concepts, understandings and national constants have unfortunately changed.

In any case, we thank him for bringing back such language as we were on the verge of forgetting it. However, we do wish he had said it at a different time and place because these Turkish troops were present in Iraq based on an agreement reached between the Iraqi government and its Turkish counterpart. They had agreed that the Turkish troops would train the Iraqi troops. However, when Al-Abadi’s government realised the national coalition’s protest against this, the government decided to fabricate a crisis fuelled by the Russian government and then Al-Sisi got involved by calling the Iraqi Prime Minister and telling him he would support Iraq. Elaraby was then awoken from his deep slumber to entertain us with this pathetic statement, in isolation from the events occurring in the Arab world, just to challenge his archenemy Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Elaraby has now returned to his slumber until he is awoken next time by the demands of the Egyptians or the Emiratis, who have become two sides of the same coin.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.