Ayoon wa Azan (The worst is yet to come)

For months, I have been asking all the presidents, prime ministers, princes, ministers and intellectuals that I meet a worrisome question that I have in mind: Ever since you were in high school, have you ever seen an Arab situation worse than this one? None of those people spoke about anything worse. However, they all agreed with me that we are going through dark and difficult circumstances, unseen in our region during the last three generations that I have witnessed, and I consider that I am well versed with this period. For decades, I thought that 1967 and its repercussions represented the worst possible Arab situation, or at least the worst since the early conquests. However, I lived to see an even worse situation by every account. May God have mercy on the soul of Abu Farook. He was a Telex expert sending and receiving messages between Beirut and Amman and sometimes some other Arab capitals. I used to provoke him by saying: you lost Palestine and you want me to liberate it or die. Then the 1967 war came and we lost the rest and Sinai and the Golan. Abu Farook came to me with tears in his eyes and he said: We lost half of Palestine but you lost the rest. I had no response to that; however, I wept for Jerusalem and am still weeping. May God have mercy on the soul of Khodor Nassar. We worked together, were “heads of shift” at Reuters and exchanged three shifts in the morning, noon, and night with others. I think it was in 1967. Aden or Southern Yemen had gained its' independence from Britain. The agency paved the way for that by sending a team to the south western part of Saudi Arabia. The journalists moved between Gizan and Najran and were surprised, one day, to see Egyptian fighting jets coming from Northern Yemen and attacking a local airport. The journalists fled the airport that was made from tin and wood. They tried to hide between bushes or behind dunes. The battle ended with the fighting jets hitting every possible location except for the runway, the main target of the raid. A colleague from Reuters told me this story; he wrote about it reports that were published by Reuters and he said to me: “God have mercy on us.” In Beirut, Khodor Nassar told me that he is worried and he cannot sleep, now that Egypt shut the Tiran straits and provided Israel with an excuse to attack Egypt and its army in Yemen. The Egyptian planes got destroyed on the land. On June 5, 1967, I was a head of shift and a college student. I was assisted by a friend, Hanna Anbar, who is now a managing editor of the Daily Star. On that morning, the other heads of shifts started coming into the office to help us. The shift that normally extends over six hours went on for five days. Khodor Nassar then arrived screaming and cursing. He grabbed my shoulders, started shaking me and said: Have I not told him? Have I not told you? He had indeed told me but he had not told it to Gamal Abdel Nasser. May God have mercy on the soul of Imad Chehadeh. We studied together at the American University of Beirut and worked together at the Daily Star in Beirut, and also in Washington. I was a part time redactor at the newspaper and then went on to become its Editor in Chief. Imad Chehadeh remained one of the finest correspondents, as well as an analyst and a caricaturist. He once came and said that Al-Hayat, the Daily Star and the entire Lebanese media were promoting an erroneous piece of news. He said that he studied the Yemeni situation with the Yemeni people and that he met with the people who are fighting the British colonization. He also added that we are focusing on the Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Southern Yemen (Flosy) while this front is only present on the “Voice of the Arabs”, and that the real fighters on the ground are the National Front for Liberation (NFL). Britain withdrew from the South and the National Front for Liberation took over, along with its military and political cadres. However, the Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Southern Yemen still occupied an important part of the “Voice of the Arabs.” Imad Chehadeh then came to my office and said: Did I not tell you? Do you believe now? Perhaps these memories came flooding as I passed by the building of the “Union” near the Sanayeh Gardens, where the Reuters offices used to be. I looked back at a day that we thought was the worst. Back then, we used to say "No". However today, if we sigh, it is a sigh that shows pain. We are now living through the era of the Arab revolutions that I refuse to call a spring. We are living in denial. Those who accessed power are saying that this is a spring and that things are shiny. Those who have not are saying that the situation is really bad. In Beirut, I spent three days reading all the country’s newspapers, including one well respected newspaper that carried no single piece of news about the massacres of Syria on the past Wednesday and Thursday, and only carried a piece on the battles in Damascus on Friday, quoting a Syrian source. I also noticed that a local TV station with an important audience failed to allude to any events taking place in Syria. I do not think that Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya invented the revolution in Syria to laugh at us. I believe, instead, that there is a major and wide strife and that people are either with or against it, with no middle grounds. Finally, I I really think that the worst is yet to come. --- The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arabstoday.