SHEIKH ZAYED 06.05.1918
A century after the birth of the UAE’s Founding Father, the nation remembers him in a year of celebration
The year is 1918. The First World War will come to a close, and a Spanish flu epidemic is sweeping across the globe. It was into this tumultuous year, 100 years ago today, that the Founding Father Sheikh Zayed was born.
They were tough times. The pearling fleets that had sustained generations had dwindled because of the discovery of cultured pearls in Japan.
When Sheikh Zayed became Ruler’s Representative in the Eastern Region in 1946, a second world war had brought more hardship to the region. But his rule through consensus, care and dialogue did not go unnoticed.
“I will not easily forget my first visit to Buraimi and my first meeting with Sheikh Zayed. It is impossible to meet him without immediately being taken by him,” Col Hugh Boustead, the British political agent to Abu Dhabi from 1961 to 1965, wrote in his book The Wind of Morning.
“He invariably had a kind word for everybody and was most generous with his money. I was struck by all that had been done in Al Ain, The springs had been dug out to increase the water supply to the gardens, wells dug and pumps supplied and cemented baths for men and women had been built in the fallujahs [falaj system]. Everyone who visited Buraimi noticed the happiness of the people in the areas.”
By 1966, oil was being shipped abroad, Sheikh Zayed was Ruler of Abu Dhabi and the region was on the cusp of a transformation.
David Neild was an officer with the Trucial Oman Scouts at that time. “Here was a great man who loved the desert and everything associated with it. But he was also more than capable of understanding the problems of the modern world,” he wrote about Sheikh Zayed in his book,
A Soldier in Arabia. “The time would soon come when it would be his destiny to transform his beloved desert into what the UAE has become today.” That moment arrived in 1971 when the Emirates was formed with Sheikh Zayed as president.
Today, 100 years from his birth, the UAE is about halfway through the Year of Zayed. Yesterday, to celebrate 100 years since the founder’s birth, the President, Sheikh Khalifa ordered that all serving and retired Government employees be paid an additional one month’s salary.
The year-long celebration of the late president’s life highlights his role in establishing the UAE and his achievements for tolerance, peace and progress. Since the start of the year, the Founder’s Office said it had already received more than 600 proposals to mark the year. In Abu Dhabi, one of the most visible commemorations has been the opening of The Founder’s Memorial. The installation was completed by artist Ralph Helmick, opened on April 22 and at its centre is The Constellation – a work of 1,327 geometric shapes suspended from 1,110 cables that form a three-dimensional profile of Sheikh Zayed.
But there have also been countless other initiatives. Etihad launched a “young aviators programme” to inspire children to become pilots, it has a branded freighter aircraft to carry out humanitarian missions, and also unveiled a Year of Zayed-themed plane. Emirates in Dubai also has unveiled Year of Zayed livery on 10 of its aircraft.
On Abu Dhabi’s Corniche during the Mother of the Nation festival, 500 drones lit up the sky in celebration of the special year, while Sheikh Zayed was announced as personality of the year at Abu Dhabi International Book Fair.
His face was illuminated with hundreds of solar lanterns in January, and the life of Sheikh Zayed in a 100 minutes and 100 films is being told by the National Archives.
Of course we cannot forget, when Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, pinned a Year of Zayed badge to a carpet seller who had refused to sell his portrait of Sheikh Zayed to a visitor.
There are too many other initiatives to mention and we are not even half way through Year of Zayed. Dates such as National Day are on the horizon, Qasr Al Hosn is set to open and everyone has much more to look forward to before the year is out.
Today, 100 years from his birth, the UAE is about halfway through the Year of Zayed
The world has never been safer, despite what headlines might lead you to think. To those who dispute the premise, I offer the example of Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Eta), which disbanded last week after nearly six decades of terror.
Eta’s violence was ideological. The Basque nationalism they fought for was never feasible.
I asked a Catalan independence supporter in Barcelona last December why a form of autonomy was not sufficient. After all, the Basques had killed people in return for theirs, I suggested. The Catalan man sneered with contempt. The Basques, he said, were nothing more than fishermen for the Castilians whereas the Catalans were a proud historic nation.
Be that as it may, there was a period when the atrocities of the Basque separatist group Eta dominated the news.
This was the era of nihilistic leftist terror. The Red Brigades of Italy, Baader Meinhof in Germany and November 17 in Greece were all socialist outfits that shocked Europe with their brutal attacks.
All were eventually defenestrated and forced by security pressure to call ceasefires or disband. Only the IRA in Ireland was, through its political wing Sinn Fein, habilitated into mainstream politics.
Jonathan Powell, the British official who negotiated peace with Sinn Fein, argued last week that Eta’s disbandment was proof that to achieve peace, it was necessary to talk to the men of violence. In the case of Eta, mediators had decommissioned its arsenal and even secured a statement of remorse to its victims.
Yet Eta’s demise proves a far bigger point: that history is a force against terror.
A look back at the pictures of devastation caused by the bombs and the gun attacks is as harrowing as anything that emerges from battlefields in Iraq or Syria today.
Yet it is a whole sphere of violence that has passed into history. It is one of the reasons why the world has never been safer – alongside declining state-on-state conflict levels and lower murder rates from criminal activity.
In the West, post-Second World War prosperity had a dark underbelly. Fifty years ago the students of Paris took to the barricades to challenge President Charles de Gaulle. That uprising is now viewed in many parts through rose-tinted spectacles. It is seen as an intellectual flowering. It is seen as a challenge to austere and minimal government.
It is seen as bringing forth more generous and supportive government policies as well as social change for a more inclusive era.
But for every Daniel Cohen Bendit and Petra Kelly moving into parliament to shake up politics, there was a balaclava-wearing gunman inflicting suffering on unsuspecting towns and villages. Aurora Intxausti, an journalist, recalled last week how the group had planted a bomb on her doorstep, tying a detonator cord to the handle. It failed to explode when she opened the door carrying her children aged 18 months and three years, accompanied by her husband.
Eta wanted to “socialise the suffering” and wiping out the journalist and her family would certainly have achieved that goal.
Achieving goals is just one source of violence. Another is seeking some form of dominance or superiority over either a foe or a whole population group. A third source is ideology.
Over time, all three are tested against the human instinct for life to improve. Just as the 2011 cycle of revolutions and civil wars was breaking throughout the Middle East region, Harvard neuroscientist Stephen Pinker released a book,
In it he stated that individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason and science pose a constant challenge to the sources of violence.
Put another way, people aim to be affluent, better-educated, freer in lifestyle and enjoy rational problem solving in response to daily events. It is possible to attain some of these in a violent situation but not all and not among a majority of the population. Therefore over time, the agents of violence face revulsion, fatigue, resentment and eventually irrelevance.
So why is life for so many haunted by the spectre of death and destruction? In part because we have a heightened concept of the value of life, we are repulsed by examples of death. Life for most is no longer nasty, brutish or short, so when examples of that occur we are sickened.
There is also the impact of much more pervasive, intimate and sophisticated media coverage of death and destruction. For those not directly impacted by violence, either geographically or through family members and friends, the suffering is much closer and more immediate than ever before in human history.
Today’s terror campaigns correspond to the Eta playbook. The violence is graphic and unjust, made for the TV news cycle. That too is why most terror campaigns are ultimately doomed.
Individualism, reason and science pose a constant challenge to the sources of violence on which terror depends