Hamas Seizes Gaza in a Military Coup Against Fatah, Tony Blair Leaves Office After Ten Years, Iraq’s Surge Begins and Car Bombers Strike London and Glasgow

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 July 2007 | Reporting Period: 3 April – 2 July 2007

Quarterly Briefing

• Hamas seizes military control of the Gaza Strip from Fatah forces on June 14-15 in five days of fierce street fighting; Fatah’s security forces collapse; Hamas fighters throw Fatah men from buildings and execute captives; Palestinian Authority President Abbas dissolves the unity government and declares a state of emergency; the Palestinian territories are now split between Hamas-ruled Gaza and Fatah-controlled West Bank.
• Tony Blair hands over the British prime ministership to Gordon Brown on June 27 after ten years in office; Blair’s legacy is dominated by the Iraq War decision of 2003; Brown takes office on the same day that British police discover two car bombs in London, and the following day a jeep laden with gas canisters is driven into Glasgow Airport; the attacks are thwarted but signal continued jihadist intent against Britain.
• General David Petraeus’s new counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq — the “surge” of 30,000 additional troops authorised by President Bush in January — is now fully in force; American and Iraqi forces are conducting operations in Baghdad’s most violent districts and in the river valleys south of the capital; early indicators suggest reduced sectarian killing in some areas but the outcome remains uncertain.
• Nicolas Sarkozy wins the French presidential election on May 6, defeating Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal; Sarkozy promises a more active French foreign policy, a warmer relationship with the United States and domestic economic reform; his election shifts French politics significantly rightward after five years of Chirac’s anti-Iraq-war posture.
• Virginia Tech University in the United States experiences the worst mass shooting in American history on April 16 when student Seung-Hui Cho kills 32 people before killing himself; the massacre reignites the US debate on gun control without producing legislative change.
• Lebanon’s Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp becomes the site of intense fighting from May 20 between the Lebanese army and the Fatah al-Islam militant group; the camp’s 40,000 Palestinian residents are displaced; the fighting, the worst internal Lebanese violence since the civil war, kills over 160 Lebanese soldiers.

Prologue: A Palestinian State Divided

Hamas’s seizure of Gaza in June 2007 destroyed the fiction, maintained since the Palestinian legislative elections of January 2006, that Hamas and Fatah could share governance of a Palestinian proto-state. The unity government brokered by Saudi Arabia at Mecca in February had lasted less than four months before collapsing in the violence of Gaza’s streets. The result was a bifurcated Palestinian political landscape: Mahmoud Abbas governing a West Bank under effective Israeli security cooperation, and Hamas controlling Gaza under blockade. For any conceivable peace negotiation, the absence of a unified Palestinian interlocutor was a structural obstacle that no amount of diplomatic creativity could fully overcome. For the Caribbean, which had followed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as both a humanitarian concern and a test of international law’s application, Hamas’s takeover was a development that complicated already thin prospects for resolution.

Iraq’s Surge: Early Assessment

General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy represented a genuine doctrinal shift from the US military’s previous approach. Rather than training Iraqi forces and drawing down US troops, the surge put American soldiers into Baghdad’s most violent neighbourhoods in joint patrols with Iraqi security forces, living among the population in small combat outposts rather than in large fortified bases. The early results, as measured by sectarian killing rates in Baghdad, were cautiously positive in some districts. The Anbar Awakening — the turn of Sunni tribal leaders against al-Qaeda in Iraq, which had begun in late 2006 — was continuing and spreading; the Sunni tribes were being paid, armed and organised into the Sons of Iraq militia programme. Whether these tactical gains could be consolidated into durable political progress remained the central question.

Blair’s Legacy and the Caribbean

Tony Blair’s ten years as British Prime Minister were, for the Caribbean, simultaneously the period of the closest US-UK alignment since the Second World War and a period of significant change in the relationships between Britain and its dependent territories and former colonies. Blair’s Strong support for the Iraq War — which CARICOM governments largely opposed — had created diplomatic awkwardness in a relationship with Britain that was important for the region. His departure, and Brown’s accession, opened questions about whether Britain’s foreign policy would moderate and whether the new government’s domestic priorities would affect development assistance to the Caribbean. The London and Glasgow car bomb attempts on the day of Blair’s departure and the day after — the first linked to a medical doctors’ network — reminded the incoming prime minister that Britain’s security challenges had not departed with his predecessor.

Looking Ahead

The Gaza split will test whether the international community’s refusal to engage with Hamas as a legitimate governing authority can be sustained when it controls territory containing 1.5 million people who require food, medical supplies and utilities that cannot be supplied without some form of engagement. Iraq’s September progress report to Congress will be General Petraeus’s most important public accounting; the political pressure on the Bush administration from a Democratic Congress hostile to the war means that the September testimony will be a pivotal moment for the surge’s political future. And the Lal Masjid standoff in Islamabad — where the Pakistani army has surrounded a mosque compound occupied by armed jihadists — is escalating as we publish; its resolution will reveal much about the Pakistani government’s capacity and will to confront the jihadist networks that operate from its territory.

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.

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