Terrorism in the Middle East casts an anxious spotlight toward the region's oil-exporting countries. Middle Eastern producers should seize the opportunity. They should renounce terrorist acts and the groups who commit them. And they should unconditionally support efforts toward peace among Israel and its neighbors.
To repudiate terrorism and support regional peace would be an act of simple human decency. It also would be good business. But such peremptory behavior would be uncharacteristic of the Middle East's reticent and cautious Muslim nations.
A DILEMMA
Therein lies a dilemma for the region's oil exporters. To the oil-consuming world, peace and violence are clearly hewn issues. Silence on them looks circumspect and suspicious. At the very least, it highlights and can exaggerate the instability of a region that, to much of the rest of the world, remains a puzzle.
To some degree, expressions of concern in the western world about Middle Eastern stability disguise motives that are less than noble: ethnic hostility, for example, or maneuvering for commercial advantage. The Middle East is, nevertheless, unstable. Oil consumers worry for reasons both good and bad about continuity of supply from the world's most important producing region.
These worries make up an important part of the political case against oil in many oil-consuming countries. It's a case that translates into the push for carbon taxes and other such economic mischief.
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and individual producing-nation governments have been outspoken against carbon taxes, and properly so. They must come to see how much their arguments would strengthen if they were equally outspoken in opposition to terrorism, especially terrorism aimed at thwarting peace.
Most of the Arab world had no qualms about condemning Iraqi President Saddam Hussein when he ravaged Kuwait in 1990. Similarly, Arab oil producers should have no qualms about condemning the bombing murder of 22 people on a bus in Tel Aviv by the militant Hamas group of Palestinian Muslims. They should have no qualms about condemning the murder of foreigners in Algeria by Muslim terrorists. And they should have no qualms about supporting each political step taken toward regional peace, such as last week's agreement between Israel and Jordan.
Palestinians in Israel and Muslims in Algeria have legitimate grievances. But neither their grievances nor what they claim to be religious fervor justifies murder. Nothing justifies murder, and Arab oil exporters, like all right-minded peoples, should not hesitate to say so.
Oil, especially Middle Eastern oil, suffers from association with terrorist murder. The association aggravates perceptions of the region as an unstable, unreliable supplier of the world's most important fuel. And the characteristic silence of Middle Eastern producers fuels consumer suspicions that oil money pays the terrorists' bills. This can only harden the antagonism oil faces in so many official places.
REACTIONS TO VIOLENCE
A world that is increasingly interdependent, committed to economic development, and in need of reliably available energy cannot and will not tolerate senseless violence. Such a world will grow around and beyond countries that support terrorism or that seem to do so by failing to denounce the patently wrong. And such a world will shun oil if distinctions blur between the fuel and the maniacs who claim to see something righteous about people murdered in the act of tending to business.
Copyright 1994 Oil & Gas Journal. All Rights Reserved.
