Asia : East moves West

Abstract

A visit to most of the major foreign ministries in Asia will find that there are no references on maps to ‘the Middle East’. A map of the vast region from the Mediterranean to the Pacific is called Asia. What we in the West have come to know as the Middle East, at least East of Suez, is known in Asia as West Asia. The movement of South and East Asians to areas like the Gulf is seen in Asian terms as an intra-continental migration. It was the West who invented the term Middle East in the late 19th century. And still, the world’s media outlets are focused on the dominant role that the Western powers have played in the region for over a hundred years. Most recently, this includes the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, the first Kuwait/Iraq war in 1990-1991, and the events that followed 9/11, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Woven into these conflicts has been the ongoing and unresolved crisis between Israel and the Arabs, America’s standoff with the Iranians, and the growing activities of the extremist groups, of whom al-Qaeda is the most prominent.