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France’s Feeble Demand

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One trait that France and the United States have in common is that each nation acts like it has moral authority to lead the world.

The opportunity for global leadership rests largely on other factors — namely power, wealth and credibility — things that the United States tends to have more of than France. But whenever a smaller state challenges a larger one, it usually needs a moral advantage to prevail. A good example is the one Panama enjoyed in negotiations with the United States over the Panama Canal. That lesson has eluded France. Even though France’s ethical credibility remains stained over its unconditional support for Rwanda until the early days of the Central African nation’s 1994 genocide, French leaders recently launched a bipartisan challenge to the United States over its unilateral dominance of world affairs.

The French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, began the refrain last November in a Paris speech when he called America a “hyperpower.” A month later, Vedrine, a Socialist, told American reporters in Paris that American leaders “have always been for sharing the burden” of multilateral actions. But, he added,”[t]hey’ve never been much for sharing the decision-making” over those actions.

The same week, French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, another Socialist, urged America to exercise power more “discreet[ly],” and President Jacques Chirac, a Gaullist, insisted that the United States do nothing less than share its power. Their joint demand would no doubt stand a better chance of success if nations were to perceive that France enjoyed moral authority over the United States.

Is France up to the challenge?

Many non-Americans fear America’s influences needs to be checked.

At the very least, countless people worldwide are glad to finally see at least one Western nation stand up to the United States. Many non-Americans fear that America’s overwhelming economic and cultural influences need to be checked. The world, too, has observed the technological superiority of U.S. weapons in strikes from Baghdad to Khartoum, along with America’s readiness (and shamelessness) to use them. Since American bombers (with the help of the British) dominated NATO’s air strikes last year against Serbia, France has pushed Europe to upgrade its capabilities in order to provide a Western military alternative to American-led might.

One might dismiss France’s challenge if one did not know that France has the largest non-American military force of any NATO ally but Turkey, even though France’s troops are still less than one-fourth the size of U.S. forces. Nevertheless, France is richer and stronger than America’s closest ally, Great Britain. France enjoys another advantage in challenging America’s global influence. Most French people not only want their government to play a lead role in foreign affairs but, unlike Americans, they both expect and accept that French troops will assume risks as needed. Since the Cold War, French troops have been deployed amidst ongoing crises in places from Rwanda to Kosovo with broad French public support.

French people also seem to understand better than Americans do the limits of military power. During the Cold War, France withdrew from Vietnam before the United States decided to back the same army that France had already abandoned. Unlike Americans, French people know well the lesson that even seemingly invincible empires later fall, from the examples of King Louis XIV and Napoleon Bonaparte. Even France’s currently governing Fifth Republic was founded upon realism. The first president, Charles de Gaulle, sought to rival America’s global power at the same time that he began to withdraw French troops from a civil war in French colonial Algeria over independence.

Another trait that France shares with the United States is the notion that its foreign policy, besides following its own realpolitik over trade and investments, also rests upon moralist ideals. After all, the 18th-century notion that men (and now also women and minorities) enjoy inalienable rights is the moral bedrock of both republics. But while America’s crusades have revolved around exporting economic and political models, France’s campaigns have leaned more toward evangelizing culture and language.

Both Western powers also have placed much weight on upholding their own military credibility to defend their respective allies from perceived external threats, sharing the logic that if one ally were to fall others might follow. This thinking, however, has sometimes led the United States and France to separately squander their credibility along with their principles. While America, during the Cold War, backed South Vietnam against North Vietnamese-backed forces, France, one year after the Berlin Wall fell, began to back Rwanda against another kind of foreign-backed aggression.

Fear of falling dominos has led America and France to each respectively back many regimes, including the aforementioned ones, even as they committed obvious war crimes. President Clinton finally took a step toward acknowledging America’s bloody record a year ago when he apologized in Guatemala City for United States’ complicity in what a U.N. Truth Commission the month before called “acts of genocide.”

France’s role in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide stands as the Fifth Republic’s bloodiest foreign campaign, which is all the more ironic being that it failed. The policy was a bipartisan effort led by a Socialist, President Francois Mitterrand. Of no strategic importance and without any valuable resources, Rwanda was not a priority for France until 1990, when a newly formed guerrilla front invaded from Uganda with Ugandan arms as large as Katyusha multiple-rocket launchers. To Rwanda’s ruling Hutu majority, the invading rebels were members of Rwanda’s minority ethnic group, Tutsis. But to France, the rebels were Anglophones backed by Uganda seeking to overthrow an allied Francophone nation.

Belgium, not France, had governed colonial Rwanda, although it was France in the early 1990s that rushed to aid Rwanda’s Francophone regime. Before Belgium had only strengthened colonial Rwanda’s ethnic divisions by issuing the first identity cards with ethnic categories. But over a half-century later, Belgium’s policy was mindful of the massacres that had accompanied the overthrow of a Tutsi monarchy during the country’s transition to independence. Yet France paid no mind to Rwanda’s prior ethnic violence as it provided arms, advisors and paratroopers to the regime. French artillery units assumed positions just south of the northern front bordering Uganda, while, over 40 kilometers away in Kigali, French armored cars patrolled the capital. Meanwhile, Belgium only provided the regime with boots and uniforms in a failed gesture to pressure Rwanda to share power.

French officials apologized for the Hutu government even though the Hutu forces committed many massacres of civilians as it was receiving French arms. “Civilians were killed as in any war,” French Col. Bernard Cussac, France’s military commander in Kigali, said in 1993 about ethnic killings that occurred in the three years leading up to the genocide. Ambassador Jean-Michel Marlaud was more discreet. “There are violations by the Rwandan army,” he said, “[but] more because of a lack of control by the government rather than the will of the government.”

On April 6, 1994, the Rwandan president died when his plane was hit by a rocket fired from the vicinity of a Rwandan army base. Hours later, presidential guards began killing fellow Hutus who were political opponents of the ruling party, starting with the country’s first elected prime minister and 10 Belgian peacekeepers around her. As ruling-party militias spread out to target all Tutsi, France seized control of Kigali’s airport, ostensibly to evacuate French and other Western nationals if necessary, but also so France could still fly in French troops if needed. Days later, however, or on the seventh day of the 90-day genocide, Ambassador Marlaud withdrew all French personnel from Rwanda to leave behind France’s remaining Francophone allies, who by then were directing the slaughter.

France’s role in Rwanda is not without dereliction.

French troops returned to Rwanda less than three months later under hastily granted U.N. auspices to establish a safe haven that, while no doubt protecting many innocent Hutu refugees, also protected countless former regime members turned genocidaires. Although human-rights groups already knew the names of many of the lead suspects, French troops did not apprehend even one. Today France, as part of its regional efforts to build anti-American alliances, is pursuing a similar strategy in the Balkans, where French troops have consistently failed to arrest Serbian war-crimes suspects who seem to move about freely within France’s U.N.-authorized zones of control.

French leaders make a popular case when they demand that America share the reigns of global leadership. But the notion that either Western nation has moral authority over the other only ignores the blood on both their hands. And without ethical credibility to back up its bi-partisan stance, France, alone, is too small and weak to successfully push the United States.

Frank Smyth is author of Arming Rwanda, a January 1994 Human Rights Watch report. The views expressed here are his own. He is a contributing editor of IntellectualCapital.com.

Leader of the Pack

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Irrespective of how things might look after the protests against the World Trade Organization talks in Seattle turned unexpectedly fierce right before the talks themselves suddenly collapsed, a consensus has already emerged in the presidential debate over foreign policy that is sure to last. The question is no longer whether Washington should try to control the pace and terms of globalization, but how and toward what ends. The leading candidates have each rejected isolationists to both their right and left while favoring different strategies for more globalization. One way or another, America is likely to become more engaged abroad in the 2000s.

Bradley’s plan

Although the candidates have so far barely addressed foreign affairs, one man long known for his ability to synthesize information, Bill Bradley, recently became the first to articulate a new strategy. Last week at Tuft University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Mass., Bradley said that the United States must stop going it alone so much in the world and making decisions unilaterally. Instead, America must learn to work more cooperatively with other states to “help mold [the] international system,” Bradley said. “This requires partners in the world to do this, alliances with international organizations.”

Bradley’s plan is so ambitious that he says it will do nothing less than establish the basis for the first consensus on America’s role in the world since the Cold War, even though it is based on the unconventional notion that America must finally get over its suspicions of multinational institutions like the United Nations and instead learn to guide them in the future. Bradley’s plan also is based on the novel idea that the interests of America and other nations have been merging since the Cold War. Popular in some circles, the concept that the world community shares an interest in matters like environmental preservation motivated many protestors in Seattle.

However radical he may sound, Bradley echoes recent establishment authors in the premier journal of its kind, Foreign Affairs. Both Samuel P. Huntington, a Harvard University professor, and Richard N. Haass, a former Bush administration national security adviser (and an IC contributing editor), have argued separately that American hegemony over the world has waned since the Cold War and that U.S. power now is only likely to decrease more. These leading “realists” say the United States no longer has any choice but to work more cooperatively with other states within international fora.

American interests and of other nations have been merging since the Cold War

Can Gore and Bush respond?

Bradley is a quick study, and his plan establishes him as a serious foreign-policy thinker. His idea — that even though we are the world’s only surviving superpower, we should work cooperatively with other states to forge a global community — was originally a progressive one that only this year was legitimized by conservatives. By being the first candidate to promote it, Bradley has begun to define America’s foreign-policy debate along new, broad lines that transcend the old divisions of the Cold War.

Bradley’s words challenge his main rival, Al Gore, and leave him with bad options. Top heavy with too many advisers loyal to Clinton as well as the vice president, Gore only suffers over his ongoing embrace of the administration. The rationale Bradley is using to explain his plan is that the United States will not necessarily stand by in the face of more crises like Kosovo, but that it cannot afford to assume either the costs or the responsibilities for future interventions by itself. The solution then is for the United States to find effective ways to support multilateral institutions like the United Nations to assume those costs in the future, says Bradley. To do so, the United States must reverse itself 180 degrees in its attitude to the United Nations and back it with the spirit and resources to make it work well.

Bradley’s plan is likely to be opposed by candidates like John McCain who this week, at the U.S.S. Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum in New York, argued that the United States should strengthen and reform its own military to better handle future problems by itself. Some conservatives are likely to have even stronger objections to Bradley’s new internationalism. A few years ago, so many members of the gun lobby believed conspiracy myths that the National Rifle Association issued a disclaimer declaring false widely-disseminated rumors that U.N. forces were flying “black helicopters” in a secret plot to take over America. Few Americans in their lifetimes have heard much more than criticism of the United Nations. No doubt, both Gore and George W. Bush will say they represent the majority of Americans when and if they express skepticism about Bradley’s plan.

But Gore finds himself cornered. The Clinton administration has recently lost big battles over arms control and global trade, and its most important legacy is likely to be its Kosovo intervention. President Clinton’sgreatest flaw in taking the United States in a bold new direction in leading humanitarian intervention is that he never set any limits to decide when it is and is not worth the risk and costs. Gore has many reasons to defend the effort, but he can no longer defend its lack of realism. Now whether he denies or admits the policy’s shortcomings, he will go on being associated with them.

Bush, too, must eventually face Bradley’s new pitch. And although, like Gore, Bush has plenty of big-name foreign-policy advisers, he still seems unsure of his own views. While Bush has yet to articulate any response to Bradley’s plan, the views of the realists who dominate his foreign-policy team are well known.

Like their most influential strategist, Henry Kissinger, most realists opposed the Clinton administration’s NATO-led intervention against Yugoslavia. But while they argue for the need to scale back international humanitarian interventions, they nevertheless recognize that the United States must, in the words of Gulf War-era adviser Haass, “support constructive notions of how international society should be organized and should operate,” instead of going on like it has done and acting mainly unilaterally.

Bush’s advisers surely will encourage him to eventually speak out against Bradley’s foreign-policy plan, although some of them may already agree with the notion that the United States must learn to work more effectively within multinational institutions to promote greater globalization. Bush, however, is sure to back efforts promoting trade instead of any leadership for humanitarian interventions, for which U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has recently all but begged. Meanwhile, Bradley’s and Annan’s separate plans seem wholly compatible. Bush might decide to attack their unspoken alliance, but whatever move he makes now will be catch up to Bradley’s breakaway last week.

Leaving the competition behind

Bradley also is the first candidate to spell out how he would handle Russia, criticizing the Clinton administration for pushing Russia to adopt unpopular economic reforms while neglecting to disarm the former Soviet empire’s various nuclear missiles. Bradley was also the first to speak out on trade.

Before the collapse of the Seattle talks, Bradley said that the World Trade Organization should afford labor and environmental groups the right to file “friend of the court” briefs to the organization, although he has yet to explain how the ultimate decisions should be made. Bradley favors global trade, but he wants it to expand at a slower, more cautious pace than some other business advocates.

While Gore and Bush alike each go on consulting their respective advisers who are no doubt giving them conflicting advice, the former New York Knicks forward and Rhodes scholar has already thought a lot about foreign affairs. He has never looked more alpha leading the pack.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has written for Foreign Affairs, World Policy Journal and Jane’s Intelligence Review. He is a contributor to Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff. He is a contributing editor at IntellectualCapital.com.

Guatemala’s Narco-military

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No country so small has ever moved so much cocaine north. Earlier in this decade, about 50 to 75 metric tons of cocaine passed through Guatemala each year, according to the State Department. But today, the State Department estimates that Guatemala annually transships (receives and then ships on) approximately 200 to 300 metric tons of cocaine, making Guatemala a frequent stop along the American drug-trade route. At least half of all the cocaine that State Department experts estimate reaches the U.S. market goes through Guatemala.

Colombia has long been at the heart of the drug trade, and back in the 1980s most of its cocaine was transshipped north through the Caribbean. But in the 1990s, Colombian drug trafficking routes shifted to the northern Central American and Mexican land isthmus. Throughout this decade, it was Mexico, which shares its southern border with Guatemala, that transshipped up to three-fourths of America’s cocaine. But over the past two years, Guatemala’s role in the trade has dramatically expanded. “Mexico still moves the same amount of cocaine,” says one U.S. expert, only now most of it goes to Guatemala first.

When it comes to the drug war, however, the Clinton administration along with its Congressional critics are concentrating mainly on Colombia. American leaders are focusing on the role of Colombia’s leftist “narco-guerrillas” in the drug trade, while ignoring the role being played by rightist military forces in Latin American nations from Colombia to Guatemala.

La Bodega

There is something ironic about Guatemala’s increased role in the drug trade especially when one considers the nature of the criminal syndicates behind it. Guatemala was a staunch Cold War ally of the United States and, back in 1954, the CIA engineered a coup from Honduras that deposed Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, after he first nationalized the lands of the U.S. firm United Fruit and then received arms from Czechoslovakia. The coup established the Guatemalan military as the country’s dominant institution, and its officer corps has since enjoyed near-blanket impunity from prosecution.

While most of Central America was consumed by ideological warfare in the 1980s, Guatemala’s conflict was by far the bloodiest. Its anti-communist military explicitly rejected human-rights considerations along with any covert U.S. aid conditioned upon them, although the CIA continued to provide the Guatemalan military with covert assistance even as its forces committed many war crimes.

The war crimes peaked in the early 1980s with the wholesale massacres of as many as 400 ethnic Mayan villages suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas. Last February, a U.N. truth commission reported that the Guatemalan military abuses included acts of genocide. One month later, President Clinton apologized in Guatemala City for America’s past complicity in the Guatemalan military’s war crimes.

But President Clinton has yet to address the Guatemalan military’s role in drug trafficking, which the DEA first began to detect during the Bush administration. As early as 1990, DEA special agents termed Guatemala, la bodega or “the warehouse.” One of their first suspects was a Guatemalan Army lieutenant colonel, Carlos Ochoa Ruiz. The DEA maintains that Ochoa transshipped a half metric ton of cocaine –worth $7.5 million wholesale — from Western Guatemala to Tampa, Fla., where he remains indicted in a U.S. federal court.

Eastern Guatemala peasants say military officers there, too, transshipped cocaine. In 1992, they filed a petition with the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City that accused suspects including four Army colonels of driving them off their farmland in order to build clandestine runways to run drugs, after killing at least nine people — including a mother and her son — in order to accelerate the land clearing. One of the suspects named by surviving peasants, Arnoldo Vargas Estrada, was later convicted in a U.S. federal court in New York of smuggling several metric tons of cocaine a month from Guatemala to New York. Yet not one of the four Army colonels named by the peasants in Guatemala was ever charged with any crime.

While some Army officers moved cocaine in private planes, some Air Force officers moved drugs in military planes. The highest-ranking officer accused of trafficking by the DEA is Gen. Carlos Pozuelos Villavicencio who retired in 1993 as Guatemala’s Air Force commander. Although the Clinton administration denied him a U.S. entry visa explicitly over his alleged role in cocaine transshipments, Pozuelos, too, was never charged with the crime.

The Ochoa case

So far, only one major military drug suspect in Guatemala received a serious sentence. Ironically he is the same suspect, Army Lt. Col. Carlos Ochoa Ruiz, that the DEA first accused of trafficking back in 1990. Ochoa currently is incarcerated in Guatemala after being convicted in a Guatemalan court even as he remains wanted for trial in a U.S. federal court in Tampa. No case better illustrates the difficulties of prosecuting Guatemalan military officers for running drugs.

Ochoa was the first Guatemalan military officer the United States tried to prosecute for trafficking. After a U.S. federal grand jury indicted him in 1990 in Florida, the State Department asked Guatemala to extradite him there to stand trial. The Guatemalan military gave Ochoa a dishonorable discharge in order to put distance between his name and the institution, but that did not stop a military tribunal from inexplicably reclaiming jurisdiction over him later to try and dismiss the case against him allegedly for lack of evidence.

The State Department appealed the case three times — all the way to Guatemala’s Constitutional Court, the country’s highest judicial body. The presiding judge, Epaminondas Gonzalez Dubon, was already well respected for his integrity, having bravely ruled against a 1993 “self-coup” by Guatemala’s then-President Jorge Serrano. Because of his unblemished record, State Department officials were confident that Gonzalez would lead the court to favor their appeal.

Gonzalez did exactly that, although he paid with his life for his decision. According to court documents published later by the Costa Rican daily newspaper, La Nacion, Guatemala’s Constitutional Court led by Gonzalez voted four to three to extradite Ochoa on March 23, 1994. Nine days later, a four-man team murdered Judge Gonzalez Dubon in Guatemala City in front of his wife and son. Eleven days later, the same court led by a new presiding judge voted seven-to one against the extradition.

A wall of silence

Although the matter was the end of a four-year effort by the United States, Clinton, like his Guatemalan Ambassador Marilyn McAfee, remained shamefully silent about the interminable loss of the case. State Department officials would later say the administration saw no reason to protest a decision it could no longer appeal. Meanwhile, Ochoa went free only to go on running cocaine to the United States.

Ochoa got caught trafficking again — this time with 30 kilograms of cocaine — in Guatemala in 1997. This year in July, a Guatemalan court finally convicted him, with Judge Marco Tulio Molina Lara sentencing him to 14 years. Such a lengthy sentence is unprecedented for a senior Guatemalan military officer, even though hundreds of officers have been implicated in either human rights or drug-trafficking crimes.

No doubt, the conviction and sentencing of a recidivist military trafficker is an important first step for Guatemala toward breaking the wall of impunity that has long protected its officer corps from justice. But the State Department’s report about the country’s recent expansion in cocaine transshipments only shows that this change has come too little too late for the United States.

Frank Smyth, who covered El Salvador for CBS News Radio, the Village Voice, The Economist and other outlets, is co-author of Dialogue and Armed Conflict: Negotiating the Civil War in El Salvador. He is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Communication at American University.

Cold War Bias in Colombia?

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Carlos Castano is not a name that comes up much in the debate over whether to escalate U.S. drug-war aid to Colombia. But policy-makers and politicians alike in America should be mindful of the alliances that he and other rightist paramilitaries there have made with Colombia’s drug syndicates, including the ones that are now ascendant after the mid-1990s decapitation of the once-powerful Cali cartel.

Instead, people from the Clinton administration’s drug czar to its opponents in Congress have focused only on the role played by Colombia’s leftist guerrillas, such as those in the FARC, in the drug trade. This bias takes on added importance — when you consider the effects it has on U.S. policy to aid the Colombian government in fighting insurgent leftist rebels.

America’s drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, wants to double current U.S. military aid to provide $600 million to help Colombia defense forces fight off the powerful leftist “narco-guerillas,” while Rep. Benjamin Gilman (R-NY) has recently succeeded in pushing the administration to arm Colombia with “Blackhawk” helicopter gunships to help in the fight. That begs the question: When looking at Colombia, do American politicians see only red?

A litany of drug involvement

Castano is not only the top commander of Colombia’s rightist paramilitary groups, he is also “a major cocaine trafficker,” according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Castano has given many interviews to journalists from a ranch compound in rural, northwestern Colombia that has been attacked by the country’s leftist guerrillas. Yet Colombian military commanders say they cannot find him. One reason may be that the Colombian military has long collaborated with the country’s rightist paramilitaries against the leftist guerrillas.

The military goes on ignoring Castano even though DEA’s then-chief of operations, Donnie Marshall, now the agency’s acting administrator, said in 1997 that Castano is “closely linked” to “the Henao Montoya organization,” which he told Congress is “the most powerful of the various independent trafficking groups” to emerge since the demise of the Cali cartel.

In fact, alliances between rightist paramilitaries and drug cartels are an old story in Colombia. Unlike its leftist guerrillas who have always been outlawed, rightist paramilitaries operated legally there until 1989. But that year, Colombia’s civilian government backed by its Supreme Court outlawed them because their movement had been taken over by Pablo Escobar, the late drug lord of the once-feared Medellin cartel.

What happened back in the late 1980s is that the paramilitaries became an armed wing of the Medellin-based drug lords who had declared war on the Colombian state. They were fighting over whether Colombia should extradite people like Escobar to the United States to stand trial there on drug trafficking charges. “The Extraditables,” as they called themselves in unsigned communiqués, terrorized Colombia through attacks like the 1989 bombing of Avianca flight HK-1803, which killed 111 passengers.

Colombian civilian investigators later linked the perpetrators of the attack to a group of paramilitaries based at Puerto Boyaca on the Magdelana river. They revealed that Escobar commanded the perpetrators of many paramilitary attacks including the Avianca bombing; he financed Israeli, British and other mercenaries who taught them techniques including altitude-sensitive detonation. Yair Klein, a reserve Israeli Army lieutenant colonel, and three more reserve Israeli military officers were indicted last year in absentia in Bogota for their alleged involvement in terrorist crimes.

Giving the paramilitaries a free ride

There is no doubt that Colombia’s leftist guerrillas, too, are deeply involved in the drug trade. Following U.S.-backed reduction efforts that have reduced coca production elsewhere in the Andes, Colombian peasants protected by leftist guerrillas today grow coca over areas comprising at least one-third of the country’s terrain. They now produce the raw coca leaf used to make about half of the world’s cocaine. But the guerrillas still earn just as much money, maybe more, through kidnappings and other forms of extortion against wealthier Colombians.

It is the rightist paramilitaries that are linked to the highest levels of the drug trade. In 1995, the Colombian judicial police reported that paramilitaries working clandestinely with local Army commanders were protecting peasants growing poppy plants to make heroin in the Magdalena valley. The paramilitaries control many if not most processing laboratories throughout the country. Moreover, U.S. Naval intelligence, DEA and CIA observers all report that among Colombia’s irregular armed groups only the paramilitaries dominate the storage and internal transport of heroin as well as cocaine.

After Colombia outlawed its paramilitaries in 1989, the Colombian military went on secretly collaborating with them for political reasons at the same time that the paramilitaries went on secretly collaborating with the country’s drug cartels to profit. The judicial police report accused Major Jorge Alberto Lazaro, a former local Army commander who graduated from the U.S. School of the Americas in 1981, of collaborating with illegal rightist paramilitaries financed by the suspected paramilitary leader and drug trafficker, Victor Carranza, who was later incarcerated and still awaits trial on charges of murder as well as commanding illegal.

The rightist paramilitaries have links to high drug trade levels paramilitary groups.

Other paramilitary leaders and military officers have been linked to even higher levels of the drug trade. The former Army commander in Cali, Gen. Hernando Camilo Zuniga, resigned as the military’s chief ¿of staff in 1996 after U.S. officials accused him of having protected the Cali cartel. Henry Loaiza, known to his confederates as “The Scorpion,” was the cartel’s underboss in charge of security. Loaiza was linked to many paramilitary massacres including the notorious Trujillo ones involving chainsaws near Cali, according to a government-sanctioned truth report. Loaiza was one of seven top cartel leaders apprehended by 1996 by Colombian forces backed jointly by the DEA and the CIA.

A boost to bloodletting

American officials like McCaffrey and Gilman have come to mimic Colombian military officers who have long exaggerated the importance of the country’s leftist guerrillas to the drug trade while ignoring the action of the rightist paramilitaries. Their misleading claims only lead the United States into another counterinsurgency quagmire. Colombia is already the fourth-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in the world after Israel, Egypt and Jordan. The U.S. military and intelligence presence in Colombia is larger now than it was in El Salvador a decade ago, making it the largest U.S.-backed counterinsurgency effort since Vietnam.

Back in 1994, when U.S. drug war aid to Colombia was just beginning to escalate, Amnesty International accused U.S. officials of turning a blind eye toward counterinsurgency efforts that also involved human-rights abuses. McCaffrey was then the chief of the U.S. Southern Command based in Panama. In response, he ordered an internal audit that found that 12 of 13 Colombian military units cited by Amnesty International as abusers had previously received either U.S. training or arms. But McCaffrey only buried the audit (Full disclosure: I later obtained the audit and broke the story in coordination with Amnesty International). Meanwhile, in public, McCaffrey began saying that, because of the guerrillas’ increased involvement in the drug trade, counterinsurgency and counterdrug measures had become “two sides of the same coin.”

U.S. military presence in Colombia is the largest since Vietnam

Colombia’s complex situation may look plain to McCaffrey, a soldier who has been fighting Marxist guerrillas since Vietnam. But the view held by the administration and its chief drug-war critic only reflects a Cold War bias that is wrong. Increasing military aid to Colombia will not curb the drug flow, although it will boost Colombia’s bloodletting.

Frank Smyth, a freelance journalist who has also served as an investigative consultant for Human Rights Watch as well as Amnesty International, is a contributor to Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff. His website is www.franksmyth.com. He is a regular commentator for IntellectualCapital.com.

Did Kosovo Beget East Timor?

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Never have so many different forces been deployed in the same place. Hungarian soldiers guard “Film City,” the former movie studio that is now a hilltop command post for NATO-led international forces in Kosovo’s capital of Pristina. French soldiers and Italian police guard the bridge that divides Serbian from Albanian communities in Mitrovic near Serbia. Russian troops man a checkpoint in the West just a few miles from where Albanian civilians demonstrate against them. British soldiers guard a road in the South not far from where Serbian civilians demonstrate against them. Polish forces in armored vehicles patrol the hills near Macedonia. Meanwhile, the United Nations is assembling a police force with men and women from countries including Ghana, Jordan, Portugal and Sweden.

Although Kosovo remains part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Western-led international community has governed it since June. The society’s links to Belgrade have been broken, and the province has just begun to develop its own institutions; yet its future is still in doubt. Though Albanian Kosovars widely yearn for independence, the province is likely to remain an international protectorate for at least one decade. International forces already have been in nearby Bosnia for five years, and its ethnic tensions are still burning.

Every matter in Kosovo — from who should be allowed to broadcast over local radio stations to breaking up fistfights over fender-benders — is now handled by either international officials or troops. NATO, Russia, and the United Nations have jointly assumed the responsibility for nation building. They face the formidable task of forging a multi-ethnic society in the wake of mass ethnic violence. So far they have enjoyed only marginal success. That, however, has not stopped the United Nations and a new multilateral force under Australian command from assuming the same responsibilities in East Timor amidst another tense climate.

Changing the tenor of the debate

The international community’s mandate in both places is to forcibly uphold human rights. The new role is consistent with other recent trends around the world, including the establishment of ad hoc U.N. tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda and the national prosecutions of suspected perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Chile and Hungary. The common denominator in all these events is the premise that the time-honored tradition of national sovereignty is now secondary to the universal value of human rights. This is nothing less than a seismic shift in the international order.

The invention challenges, too, the basic premises of American realists who have dominated the landscape of U.S. international relations since the 1970s, most notably Henry Kissinger (Then Secretary of State Kissinger accompanied President Gerald Ford in December 1975 to meet then Indonesian President Suharto in Jakarta one day before Indonesia invaded East Timor). Realists long have argued that moralism is overly ambitious, whether driven by anti-communism or human rights.

The Clinton administration’s actions over Kosovo are as radical to the foreign-policy establishment today as Kissinger’s were to it in his time. “Focusing the vast strength of American foreign policy on a tiny former Ottoman possession of no strategic importance or economic value, with which the United States had no ties of history, geography or sentiments, is something that not even the most powerful and visionary of her predecessors — not Thomas Jefferson or John Quincy Adams, not Charles Evans Hughes or Dean Acheson — could ever have imagined, let alone achieved,” writes Johns Hopkins professor Michael Mandelbaum in the current Foreign Affairs. “But as American bombs fell on Yugoslavia, [Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright had done both.”

Neither Albright nor President Clinton have yet to articulate real guidelines or limits for international human-rights enforcement. A vacuum has been created in that absence. Last week U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan stepped into the gap.

“To avoid repeating [more] tragedies in the next century, I believe it is essential that the international community reach consensus — not only on the principle that massive and systematic violations of human rights must be checked, wherever they take place, but also on ways of deciding what action is necessary, and when, and by whom,” Annan wrote in The Economist. “A new, broader definition of national interest is needed in the new century, which would induce states to find greater unity in the pursuits of common goals and values.”

At the same time, a new kind of moralism is on the rise. Though many observers like journalist Allan Nairn predicted Indonesian military and paramilitary forces would launch attacks against East Timorese residents as they finally voted their desire for independence from Indonesia in an Aug. 30 U.N. referendum, few foresaw that the intensity of attacks would provoke the international community to launch another Western-led multilateral intervention to stop them.

Though the U.N. force for East Timor will be led by Australian troops, they will be supported by military and police forces from nations including the United Kingdom, Portugal, New Zealand, the United States, Thailand and China. Still, the troubled territory’s future remains in doubt. The United Nations will govern East Timor in cooperation with Indonesia, even though no Western nation but Australia has ever recognized Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor.

UN Forces working with Indonesian police

Universal values — to be credible– must be applied consistently. One tenet held dear by most realists is that one can negotiate with even the worst thugs, as long as they are not mere freelancers but in fact heads of states. Richard Holbrooke negotiated the end of the Bosnia war with Slobodan Milosevic upon this premise, although the latter’s subsequent indictment by an ad hoc U.N. tribunal is consistent with a moralist approach.

Just as consistent would be the indictment of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein for crimes against humanity including acts of genocide upon evidence already gathered by U.S. forces after Desert Storm. Other Western practices are also inconsistent with the new trend. The United States continues to provide arms and training to Turkey, and it is escalating the same to Colombia even though they, too, have each undeniably committed crimes against humanity. Meanwhile, China participates with multinational forces in East Timor 50 years after it unilaterally seized Tibet.

The approaching century will no doubt be marked by more economic integration. Will it also be marked by effective international efforts to defend universal values? The effort remains crippled by inconsistency. Moreover, by now everyone knowing that the original estimates of what it might take to achieve even reasonable goals were grossly understated. Though they led the first charge, neither Clinton nor Albright has risen to the task of leading the trend that is developing its own dynamic. Without backing from the United States, Annan is likely to fail, as well.

In the United States there are advantages to having any watershed issue break before an election year. Although most of the presidential candidates have yet to take a stance on it, the notion of neo-moralism and whether or how America should try to lead it hangs before each of the candidates like a curve ball nearing the strike zone. Of course, the entire field lacks depth on foreign matters, which may explain why nearly everyone but Pat Buchanan is still hesitant to answer the question. But they cannot afford to ignore it forever, even if Clinton et al go on taking the pitch.

Frank Smyth, a freelance journalist who has also served as an investigative consultant for Human Rights Watch as well as Amnesty International, is a contributor to Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff.

Growing Pains in the Horn of Africa?

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Many developing nations have borders that were first established by colonial powers. But few embrace their colonial heritage as closely as does Eritrea, a tiny nation of 3.6 million people that amicably seceded from larger Ethiopia in 1993. Though Eritrea and Ethiopia each have suffered tens of thousands of casualties in the past six months of sustained fighting over their common border on the African Horn, both countries unequivocally have agreed since Eritrea’s independence that its previous colonial borders denote the modern Eritrean state.

Yet the warring nations have produced different Italian maps from different colonial eras that contradict each other about their shared, 620-mile-long borderline. The Italian-Ethiopian Treaty of 1902 was among the first to establish a demarcation between Eritrea and Ethiopia, but its text was vague and the delineation of the border was never completed. Its final delineation was never completed even after Eritrea became an independent nation.

Having waged the world’s bloodiest war so far this year, the two states and their respective leaders now face the same fork in the road. Either they will sign a peace agreement that finally allows international arbitration to study colonial-era treaties and maps to determine the borderline, or they will squander far more of their precious people and treasure.

The beginnings of war

Blood was first drawn in an area known as Badame on May 6, 1998, after provincial Ethiopian militia ordered an Eritrean army unit to disarm and it refused to do so. The militia killed three Eritrean soldiers and four officers nearly a year after Ethiopia’s province of Tigray had begun expelling Eritrean peasants from Badame, even though Eritrea claimed most of Badame, too.mEither they sign a peace agreement or squander more of their people and treasures.

Eritrea responded by seizing all of Badame, along with four other areas along the border by May 12. Trench-warfare battles and bombing raids began last June. Sustained war broke out this February. Eritrea lost Badame after three weeks. Hours after it fell, Eritrea announced it would accept an Organization of African Unity (OAU) peace plan that it previously had rejected and that Ethiopia previously had accepted.

Today, Eritrea accepts a modified OAU plan; Ethiopia has asked for clarification on many points and has not yet accepted it. Eritrea and Ethiopia have sent delegations to Algiers to forge an agreement. Former National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, now a special White House envoy, has flown between capitals to bring the warring parties to the table and keep them there. Many African leaders, including Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, back the peace talks.

One sticking point in negotiations now is whether Ethiopia will agree to compensate Eritrean expatriates whose property it confiscated after forcibly displacing 50,000 Eritrean nationals from Ethiopia last year. Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, at the National Press Club in Washington on Aug. 16, said that while Eritrea will continue to raise the issue of compensation for deported property holders when and if peace is achieved, the issue is “not a precondition” for peace.

Meanwhile, Ethiopian diplomats say this Eritrean demand is what prevents Ethiopia from accepting the modified OAU peace plan.

From allies to enemies

Badame translates as “empty” or “nothing,” and it has no real strategic or economic value. But the Horn war is about more than nothing, as one objective of each nation is to show the other that it will not be pushed around and that it is willing to pay the highest price to defend national sovereignty. Their mutual logic already has made the Horn war the largest conventional conflict in sub-Saharan Africa’s history. Before the leader of either nation can end it, he must first convince his people that their respective loses were worth it and that they have achieved some kind of victory. Even though Eritrea has lost ground in the fighting, this is already a fait accompli for Isaias, as the Horn war has only united Eritrea’s population.

But presenting the Horn war as a victory may be harder for Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. Unlike Isaias, Meles is an unpopular leader. To Meles’ left are militant Tigrinyans from the Ethiopian province of Tigray who claim that Tigray includes Badame. To his right are ethnic Amharas and Oromos who remain largely excluded from power even though they comprise roughly 25{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af} and 40{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af} of Ethiopians.

One irony of the Horn war is that it broke out over Badame, in the same region where Isaias and Meles years ago learned to work together. While Isaias’ guerrilla movement, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, had fought the previous, U.S.-backed regime led by Emperor Haile Selassie, Meles’ guerrilla movement, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, emerged to eventually ally itself with Eritrean guerrillas after the establishment in 1977 of a Soviet-backed regime. The two independent Marxist guerrilla movements jointly deposed the communist dictatorship in 1991.

Isaias and Meles addressed each other as “comrade” until hostilities began in the Horn war in May 1998. Before full-scale conflict broke out this February, American and Rwandan diplomats together tried to convince both men that their respective interests should compel them to peacefully resolve their border dispute. American officials told Eritrean officials that only Meles was likely to keep Ethiopia from fragmenting along ethnic lines.

Besides backing anti-Ethiopian factions in Somalia, Eritrea has been reaching out to Ethiopia’s long-disenfranchised Oromos. Though Isaias denies it, Eritrean loyalists say Eritrea has been backing Ethiopia’s Oromo Liberation Front against Meles’ government. The Oromo rebels recently have made gains in the south and east of the country. But although they are Ethiopia’s largest single ethnic group, the Oromos never have governed Ethiopia, and few non-Eritrean observers expect the Oromo Liberation Front to ever take power.

The objective of each nation is to show the other it will not be pushed around.

War over nothing?

Instead, Ethiopia’s Amharas are better poised to gain power if and when Meles’ grip slips. Today, most Amharas clearly resent Meles and his ethnic minority dictatorship, though many are nonetheless united with him against Eritrea in the Horn war. During it, Amhara opposition groups have grown more active. The high number of Amharas and Oromos in the Horn war will only make it harder for Meles’ government not to share real power with both ethnic groups.

While Meles’ government always has agreed that Eritrea’s borders are the same as those of its former colony, other Ethiopians resent Meles’ decision in 1993 to allow Eritrea to secede from Ethiopia. Many Amharas especially seem to resent even more the decision to allow Eritrea to secede with two Red Sea ports, leaving Ethiopia a landlocked nation.

Despite the Horn war’s already staggering carnage, some observers say it is less of a tragedy than it looks, as the border fight is merely part of the growing pains of newly emerging states. If that is the case, then the war over nothing may resolve little or nothing at all.

Frank Smyth, a freelance journalist who has also served as an investigative consultant for Human Rights Watch as well as Amnesty International, is a contributor to Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff.

A Brave Guatemalan Judge Challenges Corrupt Brass Hats

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Original article can be found here.

Something new and promising happened in Guatemala last month when Judge Marco Tulio Molina Lara sentenced ex-Army Lt. Col. Carlos Ochoa Ruiz to 14 years in prison for trafficking in cocaine. Mr. Ochoa Ruiz is one of at least 31 current or former Guatemalan military officers the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has suspected of running drugs. But no Guatemalan officer of his rank has ever received such a lengthy sentence. He has one final appeal available, which may yet set him free.

In American eyes, Mr. Ochoa Ruiz is a recidivist criminal. In 1990, DEA special agents set him up in a sting operation; they claim that he sent half of a metric ton of cocaine, worth $7.5 million wholesale, to Tampa, Fla. He was indicted in absentia in federal court. The U.S. demanded his extradition but after Guatemala’s top judge ruled in favor of the extradition and was subsequently murdered, the ruling was later reversed by the same high court. The murder remains unsolved. Mr. Ochoa Ruiz was caught running cocaine again three years later, leading to his arrest and last month’s conviction.

Guatemala has a major problem bringing present or former military officers suspected of felonies to justice. “Guatemalan military officers strongly suspected of trafficking in narcotics rarely face criminal prosecution,” wrote the State Department in 1994, complaining that suspects like the former Lt. Col. Ochoa Ruiz were merely discharged from military service. “In most cases, the officers continue on with their suspicious activities.”

The Clinton administration has largely chosen to ignore military involvement in Guatemalan drug trafficking, in part because for much of its first term it was focusing on a peace agreement, finally concluded in 1997, to end Guatemala’s 35-year civil war. It feared that raising the impunity issue would disrupt the peace process. Earlier this year the State Department reported that Guatemalan traffickers are now moving 200 to 300 metric tons of Colombian cocaine a year to northern markets, up sharply from about 50 tons in the early 1990s. That is, according to State Department officials, at least half of all the cocaine reaching the U.S. Most of the cocaine coming in through Mexico transits through Guatemala as well.

Former or current military officers, who for years have enjoyed a high degree of impunity, often protect Guatemalan criminal syndicates. According to a signed petition from Guatemalan peasants that was presented to the DEA, one syndicate led by military officers and a mayor killed locals who resisted abandoning the land they farmed, which the trafficking syndicate wanted for clandestine runways. Ex-mayor Arnoldo Vargas Estrada was later convicted of drug trafficking in federal court in New York. The four Army colonels named by the peasants in the same petition were never charged anywhere.

Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzu undertook to clean house in the military when he began his four-year term in 1996. The State Department reports that last year he discharged even more “military officers thought to be involved in corruption and smuggling.” But one of the bravest steps taken by anyone in Guatemala so far was last month’s sentencing of Mr. Ochoa Ruiz by Judge Molina Lara. It was the Bush administration that first requested Mr. Ochoa Ruiz’s extradition in 1991. The Guatemalan military later discharged him explicitly to put distance between his name and the institution. But that did not stop a military tribunal from inexplicably reclaiming jurisdiction over the former officer in 1993 in order to dismiss the U.S. extradition case against him, citing a “lack of evidence.”

The Clinton administration appealed the case three times, all the way to Guatemala’s top judicial body, the Constitutional Court. The presiding judge, Epaminondas González Dubon, was already well respected for his integrity, having made a historic, independent ruling in 1993 when he declared unconstitutional the imposition of martial law by the country’s then-president, Jorge Serrano. Mr. Ochoa Ruiz’s extradition case reached Judge González Dubon’s bench less than a year later, and in March 1994 he signed an order to extradite the former officer and circulated it to the court’s other judges to sign as well. On April 1, as Mr. González Dubon was returning with his family from an Easter day-trip, four men assassinated him as his wife and son looked on.

How did the Clinton administration react? Neither President Clinton nor his ambassador to Guatemala, Marilyn McAfee, said a word about it. They remained silent when, on April 12, the Constitutional Court’s surviving judges quietly overturned the late Judge González Dubon’s ruling and set Mr. Ochoa Ruiz free. Apparently the Clinton administration saw no reason to publicly protest this reversal of its efforts to bring a suspected drug trafficker to justice.

Four months later, in the Village Voice I accused another military officer, Gen. Carlos Pozuelos Villavicencio, the former Air Force commander, of allegedly using military aircraft to transship cocaine. In a hastily called press conference, Guatemala’s then-defense minister, Gen. Mario René Enríquez, threatened to spend his “last personal penny” suing me for libel. Ambassador McAfee called her own press conference two days later and announced that Gen. Pozuelos Villavicencio was indeed a DEA suspect. The general was never charged nor did any lawsuit ever materialize.

Some important gains have been made under President Arzu, but Guatemala still has a long way to go and fear is still an overriding consideration for all judges. The record of impunity is one reason Colombian traffickers have made alliances, with Guatemalan military officers. Considering the price paid to finally convict Mr. Ochoa Ruiz, it is no wonder that the cocaine traffic through Guatemala expanded so rapidly.

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Mr. Smyth, a contributor to “Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know,” (Norton,
1999) writes regularly for Intellectual-Capital.com.