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Iraq’s Eclipsed Red Star?

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“Iraq’s Eclipsed Red Star?” by Frank, Guerrilla News Network, January 13, 2003.

Not that long ago, when American progressives spoke about being in solidarity with the people of a foreign nation they were supporting leftist national liberation movements. Back in the 1980s, for instance, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador was allied with that Central American country’s Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front which included the El Salvador Communist Party. Not anymore, at least not when it comes to Iraq. How many anti-war activists like Sean Penn who recently visited Baghdad know their left from their right in Iraq?

Today Iraqi leftists still play roles inside and outside Iraq. But don’t expect to either read or hear much about any Iraqi leftist groups in either the mainstream or even the so-called “alternative” press. After all, who knew that the most detailed reporting available anywhere about ongoing specific humanitarian crimes by Saddam’s regime is found at none other than the Iraqi Communist Party website, Iraqcp.org?

“[T]he bodies of tens of people from the city of Basra, who were executed by firing squads of the dictatorial regime in late March 1999, are buried in a mass grave in the Burjesiyya district near the town of Zubair, about 20 km south east of Basra,” reads the Iraqi Communist Party website about a brief anti-Saddam uprising three years ago in the Shi’a-dominated, southernmost city. “Some of the victims fell into the hands of security forces after being wounded, or when their ammunition had finished. But most of the arrests took place during the following days when the authorities…unleashed an unprecedented campaign of police raids, house searches and detentions.

“The detainees, who were numbered in their hundreds, were then held at the detention centre of the Security Directorate of Basra governorate, in Al-Ashar district. They were subjected to barbaric torture over many days,” Iraqcp.org goes on. “Family members of security men who had been killed in the heroic revolt were brought to the scene, each was handed a machine gun, and they were told to avenge their dead by firing at the youths and men lined up before them. The massacre culminated with security men firing their hand guns at the [h]eads of their victims. The horrific scene ended with throwing the bodies of victims in a deep pit dug with a bulldozer which was used later to cover up the site in an attempt to hide the traces of the crime.

“Our party sources have been able to compile the names of some of these victims (a list is attached to this statement). The authorities, as part of the policy of collective punishment, demolished their houses, and detained their families, including women and children. The fate of these innocent detainees is still unknown. Reliable sources in Basra have estimated the total number of victims of the campaign of mass executions, which followed the suppression of the popular revolt, to range from 400 to 600 people.”

The Iraqi Communist Party was once by far that oil-rich country’s broadest leftist movement. Even before Iraq’s short-lived, British-imposed monarchy was overthrown in 1958, the Communist Party was organizing trade unions and other civic groups. The leftist party has also long been Iraq’s most diverse political movement to cut across traditional population lines to incorporate many disenfranchised majority Shi’as and minority Kurds. Even though tens of thousands of cadre have since perished in Saddam’s gulags, the Iraqi Communist Party today maintains a clandestine network across Iraq, despite still being targeted by the ruling Ba’athist regime. Iraqcp.org reports not only ongoing human rights abuses, but ongoing armed civil resistance to the regime.

But how many American anti-war activists like Sean Penn have heard of it? Last month the Oscar-nominated actor said he was putting his conscience first when he visited Baghdad. Yet the 42-year-old star of many films including his latest one, “I Am Sam,” spoke in Baghdad like he knew he was on weak ground. “I’m afraid of saying something that might hurt somebody, and then find out I was wrong in the first place,” he told The New York Times. Sean Penn said he did not want to end up being outcast like Jane Fonda was after her 1972 trip to the communist North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi during the Vietnam war, or like his later father, Leo Penn, was during Washington’s “Red Scare” witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

It was unwittingly ironic for the younger Penn to bring up his father in the capital of Saddam’s Iraq. Leo Penn performed in plays like John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men before migrating to the film industry. But Paramount studios refused to renew his contract in 1945 over his trade union activities, and continued to blacklist him afer he supported the Hollywood 10, or the first group of fellow actors and others who were jailed for refusing to answer questions about their alleged communist ties before Congress. (Leo Penn’s career suffered, too, until the advent of television where he became an Emmy-winning director of prime time dramas like the New York City detective series, “Kojak.”)

Today the Iraqi Communist Party firmly opposes the Bush administration’s war plans. “No to imperialism! No to war!” reads Iraqcp.org. Many of the administration’s so-called justifications for invading Iraq are indeed bogus — not least of all the claim that Saddam’s regime had anything to do with 9/11. Moreover, any unilateral military action against Iraq, especially at this time of extremely heightened Israeli-Palestinian tensions, is certain to inflame anti-American sentiments throughout both the Arab and the Muslim worlds, only driving more recruits into Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terrorist network. In addition, the Bush administration has greatly exaggerated the current strategic threat posed by Saddam’s regime to the United States along with its allies led by Israel.

But that hardly makes the Iraqi despot any more likeable now than he ever was like back during the 1980s when Saddam was a secret ally (using chemical gas) of the U.S. administration led by President Ronald Reagan. Sean Penn at least once sagely called Saddam a “tyrant” guilty of “criminal viciousness” in a paid ad on a full page last fall of The Washington Post. Similarly, the noted anti-war critic, Noam Chomsky, once last summer on “Z-net” said about Saddam, “I think he is as evil as they come.” But too many other anti-war activists only downplay any criticism whatsoever against Saddam or his regime. Moreover, unlike most American leftists, Iraqi leftists offer a policy alternative. Instead of a unilateral U.S. invasion, Iraqi communists, and others want the international community to back a broad military front against his regime.

Iraqi leftist groups also favor other positions only ignored by most American leftists like U.N. human rights monitoring inside Iraq. And instead of a unilateral American invasion, many independent Iraqi groups support a multilateral one leading to not only Saddam’s overthrow but also him and others eventually facing humanitarian charges in an international tribunal. Nobody from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International, does a better job, in fact, than the Iraqi Communist Party in documenting ongoing abuses by Saddam’s regime.

“Under [the] direct supervision of Qusay, the younger son of the dictator Saddam Hussein…15 political prisoners were executed, Nazi-style, in a poison gas chamber on 10 August 2001,” reads Iraqcp.org, relying in no small way on the Communist party’s underground cadre and sources inside Iraq. “The victims were placed inside a specially designed chamber and then a poisonous gas was released through vents. They were dead within 27 seconds. Their bodies were left there for one hour until the gas was extracted through a special vent.

“The Gas Chamber,” the Iraqcp.org report goes on, “and its operation began after approval by Qusay. It seems that this barbaric method was designed to facilitate mass physical liquidation of prisoners and detainees in a shorter time and with less effort. The dictatorial regime is continuing its notorious ‘Prison Cleanup’ campaign which has so far claimed the lives of more than 3000 prisoners and detainees.”

Last year, President Saddam Hussein emptied his prisons including his largest one, Abu Ghraib, right after he orchestrated an allegedly unanimous referendum on his rule. The listener-supported Pacifica Network’s “Democracy Now!” radio show in many large U.S. cities aired one Iraqi source after another including officials claiming it was a legitimate reflection of Saddam’s popularity without even suggesting that there might be any other Iraqi view; the Iraqi Communist Party called the referendum a farce, adding that “our people are too familiar with the deceit and manipulations practiced by the regime.” Countless political prisoners remain missing, according to not only the Iraqi Communist Party but also to other non-U.S.-backed Iraqi groups like the Shi’a-run al-Khoei Foundation based in London.

When it comes to internal security measures, Saddam copies a late communist, ironically, whom he admires, the former Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin. Saddam’s independent biographer, the Palestinian author Said K. Aburish, wrote: “he has modeled himself after and adopted the ways of Joseph Stalin and merged them with his tribal instincts.” But no matter how much he borrows from Stalin, Saddam has never held anything but contempt for Iraqi leftists.

“I used to have a Communist friend at school,” Saddam told his own authorized biographer, the [Lebanese] writer Faoud Matar. “He’s dead now, God rest his soul. He spent most of his time reading communiques and declarations to us, his schoolmates. All we did was make fun of him,” added Saddam in the 1990 edition of his approved biography published in London. “[W]e knew his theories came from abroad; they had been introduced by a foreigner, not an Arab.” At 22, Saddam Hussein carried out his first assassination plot, against a communist-backed leader in Baghdad who was the first President of Iraq. In fact, the young man from Tirkit was not accepted into the Ba’ath party until after he and others shot at President Abdel-Karim Qassem, who was backed by the Iraq Communist Party and many trade unions. President Qassem survived, while Saddam was wounded in the leg.

Instead of leftist ideology, Ba’athism unabashedly champions ethnic nationalism in order to build an ethnic-based greater nation. The [name of the] Iraqi Arab Socialist Ba’ath party explicitly excludes every one in five Iraqis who are ethnic Kurds. Moreover the Ba’athists’ pan-Arab message is made mainly by Arabs of the Sunni Muslim faith like Saddam, and their Sunni-based Arab nationalism also has little appeal with Arab Muslims of the Shi’a faith who comprise three out of five Iraqis. Rather than empower either Iraq’s Shi’a majority or its Kurdish minority, the Ba’ath party merely displaced Iraq’s old rulers of Sunni Arab-led monarchists based in Baghdad with new Sunni Arab-led rulers like Saddam from rural regions north of the capital.

“A ruling class-clan rapidly developed and maintained a tight grip on the army, the Ba’ath party, the bureaucracy, and the business milieus,” writes Faleh A. Jabar, the University of London scholar and former Iraqi communist party newspaper editor, in the current issue of the Madison, Wisconsin-based monthly, The Progressive. “You had either to be with the Ba’ath or you were against it.”

Today most of Kurdish-speaking Iraq in the north enjoys U.S.-enforced autonomy from Saddam’s regime, while Shias in the south still resist. Take Basra, where Saddam’s officials have recently brought visiting U.S. peace activists. “We were welcomed warmly into the home of Abu Haider, the father of a young boy who was killed three years ago by a U.S. Tomaha[w]k missile shot from a ship in the Gulf,” reads a pre-Christmas report from Pax Christi, a faith-based group. Pax Christi’s newsletter today says that this U.S. missile attack occurred in Basra in 1998; the same year Saddam’s regime there interred dozens of anti-Saddam rebels and others in secret graves, according to Iraqcp.org.

Most American anti-war activists also downplay another issue that Iraqi leftists are most worried about. What might a post-Saddam Iraq look like? The Communist Party refused to join the recent U.S.-backed Iraqi opposition meeting in London, pointing out that Washington has only been planning to replace Saddam’s regime with another minority dictatorship. The Iraqis closest to Washington remain deposed aristocrats, although the Bush administration finally just dumped the Pentagon-alone-backed plan to restore former supporters of the [3]7-year-reigning Kingdom of Iraq to power back from exile in London as the Iraqi National Congress.

Instead of the U.S.-backed return of the old ruling class, the Communist Party, Shia and Kurdish opposition groups want U.N.-monitored elections after Saddam inside Iraq leading to a federal representative government. This is an ongoing struggle yet to be adequately reported, unfortunately, in any U.S. press, and the issue represents a genuinely democratic frontline with so far few if any so-called American “progressives” on it.

American and Iraqi leftists also differ over whom to blame for any coming war. Iraqcp.org blames not only the Bush administration, but also the Iraqi government. In this regard, the Iraq Communist Party ironically joins the Bush administration in unequivocally demanding that Saddam fully cooperate with U.N. inspections to prevent his regime from newly developing more weapons of mass destruction. “The rulers” of “the dictatorial regime in Iraq,” reads Iraqcp.org, put “their selfish interest above the people’s national interest, refusing to allow the [work] of U.N. weapons inspectors, and thus preventing action to spare our people and country looming dangers.”

Opposing American imperialism is one thing. But ignoring Iraqi fascism is another. In Baghdad, Sean Penn said, “I would hope that all Americans will embrace information available to them outside conventional channels.” Hopefully he and other antiwar Americans will take his own advice and read unconventional channels like Iraqcp.org. Only a quintessentially American sense of chauvinism would lead leftists in a big country to think that leftists in a smaller country don’t matter. Iraqi Marxists have endured Saddam’s Ba’athist terror long enough to know the left from the right in Iraq, and, as our nation prepares to invade their country, more Americans should too of course including anti-war activists.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who is writing a book at the 1991 Iraqi uprisings. He has covered leftist guerrillas in El Salvador, Iraq and Rwanda. His clips are posted at www.franksmyth.com.”

Pentagon’s Latest Friend is Africa’s Newest Tyrant

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Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld last week became the highest ranking American official to ever visit Africa’s newest nation, the small state of Eritrea on the Red Sea across from Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

At a time when Saudi Arabia is refusing to host U.S. forces for a possible U.S. invasion of Iraq, the United States is looking to expand its military presence across the Arabian Peninsula on the African Horn.

“There are forces in the world that are urging, recommending, teaching fanaticism, extremism and terrorism, and those forces need to be overcome,” said Rumsfeld in the Eritrean capital of Asmara in a joint press conference with the Eritrean leader, President Isaias Afwerki. “One of the things that has happened since the events of Sept. 11 is the development of new relationships around the world.”

Today, just south of Eritrea on the Red Sea, the even smaller state of Djibouti is already hosting thousands of U.S. combat forces and docking American war ships. Eritrea, with a much longer coastline and two more deep water ports, is attractive turf. The U.S. military commander for the Middle East, General Tommy Franks, has already visited Eritrea four times during the Bush administration, the last time in March.

But the Pentagon’s interest in Eritrea comes at a time when the State Department over the past year has been raising concerns about human rights. Many of Eritrea’s former top diplomats and cabinet officials have been jailed in secret locations by the very government that they served.

Both the jailed Eritreans and their Eritrean jailers are veteran guerrilla fighters of Eritrea’s long independence war. So is the country’s President, Afwerki, who led the 31-year battle for independence against Ethiopian forces backed first by the U.S., then by the Soviet Union.

Two years after guerrillas liberated Eritrea, “Isaias,” as he is known, was elected by guerrilla fighters to serve as president with the explicit agreement that his government would soon establish a constitution and elections.

But in September 2001, after eight years in power, Afwerki jailed many of his closest comrades along with journalists, students and other critics of his government.

Hebret Berhe, a guerrilla veteran and former Eritrean ambassador to four Scandinavian countries, resigned in protest last year. “We have a responsibility to the martyrs to implement the constitution, the rule of law, democracy and justice,” she said. “We thought we would bring independence and then a democratic government. If not, then what is the difference between a colonizer and Isaias.”

Until recently, U.S. military ties with Eritrea were restricted because of the crackdown on civil liberties. In October, the State Department raised human rights concerns on the anniversary of the jailing of two of its Eritrean employees. They were arrested last year hours after the U.S. ambassador in Asmara, Donald McConnell, formally protested Afwerki’s jailing of Eritrean officials and others.

“They don’t respond well to pressure,” explained one U.S. official in Asmara.

Afwerki’s crackdown began one week after the 9-11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Eritrean spokesmen claimed that the dissidents were agents of either Osama bin Laden or Ethiopia.

This October, Afwerki and his spokesmen made a new claim — that the jailed dissidents had been backed by the CIA. In a press release, the Eritrean Foreign Ministry accused the Clinton administration of trying to “unlawfully change the government” and accused the Bush administration of “unwarranted intervention” in Eritrea’s internal affairs.

The prisoners read like a who’s who of Eritrea’s diplomatic corps plus a few of their wives, some student leaders and more than eighteen journalists. One is Fessheye Yohannes, an independence war veteran, who was moved to a secret prison after he and nine other jailed journalists began a hunger strike last May.

Last month, the Committee to Protect Journalists that I represent in Washington honored Yohannes in absentia with an International Press Freedom Award.

The Eritrean government is not known to have filed charges against any prisoner. With the exception of the two U.S. embassy employees, all the prisoners are being held incommunicado. Meanwhile, the government’s allegations that they were part of a foreign-backed plot remain unsubstantiated.

Afwerki may have other reasons to jail his critics. Eritrea’s last war — against Ethiopia from 1998 to 2000 — ended with Ethiopian forces displacing more than a third of Eritrea’s population. Some of the jailed ex-diplomats had favored peace negotiations as the conflict began turning against Eritrea, but Afwerki chose to keep fighting. The arrests came a year later as criticism was growing more open.

When asked about the prisoners Tuesday in Asmara, Rumsfeld said a “country is a sovereign nation and they arrange themselves and deal with their problems in ways that they feel are appropriate to them.” He said that U.S. and Eritrean officials have been engaged in “a very straightforward discussion” about many matters.

Afwerki announced at the same press conference that Eritrea was offering to host American troops in Eritrea; Rumsfeld said that the issue was under discussion. But as the United States moves closer to Eritrea, some wonder whether “Isaias” would be a reliable American partner in the long term. “This guy is not stable,” warns ex-ambassador Berhe.

Frank Smyth is a free-lance journalist and a consultant to the Committee to Protect Journalists. He traveled to Eritrea as part of a delegation from the committee in July. He has been writing about Africa since 1994 for publications including The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Nation, The New Republic,, Village Voice, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post and The New York Times. His clips are posted at www.franksmyth.com.

Hussein Opens His Prison Doors to Trouble

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Original story found here.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein released thousands of political and other prisoners from jails across his country last Sunday, including from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. The broad amnesty was no doubt welcomed by many Iraqi families whose loved ones disappeared years, if not decades, ago because of their real or suspected opposition to his regime. Hussein’s spokesmen said he freed the prisoners in gratitude, after Iraqis allegedly voted unanimously to reaffirm their support for his rule. But the act of amnesty only angered some families, whose relatives remain missing.

Many regimes around the world have brutalized their own citizens, but few have tortured and killed as many people as Hussein’s has. Eleven years ago a French photographer, Alain Buu, and myself, then a stringer for CBS News radio, spent two weeks in Abu Ghraib after we were captured traveling with Iraqi rebels during anti-Hussein uprisings following the Persian Gulf War. In prison, we saw Hussein’s guards select individual Iraqi captives, ranging from men to even one frail boy, to torture for fun at night, while intelligence operatives painfully interrogated the same prisoners during the day. Hussein’s amnesty seems to show that he is concerned about his political image as the Bush administration marches toward war. The Iraqi leader may be trying to avoid a military contest that even he, this time, knows he cannot win, and he is showing his alleged compassion to Iraqis and others whom he finally sees he could use on his side.

Ironically, he now has something in common with President George W. Bush. Each leader has recently betrayed his own instincts to try to broaden his own respective political coalition: While Bush previously announced his goal to change the Iraqi regime unilaterally if necessary, lately the administration has been negotiating with France and Russia in the UN Security Council over the terms for UN arms inspectors to return to Iraq. Not unlike Hussein, the Bush administration seems to be learning the hard way that more allies are better than one or none.

There is no need for Bush to act alone. Hussein is more widely despised than almost any other world leader, with enemies spread not only around the globe but within Iraq as well. His Iraqi enemies go far beyond the relatively few Iraqis associated with the U.S.-backed opposition based in London. The U.S. Defense Department is training 500 Iraqis recommended by the Iraqi National Congress, led by ex-monarchists.

Hussein’s opponents cut across Iraqi politics, ethnicity and religion. Human rights abuses by Hussein’s regime against his people have been widely documented, and even the Iraqi Communist Party’s Web site includes many reports about torture and mass executions at Abu Ghraib. Emptying his largest gulags may only backfire; Shia women in particular have become emboldened to demand information about their disappeared sons.

One Hussein detractor outside Iraq includes none other than Osama Bin Laden. Whether or not any ties between Bin Laden’s Al-Qaida organization and Hussein’s regime are ever firmly established, these two anti-American leaders are indeed enemies. In the summer before Sept. 11, bin Laden broadcast his contempt for Hussein through Al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite television network, in the video that Al-Qaida released last year. Bin Laden calls Hussein “a false Muslim,” who only worships himself and his ruling Ba’ath party. It wasn’t until the eve of the Gulf War when Hussein for the first time raised an Islamic banner, adding the words “God is Great” — written in his own handwriting — to the Iraqi tricolor. According to Bin Laden, the Iraqi leader is a cynic, not a fundamentalist.

As Bush talks about regime change in Iraq, the administration and its supporters should keep in mind that Iraqis have heard it all before. In 1991, during the Gulf crisis, then-President George H.W. Bush urged “the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands to force Saddam … to step aside.” Millions of Shias in the south and Kurds in the north did just that, joining thousands of defecting regular Iraqi troops and officers against his regime. At different times, Iraqi rebels controlled 14 out of 17 Iraqi cities, including the outskirts of Baghdad. But the former Bush administration was hoping for a coup and not a popular insurrection, so it ordered American troops that were then in southern Iraq to stand by — and Hussein’s elite forces crushed the rebels in four weeks.

Many of the prisoners whom Hussein just released have been jailed since that spring, and most of them are either Shi’as or Kurds. Despite his professed gratitude, this was a calculated act by a threatened despot newly willing to play any card in his hand. The freed prisoners include many Iraqis who have fought his regime in the past, and letting them go remains a gamble. No one should underestimate what he might do next.

Iraq’s Forgotten Majority

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Original story found here.

WASHINGTON — Last month, President Bush invoked the prospect of a democratic Iraq in his address to the United Nations General Assembly, while Secretary of State Colin Powell told Congress that he foresaw “a government of Iraqis governing Iraqis in a democratic fashion.” Yet the administration remains closest to Sunni Arabs, a minority group of Iraqis that has never shared power. This does not bode well for a stable post-Hussein Iraq.

Sunni Arabs, including Saddam Hussein and most Iraqis in the American-backed opposition, account for no more than 16 percent of the Iraqi population; they dominate central Iraq as far south as Baghdad. Ethnic Kurds, who are also Sunni Muslims, make up about 20 percent of Iraq’s population and are concentrated in the mountainous north. But nearly two-thirds of Iraqis are Shi’ite Muslims, and they populate the slums of Baghdad as well as the south of Iraq. Unlike Kurds and others in the northern no-flight zone, who have received a proportionate share of Iraqi revenues under the United Nations-administered oil-for-food program, Iraqis in the vast southern zone have suffered greatly from a decade of sanctions. Saddam Hussein, of course, is entirely willing to let them suffer.

Shi’ite Muslims would be the largest voting bloc in any democratic Iraq. This is why the Bush administration must find a way to integrate them into its Iraq planning, something it has so far failed to do. It is also a principal reason why Saddam Hussein has suppressed Shi’ism. In recent years Saddam Hussein has hand-picked one Shi’ite cleric after another to lead the Shiite community, only to see each one defy him ? and be murdered quickly thereafter. In a shooting spree beginning in 1998, one top Iraqi Shiite cleric after another was gunned down. Iraq’s last grand ayatollah, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, was murdered with his two sons on a road near Najaf. Another powerful cleric, Hussain Bahr al-Uloom, died under mysterious circumstances last year.

It is Shi’ites who have most consistently fought Saddam Hussein since 1991, when Shi’ite clerics called for an uprising. “The Shia uprising in the south was far more dangerous than the Kurdish insurgency in the north,” one eyewitness later reported to the State Department. Although the small and disastrous northern uprising in 1996 had no exact counterpart in the south, a Shi’ite group attacked Mr. Hussein’s eldest son, Uday, that year and crippled him. In 1998 Shi’ite rebels attacked Mr. Hussein’s second in command, Izzat Ibrahim.

American officials have long been reluctant to work with Iraqi Shi’ites out of fear that they might be too close to Iran, where the Shi’ite faith predominates. But Iraqi and Iranian Shi’ites are not as close as it might seem. The Iraqis are Arabs and the Iranians are Persian. They also, with some exceptions, follow very distinct and sometimes hostile forms of Shi’ism: Akhbari in Iraq, Usuli in Iran. [AUTHOR’S NOTE: The scholar Juan Cole commented in reaction to this NYT’s op-ed that the Usuli school is predominant in both contemporary Iran and Iraq, although there are still some practioners of the Akhbari school in Iraq.] Akhbari Shi’ism has never promoted political rule, while the Usuli school produced the politically active caste of priests that is a distinctive feature of Iranian Shi’ism.

Iraqi Shi’ites demonstrated their independence from Iranian Shi’ites in 1980 after Iraq invaded Iran. A Central Intelligence Agency report noted in 1991 that Iraq’s Shi’ites “rejected Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini’s concept of velayat-e faqui (political rule by a supreme religious leader) and remained loyal to Baghdad during the eight-year war with Iran.”

Despite a lack of political connection, Iraq’s most important Shi’ite clerics survive in exile in Iran today. Only in August did Bush administration officials meet with the brother of Shiite leader Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, head of the influential Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is based in Tehran. This is only a small step toward forming a representative anti-Hussein coalition.

For the most part, the Bush administration continues to work with Sunni groups. Among the Iraqi opposition, the State Department is closer to the Iraqi National Accord, while the Defense Department is closer to the Iraqi National Congress. Both groups are dominated by Sunni Arabs (although the president of the congress, Ahmad Chalabi, has a Shi’ite mother). The Iraqi National Congress is far more active in Washington and another congress leader, al-Sharif Ali Bin al-Hussein, in August announced his proposal to restore the Iraqi monarchy, which was installed by Britain in 1921 and lasted just 37 years. The Sunni Arab-led kingdom was never popular with either the Shi’ite majority or the Kurds.

The Bush administration can gain political credibility for its actions on Iraq only by engaging all groups there. Iraqi Shi’ites in exile in London and Tehran are seeking reassurances that, after Saddam Hussein, they would for the first time enjoy their fair share of power. Meanwhile, leaders of the Kurdish minority recently told American journalists that a unified, representative Iraq is what they want. Any viable outcome must also address the concerns of Iraq’s neighbors, particularly Turkey and Iran.

One possibility for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq is a decentralized state with considerable regional autonomy, including the division of oil revenues to ensure adequate budgets for provincial development. This could be the only way to keep the nation together. But getting there would require talking directly to leaders of all three population groups. No plan will work that does not take into account the nearly two-thirds of Iraqis who are Shi’ites.

Frank Smyth has written frequently on Iraq.

The Chance to Cry

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“The Chance to Cry,” by Frank Smyth, in Sharing the Front Line and the Back Hills, editor Yael Danieli, forward by U.N. Secretary General Kofi A. Annan, Baywood Publishing Company, Inc, on behalf of the United Nations, 2002.

The Oscar-winning film, Life is Beautiful, compels its audience to identify with a man who confronts the evil of a Nazi concentration camp and replaces it with the hope of a fantasy world. He is an Italian Jew played by the film’s director, Roberto Benigni, who loves his wife and son. While the couple are separated and detained to be used as slave labor, the man manages to save his son from harm by hiding him in his own bunk bed from the prison guards.

Like many people, I loved the film and said so to my date as we left a Washington, D.C. theater. But soon in a nearby bar I began to sweat. Before I finished my first beer the beads were pouring down so much I wondered if any other patrons besides my date noticed as they began to drip from first my forehead onto our table and then from my chin onto the cement floor when I leaned back in my chair. I was taking short breaths but could still not seem to get enough air. The toes of my right foot were curling and soon my entire right leg began to pump. Blood turned my cheeks red. I told my date I hated the film. Wouldn’t the guards have found the boy? Although a tune from a live jazz band filled the basement café, in my head I heard the high-pitched cries of an Iraqi boy named Jaffer.

Exposure to trauma affects all first responders including police, fire, and ambulance employees. What separates them from journalists? Their respective professions recognize the predictable impact that repeated interaction with tragedies may have on their staff, while journalism as a profession by and large does not. Entities from the U.S. Secret Service to the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross now provide routine counseling services to their people. How many newsrooms do? At least one does now, although its learning curve was slow.

The Daily Oklahoman offered counseling to reporters after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, but not many reporters went. “What I really needed was time with fellow journalists who went through the trauma with me to talk about all the things that happened?you know, the stuff you can’t put in the paper because it is too gruesome or too out there or whatever,” said feature writer Penny Owen. “(But) by the time we slowed down, everyone was so tired of the bombing that we never really got (to) have that big hashing out session.” Four years later, however, after the Oklahoma City area was hit by a tornado, managing editor Joe Hight ordered “(e)veryone involved in the actual coverage” to attend at least one debriefing session with a trained counselor.

Reporters are no different from cops or emergency crews in that most are more comfortable opening up before peers than a stranger. A coffee shop or a bar may provide colleagues with an invaluable venue in which to talk and perhaps debrief each other about the emotions of their work. Honest debriefings, however, require no showmanship, something that the anthropologist, Mark Pedelty, says is ingrained in journalists’ “machista” culture [1]. What is required to compel anyone to open up is an environment that makes one feel safe enough to reveal among other things what Pedelty calls “the nagging doubts, fears, and lies of press work.”

The “lies” are perhaps better described as contradictions. For unlike other first responders who rush to tragedies to help, we run in to record. The ethics of our profession mandate that we not intervene, although I admit I once used my four-by-four with TV written in masking tape on its windows to evacuate civilians from a parish under fire. Rarely do journalists experience immediate gratification; rather we interact with evolving tragedies more like vultures who pick at the scene.

Recognizing the need for debriefing or the opportunity to articulate emotions in the aftermath, for example, of a school-yard massacre is not a sign of weakness, as too many journalists and others still seem to think. Instead, when done success-fully, debriefing fosters strength. The act of articulation?writing, drawing, painting, talking, or crying?seems to change the way a traumatic memory is stored in the brain, as if it somehow moves the memory from one part of the hard drive to another. Child survivors, for example, from Guatemala to Bosnia have begun to heal by drawing or coloring out images of attacks. Especially when the act is coupled with the opportunity to grieve, articulation often provides a release of the emotions associated with the event that leaves its author able to recall the memory in the future with less or no pain.

If not, the emotions may remain bottled up in a way that can spill over. Sounds and smells, especially, can pop the cork. I was imprisoned with Jaffer and others in 1991 after the Gulf War in Iraq, where another young Western stringer, Alain Buu, and I were detained for over two weeks. Although Jaffer’s cries remain etched in my mind, I did not hear anything that sounded like the outburst he repeatedly made in an Iraq prison back in 1991 until nine years later back home on a warm winter day. I was in a D.C. park talking on my cell phone and not watching my golden retriever, Marty, when she cried out after she was bitten through the nose by a Rottweiler.

The Iraqi boy named Jaffer was at most 16. In the first cellblock of a large Iraqi prison, I only glimpsed him once or twice during daylight, although I saw and heard him a lot at night. It was spring in the Tigris-Euphrates valley and in the wake of Desert Storm millions of ethnic Shi’a and Kurdish Iraqis had risen up in an “intifada” or an attempted “shaking off” of Saddam’s regime. Alain Buu and I had been traveling with Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq when we were captured and we soon found ourselves alone among dozens of cells in a two-story block made of cement a large open floor.

Nearly every prisoner in the block was accused of sedition for having played a role in the just-crushed intifada, including us as well as Jaffer. He was the only boy in the block and he was singled out like many war victims for his ethnicityA non-political prisoner told me that Jaffer was from the south and he was a Shia.

From the second-floor cell that Alain and I were sharing, we could see almost the entire floor. There was a ping-pong table as well as some smaller tables with chairs where guards played dominoes. Every night, for several nights in a row, the guards chased Jaffer around the cellblock floor in a pack as they beat him with rubber hoses. This went on for hours for at least three nights in a row.

The trauma of torture is often associated with memory loss. The Ursuline nun, Dianna Ortiz, from New Mexico was tortured by Guatemalan guards only to be saved by a man she said spoke American English. She lost the memory of her own personal past including her dearest friends and family, as if her brain shut down that part of her mind to protect her from the pain of cigarette burns. Neither Alain Buu nor I were ever physically harmed while in Iraqi custody. But we stood accused of being spies and Iraq was holding us incognito and we were missing.

I began to recall the faces, but not the names, of dear friends, as if parts of my mind, in anticipation of possible torture, were shutting down like large steel garage doors slamming down on rollers hard enough to crack cement. Alain and I both once heard a man audibly undergoing a severe form of sustained pain coming from deeper within the prison. Our block was a holding tank, and most Iraqi prisoners in it were later released. I do not remember dreaming at all while I was detained, although I had vivid nightmares thereafter.

Looking at Jaffer’s gaunt face with his large eyes open wide like his mouth, while listening to his repeated cries, I was glad not to be the one being tortured. A moment later, I felt guilty for not volunteering to change places with him or any other tortured prisoner. The emotions clashed in my mind as I listened to Iraqis being tortured for hours including Jaffer who cried out like Marty at every stroke.

Not all my prison memories are bad. Nearly every reporter who has covered a blood-and-guts beat knows that trauma can also bring out the best in people. I do not know the name of my hero and I am not even sure what he looked like. But like Jaffer’s, I will never forget his voice. This man was quietly taken out of our cellblock some days before Jaffer arrived, but he was there the first day Alain and I were brought to the prison.

That night, after the last domino fell, the guards began what for one night shift would become a daily routine. They were still discussing the domino match as they rose to walk about and (in most cases) randomly choose a victim to bring to a large open area by the stairwell of the second floor at the Eastern end of the block. Only with the first light of dawn did I see that the man who was the victim was standing with his arms over his head as if his wrists were tied to the ceiling. From before midnight to almost dawn, the guards beat him to encourage him to properly imitate a barnyard animal. I thought they were trying to make him bleat like a sheep, as he seemed to be going, “Ba-ha-ha, ba-ha-ha.”

One guard at a time stood behind the man, and, at the encouragement of other guards, swung at him with a long flat board to hit what sounded like his bare buttocks. The guards took turns and each one swung whenever he or one of his peers judged one of the man’s animal noises to be somehow inadequate. Some guards were more merciless than others. I was wrong about the noise and I realized it around dawn when a rooster crowed in a field somewhere outside the prison. It took a moment before the guards collectively broke into laughter. I heard several guffaws.

It was hours before, during the same torture game, that my hero suddenly began to sing. He was across the atrium and a few cells nearer to the victim than we were. By then I was wondering whether the guards would end up killing the victim. The singer had waited for hours until he was no longer crowing loudly and clearly enough to avoid receiving endless swings. Once the singer began it soon became apparent that he was vocalizing in solidarity with the victim. He sang in solidarity with every nightly torture victim the four or five days he was there, and he seemed to get away with it because he may have been a Shia cleric and his songs were filled with
references to Allah.

The first night Alain and I were there the singer prayed on for hours as the guards went on as well with the crowing game. One guard began to beat the victim more fiercely once the singer started, but two other guards walked away from the group to go downstairs and play ping-pong. The sounds of pain, prayer, and the bouncing ball echoed in the dark throughout the damp block.

Smells can be even more intense, and the olfactory gland itself is hard-wired to the emotional part of the brain. One smell I inhaled in Iraq was so powerful that I forgot about it for seven-and-a-half years. Alain and I had been traveling with two other young men, Gad Gross, a Newsweek photographer, and Bakhtiar Abdel al-Rahman, an economics student at the University of Baghdad, who was now an armed Kurdish rebel and our guide. We last saw the two of them in the afternoon on March 28, 1991 just north of Kirkuk in northern Iraq as together they ran under fire toward a cluster of small cinder block houses, as Alain and I were diving into a ditch. An Iraqi tank later parked on the other side of a long dirt mound between us and a road.

The next morning at around eight we heard a commotion coming from the nearby houses, as if the soldiers had captured two people. Minutes later we heard a burst from an automatic rifle. Maybe another minute passed before we heard a loud, sustained scream that was cut short by another burst. Looking over the ditch’s edge, Alain and I minutes later both saw a soldier walking away with Gad’s camera bag in his hand. I suppressed my desire to grieve, as Alain and I were still hiding from the same soldiers. We were spotted while hiding in the ditch an hour later and soldiers were about to kill us too when an intelligence officer, who seemed to be newly arrived at the scene, argued that we be saved for interrogation. Alain and I were released eighteen days later on Saddam’s order.

I forgot one thing about the ditch, although it sometimes manifested itself anyway. About five years after being imprisoned in Iraq I began working on a novel, one of those unpublished manuscripts that more than a few journalists have lying around. In one scene, prison guards torture a young captured Salvadoran guerrilla in the cell next to an imprisoned journalist, and they do so whenever the journalist’s needs are met. For example, after the journalist is allowed to relieve himself in a bucket, the guards bring the bucket to the boy and force in his head. At one point, the guards take the boy around the corner of the cellblock out of sight of the journalist, who then hears a gunshot. (He never sees the boy again.) Several moments later, he inhales burnt gunpowder.

I thought I had made up the smell after a few shooting sessions at an indoor pistol range in Hoboken, New Jersey.

About two more years later I was working on a non-fiction version of the Iraqi event and I wrote for days, day and night, trying to recall the details, however painful some were. I brushed in more color and layered on more texture on the part where Alain and I heard the capture of Gad and Bakhtiar. I always remembered having an emotional reaction not long after hearing the gunshots, and shrinking in my mind like a little boy who was too big for his britches and who had really messed up. But I forgot what had triggered this sensation.

There was a slight breeze that day, and it took a few minutes for the smell of burnt gunpowder to travel over the ground to our ditch. It was sweet and I remembered it for the first time. I thought about the memory before I tapped the words into my keyboard. I made a few changes to the paragraph that included my feeling like a little boy in need of a savior. I walked to my bed, collapsed into a fetal position, and began to moan, shake and tear and did so nearly loud enough for the neighbors to hear for what seemed like an hour. A friend held me as I wailed for Gad and Bakhtiar seven years after Alain and I heard them die.

Journalists are people who, like almost everyone else who is exposed to pain, feel it whether it is their’s or not. Keeping it bottled up may lead to drinking, smoking, philandering, working, or doing something else in a compulsive way that provides a distraction, but not release. The need to articulate feelings after exposure to trauma is obvious, and it is more likely to happen sooner than later if a counselor who is paid to listen is on hand. Once I finally faced up to it, I paid for a counselor out of my pocket. I took the chance to cry.

REFERENCE
1. M. Pedelty, War Stories: The Culture of Foreign Correspondents, Routledge Press, New
York, 1995.”

Infallible Nation?

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I was riding a bike on a busy avenue in the Eritrean capital of Asmara when, one after another, several citizens of the newly independent nation began ordering me to stop. Why? I thought, as I was safely following the flow of traffic. But different men shouted and waved their arms, as if I were unwittingly driving a car the wrong way down a one-way street. Finally, after a uniformed policeman did the same thing, I dismounted and walked around a large traffic circle to ask him what I was doing wrong. He explained in broken English that bikes were prohibited anywhere on the boulevard, although no road signs saying so had yet been posted. I learned later that several cyclists who had tried to dodge through dense traffic at the boulevard’s wide intersections had been hit by cars to be either injured or killed.

From [Eritrea’s] long rocky coast on the Red Sea to the sandy edge of the Great Saharan desert, I have often rented bikes in [the nation] in order to unwind after a day of either talking with Eritreans or writing about their situation. I had noticed a shortage of road signs along with an apparent lack of understanding of road rules by many motorists, cyclists and pedestrians alike. But by then Eritrea’s revolutionary government had only three years in power and the formerly Marxist guerrillas leading the country in the 1990s had far more to do than direct traffic, even though their decree banning bikes from the boulevard seemed silly to me.

Today things across the tiny African Horn nation are much worse. Eritrea only became an independent state in 1993, just two years after Eritrean guerrillas finally prevailed against a foreign army. Although Eritrea is no bigger than the American state of Massachusetts and it has less people, every foreigner who visited tiny state in the 1990s was impressed by Africa’s newest nation. Eritrea reminded me of Switzerland as well as Austria as all three relatively small nations have an exceptionally developed sense of civil society. While the two above nations stand out in Europe, Eritrea stood out across Africa.

Eritrea’s streets everywhere for one thing were immaculate. Not only would almost no Eritrea even think to liter, many citizens would cross the street to pick up things as small as a bubble gum wrapper. Eritreans across the globe prided themselves on the daily sacrifices they made for their nation. While Eritreans in the country were always ready to be drafted into military service, Eritreans everywhere living outside it from millionaires to grocery store clerks voluntarily paid steep taxes to their native nation. “There is nothing I would not do for Eritrea, ” one young man told me in front of his fiancé, a stunningly beautiful woman whose patriotic parents had named her Eritrea.

But much like the contorted look of a pained face, Eritrea today faces painful trouble within. Eritreans are reluctant to talk about their problems like family members who do not want outsiders to see their dirty laundry. But in bars as well as in the privacy of a community online chat room Eritreans have lately been raging at each other about whom is to blame for their current tragedy. Nothing less than the future of their young 10-year-old nation is at stake.

The fight is already personal and [most but all] the main players are men who formerly led men and women Eritrean guerrilla fighters to power. But last week, only days after Middle Eastern terrorists attacked New York and Washington, the revolutionary government of Eritrea closed all of the country’s independent newspapers and imprisoned all of its top officials because they had dared to criticize the Eritrean president.

He was long the lead guerrilla fighter and today President Isaias Afwerki is a tall handsome man who has been greeted like a rock star by Eritreans in the diaspora. Inside his country he and other former guerrilla fighters led a one-party state throughout the 1990s that despite its monopoly of power seemed to enjoy a near consensus of popularity. In today’s world only the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan world wielded so much power and yet enjoyed so much popular support. Although Eritreans generally disagreed over many issues, they seemed to universally back Isaias and his allies who like most Eritreans are best known by their first name.

Even the Eritrean way of greeting remains unique. Many Eritreans press their alternate shoulders against each other and hold them together when they meet. The practice was common among guerrilla fighters meeting each other in the field when they were laden with too many arms to hug. Indeed, what gave the small nation its uncanny sense of cohesion was Eritreans’ thirty year guerrilla fight against first a feudal and then a communist government based in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Abeba. Nearly every Eritrean family lost a member to their long independence war and many families suffered greater loses. Like George Washington, President Isaias was elected to lead the nation after he led an even longer rebel struggle for independence.

Imagine now that if instead of establishing independent branches of government, President Washington had jailed former revolutionary leaders including legendary veterans like Thomas Paine for criticizing the President, along with closing down every newly independent newspaper. President Isaias and the remaining loyal officials of his government did just that when the world was barely watching the week of the September 11 terrorist attacks on America. The ruling Eritrean regime imprisoned the [former] Interior Minister, the [former] Defense Minister and three generals even though like President Isaias and his remaining followers they were all guerrilla veterans. But fifteen senior officials [many of whom are now] in prison had written an open letter that was critical of President Isaias.

He refused to convene even scheduled meetings of his own ruling party for a full year since September 2000 out of fear that dissidents might indeed win the sympathies of ruling party loyalists along with their votes against him. While the Eritreans who remain loyal to Isaias say that Eritrea has too many problems now to allow for any disunity, the Eritreans who have only recently begun to oppose him say that Eritrea has too many problems now not to openly debate how to handle them.

“We did not fight to have another dictatorship, ” is what one online critic said reflecting the views of many. Others retort that even to use the word dictatorship about Eritrea is an insult to their commonly beloved nation.

The controversy over the future is rooted of course in the past including the recent past. Eritrea won praise from foreign aid agencies in the 1990s as far ranging as the anti-poverty group known as Oxfam to the World Bank, as its former guerrilla fighters had comprised a new government that was on average incredibly honest. Most Eritreans would not steal from their government the same way that most people would not steal from their own family, and the government was blending free market and state-led efforts to develop and grow.

But the economy turned sour in May 1998 after Eritrea went to war with its former long-time enemy, Ethiopia. This time, the war astounded everyone as by then the leaders of Eritrea and Ethiopia were truly old friends and the border did not seem worth fighting about. Ethiopia’s Prime Minister was Meles Zenawi and he led a regional guerrilla movement that was long allied with another regional guerrilla movement led by Isaias. But tension among peasants and others along the border area had been neglected for years, so much so that when clashes finally turned violent in 1998 they took both leaders by surprise.

Whether the war was necessary is unfortunately one question that only a few Eritreans have ever dared to ask. But the question that many Eritreans continue to ask is why the war turned against Eritrea. Before the major battles began I nearly got into a fistfight at a Eritrean bar when I pointed out that even though Eritrean guerrillas were already proven to be truly extraordinary fighters, Eritrean government soldiers fighting over fixed ground against an enemy with an economy eight times richer could perhaps conceivably lose.

But the guerrilla veteran in the bar like most Eritreans everywhere seemed to universally perceive any such questions as being nothing less than a betrayal of their nation. Major political and military issues were not only not discussed in public in the early months of the fighting, but the government also intentionally kept some of the most important events leading up to the conflict in the dark. In hindsight, Eritrean government officials agree that they kept too much information secret including the all importantissue of how the recent border war began.

On May 6, 1998, Ethiopia militia forces who had been growing increasingly militant against local Eritrean farmers opened fire on an Eritrean army border patrol that was responding to recent displacements of Eritrean peasants. The Ethiopian militia killed three Eritrean army soldiers and four officers. (I originally reported less casualties.) Six days later Eritrea invaded the border area, thereby beginning a conventional war by its army without any real air force against a much stronger army backed up jet fighters and helicopter gunships. What was apparent then to nearly every foreign observer was not apparent to nearly any Eritrean: no matter how brave its citizens indeed were, Eritrea was bound to lose, as a guerrilla war and a conventional war are very different kinds of contests.

But Eritrea has yet to learn even the first lesson of the border war. A free press independently reporting facts along with a free exchange of ideas might have helped the nation avoid such a tragic loss so early in its development. Take the basic question, “Who started the war? ” Blood was first drawn by Ethiopia, in fact, but neither Eritrean officials nor citizens ever pointed out that fact to anyone expect in whispers to themselves. I later reported in The New Republic the May 6 clashes and the fact that it was Ethiopia that drew first blood. Not long afterward The Economist reported the same incident as well.

Why would Eritrea keep secret something that seemed to be so obviously in their national interest to publicize? One reason is that their leaders were too proud to admit that some of their own men including officers had already been killed. Rather than debate or even talk about the issue of going to war or what to do in response, they ordered the state press and other Eritreans to be silent as they mobilized the Eritrean army to advance into the disputed border area. Since the world’s press did not know about the killing of nearly an entire Eritrean army border unit six days before, the media everywhere reported that tiny Eritrea had started a major border war on May 12 with larger Ethiopia for seemingly inexplicable reasons.

Partly to make sure that Eritrea would not hide vital facts again, some Eritreans recently established many independent newspapers that the government has just now shut down.

Who is responsible for Eritrea’s current troubles? Every Eritrean who supported the border war and that includes nearly every Eritrean. The paranoia that Eritreans rightfully shared over three decades against occupying Ethiopian governments led them to collectively believe that the latest war was not in fact a border dispute provoked by local militant forces, but that it was instead part of a wider conspiracy to topple their entire state. No evidence of any alleged conspiracy has ever materialized, yet the Eritrean state press reported the allegation without challenging it. Many if not most Eritreans still cling to the frail notion that the border war was not really over the border and that it was necessary to their very nation’s survival.

Emotions often defy logic. In the end Ethiopia suffered more casualties than Eritrea, as many Eritreans are prone to claim, but Ethiopia has 17 times more people than Eritrea so it could better afford the losses. What continues to irk Eritreans is not that each nation lost tens of thousands of combatants in a bloody trench war, but that it left Ethiopia in control of far more Eritrean land than before. Eritreans still make faces and cross their arms or scratch their ears or heads as they try to explain mainly to themselves how, despite their loss of territory, they still did not lose the war. The irony is that their former allies in Ethiopia who still run its large nation are also facing unprecedented political unrest and any succeeding government in Ethiopia is likely to be even more hostile to Eritrea than before. Ethiopia lost its only port after Eritrea’s 1993 succession and many Ethiopians promise that one day they will take it back.

Eritreans, meanwhile, are turning on each other today like never before over who is to blame for their setbacks in the border war which they can barely admit even to themselves. Indeed, for the first time in Eritrea’s short history the eventual possibility of a civil conflict has become chillingly real. President Isaias and his remaining allies have imprisoned their former allies after they dared criticize his leadership. Most Eritreans whom I have met are exceedingly polite people who seem like they would take personal criticism well, but the same Eritreans cannot keep their respective faces from wincing as soon as they hear the slightest criticism of any kind about their nation whose history in steeped in so much of all their own families’ blood.

I was at first surprised years ago when some Eritreans got defensive when I suggested that banning bikes from a busy boulevard was no alternative to establishing common road rules including both more traffic lights and stop signs. After all, most Eritreans are the kind of people who would never think to run either, and they are indeed the kind of loyal, industrious people that would make any nation great. But my experience biking on the boulevard was only a window on the tension to come.

Even though Eritrea was once among the most promising nations in Africa, today its implodes like a dimming star over a tragically silly notion: whether the nation’s leadership like the nation itself is infallible. Thomas Paine was an American revolutionary fighter and a contemporary of George Washington and Paine is perhaps the American rebel who most challenged the authority of the early United States government and, in doing so, help keep it accountable and on a democratic track. But if Paine were an Eritrean today he would be in jail along with many other revolutionary veterans.

How long will it take Eritreans to learn something about their young nation that most people from older nations already know? Even the best of leaders make mistakes, but only the most deserving ones learn from them.

Colombia Briefing: Bad Press

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The original story ran here on the Committee to Protect Journalists website

This Colombian warlord cultivates journalists. He also murders them. For Carlos Castaño, it’s all about image.

Bogotá — On May 3, 2001, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) named Colombian paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño to its annual list of the ten worst enemies of the press. Six weeks later, a reporter from the Paris daily Le Monde caught up with Castaño in northern Colombia and asked how he felt about the distinction.

“I would like to assure you that I have always respected the freedom and subjectivity of the press,” said the leader of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), Colombia’s leading right-wing paramilitary organization. “But I have never accepted that journalism can become an arm at the service of one of the actors of the conflict. Over the course of its existence the AUC has executed two local journalists who were in fact guerrillas.” He no longer remembered their names.

Since 1999, in fact, forces under Castaño’s command have been linked to the murders of at least four journalists, the abduction and rape of one reporter, and threats against many others, according to CPJ research. “Against the violent backdrop of Colombia’s escalating civil war, in which all sides have targeted journalists, Carlos Castaño stands out as a ruthless enemy of the press,” CPJ’s citation noted.

This self-confessed murderer of journalists is now turning to the local press in an effort to rehabilitate his image in Colombia. To that end, Castaño has launched a uniquely Colombian public relations campaign, seemingly modeled after tactics employed by legendary drug lord Pablo Escobar. Not unlike Escobar, Castaño’s strategy combines a charm offensive with forthright acknowledgements of the AUC’s use of terror.

While Escobar attacked journalists who favored his extradition to the United States to face drug trafficking charges, Castaño attacks any journalist whom he suspects of cooperating or even sympathizing with Colombia’s left-wing rebels. This year, Castaño admitted that he had murdered journalists and tried to bomb a newspaper for its alleged communist sympathies. He has been implicated in many other attacks on the press in recent years.

In November 2000, Castaño granted an exclusive interview to the Bogotá weekly Semana. The reporter asked whether Castaño thought he deserved to be compared to the late Escobar. “There is no way you can compare me with a monster like that,” replied Castaño. “While he sought to destroy the country, I intend to save it.”

Old war

Eleven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War remains hot in Colombia. The U.S.-backed Colombian military has been fighting against various Marxist guerrilla organizations (see sidebar) for nearly forty years. The army frequently collaborates with private paramilitary groups, including the AUC, which the Colombian government has outlawed. Last year, Human Rights Watch reported that half of the army’s 18 brigades were sharing intelligence and other resources with rightist paramilitary groups, most of them under Castaño’s command.

Since the 1980s, both right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing guerrillas have increasingly been supported by profits from Colombia’s burgeoning trade in illegal drugs.

Carlos Castaño is Colombia’s top paramilitary leader as well as the country’s leading fugitive. He is currently wanted on multiple murder, kidnapping, and arms trafficking charges dating back to 1988. He is also “a major drug trafficker,” according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Last April, U.S. ambassador to Colombia Anne W. Patterson told the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador that if Castaño is involved in drug trafficking, “and we think he is,” the United States might one day seek to prosecute him in the United States.

Childhood memories

In 1981, when Carlos Castaño was 15 years old, his father was kidnapped and murdered by leftist guerrillas. At 23, he allegedly participated in a series of massacres of banana pickers in northwestern Colombia. Also known as “Monoleche” (Milkwhite) because of his fair complexion, Carlos allegedly killed at the side of his brother Fidel, and both brothers joined Colombia’s first national paramilitary organization, “Death to Kidnappers” (MAS).

According to DEA documents, MAS was founded in 1981 by Escobar’s Medellín cartel. But the Castaño brothers and Escobar later fell out. Fidel Castaño became chief of operations for a paramilitary strike force called “Los Pepes” (People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar). Following Fidel’s mysterious 1994 disappearance in northern Colombia, Carlos emerged as Colombia’s leading anti-communist militant.

Three years later, Carlos Castaño unified a number of regional rightist groups to form a national paramilitary organization called the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). In 1997, Castaño admits, he ordered the massacre of 49 peasants in rural Mapiripán, eastern Colombia. Since then, Castaño and his allies have committed about 80 percent of Colombia’s human rights abuses, according to Human Rights Watch. The Colombian Defense Ministry reports that rightist paramilitaries carried out three-fourths of the country’s massacres last year.

“Guerrillas, whether in uniform or civilian clothes, remain a legitimate military objective,” Castaño said on camera on March 1, 2000, when he showed his face to Colombians and others for the first time. “I know this violates international humanitarian law.”

On May 30 of this year, Castaño issued a cryptic online communiqué announcing his resignation as military commander of the outlawed AUC. Days later, he announced that he was forming a nonviolent political organization, linked to the AUC, that would seek legal recognition in Colombia (none was granted). And he continued to grant interviews.

AUC meets the press

Journalists have figured prominently among Castaño’s victims. In January 1999, for example, Castaño repeatedly threatened Alfredo Molano Bravo of the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador after Molano wrote a story about anti-communist paramilitary groups and their ties to Colombian drug traffickers.

In June 1999, AUC members threatened Carlos Pulgarín, a reporter for Bogotá’s largest daily, El Tiempo, after Pulgarín wrote an article about paramilitary assassinations of indigenous activists. Pulgarín fled to Peru, where his movements were apparently monitored; he later received telephone threats in Lima.

On September 16, 1999, two assassins on a motorcycle shot and killed Guzmán Quintero Torres, editor of the northern Colombian daily El Pilón. Quintero was investigating several AUC-linked murders at the time, including the 1998 slaying of television journalist Amparo Leonor Jiménez Pallares, who was killed after she reported that local paramilitary forces had murdered peasants.

On September 9, 2000, AUC paramilitaries abducted and killed a rural community leader named Carlos José Restrepo Rocha, who ran two small regional publications. AUC fliers were left next to Restrepo Rocha’s bullet-ridden corpse, but the motive for this particular murder remains unclear. Later that year, AUC members threatened Eduardo Luque Díaz, of the daily La Nación, at his office and home, demanding that he reveal the whereabouts of a family he had mentioned in a story.

On April 27 of this year, Flavio Bedoya, a southwesternColombia correspondent for the Communist Party weekly La Voz, was murdered. Colleagues believed the murder was linked to a series of highly critical reports that Bedoya had published in La Voz since the beginning of April about collusion between the security forces and outlawed right-wing paramilitary gangs in southern Nariño Department.

One month after Bedoya’s death, the AUC tried unsuccessfully to bomb the Bogotá offices of La Voz. Castaño took responsibility for the incident a few days later.

On October 31, 2000, rural community radio station director Juan Camilo Restrepo Guerra was summoned to a meeting by rightist paramilitaries who were apparently incensed by his sharp criticisms of the local administration. Restrepo Guerra’s brother drove him on a motorcycle to the rendezvous site. The paramilitaries shot Restrepo Guerra dead in front of his brother, who has since declined to testify and has gone into hiding.

Journalists who choose to remain in Colombia despite Castaño’s intimidation privately admit that they censor their own reports to protect themselves and their families. “Of course I censor myself,” said one threatened journalist who elected to stay. “You have to tell the story, but there are some things I can’t include.”

Carrot and stick

Although journalists all over Colombia have been threatened and attacked for daring to criticize the AUC, Castaño has also used the press to launch a PR offensive. The formerly reclusive leader has “gained public visibility in the national and international media with disconcerting ease,” according to a March 2001 report by the United Nations human rights office in Colombia.

“Carlos Castaño, Colombia’s fugitive paramilitary leader, unleashed a national stir when he stepped from the shadows and submitted to a ninety-minute, one-on-one interview, televised on March 1 [2000],” wrote then-U.S. Ambassador Curtis W. Kamman in a recently declassified U.S. embassy cable. “The 35-year-old Castaño appeared intelligent, articulate, well-poised, and, above all, very charismatic.”

Nearly one in five Colombian adults watched at least half the program, about the same percentage that supports Castaño, according to opinion polls. Since that first television appearance, Castaño has made himself freely available to both domestic and foreign reporters.

The Garzón murder

While Castaño has been linked to numerous attacks on the press, he currently faces just one criminal charge over an attack on a journalist. The charge, aggravated homicide, relates to the 1999 murder of Colombian television host Jaime Garzón. According to the official charge sheet, Castaño ordered Garzón’s murder because of the journalist’s role in negotiating the release of hostages held by leftist guerrillas.

The 39-year-old Garzón was a morning news host for the Caracol network and a regular columnist for the weekly magazine Cambio. But Garzón was best known for his work as a television comedian who used humor to criticize all factions in the civil conflict. He specialized in uncannily accurate impersonations of Colombian officials and other notables and was so popular across Colombia that in 1997, then-presidential candidate Andrés Pastrana Arango appeared live with other candidates on his TV show.

Garzón regularly traded on his stature as a well-respected broadcaster to negotiate for the release of victims of guerrilla kidnappings. He also served on an independent commission that mediated between the government and the leftist guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN).

Two points emerge clearly from the Garzón case. First, some of Colombia’s most dangerous criminals work for Carlos Castaño; and second, not even famous and well-connected journalists are safe from him.

On August 10, 1999, Garzón heard that Castaño was planning to kill him. The news was conveyed by a Colombian senator named Piedad Córdoba, who chaired the Senate’s human rights committee at the time. In late 1998, Castaño’s men kidnapped Córdoba and held her for nine months. During that time, Castaño told Córdoba that Garzón was on his list of targets. Castaño read her excerpts from what he said were transcripts of Garzón’s private telephone conversations. He claimed that the transcripts proved Garzón was really a guerrilla.

After Córdoba was released in June 1999, she told Garzón that Castaño was planning to eliminate him. During the second week of August, Garzón learned that Castaño had ordered him killed by the end of that week. On August 10, desperate to get in touch with Castaño, Garzón visited La Modelo prison, a maximum-security installation in Bogotá where several important AUC figures are incarcerated.

According to the charge sheet, Garzón met with Ángel Custodio Gaitán Mahecha, also known as “The Baker,” and with Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez, also known as “Popeye.” Velásquez was an early 1990s Escobar loyalist who later transferred his allegiance to the AUC. Both were well-connected members of the Colombian underworld.

Gaitán used his cell phone to call Castaño. He handed the phone to Garzón, who pleaded with Castaño to spare his life. Castaño called Garzón a son of a bitch who supported the guerrillas and added that he was a coward who didn’t have the guts to meet him face to face. Before hanging up, the two men arranged to meet the following Saturday, August 14.

On August 13, a motorcycle-riding gunman shot Garzón dead at a traffic light just four blocks from his office. A few hours later, Castaño himself called Garzón’s radio show and denied responsibility on the air. Velásquez and Gaitán also claim they had nothing to do with Garzón’s death.

The gunman who shot Garzón allegedly belonged to a criminal band known as La Terraza. In the past, La Terraza carried out attacks for the late Pablo Escobar. However, Castaño admits he has hired La Terraza to carry out a number of crimes in recent years, including kidnappings. The official government charge sheet accuses him of hiring La Terraza to kill Garzón.

On August 3, 2000, three months after Castaño was formally charged with Garzón’s murder, he invited seven La Terraza leaders to a meeting in northern Colombia. Authorities later discovered all seven of their corpses near a local road. Meanwhile, Castaño issued a communiqué saying that the AUC had executed them for giving leaders like him a bad name.

Three months later, several young men who claimed to be La Terraza members surfaced in Medellín. Wearing masks, they taped a television interview in which they claimed to have committed many kidnappings and murders on behalf of the AUC, including the Garzón assassination. During the interview, they claimed that Castaño was planning to kill them and their families with the help of local police and military forces. Castaño did not deny the accusation. In March 2001, he told El Tiempo that only one or two members of the band were still alive.

War on El Espectador

On May 24, 2000, a suspected AUC militant tried to abduct Ignacio Gómez, an investigative reporter with El Espectador, in downtown Bogotá. The man who failed to trick Gómez into boarding a “taxi” that day matched the composite sketch of an AUC suspect in the massacre of 49 peasant farmers at Mapiripán in 1997.

Gómez had just published a story that documented the Colombian Army’s collaboration with the AUC in the Mapiripán massacre. That same day, Gómez found an envelope with his name stenciled on it in his mailbox at work. The envelope contained a photocopy of a recent article by Jineth Bedoya, one of his colleagues at El Espectador.

Bedoya had reported that La Modelo prison guards were allowing AUC inmates to keep guns in their cells even after clashes between them and other inmates that left 25 prisoners dead, 18 wounded, and an undetermined number missing, according to a United Nations report on the incident.

Bedoya and her editor, Jorge Cardona, received identical envelopes. An hour and a half later, Bedoya’s telephone rang. Gaitán was calling from his cell in La Modelo. He offered Bedoya the opportunity to interview him at the prison at 10:00 a.m. the next day. He promised the 25-year-old reporter an exclusive and asked her to come alone.

Cardona insisted on accompanying Bedoya and on bringing a photographer. The three El Espectador journalists arrived at La Modelo shortly before 10:00 a.m. on May 25. Prison guards told them to wait.

The visitors waiting area is just inside the entrance to La Modelo, although many visitors prefer to wait in the street just outside the entrance. Cardona and the photographer walked to a nearby concession stand to buy sodas, leaving Bedoya standing in front of the prison entrance. She stayed within view and earshot of the waiting area in case the guards cleared them to enter the jail.

Bedoya disappeared during the few minutes it took her colleagues to buy the sodas and return to the prison entrance. The prison guards claimed they had seen nothing.

At 8 p.m., the police reported that Bedoya had been admitted to a police medical clinic in the city of Villavicencio, a three-hour drive from La Modelo. A taxi driver found her lying with her hands tied in a garbage dump on the outskirts of town. She had been drugged, brutally beaten, and sexually assaulted. Bedoya was found in a state of nervous collapse but eventually recovered from the attack and returned to work at El Espectador.

During the assault, the men told her in graphic detail about all the other journalists whom they planned to kill, including her colleague Gómez. They did not explain why they chose to free her. A week later, Gómez fled to the United States.

No suspects have been charged in the attack on Bedoya. Gaitán and Velásquez both denied any role in her abduction, as do La Modelo prison authorities.

In a June 2000 interview with El Tiempo, Castaño also disclaimed responsibility for Bedoya’s ordeal. He acknowledged that Gaitán was his subordinate, but claimed that Gaitán had assured him he was not involved.

On the evening of September 7, 2001, Gaitán was murdered in a prison called La Picota. He was apparently killed by leftist guerrilla inmates in retaliation for last year’s jailhouse massacre at La Modelo.

The hunt for Castaño

Since the death of Pablo Escobar, no Colombian has terrorized so many members of the Colombian press, to say nothing of Colombian society in general. Carlos Castaño’s extraordinary assault against local journalists comes as the Colombian government is receiving a record amount of U.S. aid. On September 10, as U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell was about to leave on a visit to Colombia, the State Department formally designated the AUC as a terrorist organization.

Yet U.S.-backed Colombian forces have so far been powerless to stop Castaño. As a result, he has enjoyed complete impunity for his crimes. The Attorney General’s Office was the only Colombian law enforcement agency that even tried to pursue Castaño. Earlier this year, its civilian agents launched a series of raids against the AUC. But they complained of working without the support of the military or other government bodies. “In this struggle…the Attorney General’s Office has been alone,” chief investigator Pablo Elías González told El Tiempo in June 2000.

At that time, the AUC had just kidnapped seven members of González’s staff while they were exhuming the corpse of an alleged AUC victim in Cesar State. All seven investigators remain missing and are presumed dead at the hands of Castaño’s men.

Leftist guerrilla attacks on the press

Carlos Castaño is by no means the only threat to the embattled Colombian press. The country’s two main leftist guerrilla organizations, the ELN and the FARC, have both threatened and kidnapped dozens of journalists in recent years.

The FARC kidnapped seven journalists in October 1999 and held them for five days. El Tiempo editor Francisco Santos (who was once kidnapped by Pablo Escobar) has also been threatened by the FARC and is now living in Spain. And RCN television correspondent Claudia Gurisatti received FARC threats last year after the station aired her interview with Castaño. Both Santos and Gurisatti have since fled into exile.

There are indications that FARC was responsible for the December 13, 2000, killing of radio station director Alfredo Abad López, according to reliable Colombian sources. Abad was the director of Voz de la Selva (“Voice of the Jungle”), an affiliate of the national Caracol radio network in the southern Colombian city of Florencia. Just before his death, Abad had conducted an on-air discussion on whether the government should renew its grant of a Switzerland-sized chunk of territory to the FARC. A majority of the callers apparently opposed renewal.

The FARC has also been linked to the July 6 killing of José Duviel Vásquez Arias, who took over as news director of Voz de la Selva after Abad was murdered. Vásquez’s last broadcasts dealt with an AUC communiqué announcing changes in local leadership and promising to refrain from kidnapping and extortion.

On May 23, 2001, FARC guerrillas briefly detained three employees of the Medellín daily El Colombiano, according to the Colombian press freedom organization FLIP (Fundación para la Libertad de Prensa). Correspondent Gustavo Gallo Machado, photographer Donaldo de Jesús Zuluaga Velilla, and driver Ramón Morales were held for several hours, and their vehicle was damaged. That same day, FLIP reported, an urban faction of the ELN distributed a pamphlet directed at all Colombian journalists, who were warned to avoid partiality.

Frank Smyth is an investigative reporter and CPJ’s Washington representative.