November 26, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
China, Globalization, Human Rights
Low wage workers fuel world economy
LOTUS MOUNTAIN, China – The shiny blue and maroon fabric that worker No. 0391 guides into a Chinese factory sewing machine could be on your back this winter.
The worker, Lu Huikun, makes ski jackets, including this U.S. Ski Team model, for Colorado-based Spyder Active Sports. The jackets cost up to $529 in Denver-area stores.
Lu is paid 31 cents an hour if she keeps a brisk pace at the rattling machine.
A 36-year-old mother of two, she considers herself lucky. Bulldozers making room for factories scraped away her family’s rice field 12 years ago. Lu’s job sewing sportswear for Spyder, Adidas, Champion and other companies helps sustain her family.
“May you all be champions,” she says to those who would buy her jackets this fall.
But Lu’s eyes are tired from overtime shifts. Her thin legs tremble as she pedals her bicycle down People’s Road. More overtime lies ahead.
Lu’s daughter is gradually going blind. She needs special glasses that cost $250 – five months’ wages. When Lu reaches home, crosses a brick courtyard and bends to pump water, the 9-year-old clings to her leg, frightened by a world growing cloudier each day.
Behind many of your possessions – and goods you may buy in the holiday shopping blitz that began Friday – are desperate laborers like Lu in low-wage countries worldwide.
They are the invisible backbone of today’s world economy. But their presence increasingly raises policy questions in corporate boardrooms, spawns riots at trade summits from Seattle to Prague, ruffles consciences of some shoppers in malls.
This report will show you how these workers – in most cases the only people to touch your possessions before you – count on your purchases to survive. Still, they lack many things Americans take for granted.
And in the corporate drive for flexibility and low-wage efficiency, some are treated in ways Americans won’t tolerate at home.
A Denver Post examination of the system traced the origins of products into China, where U.S. firms farm out production of everything from ski coats to computers. Many companies try to shield this information from the public.
Once, such products might have been labeled “Made In USA.”
But today if you buy one of those trendy collapsible scooters, odds are it was made in China. Same with many skateboards, snowshoes, inline skates. The fireworks you shoot on the Fourth of July? Made in China. Your child’s school backpack or the one you wear hiking? Stitched and inspected in China.
The Post gained access to eight factories and interviewed dozens of workers and managers. Compulsory overtime here is the norm. Uniformed guards patrol gated factory compounds, where up to eight workers reside in dormitory rooms. Workers are paid based on quotas that punish any lapse. Wages in China vary, but 30 cents an hour is common; factories producing for Americans typically pay roughly minimum wage. Sometimes workers can’t leave factory compounds. Police on motorcycles cruise industrial zone streets looking for factory workers who cause trouble.
China’s central government requires 40-hour weeks, limits overtime to no more than three hours a day or 36 a month, and bans workers under 16.
Yet with tens of millions fleeing rural areas to seek work, factory managers say the labor law is seldom enforced. Workers often don’t receive extra pay for overtime and can’t refuse to stay late, said Kent Guo, a U.S. Foreign Commercial Service officer posted in Guangzhou.
“The employers say, “If you don’t want to work overtime, I’ll fire you.’ Or they find another reason to fire you.”
Compound-restricted workers proudly build “gliding boards’
Inside the Circle Skater Corp. factory – about two hours north of Hong Kong near Dongguan – 1,500 workers run by Taiwanese managers produce many things sold in America.
It’s a typical factory, a gated cluster of three-story buildings. The workers are migrants who live at the compound where, as at many factories, room and board is provided. Normally they’re allowed out three times a week, factory manager Circle Yan said. A team of 30 ex-soldiers in blue-and-white uniforms patrols 24 hours a day, registering who comes and goes.
The factory supplies sporting goods including skateboards, beginner snowboards bearing Bugs Bunny and the Time Warner logo, plastic snowshoes and inline skates, elbow and kneepads. One of the hottest products made here for U.S. consumers, Yan said, is a silvery collapsible scooter. The Chinese call these “gliding boards.”
Factory sales of all products top $23.6 million a year. You can find stuff made here in Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney, and Toys ‘R” Us among others, Yan said.
Soon after receiving an order, he mobilizes assembly lines that roar, hum and shake as workers rivet, glue, hoist and haul. Workers seldom speak in the process.
Boxed products roll out of workshops on conveyor belts leading into shipping containers mounted atop trucks. The trucks travel new concrete highways to Hong Kong for shipping to the United States. The journey from Chinese factory to Colorado store can take as few as 14 days.
Workers earn an average of 20 cents an hour, Yan said. That’s based on a quota tied to how much and how well they produce. The official work week is eight hours a day for six days – more days than China’s law allows. About 12 hours of overtime is typical, he said – again, more than permitted.
The workers are restricted in leaving the compound, Yan said, because he needs them close to respond quickly to orders from the United States.
“We are very busy. Most of the time they work.”
The restriction breeds bitterness.
“Here there’s a lack of freedom,” said 19-year-old Huang Changbin, a migrant villager diligently assembling scooters.
“We can’t go out when we want. I want to go out and play.”
Huang and his crew of 60 workers assemble 2,000 scooters in 12 hours, a foreman said proudly. Each scooter retails for about $75 in the United States. That’s about $150,000 worth of scooters for U.S. retailers. The workers combined, at 20 cents an hour each, earn about $144 for their part – one one-thousandth of the market value of their products.
Like many here, Huang migrated from a village in western China after completing junior high school. “There was nothing to do,” he said. He paid $25 for a third-class train ticket, a huge burden for his subsistence-farming family, and rode for 36 hours to Dongguan.
This Pearl River Delta region in South China – where Lu Huikun works too – draws millions of migrants into what may be the world’s biggest industrial zone. From Lotus Mountain, a 1,000-foot-high knoll in the middle of it, gray-black factories splay out spewing noise and smoke into a thick acid haze.
Here, Huang can earn up to $50 a month. “My family will save it for when I return,” he said. “I wanted to see the world, what’s going on here.”
He shares a room with seven others. Homesick and confined to the compound, he devotes off hours to writing letters to his parents and 16-year-old sister Changyan.
His advice to his sister: “Stay at home. Study. Read more books.”
But he’ll gut this out.
He’s worked as much as 70 hours in one week. He wants more, maybe a better job sewing. “I can get more money.”
He characterized his life as “not very good, not very bad.”
There was one high point.
He got to try out one of the “gliding boards” he assembles. He smiled as he described zipping across a factory floor on the scooter. Supervisors waived company rules for that test ride.
Back assembling handlebars, Huang takes consolation imagining he is an instructor for young riders in America showing them how to set up the scooter, watching them glide down a street.
“I know American little friends will enjoy playing with this,” Huang said, looking up from the factory line. “Let them play happily.”
U.S. companies try to respond to labor concerns with codes
Few U.S. corporations that sell things made in China allow scrutiny. Many won’t even identify who makes their products.
Wal-Mart spokesman Tom Williams declined repeated Denver Post requests to visit any Wal-Mart supplier factory, saying locations of factories are a closely held secret because “everybody watches everybody else and where they buy.”
Target spokeswoman Susan Eich said “we don’t have any such list” of supplier factories in China.
Kmart, too, counts on China. Chinese suppliers of electronics, bicycles and other products are required “to notify us of who their subcontractors are,” said Dale Apley, Kmart’s public policy director. But he wouldn’t give details or allow a visit.
Colorado-based corporations such as bicycle maker Schwinn, ski clothing company Obermeyer, and Crazy Scrubs – colorful medical wear – take a similar approach.
Meantime, public concern is growing about globalization hurting human rights. Street riots that shut down Seattle during World Trade Organization meetings last year were motivated in part by a sense of injustice in factories abroad.
“We get dozens of letters every month. A lot are form letters: “We want you to stop exploiting children,'” said Tim Lyons, spokesman for J.C. Penney, which sells products made in China at 1,100 stories across 50 states. The ideological anti-corporate tenor of some critics is such, Lyons lamented, that “you can’t win.”
Many corporations have responded. Target, Kmart, Wal-Mart and J.C. Penney officials say their suppliers must agree to obey local labor laws, pay prevailing wages, and ban child or forced labor.
Some companies such as Nike and Levi Strauss established elaborate codes of conduct that are posted on factory walls. Some firms hire auditors to review supply-chain conditions, sometimes visiting factories unannounced and conducting off-site interviews with workers.
In Colorado, Spyder this fall began negotiating a code of conduct with 24 suppliers in Asia. Chris Okazaki, formerly with Nike, is helping lead Spyder’s effort.
Fireworks industry an example of raw capitalism of China
Still, shoppers eyeing foreign-made products generally can’t tell from packaging the conditions in which those products were made.
And tracing products to specific factories “is probably one of the toughest things you could ever try to do,” said John Colledge, the U.S. Customs chief of forced-labor investigations. “We need substantive information to tie the product back to the factory. That’s what the consumer is going to need too.”
A 1930 U.S. law prohibits import of products made with forced labor. U.S. investigators say access in China in particular is so restricted that they’ve resorted to offering money over the Internet for tips.
And even inside factories in China, the source of a product isn’t always obvious.
Just as U.S. companies farm out production to factories in China, many big factories in China farm out work to smaller and smaller factories down to informal village-level “cottage” labor.
U.S. fireworks companies such as Rocky Mountain Fireworks in Denver rely on factories in China. Rising labor costs and safety regulations forced closure of factories at home, said Bill Stonebraker, president of Rocky Mountain Fireworks.
And demand is growing. U.S. consumers bought $625 million worth of fireworks in 1999, a figure that increased by about $25 million a year through the decade, according to Julie Heckman, director of the American Pyrotechnics Association.
One of the emerging new suppliers handling orders from Stonebraker and others is Brothers Pyrotechnics, based in Beihai, in a rural area near Vietnam along China’s southern coast.
Much of China’s fireworks industry is struggling after a series of explosions at factories. Most recently, an explosion July 1 at a plant in Guangzhou killed 40 workers, and central government officials shut down factories nationwide.
But by mid-September, Brothers was up and running. U.S. industry safety inspectors stationed in Beihai give the company high marks.
In charge is Garry Wang, 38, the son of a fisherman turned into flamboyant entrepreneur. Relying on a network of 20 rural Chinese factories, he sells $20 million worth of fireworks a year to Stonebraker and others.
Wang lives in a mansion with marble floors in Beihai. Recently at midnight, he strolled outside across his manicured grounds, fountains burbling, to practice golf.
Gardeners teed up balls and Wang swung away. A day later, he sat beneath a full moon by his swimming pool with two old friends, after a feast and footrubs, and addressed the matter of U.S. sensitivity about working conditions in China. The capitalism emerging here is raw, he said, like in the United States last century, with huge rich-poor gaps and also huge opportunity.
“Comparatively speaking, I think the United States is more important to China than China is to the United States,” he said. “Imagine what would happen if Americans stopped buying all these products. So many Chinese people would lose their jobs.”
Indeed, workers at Wang’s supplier factories said they were grateful for their jobs.
But some doubt they’ll ever get ahead.
“I know people enjoy these,” said Mou Qijuan, 30, piecing together a golden cardboard “Mighty Dragon” firework in a room at one factory with a dozen other women. The Mighty Dragons, which when lit roll around spitting sparks, sell for $3 or so at U.S. fireworks stands. Silently she and her co-workers folded, twisted and glued labels on hundreds of small fireworks every hour. Mou said she earns 15 cents an hour if she works at top speed.
Life for Mou is “just work, nothing exciting.”
She does a lot better than the cottage-worker villagers who make cardboard tubes for fireworks outside factories. They earn the least of all.
As Mou and her colleagues worked, she allowed that “sometimes my back hurts.” She added: “No rest.” Still, any overtime work was welcome. “If I am paid more,” she said emphatically.
The problem, she said, is that she isn’t paid enough.
Now that her son Lu Tiehua is 6, she said, she pays $12.50 a month – half her earnings – for child care so she can work. Not to mention money for food, and medicine when he falls sick.
“How can you save?” Mou asked indignantly.
As she spoke, Zheng Daji, 41, the factory manager, looked on. He’s run this compound with 2,200 workers since 1985.
Zheng acknowledged the plight of his workers. “If we don’t have orders for more fireworks, we have to ask people to leave,” he said.
He often hears complaints, usually about money. ” “Can you pay more?'” He always says no, fearing others would make demands too. He said he’s worried about growing unrest. “I’m afraid it will happen.”
But Brothers assistant business manager Judy Zhu, who accompanied Zheng as an overseer of his factory, hastily downplayed this. Jobs are too scarce, there are too many workers, she told Zheng. “I don’t think it will happen.”
Back in Colorado, Stonebraker at Rocky Mountain Fireworks said conditions that look harsh to Americans must be seen in the different context of China. He suggested U.S. consumers, not human rights groups, should guide how the United States handles standards in the global economy.
“It’s what you are going to pay for that product that governs what the manufacturer has to do,” Stonebraker said.
And for Chinese people “their recreation is work, more than in the United States. We don’t know what work is anymore. These people are happy in their way of doing things. We need to leave them alone. They do well by themselves. And they are advancing themselves at a pace they can stand.”
Villagers chase dreams with assembly-line jobs
Many villages offer Chinese workers little opportunity beyond subsistence farming.
In western China’s impoverished Yellow River Basin, landowner Hou Jianguo, 46, found growing crops in the dry clay soil of Gansu Province too hard. The family barely survived, eating almost all that they grew.
So in 1997, Jianguo decided to move his family. He, his wife and 19-year-old daughter rode a train for three days and two nights to China’s eastern coast south of Shanghai.
He found work burning holes into nylon pullstraps for Colorado-based Samsonite at a factory the company owns in Ningbo.
He calls his $112-a-month wages “very good.” He lives apart from his wife and daughter. His daughter works and lives at a garment factory nearby. His wife lives with a relative in town taking care of children while the relative works.
Jianguo’s family will endure the separation, he said on the Samsonite assembly line, because eventually they’ll attain their dream: returning to Gansu and opening a small tailoring shop.
“I’ll work until I’m old,” he said looking down at a stack of nylon pullstraps he’ll prepare for “Worldproof” suitcases. “Then I’ll return to my hometown.”
Similarly, Yiana Zhenghai, 24, left her village near Ningbo when she had a son in hopes that he might live more like American children. Her mother watches the boy each day while Yiana works in a backpack factory.
Workers there recently were stitching up wallets for Esprit and “America’s No. 1” backpacks for Jansport. Manager Sunshine Gui walked across the factory floor picking up odds and ends from the floor. Workers at sewing machines eyed her nervously as she passed.
At the end of the line, Yiana inspected every stitch. She and the others amaze manager Gui with how intensely they work for piecework wages. During lunch break many continue to work, she said, to earn a little more money.
“Of course I will spend the money I earn on my son,” Yiana said.
Despite the economic lure, the factory system also traps workers such as 22-year-old Zhang Youyan.
Now tending a juice shop near Dongguan, she made clothing for export since age 14. The juice job is easier but a dead end.
“People like me,” she said, “we just live one day at a time. We don’t think about the future. … It’s not that I don’t dream. I do dream. I just don’t have the opportunity to make it.”
Consumer group aspires to “fair labor’ labels
While the laborers churn out consumer goods, a growing debate about corporate responsibility is taking a new twist. Beyond street protests, a fledgling movement aspires to give U.S. consumers information about how products are made in hopes they’ll discriminate carefully. Leaders of the effort contend workers bear disproportionate burdens and that Americans would respond if they knew.
“If you believe that you are your brother’s keeper, you have some obligation to the people who are the least advantaged in the world,” said Sam Brown, director of the Fair Labor Association in Washington, D.C. “If your prosperity is built on the backs of people who are being exploited, then you have an obligation.”
Brown said retail discount giants in particular are perpetuating a shameful global “race to the bottom.” Within two years, he said, companies that adhere to humanitarian standards will be able to put “fair labor” labels on their products and gain a competitive boost.
But manager Yan at the scooter factory figures codes of conduct and labeling won’t amount to much. It’s window-dressing for image-conscious companies, he said, sitting in the office where he receives orders.
U.S. executives “only care about good products,” Yan said.
“They don’t care about human rights. They are businesses.”
Worker sadly, proudly toils to earn glasses for daughter
Lu Huikun and her colleagues at the sportswear factory doubted Americans who buy their products think about factory workers.
Even if Americans did care, they “can’t do much to help me,” Liang Qianzhen said, finishing some Adidas trousers. “There are too many people in this country.”
The best hope is that Americans consume as much as they can while workers here toil as fast as they can, Lu said. “I just want more work from you so I can make more money.”
She’s given up travel plans she and her husband, a delivery motorcycle driver, once shared. Now, instead of imagining a family vacation in Beijing, she thinks of her daughter’s future, and worries about her impending blindness.
Her daughter is bright and talks of becoming a doctor or teacher. “Mommy and Daddy save money,” the girl says.
Doctors insist there’s no cure. “Sometimes my daughter feels bad that she can’t see clearly,” Lu said. “When that happens, I tell her: “Don’t think too much about this problem. You were born with it.'”
So Lu toils and saves for special glasses. Tears streaked her face as she spoke. She sees no end to her struggles for her child.
And making things for Americans probably won’t meet her needs. She sat silently at her machine for a moment. But rather than dwell on consumers far away, she resumed sewing.
“I’ll try,” she said proudly, “as hard as I can.”
November 19, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Globalization, Human Rights, Security
Israeli, Arab long for peace
Colorado camp drew girls together
HADERA, Israel – Blue police lights flashed at the central bus
depot. Israeli soldiers swarmed with machine guns. A plainclothes
commander barked into a cellphone, chasing a tip about a
Palestinian. The Holy Land pulsed, again, as if something was
about to explode.
Ignoring this blitz, a Jewish girl, 16-year-old Adi Meidan,
and a Palestinian girl, 17-year-old Moran Zhalka, ran toward each
other, smiling. They embraced.
“I believe in Adi. She will never kill anyone,” said Zhalka.
“Moran has this magical smile. She can really cheer me up
when I’m down,” said Meidan.
This unlikely friendship – surviving in the face of an
escalating Mideast war and skepticism from their segregated
communities – began five months ago in Colorado. At a three-week
“Bridges For Peace” camp in the San Juan Mountains, Meidan and
Zhalka met far from the pressures of their charged home environment.
The Colorado camp over seven years has introduced more than
200 Jewish and Palestinian girls to each other – a youth version
of the 1993 Norway retreat that, until this fall, had Israeli and
Palestinian leaders working toward peace. Building peace is an
ideal role for Americans, said camp director Melodye Feldman.
“We’re not rioting and shooting in our streets. We have something
to teach. We have a democracy that works and a society that is
pluralistic in its views. It’s something other nations can learn from.”
She and her Jewish and Arab-American supporters plan to
expand the camp to include boys. They talk of inviting teens from
Belfast to Bosnia.
But in the Mideast, seven weeks of killing as Palestinians
and Jews clash over land they both covet is thwarting those
efforts to open young minds. Teenagers are among the most furious
fighters, say parents in Israel and Palestinian territories. And
unlike Meidan and Zhalka, Feldman finds most of the girls who met
in Colorado now feel hopeless.
Internet conversations between the girls grew contentious,
even angry, during recent hostilities: Israel’s Sept. 30 shooting
of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy as he huddled against his father
for protection; the Oct. 12 Palestinian mob slaying of two Israeli
soldiers; and Israel’s Nov. 9 helicopter-missile attack on a
Palestinian leader. The death toll has topped 230. Most of the
dead are Palestinians.
The new war “definitely has set us back, probably by 10
years,” Feldman said, adding that she may have to change camp next
summer because fewer families are willing to participate and
Palestinian girls may face travel restrictions.
Yet the friendship of Meidan and Zhalka has survived. The
two say they are determined to defy any challenges. In a few
months, Meidan is supposed to begin her compulsory military
service in Israel’s army. Two of Zhalka’s schoolmates recently
were shot by Israeli soldiers who fired into an “intifada” rally.
Since returning from Colorado in July, the girls called each
other almost every day, sometimes surreptitiously.
In her Hebrew-speaking Jewish suburb of Tel Aviv, Meidan
slinks upstairs to the phone in the family office while her
brother, two older sisters and parents get ready for bed. The
escalating war has left her so distracted that her grades have
dropped. She says a million thoughts race in her head.
Zhalka may be “the only one who really understands me,” she
said.
They talk about everything, from family arguments to
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Lately they dwell on the Army
decision that looms more heavily than anything Meidan has had to
do.
Refusing her required service would cause problems: no
admission to some universities and difficulty finding jobs and
obtaining loans.
“On one hand, it’s my duty,” Meidan said. “On the other, it’s
an organization that is using violence. I’m against violence and
don’t want to be part of it.”
About 90 minutes to the north, Zhalka retreats upstairs to
her room with a Boyzone poster on the wall and a telephone. A
rooftop porch looks out across Kfar Qara, an Arabic-speaking
Palestinian town amid olive trees just north of the West Bank
territories.
Outgoing and self-confident, Zhalka is a natural class leader,
according to a teacher. But like Meidan, she can’t concentrate
these days in class.
The killings “make me angry all of the time” and unleash
feelings that cut to the core of her identity as an
Arab-Palestinian. As Israel emerged as a nation where he and his
forefathers have grown olives for centuries, Moran Zhalka’s
father, Ali, gave her the Jewish first name Moran in hopes it
would bring better opportunity in her life.
“Sometimes I want to change my name and make it an Arabic
name,” she said.
But as hostilities intensified, the girls learned to control
their own anger and maintain mutual respect.
Consider what happened after the Sept. 30 incident when
Israeli bullets killed 12-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Al-Dura as
he huddled against his father for protection.
Zhalka was so enraged that she questioned whether she could
still be friends with Meidan. She spoke first with her father, who
told her that “this girl, your friend, is not guilty.” He’s an
elementary school principal who, after recent riots, arranged a
roadside peace rally including some Jewish principals from Hadera.
They passed out bumper stickers that say, “Enough. Don’t Destroy
Our Home.”
When Zhalka spoke with Meidan after the shooting, she felt
conflicted, she said, swallowing thoughts she hesitated to
express, worried about making Meidan angry and defensive.
“When I talked to Adi about the kid being killed, I didn’t
want to say this at first: “You see? This is your army.’ Because
Adi is a special girl. You want to say: “They are a killer.’ But
what does she have to do with that? I know Adi. She would start to
cry. She would be in her room for a week. So, I didn’t say anything.”
On Oct. 12, a Palestinian mob killed two Israeli soldiers in
Ramallah and flashed bloody hands to the world.
Meidan fumed. “It’s murder. You can’t defend it.”
Zhalka agreed. Yet she understood, even shared, the anger
motivating the slaying. Every day in Kfar Qara, she and other
Palestinians hear menacing thuds of Israeli soldiers taking target
practice – perhaps “to make us afraid.” In October, when some of
her classmates joined a local “intifada” demonstration against
Israeli killings, Israeli soldiers opened fire and injured two.
After the slaying in Ramallah, an Israeli helicopter fired a
missile into the central Palestinian police station. Sad and
confused, Meidan forgot her anger and called Zhalka and three
Ramallah girls she had met in Colorado. She didn’t want to argue
about what happened. She wanted to see if they were all right.
They were. They told her they were scared, the shooting was so
close to their homes. They told her they were happy she cared
enough to call.
Meidan must decide soon about the army. She’s scheduled for
interviews and tests in January. Her sister is in the army, along
with a boyfriend who serves in the West Bank. Her mother and
father want her to serve. “Maybe, if I go, I can make a little
change,” she said.
Zhalka holds back her comments on this too.
“I’m afraid she will change,” Zhalka confided away from
Meidan, “that she may begin to agree with what the army will do.
I’m afraid when I think about it.”
Yet when Meidan cries, flip-flopping about what to do, Zhalka
tries to respond comfortingly. “I tell her: “You have to go.’ I
think we can still be friends.”
While the girls grew closer, their communities grew more and
more tense – and disapproving of the girls talking, let alone
meeting face-to-face.
Meidan’s father, Rami, 51, an accountant, said he let her go
to the Colorado camp for a broadening experience, not to change
the world. He says he doesn’t believe in peace camps. His own
experience has imbued deep wariness. His father, a Jewish tailor,
was expelled penniless from Iraq. Rami grew up knowing hunger.
Fighting for Israel against Egypt in 1968, he lost his right arm.
He looked ahead to the Mideast he figures his daughter will face
in two decades, and said sadly: “There will be fighting. Small
wars.” The only question, he said, is whether a nuclear bomb
destroys everything.
At school, Meidan and Zhalka are regarded at best as dreamers.
At worst, their siblings, friends and neighbors accused them of
disloyalty.
Zhalka’s older sister Ann, 20, “doesn’t like that I have a
Jewish friend,” she said. Ann and her other sisters warn that
hanging out with Jews could corrupt her, lead her into forbidden
behavior such as drinking beer. “And my sisters think that,
because I have a Jewish friend, maybe I won’t talk to my Arab
friends.”
Palestinians pushed Zhalka to reconsider what she’s doing.
One girl said: “Maybe her father would kill your father. How can
you be friends?”
Jewish boys at Meidan’s school told her “Arabs are bad.”
“I feel so alone,” Meidan said.
Now the girls idealize Colorado – Meidan remembered it as
“this special warm place full of love and happiness.” They long to
return to camp next summer.
In Colorado, nobody asked for identification, Zhalka
marveled. “It felt great. And I found myself. Before, I didn’t
know for what I was living. I wanted another goal, not just to
study and be someone. I want to live so that, after I die, people
will say: “She changed something.'”
And in Colorado, the girls can get together – something that’s
nearly impossible here. In Israel, Jewish and Palestinian
communities mostly are segregated, similar to apartheid-era living
that split people racially in South Africa.
The girls’ parents say meeting face-to-face is too dangerous.
Fighting once concentrated in Gaza and the Palestinian West
Bank territories – where 3.1 million Palestinians reside –
threatens to spread closer to the girls’ homes. As the killing
continues, Israelis increasingly question the allegiance of the 1
million Arab-Palestinians living outside the West Bank in Israel.
Riots against Israeli killing recently erupted in
Palestinian-Israeli towns including Zhalka’s home, Kfar Qara.
In early November, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat still were refusing to talk.
Bloodshed was increasing daily. Fighting escalated toward all-out
guerilla combat.
Meidan and Zhalka resolved that their relationship also had to
take a new course.
They launched an offensive of their own.
Their mothers immediately said no.
The girls persisted.
They proposed a meeting in Hadera – a Jewish coastal city
between their homes.
On a sunny afternoon, Meidan called Zhalka to say even that
was refused, but promised she’d keep pressing anyway. Zhalka then
sat with her father on the porch overlooking the hillsides where
olive trees were heavy with fruit.
Just then, the phone rang again – Meidan with a breakthrough.
“OK!” Zhalka reported to her father. “We will meet in Hadera!
Her mother agreed to meet in Hadera. She said her mother asked her
why Moran can’t come here. And she told her mother: “The same
reason you don’t let me go there.’ OK!”
Her father’s face furrowed. How would Moran get to the bus
depot in Hadera? His car was broken. Taxis wouldn’t go to Kfar
Qara. Israeli soldiers were shaking down Arabs everywhere.
Zhalka begged. Finally, Ali Zhalka got up and hastily
arranged to borrow a car.
Off they went to Hadera’s bus depot.
And they saw the flashing police lights and soldiers. Ali
drove past them, pulled over. Moran got out. That’s when Meidan
saw her and ran.
After they hugged, the girls climbed into the back of the
borrowed car.
Ali Zhalka felt tears in his eyes as, in the rearview mirror,
he saw the girls happily sitting together talking.
“When you see something like that, you hate this conflict,”
he said. “You hate everything that would keep two girls who want
to be friends apart.”
He drove the girls to the Odd Cafe on Hadera’s main street.
Meidan had an hour. He waited nearby while the girls sat at a
table and ordered two cups of hot chocolate.
While machine guns crackled across the West Bank and Gaza,
they sipped and talked.
While Arafat and Barak stayed deadlocked, the girls made new
plans. Swim together. Go for a walk on the beach. Eat pizza
together. Attend a concert.
While military commanders honed strategies for stepped-up
action, the girls honed a strategy too. Soon, they vowed, they
will visit each other’s homes.
April 23, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Human Rights, Security
“God help us if we go back”
Denver lawyer’s mission is a peace-by-peace effort
CROSSMAGLEN, Northern Ireland – Head south from Belfast to the
embattled green pastures and villages of County Armagh, and see
what Denver lawyer Jim Lyons is up against as he tries to secure
peace.
Five British soldiers crouching in full combat camouflage,
lugging machine guns, creep through the Crossmaglen market square.
Townspeople look away, shopping for fish, flowers, newspapers,
pushing small children in strollers.
Military helicopters clack overhead. A fortified brown tower,
surveillance camera swiveling on top, looms over the square.
One soldier listens through an earpiece. “It’s a normal
patrol,” he says on this recent spring morning, “like what police
would do in any town, any city in the world.”
Angry farmers in Paddy Short’s pub complain about helicopters
landing in their pastures. “The war won’t end,” 81-year-old
pubkeeper Short declares, “until the British soldiers leave.”
But from Britain’s perspective, military towers and regular
patrols, conducted by 15,000 British troops in Northern Ireland,
provide necessary protection. Crossmaglen lies in what the British
call “bandit country,” an Irish Republican Army-controlled region
where weapons are oiled, wrapped and stored in plastic containers
buried on farms.
British authorities say the bomb that killed 29 people in the
northwestern market town Omagh in August 1998 entered Northern
Ireland through this county. Earlier this month, 20 miles or so
west of here, an IRA splinter group tried to fire a mortar rocket
from a car into a Royal Ulster Constabulary police base.
Peace is faltering this Easter morning in Ireland, the
ancestral homeland of 44 million Americans.
The U.S.-brokered Good Friday Agreement, which two years ago
established a framework for the first lasting peace after
centuries of sectarian strife, is no longer a done deal. The
agreement set up a shared Catholic-Protestant government in
Northern Ireland, ending 78 years of British rule. The government
got started. But both sides balked at surrendering weapons.
Britain reimposed direct rule on Feb. 11. Tensions between
Protestants, who want to remain part of Britain, and Catholics,
who want to join the Republic of Ireland to the south, have risen
ever since.
Enter Lyons, a special adviser to President Clinton on
Ireland, who went to Belfast this month to try to help turn things
around.
It was the 35th trip to Ireland for Lyons, 53, who’s been a
close confidant of Clinton since the 1970s. More than seven years
of unpaid work here, his closeness to Clinton, his influence
bringing in $1.5 billion of investment through an international
foundation, and his dispute-resolution skills have won Lyons
access to all sides in the conflict, which since 1970 has claimed
3,500 lives. On this trip, Lyons met with deadlocked politicians,
urging them to stay the course toward compromise. He also worked
with community leaders on economic projects he believes are
crucial to ending Ireland’s “Troubles.”
Hard-line paramilitaries, Lyons said, are threatening an
uneasy equilibrium in Northern Ireland. Police report nearly one
political shooting a night, and four attempted attacks on security
forces over the past two months.
Yet Lyons believes most Irish people are motivated, beyond
politics by a desire to move ahead economically. He argues that
peace will lead to prosperity.
Lyons works behind the scenes in a personal, blunt-spoken way
that can clash with bureaucratic sensibilities. He refuses
security, and usually travels alone.
The hope is that sustained attention from a friend of
President Clinton can add heft to U.S. foreign policy. And in the
waning days of Clinton’s presidency this may be his best chance
for an uncontested foreign policy success. Clinton calls Ireland
to check on peace negotiations no less than once a week, said
Dermot Gallagher, a senior Irish government official and former
Irish ambassador to the United States, and sometimes twice a day.
Lyons’ task is “to remind people that there is an economic
stake in the peace process,” said Dick Norland, a National
Security Council supervisor in the White House. After former
U.S. Sen. George Mitchell stepped out of his negotiating role this
year, Lyons emerged as a key inside figure, said Gallagher.
“Jim Lyons is a player here, and is listened to very
attentively indeed,” Gallagher said. “The guy is fair.”
And he likes his fish and chips.
During a break between official meetings, Lyons bolted for
the bitterly torn Ardoyne neighborhood in West Belfast. There,
razor wire curls atop brick walls, metal barricades separate
homes, and paramilitary murals on sides of buildings are carefully
maintained.
Lyons walked into the crowded Annie’s Home Bakery and Cafe on
the Crumlin Road dividing Catholic and Protestant sections.
The building was a burnt-out shell when Betty and Annie
McGuigan moved in a couple years ago. A $1,500 loan from a
micro-credit organization Lyons started gave them a boost. Banks
had rejected their project as too risky.
Lyons ordered. He began eating.
The McGuigan sisters approached, timidly, suspecting this
American in the blue business suit might be important. Lyons
handed them his card with its golden eagle seal. Betty McGuigan
informed Lyons proudly that, thanks in part to the loan, business
doubled over the past five months.
But to stay open, “we need to draw trade from both sides,”
Betty said, meaning Catholic and Protestant customers. That’s been
the secret to their success so far. A political stalemate that
drags on much longer could ruin everything. On Feb. 11,
British Prime Minister Tony Blair suspended Northern Ireland’s
10-week-old shared government – set up under the Good Friday deal
George Mitchell brokered – because the Irish Republican Army
refused to disarm by a May 22 deadline. Surrender of IRA weapons,
and the continuing British military presence, are primary
obstacles stalling peace.
Unionists who favor continued British rule contend Northern
Ireland shouldn’t begin to govern itself until the IRA gives up
its guns. Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, argues that
unionists should be satisfied with IRA assurances that weapons are
in storage and won’t be used.
After more than two months, this impasse and the government
shutdown leave political leaders such as Nobel Peace Prize winner
David Trimble, head of the Ulster Unionist Party, and Sinn Fein
leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, increasingly powerless.
While they occupy tomb-like offices in Stormont Castle, the
seat of Northern Ireland’s short-lived government, paramilitary
groups are active in neighborhoods. Royal Ulster Constabulary
police statistics show increased shooting incidents during the
first three months this year. Lyons’ main job on this trip was
to encourage the marginalized politicians, whom he worried might
be frustrated enough to lose heart.
His message: The United States will do anything it can to
facilitate compromise, and President Clinton cares passionately.
But time’s running out. The presidential election looms in the
United States. Restarting Northern Ireland’s government after the
May 22 deadline for getting rid of IRA weapons will be even harder
than it seems now.
Making his rounds to political leaders, Lyons met first with
Trimble at Stormont. Trimble acknowledged that, without
self-government, Northern Ireland “is going to miss out on
opportunities.”
Lyons was convinced that Trimble is “very much committed to
going forward” in the coming weeks.
But Trimble faces dissent from hard-liners within his
unionist party. Those who demand IRA “guns before government”
constrain his ability to compromise.
And with a Protestant majority in Northern Ireland, there’s
plenty of support for not giving ground.
Consider the experience in Coleraine along Northern Ireland’s
north coast. In 1992, a phone call to police announced that the
town center complex would be blown apart in two hours. Police
cleared the area. A 50-pound IRA bomb exploded.
Memories of that attack still are fresh for residents such as
Michael Ferguson, owner of the Happy Haddock fish-and-chips shop.
No government’s possible, in his view, until the IRA disarms. And
he doesn’t expect that to happen.
“Back to square one,” said Ferguson, whose son plans to visit
Colorado Springs on a church exchange this summer to “just get
away” for awhile.
“There is no chance of keeping the government going,”
Ferguson said. “Optimism is going away.”
The next official stop for Lyons was moderate leader John
Hume, who shared the 1998 Nobel Peace prize with Trimble. A
63-year-old Catholic who heads the Social Democratic and Labor
Party, Hume has tried for three decades to bridge political
extremes.
But Lyons found him physically weakened, recuperating from
two major surgeries.
Where Hume lives in Derry, people once struggling
economically are benefiting from peace. Since the Good Friday
agreement, companies such as Fruit of the Loom, DuPont and Sega
have opened plants, giving young people a chance to earn a living
without moving away.
The government must be up and running “as soon as possible,”
Hume said. In an interview, he called for compromise now.
The problem, he said, is continuing “distrust between two of
the parties, Sinn Fein and the unionists, which arises out of the
past.” Hume assured Lyons “we’re still working to break the
barriers down.”
Lyons turned last to Sinn Fein. Party leader Martin
McGuinness greeted him, and nobody minced words.
Some sort of “constructive movement” is crucial, Lyons said.
McGuinness acknowledged that he knows what’s at stake.
“Unless we provide a stable political situation,” business
investment that Irish people need “isn’t going to be available.”
Yet McGuinness contended in an interview that it’s up to
unionist leaders “to face down their own rejectionists.” He blamed
the British government for “a terrible mistake” in suspending
Northern Ireland’s shared government.
Sinn Fein officials said that approaching IRA “hard men” and
asking for disarmament to revive the government would draw
laughter.
But Lyons noted later that McGuinness in private talks
“didn’t rule out” some gesture. Lyons dined with economic leaders
including Sir George Quigley, chairman of the Ulster Bank and
former chief of Northern Ireland’s civil servants.
Business leaders are pressing political leaders to
compromise, Quigley said.
They point to the economic takeoff and improving standard of
living in southern Ireland, dubbed the “Celtic Tiger” in Europe.
“Provincialism and isolationism,” Quigley said, are holding
Northern Ireland back.
On the streets beneath Quigley’s Ulster Bank office that day,
a green tank rolled toward Belfast City Hall – not to attack but
to film a popular television sitcom called “Give My Head Peace.”
The show airs stereotypical sectarian views, much as “All In The
Family” exposed Archie Bunker’s racism, in hopes that humor might
ease tensions. In this episode, an actor portraying an elderly IRA
diehard drove the tank to Protestant diehards and offered it as a
gesture of peace.
Producer Colin Lewis said he’s counting on more than a
commercial success.
“God help us if we go back,” Lewis said.
Northern Ireland today actually “is a safe and reliable place
to do business,” said Mark Stevenson, chief executive of
Colorado-based EM Solutions, which invested about $28 million in a
factory in Lisburn, west of Belfast, that employs 479 workers.
Michael Best, managing director at the factory, said sectarian
tensions haven’t hindered production of computer and telecom
equipment. A strict no-politics policy forbids workers from
wearing soccer jerseys, because soccer rivalries reflect sectarian
divisions.
“Everyone still has an opinion,” said Clifford Nettleship,
37, a Protestant foreman. “But because of the nature of our
politics, it’s not talked about on the shop floor. … If the most
powerful man on Earth (he means Clinton) takes an interest in your
local politics, you gotta think maybe something’s gotta be done.”
Lyons worked neighborhoods, too, trying to encourage
compromisers, hoping that high-level U.S. support of street-level
detente will avert violence.
He relies on his relatively neutral background, as an
Irish-American Catholic whose mother was descended from Northern
Ireland Protestants. He goes running regularly with an ex-prisoner
with ties to Protestant paramilitary groups. Most importantly, he
has a record of finding financial support for groups committed to
cross-community cooperation.
As the official U.S. liaison to the International Fund for
Ireland, which receives $20 million a year from the United States
and about $20 million more from Europe and Australia, Lyons
influences spending on major projects such as business-incubator
centers. The $1.5 billion in direct investment that the foundation
has leveraged since 1993 created some 30,000 jobs.
One of the latest projects Lyons set up is the Aspire
micro-credit loan program that gives loans to small businesses
that banks won’t help, such as Annie’s bakery in the Ardoyne.
Lyons checked in at Aspire’s central office.
“How many loans?” he asked Niamh Goggin, the local director.
“Ten.” All recipients were making their payments.
“Anything I can do to help?”
The challenge is converting people in the poorest
neighborhoods, Goggin said. “They don’t believe anyone will help
them.”
Lyons later dropped in on a hairdresser of African descent.
She recently received a small loan, used it to pay off debts for
her “Samara’ salon, and now is repaying the loan. She told Lyons
his micro-credit lenders “are the first ones who believed in me.”
Small businesses struggling now, she said, “are the ones that will
build up the community.”
Later, in a converted linen mill, Lyons shared a pint of
Guinness with Father Myles Kavanagh and Sister Mary Turley, who
run an array of social-services projects he helped fund. They
urged him to consider inviting Clinton to introduce Ireland’s
President Mary McAleese at a fund-raising event next month in
Washington, D.C.
At a business-incubator facility that provides phones, faxes
and work space in east Belfast, he met fellow Denver Broncos fan
Gerry O’Reilly, 36, who graduated from high school in Denver.
O’Reilly moved home to Belfast for college, then launched a coffee
business. Now his Black Mountain Coffee sales are increasing
through the Internet. Young entrepreneurs in Belfast favor
political compromise and self-government, O’Reilly said. “I’m
depressed,” he said. “You can see a cloud coming over this place
again. … If it goes back to the way it was, I’d pack my bags and go.”
Lyons even worked Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams’
neighborhood, where veteran community worker Geraldine McAteer
handed him an 80-page draft proposal to create a business park and
asked for his opinion.
Because that’s a Catholic neighborhood, Lyons made a point of
following up with a visit to Shankill, a Protestant neighborhood
devastated economically when textile factories closed. It’s a
stronghold for paramilitary groups now.
Lyons checked in with unionist community leader Jackie Redpath.
“People are mixed up, very mixed … I think people are fed-up
… It’s very difficult to see a way back from where we are at the
moment, Jim,” Redpath said. “Sorry to be so depressing.”
Lyons nodded. “That’s probably a very realistic assessment,”
he said. “We’re doing what we can.”
He dropped in at the home of Margaret McKinney. Her
youngest son, Brian, mentally disabled, was murdered more than two
decades ago. Goaded by neighborhood boys, he’d used a toy pistol
to hold up a store. When he showed the stolen money to his
parents, they returned it to the store and apologized.
But the IRA group that policed the neighborhood decided to
discipline Brian. Hooded men showed up at the McKinney home one
night. They told Margaret they would only scare her son. Instead,
they apparently killed him. Two decades later, she finally found
out what happened after visiting the White House with an Irish
women’s group. She met Lyons there, and when he asked what had
happened, she told him about Brian.
Lyons told Clinton, then began pressuring Adams to do “the
right thing.” Last year, IRA leaders arranged for excavation of a
field across the border in the Republic of Ireland. Police
unearthed Brian’s body and brought it home for burial in Belfast.
McKinney told Lyons she feels much better now. A picture of
her with Clinton sits on the mantle with pictures of Brian. But
she still clings to the white tennis shoes found on his body –
“with the wee blue stripes up the sides,” she tearfully told Lyons
in her tidy sitting room.
Lyons hugged her.
And he handed her a packet of flower seeds. People in
Colorado know the pain of losing children, he said.
McKinney planned to plant the seeds the next day. She was
hoping one might sprout by Easter.
February 14, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Globalization, Human Rights, Iraq Under Saddam Hussein
A group of Coloradans sees the nation firsthand and joins members of Congress in asking that restrictions be lifted
AMARA, Iraq – Iraqi Lt. Khaled Ramady stands proudly in front
of a dilapidated brick fort after a Colorado peace group passes
by.
He and his troops consider themselves “at war” with U.S. and
British warplanes that regularly bomb Iraq. And they won’t let
visitors check their guns, just as their leader Saddam Hussein
won’t let United Nations inspectors look for possible chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons.
Kuwait is “our right,” 24-year-old Ramady adds.
“As long as you want to dominate my country, we will fight
you.”
Now much of the world is starting to believe that and
wondering what to do.
For nearly 10 years, a United Nations economic and military
crackdown – the most comprehensive in history – has tried to
control Saddam Hussein. And he’s still having his way, while 24
million working Iraqis struggle. U.N. officials say average
incomes have dropped from around $1,200 to $10 a month.
The United States remains firmly committed to defeating
Hussein. U.S. policy calls for “containment until regime change” –
making sure he doesn’t threaten other countries or amass weapons,
and eventually removing him from power.
But the Colorado peace group, which was in Iraq recently on a
12-day fact-finding mission, is not the only such organization
calling for a new course of action to ease the plight of ordinary
Iraqis.
Some 70 members of U.S. Congress this month asked President
Clinton “to turn a new page in our dealings with Iraq” and lift
the economic sanctions.
And the 50-nation coalition marshaled to fight the Gulf War
against Iraq “is certainly deteriorating,” said Diane Rennack,
foreign policy analyst for the U.S. Congressional Research Service.
U.N. Security Council members France, China and Russia for
months have challenged U.S. and British efforts to ensure rigorous
weapons inspections in Iraq. Commercial interests in oil-rich Iraq
are growing.
On Feb. 2, a Russian tanker was caught smuggling Iraqi oil in
violation of the embargo. U.S. Navy SEALs seized that tanker.
Embargo-defying trade is on the rise, U.S. officials warn,
reaching an estimated $25 million worth of illegal oil exports a
month.
Inside Iraq, the nine Coloradans encountered European and
Chinese business groups edging into the once-prosperous country
they expect will bounce back if sanctions are lifted. Taxi drivers
running the road between Amman, Jordan, and Baghdad say they move
more and more French, Russian, Chinese and Canadian businessmen
scoping out opportunities. Private-sector patience with sanctions
is wearing thin.
Hans von Sponeck, the senior U.N. official in Iraq,
questioned the morality of continuing “to keep a nation in the
refrigerator. … We must give each other a chance.” On Sunday,
von Sponeck asked to be relieved of his duties – he’d be the
second U.N. chief in Baghdad to resign.
And senior Iraqi officials, in interviews around Baghdad,
insisted Iraq wants only to live in peace.
So what does this mean for U.S. influence in the 21st century
– especially when it comes to maintaining multilateral economic
sanctions?
Dozens of countries are targets of unilateral U.S. sanctions
– a traditional foreign policy tool, short of war, designed to
further U.S. interests. But in a global economy where commerce is
ever more fluid, experts believe that only by building
international consensus can the United States really bring
pressure to bear. That requires serious diplomacy.
“To the extent the United States pushes too hard, it will
stimulate resistance” from other world powers, warns Richard
Haass, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings
Institute in Washington, D.C., and a senior adviser to President
Bush during the 1991 Gulf War that repulsed Iraq’s invasion of
Kuwait.
Yet Haass said he’s baffled by critics of sanctions against
Iraq. Ordinary Iraqis may be suffering, he said. “It’s just
important that people not blame the sanctions for what is the
cynical result of Iraqi policy.”
Sanctions must continue, he said, lest Hussein do something
outrageous. “It’s only a question of when, not if. Clearly the
best outcome is he’s out of power.”
But he’s not. And some U.S. officials say he may be re-arming.
So, the U.S. government is lobbying hard for a new U.N. plan
that would return weapons inspectors to Iraq in return for
eventually lifting sanctions. Hussein “is still a threat to
Kuwait,” contends Beth Jones, deputy assistant U.S. Secretary of
State focusing on Iraq. “Inspectors would make it better.”
In preparation for their January trip, members of the
Colorado peace group wanted to speak with a weapons inspector.
They turned to U.S. Air Force Capt. Eric Jackson, 31, raised in
Buena Vista and now stationed in Wyoming.
An aerospace engineer, Jackson spent four and a half months
in 1996 and 1997 working in Iraq with Richard Butler on the United
Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspection team.
He traveled up and down roads – including the one in front of
Lt. Ramady’s fort – stopping everywhere from fertilizer plants to
storage bunkers in search of weapons material.
Iraq “was probably six months away from having the (nuclear)
bomb in 1991,” Jackson told the Coloradans. And Iraqis may well
have learned, from U.S. military advisers in the 1980s, details of
U.S. satellite surveillance, he said.
But “sanctions are not going to work,” he contends. They are
a crude “continuation of the medieval approach of surrounding
castles and trying to starve people out.”
Moreover, current U.S. demands for Iraq to allow more
inspections amount to “an untenable position,” Jackson said,
because chemical and biological weapons in a relatively
industrialized country such as Iraq can be practically impossible
to detect.
In Baghdad, senior Iraqi officials insisted Hussein has no
territorial ambitions – and the top U.N. official backed up their
case for easing economic sanctions.
“We want only to maintain our sovereignty as a nation. We
would like to have peaceful coexistence between Iraq and its
neighbors,” Usama Badraldin, a senior foreign ministry official,
said in a Denver Post interview.
Yet the new U.N. plan to end sanctions after bringing in
inspectors “is unworkable,” he said, because it would prolong a
process already tainted by allegations that some inspectors shared
information with intelligence agencies.
Iraqi officials didn’t express any urgency toward breaking
today’s deadlock. “It’s up to the United States,” Badraldin said,
“to decide how to roll the ball. We are open. We are ready. We
have no precondition other than: Respect our dignity. Respect our
sovereignty.”
A senior official of Saddam’s ruling Baath Party, Abdul
Hashemi – a Boston University graduate who later served as Iraq’s
ambassador to France and as education minister – spoke for the
government in a meeting with the Colorado group.
“What Iraq wants: Just leave us alone,” he said. “We have
oil. The United States wants oil. The oil we have, we will sell
it. We can’t drink it. We will not prevent you from getting it.
And we will not let Iraqi oil be used against you.”
He denounced U.S. efforts to “liberate” Iraq by toppling
Hussein, and challenged the Coloradans to see today’s conflict
from a broader perspective.
“If you are really for human rights,” he implored, “then
respect those rights for me.”
Meantime, weapons inspections vehicles were lined up and
ready to go outside von Sponeck’s U.N. office.
Von Sponeck warned that today’s standoff between governments
is creating an angry generation of Iraqis whose education and diet
are deteriorating under economic sanctions.
Millions of working Iraqis “have nothing to do with whatever
was done by their leaders,” von Sponeck said in a Denver Post
interview earlier this month.
“So why should they be hooked in the first place? It’s
regrettable that, in the confrontation of Iraq, the population
itself is taken for granted. This is the call that any responsible
person has to make: end the singling out of a population to
continue to suffer.”
Back in the United States, some of the 70 Congress members
who signed a Jan. 31 letter asking President Clinton to lift
economic sanctions planned to introduce Iraq legislation this
week. It aims at easing the humanitarian situation while
continuing an embargo on weapons.
Current policy “is not compassionate, and it’s not consistent
with our moral position in the world,” said U.S. Rep. Tom Campbell
(R-Calif.), a co-author of the letter to Clinton. “And we’re not
accomplishing what we set out to do. … You’re not pressuring
Saddam with these economic sanctions. You’re hurting his people.”
In Iraq, from civil servants to mothers depending on food
rations in slums, people begged the visiting Coloradans for
relief.
“I just want to raise my children,” implored Sabeha Taher, a
single mother of five, in a crumbling home in the ancient city of
Samarra.
“It’s my duty,” she said. “What can we do?”
February 13, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Globalization, Human Rights, Iraq Under Saddam Hussein
Nine Coloradans recently visited Iraq to reach out to its people and try to mend hatred wrought by nine years of warfare and sanctions.
QURNA, Iraq – Nine Coloradans walked reverently into what
religious scholars consider the Garden of Eden.
They found muddy trash, a skeletal tree and a swarm of unruly
boys.
The Adam Ice Cream stand and a tourist hotel were long closed.
A U.S. warplane had just bombed Iraqi positions nearby.
Nasser Adnan, 10, eyed the visiting peace group.
“I don’t like Americans,” he declared.
Hatred seems to be the only thing growing in the cradle of
civilization.
Move 500 miles up the Tigris River to the Al-Zanabiq primary
school. There, teacher Mashall Abrahim’s classroom windows
shattered last November when an errant U.S. bomb fell next door.
Shrapnel shrieked across a playground that one minute later would
have been full of children. Now, student drawings show Iraqi
soldiers shooting blindfolded enemies hanging from trees.
And students ask: “”Why do the Americans hate us?'” said
Abrahim, a devout Christian woman with a fiery gaze.
“I tell them: “I have the same question. I have no answer.'”
“What is the crime that these children should bear all this
tension in their lives? I have no way or God or justification to
teach these children not to hate. They are learning it by their
own eyes and ears. It’s a daily event. I can’t turn it around
unless the bombing stops and they lift the sanctions. Then I could
try to tell the children there’s another way.”
That’s what the Coloradans are trying to do – find another way.
For nearly a decade, a U.S.-led military and economic crackdown
has effectively held Iraq’s 24 million people in a box.
The goal is containing their president, Saddam Hussein, who
set off the six-week Persian Gulf War when his forces invaded
Kuwait in 1990, and who amassed fearsome chemical, biological and
possibly nuclear weapons.
A United Nations-enforced embargo shuts off Iraq’s oil-rich
economy – blocking at least $6 billion of goods and services since
the war. This is meant to deny Iraq all but essential resources
until the United Nations certifies the weapons are gone.
About every three days, U.S. and British pilots bomb Iraq, in
response to Iraqi gunfire, while patrolling no-fly zones covering
most of the country.
Without this crackdown, U.S. officials maintain, Hussein
could re-arm and threaten other countries. U.S. policy includes
the goal of removing the president from power.
Hussein “only responds to negative pressure,” said Beth
Jones, the deputy assistant U.S. secretary of state focusing on
Iraq.
But the longer this goes on, the longer Iraq’s people are
trapped.
Consequently, Iraqi parents say, children waking up in Denver
this morning can be virtually assured of someday facing grownup
Nassers trained never to forget or forgive. And Colorado
agribusiness, oil exploration and high-tech companies can only
watch as European and Asian competitors edge into a lucrative
Persian Gulf market.
The crackdown wasn’t supposed to do this.
The Coloradans who met teacher Abrahim and young Nasser want
to change course. They are a diverse group of professionals who’ve
been following the U.S.-Iraq standoff for years, demonstrating on
Denver streets, warning of an endless entanglement abroad that
they believe is morally wrong.
Their recent 12-day mission in Iraq was designed to challenge
U.S. policy, which increasingly pits the United States against
Russia, China, France and other world powers.
They paid their own expenses – about $1,800 each. Journeying
under official supervision throughout Iraq, they tried their best
to bypass governments and forge peaceful relations with ordinary
people – even if that meant getting caught in the crossfire.
Accompanying this group offered a rare opportunity to get
inside Iraq. That led to a series of interviews with government
and United Nations officials, and dozens of Iraqis from many walks
of life, as well as U.S. officials back home.
The Denver Post found evidence that, after nearly 10 years,
the crackdown is incurring humanitarian costs that could fuel
future conflicts – and that it also may be working against the
stated U.S. goal of defeating Iraq’s president:
The embargo and bombing have led to a rallying, not
weakening, of power behind 62-year-old Hussein, U.N. and Iraqi
officials say.
The Coloradans saw no sign of serious dissent in the nation
he rules by fear and control over distribution of food and
medicine. United Nations officials in Baghdad confirmed nobody’s
challenging Hussein. The Coloradans saw that Iraq’s elite has a
stake in today’s standoff: They drive new BMW and Mercedes cars.
They dine at the likes of the Iraqi Hunting Club in Baghdad, where
the sound of clinking teacups is drowned out by bulldozers at work
on a massive new university nearby.
While Hussein and his elite live high, the sanctions weaken
an educated middle class that otherwise could be the backbone of
an open society. Hyperinflation has cut salaries that averaged
around $1,200 a month in the early 1980s to less than $10. Mothers
lament they can rarely afford meat. Still, with few other options,
working Iraqis toil tenaciously for small gains – farmers harvest
more and more wheat that few can afford to buy.
“We hear the American government say they are against the
government, not the people,” said an architect-turned-shopkeeper
in central Baghdad, whose brothers fled all over the world because
they can’t make a decent living here. “But the embargo isn’t
hurting the government. It’s hurting the people.”
Though working Iraqis suffer, Iraq’s overall economy is
moving ahead despite sanctions – due in part to rapidly increasing
U.S. consumption of Iraqi oil. U.S. purchases fall within
UN-supervised sales, with proceeds earmarked for food, medicine
and Gulf War reparations. Iraqi sales to the U.S. doubled last
year, averaging 712,000 barrels a day, making Iraq our
fifth-largest supplier, according to the American Petroleum Institute.
The Coloradans saw an aluminum smelter and brick factories in
operation, rebuilt bridges, bustling markets, shops stocked with
fresh fruit and vegetables, honking traffic jamming streets on
nickel-a-gallon gas, new construction of mosques and government
facilities.
A recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a
London-based think tank, predicts double-digit economic growth in
Iraq over the next two years.
UNICEF’s director in Iraq, Anupama Rao Singh, confirmed the
economy has “stabilized” over this past year.
“There’s been no further decline,” Singh told the Coloradans
at her office in Baghdad. But an emerging class of “profiteers and
operators” benefits, thriving on back-channel trade, rather than
middle-class Iraqis, she said.
Meanwhile, more and more people in Iraq’s secular society
seek solace in mosques. Some Muslim leaders are bold enough to
speak independently of the government. Yet they may be even more
opposed than Hussein to the U.S. government.
Moving a finger across his bearded throat – a gesture showing
what authorities could do – Shiite Imam Sayed Kysei, in long black
robes, shrugged off warnings from his assistants. “It’s the duty
of an imam to speak the truth,” Kysei said in a Denver Post
interview.
“What you see, officials clapping for officials, it’s nothing
more than a setup,” he declared. But that doesn’t make U.S. policy
less criminal in his view. He blamed Israeli influence in
Washington. “The undeclared part of the war is to kill the science
and Islamic knowledge here,” he said. “Iraq is a source of
knowledge for the world. We are objecting to the new (weapons)
inspectors because they represent the American policy.”
A U.S. taxpayer-supported insurgency led by Iraqi exiles is
going nowhere.
Most of the money Congress has released so far under the
Iraqi Liberation Act appears to have gone for consultants, rented
offices, and the like, U.N. officials in Baghdad say. Shiite
leaders failed to show for a recent expenses-paid Iraqi opposition
conference in Washington. People in Iraq are unaware of exiled
leaders.
Instead, working Iraqis are preoccupied with making ends
meet. Some seem genuinely to support Hussein. Many more rally
around his belief – widespread in Arab world – that U.S. leaders
motivated by oil, and Israeli influence, want unfairly to control
a rising Arab power.
Intellectuals who once might have questioned Iraqi leadership
now question U.S. motives instead, said Professor Zuhair
Al-Sharook, education dean at the University of Mosul. “Now I
wouldn’t think of doing anything against my country,” he said,
“because I know my real enemy is the American government.”
Friends, relatives worry as group heads for Iraq
The Coloradans set out for Iraq Jan. 17.
The United States was pushing a U.N. compromise plan that
would bring back inspectors and then lift sanctions if no weapons
are found. Iraq was calling the plan “unworkable.”
“What’s morally right here?” said Byron Plumley, 52, a
lecturer in religious studies at Regis University.
Down a Denver International Airport walkway he and the others
went: Elaine Schmidt, 66, a University of Northern Colorado
librarian; Andrea Fuller, 28, a University of Denver graduate
student; Karen Norder, 27, Metro State political science graduate;
Stephanie Phibbs, 28, a University of Colorado Health Sciences
Center research project manager; Gretchen Hawley, 67, grandmother
and former missionary in Africa; Mohamad Jodeh, 58, delicatessen
owner and Muslim community leader; Mark Schneider, 28, thrift
store worker; Jeri Kharas, 39, adoption agency case manager.
Friends and relatives worried. “As long as there’s no
bombing,” Schneider’s mother said, wiping a tear from her cheek
with her wrist as he left.
The U.S. government forbids most civilian travel to Iraq,
though officials haven’t prosecuted the growing number of peace
groups purposefully violating the rules. Telephone links are
limited. Modems, satellite dishes and Internet communication are
forbidden. No airline flies in or out of Baghdad. No U.S.
officials work in Iraq.
The Iraqi government wasn’t entirely welcoming. Officials
warned the Coloradans they’d have to submit to $50 AIDS blood
tests, using Iraqi needles, at the border.
The Coloradans flew to Jordan.
For 11 hours they rode in rented orange-and-white Suburbans
across the Syrian desert. They passed hundreds of trucks moving
Iraqi oil into Jordan. Here and there a dead sheep or camel was
lying. They patiently waited through a three-hour border stop.
“Can you help me find a job in America?” one guard asked
adoption caseworker Kharas.
Border officials waived the blood tests, thanks to letters
and lobbying from Michigan-based Life For Relief and Development,
an Iraqi-American agency that helped coordinate this mission.
A midnight sandstorm blocked out the moon. Inside one
vehicle, Phibbs practiced Iraqi greetings such as “Sabah Noor!”
(“Morning Light On You!”) and Arabic words describing sand. The
sandstorm delayed arrival in Baghdad (population: 5 million) until
2 a.m.
The city bombed in 1991 and 1998 looked good. Well-lit. Clean
streets. Fountains full of water. Statues and murals at traffic
circles.
Everywhere they went, each Coloradan carried a note written
in Arabic. The message: “Hello. We are part of a peace delegation
from the United States and we work to end U.N. sanctions and U.S.
bombing. We are here to meet Iraqi people and take their stories
back to the United States. We are sorry for any harm U.S. policy
has caused you and your family.”
The group planned to distribute $572,000 worth of medical
supplies – from IV packs to pacemakers – donated by Denver-based
Project Cure. But the shipment never arrived; it’s unclear what
happened.
Iraqi officials informed the group that Iraq refuses charity
and they’d rather the Coloradans lobbied Congress against
sanctions. The president of Iraq’s Red Crescent Society, similar
to the Red Cross, brusquely told the group that if the suppplies
ever did arrive, Iraqis would distribute them to hospitals.
Meeting among themselves later, the Coloradans weighed
staying on in Iraq to make sure the supplies reached people, or
sending someone back later. “I mean, we came here to do this,”
Schmidt said.
Foreign ministry staffers monitored the Coloradans, escorting
them around in three white government Oldsmobiles and a Chevy. The
ministry handlers arranged visits with officials who voiced Iraqi
positions.
But the group managed also to converse casually with dozens
of ordinary Iraqis from the southern oilfields near Kuwait to
northern Iraq, where U.S. warplanes scream down from Turkey. They
visited truck stops, schools, markets, hospitals, and ruins of the
earliest civilizations where agriculture, writing and the wheel
first appeared. They stayed in Iraq’s three main cities – Baghdad,
Basra and Mosul. Officials nixed an excursion into the Kurdish
region that is largely self-governed.
The system here is ruthlessly authoritarian. Agents of
Hussein’s ruling Baath Party operate in every neighborhood, as
ward bosses once controlled U.S. communities.
The president’s picture hangs everywhere: behind counters, in
offices, on either side of the podium in university auditoriums
and again at the back looking over students. Civil servants wear
wrist watches displaying his face. His initials adorn bricks in
restored ruins of Babylon and Hatra.
Soldiers are everywhere. Anti-aircraft guns perch on roofs
and alongside bridges. Military compounds line main roads. Tanks
lurk in trenches. Slogans on forts declare “Down USA” in English.
A gunner protected by sandbags flashes two fingers – signaling
victory, not peace – at the passing Americans.
Civilians being killed in low-intensity war
Shortly before the Coloradans traveled the 350 miles south from
Baghdad to Basra, Iraq’s Catholic archbishop, Gabriel Kassab,
traveled the same route, returning from the capital to his parish.
Conversing with the Coloradans in his office, he said he
witnessed a bombing. American fighter jets were patrolling.
An explosion seemed to lift the archbishop’s car off the
road, Kassab said. “I was afraid.” Similar bombings were a factor
in Pope John Paul II’s December decision to delay a visit to Iraq,
Kassab said.
Nobody’s sure how many civilians are dying in this
low-intensity war. Authorities in Mosul reported 51 civilian
deaths last year.
U.S. officials say Iraqis exaggerate post-war deaths. But
U.S. and British pilots bombed Iraqi targets 186 times since
January 1999, Pentagon spokesman Pat Sivigny said. “Pilots take
every effort to avoid collateral damage,” Sivigny said. “As long
as Hussein targets coalition aircraft, the Iraqi people will
continue to be at risk.”
Walking down dusty Al-Jamhorai street in Basra to get a feel
for middle-class life, the Coloradans heard about a stray missile
that landed amid row houses on Jan. 25, 1999, killing four
civilians and injuring 67. Residents insisted there were no
anti-aircraft guns or other weapons in the neighborhood.
Five-year-old Mustafa Saleh held up his left hand for the
visiting Coloradans. Two fingers are missing. His back is riddled
with scars from shrapnel. He and his brother, Haydar, were playing
in the dirt street when the missile fell, said their mother Iqubal.
“The missile came in. Then I go out into the street. I saw
both of them lying on the ground. The blood covered their legs and
their heads. All over was debris from the missile. When I called
them, Mustafa looked up. He called “Mama.’ But there was no word
from Haydar.”
He was dead.
“People here don’t need war and missiles,” the mother said.
“What can we do?”
Then there’s the economic hardship caused by the shutout from
the world economy.
Iraqi authorities wanted to emphasize this and encouraged
group visits to several hospitals. Inside the Basra children’s
hospital, where the group once hoped to deliver supplies, Dr. Ali
Jawad spoke of widespread malnutrition and falling birth weights.
Jawad led the group to a ward where four tiny newborns
struggled for breath inside incubators. One blue tank supplied
oxygen to all the incubators. It was the last tank, the doctor
said. “If that oxygen stops, all of them die,” he said. “We have
enough for half a day.”
Gazing at one of those babies, Karen Norder wept. Plumley
cried out: “It’s so, so sad!”
Suddenly perturbed, Jawad snapped: “We don’t need people to
cry here. Let him go and cry to his president and senators.” He
asked the Coloradans to leave.
Some medical supplies are allowed into Iraq under the
economic embargo. Jawad blamed shortages at his hospital on
embargo restrictions and a generally weakened economy. U.S.
officials accuse Hussein of keeping supplies away from his people.
The truth is, Iraq’s humanitarian troubles are due both to
sanctions and government spending priorities, UNICEF director
Singh said. “A bit of both.’
U.N. officials estimate sanctions have cost Iraq’s economy
about $6 billion. Rich with oil, Iraq once could spend heavily on
almost everything including public health and schools. Now U.N.
officials review all purchases and block anything deemed “dual
use” – materials ranging from graphite pencils to chlorine that
while needed for water purification could also fuel chemical
weapons. Meantime, Hussein’s government is spending millions of
dollars on new government facilities, a lakeside resort west of
Baghdad for ministers and their families, a new Islamic
university, massive mosques.
Impoverished families like Sabha Neimeth’s struggle to
survive on food rations that don’t include meat. Neimeth said
she’s hard-pressed to keep track of her 10 kids as she scrambles
to make ends meet. Garbage infests her once-tidy neighborhood in
central Basra.
A pile of trash captivated Neimeth’s youngest son, Husein
Salem, 5, a determined preschooler she dotes on. He was playing
with three friends the day before Neimeth met Colorado Muslim
leader Jodeh in a hospital.
Fluent in Arabic, Jodeh bowed his head listening, frowning,
as Neimeth spoke angrily from behind her black robes. Something, a
land mine or bomb, exploded, she said. It blew off Husein’s tiny
hands. It ripped and burned his face beyond recognition.
On a bed, his soft chest still rose and fell. Through swollen
bloody flesh, two eyes looked out at this world in terror. And
Neimeth couldn’t bear to touch him.
“My heart is shredding,” she told Jodeh. “I don’t know where
it came from. It was just in the trash. This is what is left from
the war. Can you help treat my boy?”
The Coloradans heard dozens of stories. Some surprised them.
Walking through a library in Mosul, Gretchen Hawley, whose husband
taught at the University of Denver for years, met Mahmood
Mohammed, a 1984 DU graduate. Turns out he lived a few blocks from
the Hawleys.
“I stopped receiving letters five years ago,” Mohammed said
sadly. “Many friends.”
Some of the questions Iraqis asked challenged the Coloradans.
“Are we part of this world?” one Iraqi professor wanted to know.
“Or are we to be excluded?”
DU graduate student Andrea Fuller, raised on a Western farm
and not wanting to sound like she hated her country, worried as
she rode south from Mosul that, “We are becoming imperialists.”
Visiting Iraq prompted a constant, mentally exhausting sifting of
facts. “I’ve played devil’s advocate with myself while I’m here. I
want to know the truth. I’m really trying to get my mind around it.”
Sitting beside her as the car passed military fortifications,
Kharas concurred. “I’m feeling so many conflicting thoughts,” she
said. “I’d heard Iraq is being strangled. Now that I’m here, I
don’t see that.”
But the idea of continuing a policy that holds 24 million
people back to get at their president – whom many of them support
– began to feel more and more wrong.
“Who are we,” Kharas said, “to think we can starve these
people into submission?”
Shopkeepers befriend peace group with offers of free treats
To foreign policy experts, Iraq remains one of the most
vexing challenges the United States has faced since the Cold War.
Yet ordinary Coloradans and Iraqis mingling on the streets
said simply talking might be a first step to resolving the
standoff.
The visiting Americans brought genuine friendship, said
Layla Ismail, headmistress at State Girls Orphanage No. 22 in
Basra, where the Coloradans handed out toys.
“I hope the friendship will grow,” she said. “And that might
bring peace between the governments.”
One night in Mosul, a musty northern city that once was a
stop along the ancient Silk Road trading route, the Coloradans
took an unplanned walk down Dawasa Street. Hundreds of heads
turned. Men looked up from domino games.
“As long as you are a peace group, you are welcome,” one man
said.
A classic Ford Galaxy parked on the street. On a movie
marquee, Stallone gazed down, armed with a big gun. Music blared
from a shop.
The owner of a juice bar thrust crushed mint into the hands
of the Americans. “From the north of Iraq,” he said. He poured
them a clear purplish drink called zabeb, made from half-dried
grapes and the mint. They loved it. He said it relieves pain and
stress.
Shopkeepers shared other morsels, and wouldn’t accept money.
As Phibbs nibbled candied almonds, an Iraqi man abruptly collapsed
on the sidewalk, writhing in an eplieptic seizure. Vicki Robb, the
group coordinator and a nurse, jammed a wad of Kleenex between the
man’s gnashing teeth. When his seizure subsided, she helped him
sit up against a wall. Then he went on his way.
The dean of a major university told the Coloradans relations
must improve lest Iraqi children become forever embittered.
“We don’t want our children to have hate inside them,” said
Ryad Al-Dabbagh, dean of Al-Mustinsariya University in Baghdad and
a father of three.
He and the Coloradans agreed to petition universities that
once hosted Iraqi students – including Colorado State University,
the University of Colorado and the University of Denver _ to begin
exchange programs again.
Now, back in Colorado, some in the group plan to press a
political case against sanctions. They talk about blizzarding
congressional offices with phone calls, shadowing presidential
candidates.
But working Iraqis, while desperate for economic breathing
room, were equally interested in developing contacts with the
outside world.
Individual people mixing “might make a difference” in
forestalling conflict, Iraqi actress Azadouhi Samual suggested.
Sitting at a table, she leaned over an imaginary small cup of
tea. She pressed her forefinger and thumb tips together. She
pretended to spoon out bad blood.
“If everybody take out one spoonful of bad things,” she said,
“then maybe we can make it clear.”
Reporter Bruce Finley will discuss his trip to Iraq on 9News
This Morning between 7:30 a.m. and 8 a.m. today. The Colorado
peace group will be featured in a Channel 9 report at 10 tonight.
November 7, 1999 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Human Rights, Security
Code Talkers WWII heroes get late recognition
WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. – For the first time in half a century,
the Navajo Code Talkers find themselves standing at the edge of
the limelight.
Researchers seek them for interviews. Schools invite them to
speak. Hollywood producers want to film action movies about them.
All the attention is linked to a longtime secret: the Code
Talkers’ use of Dine, the complex, tonal Navajo language, to help
the United States win World War II.
As boys in U.S. government-run boarding schools, the Code
Talkers would be punished for speaking Navajo. But when the war
flared, the government that banned their unique language suddenly
valued it as the base for a code to flummox the Japanese. The
Marines enlisted 420 Navajos, many of them teenagers, for combat
communications.
A code was developed using Navajo words to represent each
English letter. The Navajos also borrowed from nature for military
terms, translating battleships as “whales,” fighter jets as
“hummingbirds,” bombers as “buzzards,” bombs as “eggs.”
For years, only military historians knew much about the
special mission in which Code Talkers transmitted thousands of
messages on World War II’s bloodiest beaches, from Guadalcanal to
Iwo Jima. U.S. officials long failed to recognize this unusual
cross-cultural service.
Now in their 70s, with etched, weary faces, the men are
unsure what to make of the recent sudden attention. Some are
ambivalent.
“We just think it’s kind of late,” said their leader Sam
Billison, 74, president of the Navajo Code Talkers’ Association
and a member of the Navajo Tribal Council. Shaking his head in the
doorway of his one-story home, Billison noted that one Hollywood
thriller in the works may use Anglo actors to play the leading
Code Talker roles.
Surviving Code Talkers, in recent interviews, tried to convey
their experience, starting with their move to assimilate in the
modern world, then later to conserve the Navajo language for the
future. Many are still physically active, chopping trees,
attending political meetings. Going into the 21st century, the men
are an emblem for Native Americans – struggling for survival
within the nation they served, the nation that has all but
obliterated their world.
From boarding schools to battlefields
The story began when the Code Talkers were boys, sent out from
round cedar-log hogans across the Navajo reservation. It’s a high
desert land, a fourth the size of Colorado, where blue skies
blanket natural wonders from the blood-red buttes of the Monument
Valley to echoing Canyon de Chelly.
Their parents herded sheep and grew corn. There was no
electricity or running water.
Many parents wanted their sons to be educated at boarding
schools the U.S. government had established around reservations.
“Son, you should go to school,” Billison recalled his mother
saying every morning. “She used to say: “Look at the way we live.
Look at the hogan. Look, we don’t have any car. We don’t have
anything. I don’t want you to grow up and be like this. … I
don’t want you to live the way we are living now.'” Sheep prices
were falling. Anglo cattlemen encroached on their land.
Thomas Begay, 73, remembers his father telling him: “I want
you to be like that white man over there in that suit and tie. I
want you to be in that position,” he said. “Never again will my
family live off livestock.”
But boarding school often was brutal.
Administrators changed Navajo names to Christian ones. They
forbade the students from speaking Navajo. Transgressors were
punished – grounded, ordered to write sentences over and over,
humiliated as teachers washed their mouths out with soap.
“They’d line us up, march us around,” said Wilford Buck, 73,
who attended a school near Ship-rock, N.M. “You missed your
parents. You wanted to see your parents.”
The idea of Navajo-based code took hold in 1942. Philip
Johnston, who grew up on the reservation as the son of a
missionary, suggested to military leaders that Navajos might give
the United States an advantage in sending secure battlefield
messages.
U.S. recruiters set up on the reservation. Thousands of
Navajos volunteered to fight, eager for off-reservation work. The
Marines chose 420 who seemed particularly bright to be Code
Talkers.
After breezing through basic training, they worked secretly
in military classrooms in California. The initial code they
memorized included 26 Navajo words – one for each English letter.
There were 211 other words for military phenomena. Observation
planes became “owls.” Submarines were “iron fish.” Grenades were
“potatoes.”
At the time, U.S. troops relied on complicated combinations
of numbers and letters that they changed daily. Still, Japanese
cryptographers were cracking U.S. codes regularly – learning what
troop movements to expect.
At Guadalcanal, a U.S. colonel grumbled that it took 21/2
hours to send and decode a single message.
In a test, Navajo Code Talkers relayed that same message in
minutes.
From then on, the Navajos were considered essential. Or at
least their code was. Security guards assigned to each Code Talker
reportedly had orders to execute them if necessary to keep them
out of Japanese hands.
First on beaches and in foxholes
The Navajos were among the first Americans crawling on the
bloody beaches at Saipan, Tarawa, Guam, Iwo Jima, Okinawa – flash
points in the South Pacific.
Attached to invading ground units, they lugged M-1 rifles or
carbines and 2-foot-tall radios. In their warrior tradition, many
also carried pouches of sacred corn pollen, arrowheads and
feathers for protection. They knew that medicine men and their
elders were praying back on the reservation.
At war, the Code Talkers prayed, too, calling on Navajo holy
people.
“Anywhere. In the foxhole. To survive,” said Jimmy Begay, 76,
who still wears the handmade necklace he clutched during the war.
“That’s what my grandfather told me: “When you go, if you get
stuck, say the prayers,'” Begay said. “Then I’d feel all right.”
On the steamy islands, prompt radio communication was crucial
for troops to receive effective artillery and bombing support. One
Code Talker would be given a message written in English to
translate into code. Another Code Talker would read it into the
radio. Other Code Talkers on command boats would receive the code
and translate it back into English.
An island named Iwo Jima
One island Code Talkers know too well is Iwo Jima, where
fighting in 1945 left 6,000 Americans and 22,000 Japanese dead.
Iwo Jima was a Japanese stronghold. Before the U.S. invasion,
bombers blistered the island for 72 days. Yet Japanese troops
retained their hold, massed in tunnels.
That’s when Thomas Begay and his unit approached, in a
rocking iron boat. They leapt into waves, he recounted, and fought
their way forward under heavy fire.
Other boats “were all torn to pieces,” Begay said. “There
were bodies. … I was numb. You know, you came to some places
where you got so scared you didn’t have feelings.”
As for Billison, he worked at first on the flagship offshore
with commanders. “We saw the machines – tanks, weasels – bogged
down on the beach.” Then he was ordered to join the invasion.
At night, climbing down the rope ladder on the side of the
ship, he remembered hesitating. Was his training sufficient, he
wondered, “to save myself?” He made himself move on into a boat
and then into the deep, black, sandy morass.
“You couldn’t walk, you couldn’t run, because of that sand.
The only way you could move ahead was to crawl on all fours.”
A Japanese fighter plane roared overhead. Bullets and mortars
rained down from Mount Suribachi.
“You knew they were targeting everybody,” Billison said.
Jimmy Begay was there, too, crawling through the black sand.
“They’d pin you down,” Jimmy Begay said. “Can’t go no more.
Then you’d send a message to bring in a bomb. Anything.”
The coded messages moved, flawlessly, more than 800 of them
during the first 48 hours, according to military records. And this
time, the Japanese couldn’t crack the code. Maj. Howard Conner,
signal officer for the 5th Marine Division in the battle, was
quoted later as saying, “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines
would never have taken Iwo Jima.”
Most Code Talkers came home from that ordeal and the war.
Today, an estimated 190 of the 420 who served are still alive.
Many prefer not to talk about what happened.
“When you are out there, you don’t feel it that much,” Buck
said. “Afterward, that’s when it gets you. People being shot at.
The real thing. Not just pictures made in Hollywood. People being
shot at and dying. Later on, it scares you.”
Forgotten by nation they fought for
After the war, the Navajos went home on buses.
Elders arranged purification rituals – a four-day “Enemy Way”
ceremony – designed to get each man’s mind off the war. Jimmy
Begay remembers a medicine man bathing him in yucca soap, then
rolling him in white corn meal to dry. The elders chanted prayers.
They “took the shield off,” Begay said, “a shield that protects
you during the war.”
Begay felt “a sort of cool feeling inside me,” he said, “and
I started to cry. It was a strong prayer. Then I felt all right.
No anger. … They told me: “Now you don’t have to have fear
again.'” Many returning warriors faced poverty. The economic boom
that made the United States the world’s richest nation was
bypassing the Code Talkers and their people. To this day, income
on this semi-sovereign reservation lags far behind the U.S.
average. According to federal figures, the average income here is
about $71 a week.
And many warriors found themselves confronted with
indignities. Some weren’t allowed to vote. Some had to travel far
and haggle for medical treatment they needed. As recently as the
early 1990s, Thomas Begay said, he had trouble obtaining a
passport, with State Department officials questioning his
citizenship.
The Code Talker mission was declassified in 1968. Yet it
wasn’t until 1982 that President Reagan formally acknowledged the
courageous service, proclaiming Aug. 14 Code Talkers Day.
Before that, people who saw them marching in Veterans Day
parades often had no idea what they’d done.
Nevertheless, Code Talkers on the reservation remained loyal
to the United States. Many devoted their lives to federal programs
that encouraged assimilation into mainstream U.S. society.
Buck worked construction projects. Among those who earned
college degrees, Billison became a principal, teacher and
superintendent, and served for years on Navajo governing councils.
Thomas Begay at first trained young mechanics and clerks. Later he
ran the Navajo branch of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.
“What was in my mind when I came back was: There is a better
life out there beyond the Navajo reservation in urban centers,”
Begay said.
His advice to a new generation echoed that of his father
before the war: “Be like those white folks. Have a job. Earn a
living.”
The civil rights movement hadn’t begun. Assimilation was the
only option, said John Echo Hawk, a Pawnee who grew up in Navajo
country and now directs the Boulder-based Native American Rights
Fund.
“But in the last generation, Indians have fought back,” Echo
Hawk said. “They’ve used the courts and politics to try to get
more control over their lives.”
New mission: Preserving language
The Code Talkers, too, grew concerned about modern culture
diluting their Navajo culture and language.
After he retired, Thomas Begay noticed that “the language was
being lost.”
And that gave him pause. In the Marines, he wanted “to prove
that I can be as good as anyone else.” Now he drives to schools
around the reservation where he and his wife sing traditional
Navajo songs.
He wants “to identify as being a Navajo,” he said. “Not
somebody else.”
Buck voiced similar sentiments. “If we don’t teach the little
kids the language, I don’t know how long we’ll survive.”
Billison for years has tried to improve Navajo instruction in
schools.
But U.S. television shapes children’s thinking. Families
flip-flop between jobs in U.S. cities and communal connections at
home.
Wary of appearing in Hollywood limelight
The Code Talkers weigh grinding poverty and the erosion of
their culture against the potential benefits of fame.
They’ve shared their war experiences recently in schools as
far away as Dallas. And Hollywood’s action movies in the works
certainly could amplify their efforts.
On the other hand, “it’s people making money off this for
themselves,” Guy Clauschee, 72, said.
“They’ll make a lot of money. And they’ll add some more
action, like in John Wayne,” Jimmy Begay said after a morning’s
work cutting wood for the winter. “I don’t care much for all that.
That’s why I don’t talk too much.”
A movie cameraman approached him recently, asking Begay how
he felt about fighting for his country. Later, Begay chuckled at
how he taunted the cameraman: “”We don’t have a country,'” he’d
said. “”You guys have it all now. We have a reservation.'” One of
the movies, “Windtalkers,” to be directed by John Woo and
distributed by MGM, will be filmed in Hawaii next summer, with
Nicolas Cage as the star, said Michael Dellheim of the New Mexico
film office.
Code Talker veterans sent a letter telling Cage “that to use
Anglos to portray Navajo Code Talkers is not the right thing to
do, and we object to it,” Billison said.
Another project won approval after Code Talkers reviewed a
script. “Whisper the Wind” boasts a $30 million budget and Gale
Anne Hurd, who produced “Armageddon,” “Aliens,” and the
“Terminator” movies. The deal included money for the Code Talkers
association. Researchers say they’re filming a documentary to be
released along with the movie.
The Hollywood action adds grist at the Code Talkers’ monthly
meetings, where they sip coffee and attend to honoring dead
colleagues.
The limelight could be nice, they concede. They want their
children to value tradition.
Navajo “is the most powerful and sacred language,” Billison
said. “We found out.”
February 14, 1999 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Human Rights, Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
CUCUNA, Guatemala -“Oh, Osveli. My little one. Where have
you gone?”
Isolated in mountains where they’ve cultivated corn patches
for centuries, Mayan farmers chant for a fallen 15-year-old boy
– killed in Colorado as an illegal immigrant when a smuggler’s
van crashed Dec. 23.
They carry the boy in a donated steel coffin to a ridge crest
where they’ll pray for nine days – beneath the sun and the stars
– before decorating Osveli’s tomb with a cross.
Cristobal, Osveli’s father, opens the coffin, peeks at the
disfigured face. And villagers pack in what Osveli would need
for a journey.
Carefully folded clothes. A blanket. New black walking boots.
Even as fathers, mothers and sisters mourn, anxious young men,
soles of their own boots worn thin, talk nervously about the
journeys they intend to make.
“We need money to live,” said Osveli’s 23-year-old brother,
Aulio, a father of three.”I will go to the United States soon.”
The circumstances behind the tragedy of Osveli Salas Vasquez –
which was chronicled in The Denver Post a week ago – suggest the
makings of a mass migration from Central American villages.
Consider how, here in Cucuna, Osveli’s death only adds to the
pressure on the people he hoped to support. Just paying debts
Osveli owed means his family must send another son north in
search of work.
A Colorado rancher who brought home the bodies of Osveli and
Raquel Jimenez Aguilar, a second Mayan migrant killed in the
crash, got an intimate view of the situation. Neil Harmon, who
also runs a funeral home, embarked on an odyssey to do what he
and his wife, Judy, felt must be done.
They lost their son in a car crash two decades ago. And when
they saw the unidentified young Mayans in their morgue at
Springfield, they knew that somewhere parents were suffering.
Mayans here responded with incredulous gratitude.”We’ve
never had an American come into our village and do something
like this,” one man said.
And the villagers began confiding to the Harmons how they
want to benefit from the modern world but not get lost in it.
The Harmons returned to Colorado last week with a new
understanding of the migrant workers – a record 5 million of
them illegal – who help drive the U.S. economy.
“We have a responsibility to help these people who have
nothing,” said Harmon, a politically conservative 61-year-old
who serves as deputy coroner and sheriff’s posse member in
southeastern Colorado’s Baca County.”The pressure is really on
now. This matters because America could lose a valuable culture.”
Getting ahead in Guatemala has proven an uphill battle for
impoverished Mayans. They trek long distances from highland
villages to attend school. They migrate on foot across Mexico to
the United States.
The risks seem horrendous by U.S. standards. But Mayans say
they are desperate.
“We need money to buy land,” said Bidal, father of Raquel
Aguilar, after the first funeral the Harmons attended.
Bidal’s wife died a dozen years ago. Raquel and his five
brothers and a sister had to fend for themselves while Bidal
worked plots of land owned by others. They lived in an adobe
shack with no running water or electricity at Aldea La Laguna.
The village lies up a steep hill from another village called
Chejoj, which six months ago received electricity when
government workers extended a power line.
Raquel migrated to the United States and returned with enough
money to buy a small plot of land last year. But his brothers
and sister still seemed to be falling behind. Raquel”wanted
his little brother to go to school and get a career,” Bidal
said. So last fall, Raquel and his boyhood friend, Aniseto
Ramirez Vasquez, set out for Florida again.
As villagers hoisted his coffin off a dusty field and carried
it toward a cemetery, Bidal hung back.”I can’t bear to see him
go into the ground,” he said tearfully.
In the procession, 45-year-old Florenzio, Aniseto’s father,
approached the Harmons. Aniseto was one of 13 illegal immigrants
who survived the van crash on the prairie. It was Aniseto who
broke down, under questioning by U.S. Immigration and
Naturalization Service agents, and identified the body of his
friend Raquel.
Aniseto is in jail, a federal detention center at Englewood,
as a witness in the federal case against the smugglers who drove
the van. Then Aniseto faces deportation.
“Will he be able to stay there and work?” Florenzio asked.
“Or will they send him home? To stay and work, that would be
the best that could happen. We are poor. We have no money.”
The Harmons assured Florenzio that a priest would visit
Aniseto in prison.
Then Israel Roblero approached Harmon hopefully about working
in Colorado.”One of these days I may see you there,” he said.
Harmon paused a few seconds before replying.”Well, I’ll be
glad to see you.”
Some immigration experts believe economic integration across
the Americas will lead to more and more Mayan villagers
migrating to the United States for work.
Hurricane destruction of crops last fall added to the pressure
on indigenous farmers, confined to the margins of Central
American society. They can’t get ahead without leaving their
villages, said Tracy Ehlers, a University of Denver anthropology
professor who has worked in Guatemala since 1976.
“There are no opportunities for kids,” Ehlers said.”They
have to take their lives in their hands and go north.”
A U.S.-orchestrated coup here in 1954 led to decades of
Guatemalan civil war and a legacy of poverty. The conditions
have led desperate Guatemalans into smuggling cocaine and
growing opium for Mexican mobsters.
“Are we responsible for this in any way? Yeah. No doubt about
it,” said Robert Carlsen, a University of Colorado professor
who recently published a book about a highland Mayan community.
“We’ve contributed to the destabilization that makes it so that
(Mayans) can’t exist in their own villages. We put the generals
in power. The cocaine consumers are in the United States.”
And the U.S. economy benefits from cheap migrant labor,
Carlsen added.”Where would we be without them?”
U.S. immigration officials are watching for signs of a mass
migration. In December, most of the 2,400 migrants stopped along
the southwestern U.S. border came from Central America, said
Greg Gagne, INS spokesman in Washington, D.C. Many were
indigenous people who find little opportunity at home.
“We recognize that the potential is there,” Gagne said.
“We have contingency plans that deal with augmenting our
resources along the border. … Certainly, on a human level, we
have empathy for these individuals. But our job requires us to
enforce the law. And we do.”
After Raquel’s funeral, reaching Osveli’s village proved
difficult for Harmon.
The road to Cucuna turned into a steep trail, too rough for
four-wheel-drive. Harmon set out on a mule.
Osveli’s brother Aulio and other men already had hauled the
300-pound casket up the steep, 3-mile, twisting trail to Cucuna.
Harmon followed them into the clouds where, at an altitude of
about 9,000 feet, villagers look down on Chiapas, Mexico, to the
west.
Men trek down there, sneak across the Mexican border and work
on small coffee plantations. They earn about $3.50 a day.
Osveli got tired of that and left. And died.
When Harmon arrived, the villagers, who speak mostly in Mam,
were mourning.
They invited him into an adobe house, across from the
thatch-roof adobe where Osveli lived. The closed coffin was on
display, candles flickering around it. Women arranged lilies
they picked below in the valley by the Coatan River.
Cristobal, Osveli’s 57-year-old father, spoke to Harmon through
a translator.
“Thank you for bringing my son back to his home. I am content
now that my son is home.”
Into the night, as villagers grieved in the candlelight, nine
young men gathered more closely around Harmon.
“We can’t do anything,” Santos Hernandez confided in a
quavering voice, tears in his eyes.”We work all the time. We
have to go to make it, to make it here. To stay we would have to
work the land better using fertilizers. But we don’t have the
money to get fertilizers. We can’t do anything. We all want to
go to the United States.”
Hurricanes last fall wiped out most of Cucuna’s corn. A bit
that was salvaged was stored in the rafters above where Osveli’s
body lay in the coffin.
The next day, the young men told Harmon how Osveli had
borrowed 8,000 quetzales (more than $1,000) from a woman in
Tacana, the electrified town 5 miles below in the valley.
It was money he needed to pay guides and make it to Florida,
where he hoped to join his sister, Irma. He planned to earn
enough money to pay off the debt and more. But robbers took the
money in Mexico.
When Osveli set out a second time with his brother, Noe,
the family already owed the debt from his first try.
“”So that is why now I must go,” Osveli’s brother Aulio said.
The death raised concerns about dangers of the long journey
north – which Mayan migrants make mostly on foot.
A 23-year-old villager, Jaime Rodrigo Perez, confessed that
Osveli’s death leaves him”a little afraid” about leaving home
for the United States. He described an uneasy tension between
young men and village elders who never felt they had to leave
home.
“We have to go for money. Here, we can’t earn it,” Perez
said.”Our parents say: “Don’t leave. It’s far. Why leave?’ But
we need to live better. We try to explain to our parents. They
are content only when we return. And then, they thank us.”
The Harmons say they never thought much about migrant workers
until the accident near their ranch. Now they’re convinced that
technical assistance delivered directly to Central American
villagers, and compassion toward migrants in the United States,
could help improve a complex, intertwined situation.
In Cucuna, Neil Harmon asked villagers what they would buy –
if village debts were paid – with any extra money their children
might earn in the United States.
A water pump, they said. Elders said a gasoline-powered pump
might help them move water hundreds of feet up from the valley
floor below during dry seasons. And a pump could move greater
volumes of water from side streams when they run full.
Harmon nodded. What else?
Electricity, they said. A farmer across the valley in another
hillside village had a solar-powered light. Cucuna villagers
looked out at it every night.
And how did he get it?
His son had worked in the U.S. and brought the solar panel
home.
Today, just about every ambitious Mayan in Cucuna has Neil
Harmon’s address on the Colorado prairie near Springfield.
“No, I won’t be surprised to see them knocking on my door,”
Harmon said, heading home past the mist-shrouded tops of
volcanoes.”And I wonder, will I welcome them then? I don’t
know. … But we’re going to try to help.”
February 6, 1999 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Human Rights, Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
Coloradans help Guatemalan clan
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala – A Colorado rancher and his wife
walked solemnly into a world of grief this week – bringing the
bodies of two illegal immigrants home.
The fathers of the two Guatemalans were waiting for Neil and
Judy Harmon at a mortuary. Anguish etched on their faces, they
are Mayan farmers who journeyed for more than seven hours from
Guatemala’s impoverished highlands to the capital.
Their sons – 15-year-old Osveli Salas Vasquez and 22-year-old
Raquel Jimenez Aguilar – died near the Harmons’ ranch in
southeastern Colorado – victims of unscrupulous smugglers.
“I was trying to convince him not to go,” Aguilar’s father,
Bidal, lamented. “But he saw that the situation here wasn’t
getting any better. He went to support his little brothers and
sister.”
The Guatemalans gazed with awe at the Harmons, who also run a
funeral home near their ranch in Springfield, where they had
taken care of the bodies since the crash Dec. 23 of a van packed
with illegal immigrants.
The Harmons couldn’t ignore the tragedy – two decades ago,
they lost their own son in a car crash. And the more they tried
to do the right thing, the deeper they ventured into Central
America’s woes.
The villagers who raised Raquel and Osveli are desperate.
A U.S.-backed coup here in 1954 led to decades of Guatemalan
civil war, which brought guerrillas and government soldiers into
the highlands and erased more than 400 Mayan villages. War gave
way in the mid-1990s to lawlessness and pockets of extreme
poverty. Then last fall, hurricanes hammered Central America,
worsening the poverty by destroying coffee plantations where
Mayan villagers sometimes found work.
So village elders had little choice but to wave adios to their
young shining stars last fall. Osveli and his 19-year-old
brother, Noe, left from Canton Cucuna, near Tacana, and Raquel
from Aldea La Laguna, near Cuilco.
They hiked down from their native land of towering volcanoes
and joined the exodus of tens of millions of people moving from
poor countries to rich ones. Raquel, Osveli and Noe hired
“coyotes,” smugglers who spirited them through Mexico and into
the Arizona desert. There they met other smugglers, who drove
them in van along a notorious smuggling route – one that INS
agents say brings at least 1,300 illegal immigrants a month
through Colorado. But these smugglers pushed too hard. On a
frigid patch of prairie west of Springfield, the van crashed.
Raquel died instantly of head injuries. Osveli died soon after,
also of head injuries, at Southeast Colorado Hospital.
The bodies lay unidentified in Springfield for more than a week.
Some authorities called for cremating or burying the illegal
immigrants in Springfield. But Neil Harmon, who also serves as
the deputy Baca County coroner and a member of the sheriff’s
posse, wouldn’t do that. In 1980, the Harmons’ 19-year-old son,
Bo, died on that same prairie when a tractor-trailer mowed
through his prized bronze-colored Camaro.
“It’s bad enough losing a child,” Harmon said recently at
the wheel of his white pickup. “But for the families that sent
those boys not to have the bodies back. …”
So he embalmed the bodies carefully. And he waited, checking on
them at the end of each day.
“These boys need to go home.”
***
The tragedy of Osveli, Noe and Raquel began with basic education
and ambition.
They grew up in villages where elders speak mostly in Mam – a
language spoken before Spaniards arrived in America. No
electricity. No running water. The villagers harvest just enough
maize and beans to survive. But the boys went to school in
accordance with new Guatemalan laws. They learned to speak
Spanish and write a bit. In the Vasquez family, Osveli was the
youngest of twelve, said his 57-year-old father, Cristobal Salas
Perez. “My last boy.”
Rugged, nearly impassable terrain separates Osveli’s village
from Raquel’s. The two never met before reaching the United
States.
Raquel had worked briefly in Florida before and saved enough
money to dream about buying a bit of land near his home,
building a house and getting married. He returned from Florida
in February 1998 to check on his father, five younger brothers
and a sister. Their mother, Rosenda, died 12 years ago.
The children were barely managing to eat, said 47-year-old
Bidal. “That’s why Raquel left again, to help the family
survive.”
Getting into the United States was an ordeal.
After the journey through Mexico, U.S. Immigration and
Naturalization Service agents caught Raquel trying to cross the
border illegally near Nogales on Dec. 8. They entered his
fingerprints into a computer database and sent him back across
the border. On his second try, Raquel made it. He sneaked to
orange groves near Chandler Heights, Arizona, a well-known
staging ground for smuggling across the United States.
Osveli and Noe fared better at first. But the desert route
they took left cactus spikes embedded in Osveli’s right hand and
arm.
Laying low in the orange groves, they met other immigrants,
all hungry and exhausted, and haggled with smugglers for rides.
Much of what happened next is described in a federal affidavit,
based on interviews with crash survivors, that prosecutors in
Denver filed for their case against smugglers.
Investigators believe 13 illegal immigrants jammed into the
ill-fated van. They paid $250 to $700 each for transportation to
labor compounds in Tennessee, North Carolina and Florida.
The smugglers suspected of transporting Osveli, Raquel, Noe
and the others were illegal immigrants themselves: Alberto
Velasquez of Guatemala and Beltran Morales Roblero of Mexico.
Other than front seats for the driver and his assistant, there
was one seat. Most of the immigrants huddled on the floor. And
in the frigid darkness of Dec. 23, the van was speeding along
U.S. 160, which runs east from Trinidad. INS agents say they
can’t afford to patrol the long, empty highway.
The accident occurred about 6:30 a.m., 8 miles west of
Pritchett, where the highway curves sharply to the north. Over
the last two decades, more than a dozen vehicles have crashed at
the turn.
The driver hit the brakes and skidded. The van apparently
flipped and rolled.
The immigrants wore no seat belts. Some, including Noe, were
dozing. The impact hurled them around the metal interior. Some
were ejected through shattered windows. The van’s roof crumpled.
At the back of the van, Raquel slumped, face down and
lifeless, his skull crushed.
Six survivors, cut and bruised, staggered away from the
wreckage. One man threw away a driver’s license that INS
investigators later found in a clump of grass. As the sun rose,
the survivors trudged across the prairie toward three grain
elevators visible in the distance. A Colorado Public Service
utility crew picked them up and drove to the scene of the crash,
then radioed for help.
At the Southeast Colorado Hospital in Springfield, a doctor
pronounced Osveli dead. Nurses called for an airlift to Denver
for his brother, Noe, who was unconscious with neck injuries.
“This disturbed me terribly,” said nurse Marilyn Chenoweth.
The immigrants she treated “looked like a bunch of kids.”
Meanwhile, Neil Harmon, in his capacity as deputy coroner, went
to the scene and retrieved Raquel’s body. And Noe woke up
clueless in Denver.
Doctors at Denver Health Medical Center had stabilized him and
put his neck in a brace. Several teeth were bashed in, leaving
raw nerves exposed. A nurse told him he’d been in an accident.
All Noe knew was that his little brother Osveli wasn’t with him.
***
At the INS regional detention center in Aurora, agents pressed
the crash survivors for evidence, anything. They got nothing for
days.
Then one of the survivors, another Guatemalan, broke down and
identified Raquel Jimenez Aguilar. He gave the name of a cousin
in North Carolina.
Around Christmas, Noe was released, somehow, from the Denver
Health Medical Center. His discharge papers indicate nurses
checked him out on Dec. 26, with instructions to seek further
treatment. Noe went to the Denver Rescue Mission in a taxi
sent from the hospital, shelter director Paul Anderson said.
That was home for a week. Noe barely spoke, shelter workers
said. He couldn’t eat, though he was starving, with the nerves
of his broken teeth exposed.
And Noe might still be at that shelter today were it not for
the Corica family of southeast Aurora.
On the snowy evening of Jan. 2, Carmine Corica, his wife,
Razz, and Gaby, their 12-year-old daughter, who wanted to help
homeless people, arrived at the shelter for a stint as volunteer
kitchen workers.
A Sun Microsystems technician, 37-year-old Razz Corica once
was an illegal immigrant herself, smuggled across the Mexican
border with her mother. Once, after INS agents raided the
Chicago plastics factory where her mother worked, she was nearly
deported. An agent took pity on the mother and her daughter and
offered to sponsor them as future citizens.
At the homeless shelter in Denver, Razz remembered all this
when she noticed Noe gazing down, looking lost, as she tried to
hand him a green chile burrito.
He sat down alone and couldn’t eat it. The Coricas decided to
sit down next to him.
He told them he’d been in an accident. “He said: “I’m on my
way to Florida to meet my sister,”’ Razz recalled. “I said:
“You’re in Colorado.’ He took that in. He said: “How far is that
from Florida?”’
Another homeless man showed them a crinkled newspaper story
about an accident in Springfield. The bodies hadn’t been
identified.
From that moment, the Coricas made the case their mission.
“I put my arms around him and said: “We’re going to help you
find your family,”’ Razz said.
Noe had little to offer. The telephone numbers to reach his
sister Irma in Florida had been lost. That night, Razz worked
her computer and phones, focusing on “Ejido Miscun,” the name
of a village in Chiapas, Mexico, that Noe mentioned – a village
where his other sister, Mercedes, might have access to a public
telephone.
Razz reached an operator in Mexico City who gave her an area
code for southern Mexico. Razz dialed a number randomly,
reaching a servant, and arranged to call back 15 minutes later
for an area code for Ejido Miscun. Using that code, she dialed
randomly again, reaching a nurse. And the nurse gave her a
number for a public telephone facility close to Ejido Miscun.
Razz reached an operator, who said she would have Noe and
Osveli’s sister Mercedes by the telephone that evening.
At last the connection was made.
The Coricas got more phone numbers and information they needed
to help Noe.
They’d taken Noe into their two-story, three-bedroom home.
They rented him a Bruce Lee video.
Carmine Corica persuaded Noe to drive with him to Springfield
in early January to try to find out about his brother. Noe was
terrified that police would arrest him.
Inside Neil Harmon’s funeral home morgue, Noe gazed at the two
bodies silently for more than 10 minutes. He and Corica got
back in the car. That’s when Noe broke down.
Corica still recalls those wails word for word. “My poor
little brother. Now I’ll never see him again. He’s dead. And I
was supposed to protect him.”
Corica called the Harmons later to identify the body.
Neil Harmon rarely has felt so relieved. “I’ve never had a
body this long in 17 years,” he said later in Springfield.
“You think, who is this kid? How do I get him back? He needs to
go back to his family. And am I going to be able to show him
when I get him back?”
The Harmons began collecting money to send the bodies home.
“After losing Bo, it really became important to us to get
these bodies home,” Judy Harmon said. “We’re Christians. We
like to go the extra mile.”
They received contributions from four prairie churches. Baca
County social services officials kicked in $2,000. Denver City
Councilwoman Debbie Ortega persuaded American Airlines to ship
the bodies for free. Illegal immigrants where Osveli and
Raquel’s relatives work scraped together more than $1,000. And
in the end, the Harmons contributed $2,500 of their own money.
They hired Funeraria Latina of west Denver to handle paperwork
with the Guatemalan consulate in Los Angeles.
Meantime, Carmine Corica had rented a car and was driving Noe
on to his destination – a labor compound in Florida.
Reunited with his sister, Noe has managed to elude INS agents,
who are eager to find him as a witness to the crash.
The Coricas are confident they did the right thing.
“I believe U.S. actions in Latin America over the last 200
years are deplorable,” Razz said. “All those governments they
propped up at the expense of the peasant population. … If this
is what I get put in jail for, it’s a noble cause.”
***
This weekend, the Harmons are traveling with the fathers and
cousins of Osveli and Raquel back into their villages. Families
in the villages plan funerals based on a fusion of Catholic and
indigenous rites.
The journey, with gray steel caskets in tow, is a long one on
rugged roads. Logistical preparations began Thursday when the
bodies arrived, and when Guatemalan Congressman Juan Diaz
Gonzalez intervened to help speed matters with airport
authorities. As president of Guatemala’s Commission on
Indigenous Communities, Gonzalez sees smuggling of undocumented
workers as a growing problem that countries must address
cooperatively – not just with domestic immigration crackdowns.
Impoverished Mayans are making their way to the U.S. “out of
necessity,” said Gonzalez. “It’s survival for them. And the
migration is going to increase rapidly because of the hurricanes
last fall.”
A cooperative approach could eliminate opportunities for
smugglers: Guatemala could open its doors to U.S.
labor-contracting companies that would recruit workers here and
grant them proper eight-month visas up front, Gonzales said.
But mourning, not politics, was the priority in Guatemala City.
The fathers and cousins repeatedly thanked the Harmons.
“We’ve been suffering here. We were far away and couldn’t do
anything when we heard about the deaths,” said Luis Domingos
Vasquez, a cousin of Raquel Aguilar serving as family spokesman.
“The boys were in their country illegally. And for these people
to help. …
“How can we ever repay you? ” he said to the Harmons. “God
will reward you. We are very satisfied and content with what you
have done.”
Osveli’s father, Cristobal, can’t bear to look directly at the
Americans, ashamed because he doesn’t have money to help pay for
a truck to carry his dead son’s casket.
“I want to thank for all your work and sacrifices,” he told
Judy Harmon in a quiet, measured voice. “I am completely
grateful to you.”
The Harmons replied, through an interpreter, that they
understand, a little, because they lost a son once, too.
Guatemalan migrants “are just people, like we are,” Neil
Harmon said. “They are poor, hardworking people just trying to
get a job. And I can identify with them.”
January 11, 1998 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Africa, Human Rights, Immigrants, Migration
Dia’s family devastated by his death
DIORBIVOL, Senegal – “Baba?” cries 3-year-old Amadou,
clinging to his visiting uncle Abdourahmane’s right leg, dark
eyes shining with hope.
Daddy?
Little Amadou is bewildered by the soft sobbing among adults
he hears in this hot windy village at the edge of Africa’s
Sahara Desert. He’s never met his quiet, coffee-colored father.
They were supposed to meet this year. Yet now when Amadou asks
about Daddy, the sobbing gets louder.
Nobody can bear to tell Amadou the truth: His father –
38-year-old Oumar Dia – is dead. A gas station clerk shot him
one November night as he waited at a bus stop after work, half a
world away in Denver, Colo.
Now in tiny Diorbivol, the full meaning of Dia’s death is
starting to sink in: A bit of wanton barbarism in Denver
threatens the very survival of his village. Like villagers
across Africa, and much of the developing world, Dia’s people
depend increasingly on their migrant sons.
They sent Dia into the growing wave of tens of millions of
sons and daughters migrating from poorer nations to richer ones
to make better lives for themselves and their families back
home. And Dia became one of the newest of such immigrants in the
United States, where just about everybody has an ancestor who
came from someplace else – Ireland, Italy, Germany, Mexico. It
is a phenomenon that has defined our country.
Here in Africa, the situation resembles that of American farm
boys leaving the heartland for city lights. Young Africans go
far to get money at gateways to the global economy. They scrub,
lift, sell – any kind of job – in Dia’s case cleaning at a Hyatt
hotel. They send home money and sustain the places of their
heart – the familial villages where two-thirds of Africa’s 700
million people live.
The Denver Post decided to go to Dia’s village to investigate
the impact of his death on the people he was supporting. A month
after the murder, you can already measure the difference here in
Diorbivol. The rice supply is running out. The water pump that
used to irrigate rice paddies doesn’t work, and nobody’s in a
position to diagnose the problem, let alone pay for fuel. Eyes
and noses of the sick are left to run. Children no longer can
aspire to attend high school. Dia’s family must forget about a
solar panel that would let them turn on a light at night.
This wasn’t the first tragedy the family endured. In 1989,
they were driven from their village in Mauritania by the Moors
in a massive land grab. The conflict has racial overtones
because the lighter-skinned Moors still enslave dark-skinned
Mauritanians without land.
Now in this village where the Dia family resettled along the
Senegal River, Dia’s grieving relatives slump on straw mats
beneath the acacia tree that grows in their compound of cement
houses and adobe huts. A pale blue-and-yellow mosque towers over
the survivors: his widow, Mariam, veiled in black; his frail
father, Barka, tears seeping through slits of his nearly blind
eyes; his mother, Aissata, lines on her face etching in what
feels like too much of an endless struggle.
“Since Oumar died, we cannot live normally,” says
80-year-old Barka, clutching empty bottles of the glaucoma
medicine he needs to save him from blindness. “All what Oumar
had done in the United States, we saw it here. Everything we
needed to lead a good life came from Dia – health, shelter,
food.”
Now the family must decide what to do. Justice is one thing.
But they’re more concerned about simply managing to live.
They’ll send out other sons to try to take Dia’s place. And
they’ll pray.
“Alhamdoulilahi (Thanks be to God),” they say, bowing
repeatedly in respect at the rising and setting of the sun and
the moon and the stars.
The wooden casket sitting behind the mosque here has a splintered
hole in one end. This is the casket that carried Dia’s body
home, accompanied by Mohamadou Cisse, one of Dia’s friends in
Denver. The villagers received it, pulled out the body, and
buried Dia lovingly in the cemetery overlooking the Senegal
River. Dia’s freshly turned grave isn’t marked. The villagers
can’t afford that. But they welcomed Dia back, eulogizing him as
a hero slain while doing his duty for the village.
The villagers understand all too well: Dia bridged a gap that
is wider than the oceans.
Until he was 30, he lived the life of a subsistence farmer.
He was born and grew up in Rouji Aoudi, Mauritania, a squat
adobe village half a day’s hike from here on the northern side
of the Senegal River. He liked to wrestle, sometimes tussling
with other boys to the beat of a drum in parched, dusty yards.
At age 7, he began school, hiking 3 miles and crossing the
river to Senegal, then climbing up through eroding gullies to a
village called Poste. A teacher in a one-room concrete building
taught French, bits of geography and history. At 12, his
education was finished, because his parents had no money to send
him away for high school. So he did what boys do across this
Pulaar-speaking region: herded goats, fished from pirogues in
the murky green river, tended green shoots of maize and millet,
savored the strong sweet tea that women prepare after dusk.
But then, one day in May 1989, everything changed.
Khaki-clad Mauritanian soldiers approached his village. The
fertile floodplain around Rouji Aoudi is one of the few parts of
Mauritania with the potential for large-scale development. In
1989, indiscriminate attacks on Pulaar-speaking people flared
into a brutal campaign that forced out more than 70,000
landowners – persecution that human-rights groups describe as a
Bosnia that the rich world ignored.
When the soldiers arrived, most of the villagers, including
Dia’s family, fled, paddling pirogues across the river to
Senegal. Dia and a half-dozen other men never made it.
The soldiers caught them and arrested them. They marched them
20 miles along the river at gunpoint to what Dia later would
describe as “a military labor camp” at Mbagne. Moorish
authorities have jailed hundreds of Pulaar-speaking people as
political prisoners, and other dark-skinned Mauritanians are
condemned to work as indentured slaves.
The soldiers put Dia and the others to work tilling hard soil
and hauling rocks. Apparently, the Moors believed rocks near
Mbagne contained iron. They used the prisoners as miners. In the
camp, soldiers fed Dia very little.
Others fared worse. In Rouji Aoudi, soldiers gang-raped a
local beauty named Djeneba Baidy. As refugees tell the story,
her parents rescued her one night, led her to the river, sent
her away in a pirogue to Senegal. She took shelter with Dia’s
uncle, Djiby, in Diorbivol. When the soldiers found she was
gone, they threatened to kill the parents if Djeneba wasn’t
returned. Resigned, Djeneba’s brother Adama crossed the river to
collect his sister at Djiby’s house in Diorbivol. The two headed
back to Rouji Aoudi. As they were approaching the village,
soldiers with machine guns opened fire, mowed them down and left
them dying in the dirt.
After two months, the soldiers released Dia and other
prisoners, and ordered them out of Mauritania across the Senegal
River. Dia searched for his family at the Thilogne refugee camp.
When he found them eventually at a camp near Matam, his parents
looked defeated and old. He stayed with them for a few weeks.
But he knew, without asking, there was only one thing to do.
The ethnic cleansing in Mauritania forced Dia to leave rural
Africa for a fundamentally different world.
He squeezed into a 16-seat Car Rapide bus and set out for
Dakar, Senegal’s capital. It was a 12-hour drive down a pocked
two-lane blacktop road that curls across the threshold between
traditional and modern. The closer Dia got to Dakar, the busier
life became. There were more cars, and they moved faster.
Streetside stacks of watermelons for sale grew higher. There
were more merchants, and their voices grew more and more
aggressive. There were power lines and factories of all sorts
making tissues and phosphates and battery acid.
In Dakar, Dia shared a room with a cousin in the crowded slum
of Pikine. He worked shining shoes, lugging a box of rags and
polish. He charged about 20 cents a shine. He saved up enough to
travel, by train and bus, to Abidjan, capital of Ivory Coast,
and later to Libreville, capital of oil-rich Gabon. In these
cities, Dia bought and sold costume jewelry, stringing the
necklaces enticingly across his long, slender fingers and
smiling so that maybe pedestrians would stop.
In this new, busy city world, family life fit in on the side.
On one brief visit to Diorbivol, Dia married Mariam. On
another visit, he rejoiced at the birth of a daughter. Two years
later, Mariam gave birth to another daughter. Dia told her he
also wanted a son. And he wanted to stay with the family. But
the family needed money. Life was tearing Dia apart.
He left again, vowing to return one day and keep their
fractured family together. He promised Mariam he wouldn’t be
like his oldest brother, who went to France 25 years ago and
never came home.
Yet living up to that promise – a promise made by millions of
African men – became incredibly hard. Between 1970 and 1990,
economies crashed and jobs disappeared across Africa, where 270
million people live on less than $1 a day. Conflicts flared from
Kano to Kinshasa. An old bailout option for West Africans in
former French colonies – migrating to Paris – was closed off
under tough new immigration rules.
Dia grew desperate. And on June 3, 1994, he boarded his first
airplane, the Air Afrique flight to New York, where his cousin
Sileye Gaye was living in a basement in Brooklyn. Dia had
embarked on the heart-driven struggle that led millions of
immigrants from around the world into better lives in America.
Almost as soon as he landed at Kennedy International Airport,
he felt a new “time is money” ethic sweeping him up like a
desert wind.
He hailed a cab, and gave Gaye’s address on Dean Street. When
the cab arrived, Gaye emerged from the two-bedroom basement. Dia
got out, said: “America, it’s not like what you hear once you
arrive. It’s harder.”
Gaye knew what he meant. Sometimes Gaye missed Africa so much
he stayed awake all night thinking. If only there were more jobs
at home.
At first, the two worked together as street vendors. “Seven
to seven,” they would say, referring to their 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
routine.
They’d hurry, hurry, catch the A or C train to Manhattan.
There, at a wholesale warehouse, they’d buy discounted
merchandise – Tommy Hilfiger knockoffs, watches – then haul the
stuff back to Brooklyn to sell on the streets.
It was anxious work, complicated by neighborhood gangsters.
When street vendors started packing guns for protection, police
told them: You fight, you both go to jail. Some vendors still
carried bats to scare off gangsters. “We never worked like this
before,” Gaye said, referring to the long hours and the danger.
At night, they retreated to the basement, ate together and
prayed to Allah. After praying, Dia would sit for a few minutes
stroking his red prayer beads contemplatively.
“Alhamdoulilahi,” he would whisper. Thanks be to God.
Meanwhile, across the world, Dia’s mother, Aissata, was
praying, too, in her crumbling adobe hut. Aissata thought about
her son even when she was sleeping. She missed him. Yet facing a
severe drought, she relied on the money he sent to buy rice and
oil.
“In ancient times, there used to be everything here in the
forest,” she explained to her villagers when they asked about
Dia. “Everything we needed was right here. Man did not need to
go away to get things for the family. But now that the wars have
destroyed everything, man is obliged to go abroad to find things
for the family. Many of our fields have been confiscated.”
Here’s the real tragedy of Oumar Dia’s life: Starting in
1996, he was actually managing to make his miracle – the
American miracle – happen the way it’s supposed to. He found a
better job in New York, running a trash compactor for a
janitorial company. Remembering his imprisonment in Mauritania,
he also filed two applications for political asylum.
“The situation in Mauritania has not improved, and I still
fear returning there,” Dia wrote. In the United States, he
sought “protection and relief from the atrocities I have
suffered.”
He seldom took time off work. One day he made an exception.
He rode the ferry from the southern tip of Manhattan to the
Statue of Liberty. He came back smiling.
And in July 1996, after two years in New York City, he
boarded a Greyhound bus for Colorado. He’d heard that a growing
number of West African immigrants earned good money there, and
that Colorado was cheaper than New York. Africans said they felt
less racial tension than in New York.
In Denver, he shared a third-floor apartment off East Colfax
Avenue with fellow Africans. He found work as a janitor at the
Hyatt hotel Downtown. He wore a white uniform and earned $6.50
an hour. And he enrolled in an English class at Emily Griffith
Opportunity School. He took copious notes.
“I am tired” and “She is lonely” are two sentences he
wrote in a workbook.
On Nov. 12, 1996, his application for political asylum was
approved. Dia cried. He celebrated over dinner and fruit juice
with friends. For an African migrant, asylum status means you
can at least think of visiting home without worrying about not
being able to get back into the United States.
And Dia was thinking a lot about his family in Diorbivol. He
sent back $200 a month. He figured out how to phone home through
an expensive and tedious process.
Once a month, he dialed the number of a shop run by Abdul
N’Diaye in Orefonde, a town near Diorbivol. Dia would tell
whoever answered to send somebody to Diorbivol to tell Mariam
Dia that her husband in America would try to call the next day
and to be by the phone in Orefonde. She would walk there, two
hours each way. Sometimes, when Dia couldn’t get off work at the
Hyatt, she waited all day for a call from the United States that
never came.
But when they did connect, Mariam’s heart leapt at the
sensation of hearing Dia’s voice.
“How are the children?” he would say. “The family? What is
lacking there?”
They made plans. They relied on Mamadou Gaye, Dia’s cousin
who lived in Dakar, to relay goods and transfer money. There are
no banks, not even a power line, in Diorbivol. When Amadou was
sick with an open sore on his stomach, Gaye brought the boy to
Dakar for medical treatment.
For the future, Dia envisioned a solar panel on his family’s
roof so his children could see at night. He wanted to help fix
the machine that pumped water up from the river to irrigate rice
paddies. He thought about maybe moving Mariam and the children
to Dakar, where schools were better – maybe even flying them to
Colorado. On the night before he was killed, he telephoned Gaye
in Brooklyn and said he was missing his family too much. This
system of living apart made no sense to him.
“I want to bring them out here,” he told Gaye. “They’d be
safer.”
More than anything, Dia wanted to meet Amadou, his son who
was born after he left for the United States. Now that he had
papers, he promised Mariam he would visit this coming summer, no
matter what. He set aside some money he usually sent home to buy
a plane ticket.
“That’s why this year we couldn’t have new clothes,” Mariam
tells me.
He would get to know his children at last. Then it all fell
apart.
Maybe it was Dia’s determination to see his son Amadou that
explains why he didn’t fight back that night Nov. 18.
He’d just finished work at the Hyatt, was sitting on a 17th
Street bus bench waiting for the last No. 20 bus, which was due
to come by at 11:49 p.m. Jeannie VanVelkinburgh, a single mother
he’d never seen before, joined him waiting by the bench.
Denver police reports describe what happened next. About
11:40, Nathan Thill, a 19-year-old who called himself a
supremacist skinhead, and a friend, with a few beers inside
them, approached the bus bench. They saw Dia. They taunted him
and called him racist names. Finally, they knocked his cap off,
onto the pavement.
VanVelkinburgh reached and picked up the cap. As she was
handing it back to Dia, at 11:46, one of the men opened fire. He
pumped three bullets into Dia’s upper chest and neck. Then, as
VanVelkinburgh turned trying to flee, the killer fired another
bullet into her back that left her paralyzed. Thill later
confessed to the killing. He said he targeted Dia “because he
was black” and didn’t belong in America.
At 12:15 a.m. in the Denver Health Medical Center emergency
room, Dr. Brad Post pronounced Dia dead.
Is that Oumar?” comes the voice of 3-year-old Amadou in
Diorbivol, mid-December, two weeks before Ramadan.
He has glimpsed a framed photo of Dia that village elders are
passing around as they look over condolence letters I delivered
from Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, Dia’s classmates and dozens
of other people in Colorado.
The elders are sitting on the floor of a 12-by-14-foot room.
They nod as a visiting graduate student I hired slowly
translates Webb’s letter into the local Pulaar.
Afterward, the elders make public speeches of thanks to Webb,
President Clinton and the thousands of Coloradans who attended
public anti-hate rallies after the slaying. The killing was a
tragedy for which people of Denver “should be embarrassed,”
Barka Dia allows. Yet the sympathetic way Denver leaders dealt
with Dia’s death – from paying to send Dia’s body to Diorbivol
to prosecution of the crime – leaves the villagers heartened.
“We consider Americans to be the leading people in the
world,” Barka Dia says.
Yet here in this village, where people have virtually
nothing, nearly every family has delivered me a meal to eat. And
the elders have given me a goat – enough meat to feed a family
here for several days. This African village – with such marginal
prospects for the 21st century – is a cradle of basic human
virtues.
The elders tell me villagers have accepted Dia’s death as fate.
Fate is the standard explanation African villagers settle on
when their migrant sons are slain far away. Of the thousands of
Africans who set out from Senegal’s old slave port of Dakar, at
least 40 were murdered in New York over the past five years,
government officials told me. Most were gypsy cabdrivers,
serving dangerous neighborhoods that other cabdrivers avoid. In
each case, villagers mourned. Yet village elders won’t hesitate
to send out more sons to America, government officials said,
because the murders were fate and the villagers have no better
option.
Now in Diorbivol, Dia’s people explain intently that they’re
struggling to move beyond their grief. But there’s so much to
do. For example, the broken water pump. Nobody can afford to fix
it, let alone pay for the fuel to run it. The rice paddies are
drying up, and food supplies are dwindling. Store-bought rice in
Orefonde costs too much. Then there are sick villagers with
runny noses and watery eyes.
Amadou squirms insistently in the arms of his sisters –
5-year-old Djeneba and 7-year-old Makai. The girls remember
their father. They are fine-boned, gentle, content to be quiet,
the way Oumar appears in videos taken before the murder. They
like to play by the river, scooping mud from the banks, molding
it into pirogues and cows. If American children come to
Diorbivol, Makai informs me, “I will take them down to the
river to play.”
As Amadou squirms, Barka Dia, draped in blue robes, clears
his throat, then lays out concerns that are far more pressing
here than the abstract concept of justice. He points at the
children. Makai should be starting school, but the teacher
appointed to work in Diorbivol hasn’t shown up. The family can’t
afford to send the children away to school.
“I am 80 years old now,” he says as the villagers fall
silent. His left hand shakes, still clutching those empty
bottles of glaucoma medicine that he needs.
“As you can see, I cannot work, I cannot do anything,” he
says. “I was always waiting for Oumar to give me things. What
we are eating now was given to us by Oumar. Everything we have
now came from Oumar. And he’s got these three children, two
daughters and one son. These children cannot live if you in the
United States don’t help us.”
The only silent adult on this day is 27-year-old Mariam Dia,
Dia’s widow. Tall and slender, downturned face shrouded in
purple, she’s following a tradition of mourning in seclusion and
silence for three months. But she makes an exception on behalf
of her children.
“If I had the means, I would send my children to study
abroad,” she says. “The men who are responsible for Dia’s
death, I pray to God they may help us, so that we can raise the
children in the best way.”
She pauses for a moment, thinking of the long road from
Mauritania to murder, and how her family in Africa fits into the
modern world. She sighs.
“The best place for the children,” she says resolutely,
“would be the United States.”
DONATIONS
Friends of Oumar Dia, local Muslims and Dia’s employers at
the Downtown Denver Hyatt Regency Hotel have been collecting
money since Dia was killed Nov. 18. The goal is to provide for
Dia’s family, said John Schafer, general manager at the hotel.
So far, more than $20,000 has been raised.
Donations can be made to:
MEMORIAL FUND FOR OUMAR DIA,
c/o Norwest Bank,
1740 Broadway, MS 8671,
Denver 80274;
attn: PERSONAL BANKING.
For more information, contact John Schafer, general
manager, Hyatt Regency Denver, 1750 Welton St., Denver 80202.
Telephone: (303)295-1234.
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A journalist and lawyer, Bruce Finley has investigated local, national and international issues with on-site reporting in more than 40 countries. In his position as a staff writer for the Denver Post, he is focusing on environment-related news including water challenges, the oil and gas boom and wildfire.
