April 4, 2004 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Security
Passenger planes still at risk as efforts to fight terror lack funds, technology
Each month, freight loaders pack some 17 million pounds of
uninspected cargo into the bellies of passenger planes leaving
Denver.
More uninspected commercial cargo – an estimated 2.5 million tons a
year – moves at airports nationwide. No federal agency monitors the
cargo or who’s sending it. Counterterrorism officials see each
piece as potentially explosive – and call this a major threat to
passenger safety.
Congressional leaders have demanded inspections.
“It is a matter of such critical importance, such an obvious
security gap, we cannot afford not to inspect the cargo that
travels on every passenger plane,” said U.S. Rep. Jim Turner,
ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Homeland
Security.
But U.S. Transportation Security Administration officials say
inspecting all cargo is unrealistic. They say they don’t have
enough money or big enough machines to scan enough cargo fast
enough without impeding commerce.
The situation illustrates the soft spots in security and heightened
anxiety plaguing the home-front war on terrorism today.
The railway bombings that killed 191 and wounded more than 1,800 on
March 11 in Madrid, and testimony at the Sept. 11 commission’s
hearings in Washington, have raised concerns that Americans aren’t
as safe as they should be.
Federal agents with access to classified intelligence say there’s
still no way to know whether Denver, or any other city, is more or
less vulnerable.
Part of the problem is money. Part is the nature of the threat.
Agents say their job is becoming harder with new vulnerabilities
emerging as the war on terrorism evolves. “It’s difficult to cover
every potential vulnerability,” said Phillip Reid, FBI agent in
charge for Colorado and Wyoming. “There obviously are
vulnerabilities out there that we aren’t aware of. … It’s an
endless job.”
Government intelligence suggests that enemies, particularly those
tied to al-Qaeda, “tend to look for the major terrorist attack,
where it has major consequences and numerous fatalities,” Reid
said. So agents assume the risk in cities is greatest and treat
Denver as a potential target.
Bus, rail lines threatened
FBI and homeland security chiefs issued bulletins last week warning
police that terrorists might try to bomb buses and rail lines in
U.S. cities this summer and that terrorists might try to use
cultural, artistic or athletic visas to slip into the country.
For three years, security officials have focused on airports.
The bulletins reflect a desire, after the Madrid attacks, to do
more. In addition to rail and bus systems, there’s also concern
about cargo containers that aren’t always fully inspected at
seaports and border crossings. Thousands of these metal containers
sit unattended in rail and truck yards around downtown Denver –
possible vehicles for delivering deadly weapons.
“We’ve got to get to a point where we have a high level of
confidence,” said John Suthers, the U.S. attorney in Colorado.
The Sept. 11 commission this month is scheduled to look more
closely into homeland security. Meanwhile, the $40 billion budget
for the Department of Homeland Security, created last year after
other agencies were consolidated, is not expected to increase
dramatically.
Recent congressional testimony from counterterrorism chiefs
revealed that a unified terrorist watch list to enable screening
for terrorists is not complete. The list drawn from multiple
intelligence databases was supposed to be done last year. FBI
leaders said it should be done this summer.
Testimony also revealed that another task is incomplete: a national
threat and vulnerability assessment to prioritize critical
infrastructure for protection. Homeland Security spokesman Donald
Tighe said that work would be done by December.
Implementing protective measures will be left to “local
leadership,” Tighe added.
There’s the rub. Colorado Department of Public Safety spokeswoman
Patti Micciche said local agencies are requesting equipment and
training “far beyond” what Colorado can afford after receiving
about $50 million in federal homeland security funds last year.
Few on the front lines see security spending as sufficient.
“We get all kinds of information,” said Pat Ahlstrom, the U.S.
Transportation Security Administration director in Denver.
“Does the Madrid thing portend the possibility of that happening
in America? Yes, it does. Do the suicide bombings in other parts of
the world portend what could happen in America? Yes. Does 9/11
portend that people who planned that horrible, unthinkable set of
acts, could they or others of their mind-set attempt the same thing
again, only now trying to defeat what we have in place? The only
answer is yes.”
Ahlstrom said he’s pushing to increase his force of 750 passenger
screeners at Denver International Airport – up from 600 to 700
before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks – to about 1,000 until better
technology is available. He’s also asking for more inspectors – 13
instead of the current 10 – to ensure that there aren’t any
lapses.
Cargo slipping through
The matter of cargo moving on passenger planes looms unaddressed –
at DIA and nationwide.
While TSA agents swarm around passengers and their carry-on
baggage, and check-in baggage is scanned, commercial cargo moves on
conveyor belts and carts toward passenger planes without systematic
inspection. Officials have the authority to conduct random spot
checks but could not confirm whether any had been done.
DIA statistics show that in January, passenger airlines carried
17,922,194 pounds (8,961 tons) of commercial cargo domestically and
internationally.
“What is essentially too cumbersome at this point is to check
everything,” said TSA spokesman Mike Fierberg. “We don’t have the
resources. And we don’t have the technology, most important.”
Instead, airlines are supposed to police themselves by allowing
only “known shippers” to send cargo on passenger planes. TSA
officials keep no list of known shippers – the airlines are
supposed to do that – and no audits are done to make sure airlines
comply, Fierberg said. However, TSA technicians are working on
giving airlines access to government databases so that they are
able to check out cargo shippers and customers before loading
planes, he said.
At one point, officials considered issuing licenses to known cargo
shippers, Fierberg said. They decided that would be too
cumbersome.
Current policy “meets the requirements of Congress” that cargo be
inspected, Fierberg said.
U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., said he is “very concerned about
the potential risks of unscreened cargo on passenger airlines” and
has supported efforts to have all cargo screened. “A lot of work
remains to be done,” he said.
Also in the Denver area, hundreds of cargo containers arrive daily
by truck and rail – all supposedly screened by customs agents at
U.S ports and border crossings.
A federal security directive also deploys Denver-based customs
agents in this effort.
The concern, customs agents say, is that terrorists could smuggle
weapons of mass destruction in containers and team with terrorists
already inside the country to coordinate attacks.
The rail yards are fenced but not impenetrable. Union Pacific
security agent John Cavanaugh said pilfering “goes on.” He also
said federal customs agents seldom inspect containers in rail
yards. “My understanding is (that) whatever is inspected, it is
inspected at the port of entry.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials were unable to give
statistics on how many physical inspections are conducted at ports,
border crossings and in Denver. They are setting up radiation
detectors and X-ray scanners at seaports and elsewhere.
Yet along the U.S.-Mexico border at El Paso, customs agents raise
concerns. Trains moving from Mexico into the United States pass
through X-ray and other scanners but only occasionally are stopped
for physical inspections, agents said.
“Customs and Border Protection officers are not comfortable with
the emphasis on facilitation of traffic and trade,” said Kevin
Odenborg, a National Treasury Employees Union representative on the
customs force at El Paso. “The security systems are not
infallible,” he said. Hundreds of trucks and cars deemed low-risk
are routed through fast lanes where they may not be checked, and
staffing levels aren’t always sufficient, he added.
Spot checks in fast lanes have found illegal drugs, raising the
specter that dirty bombs or explosives might slip through in trucks
or cars, Odenborg said. “With the emphasis on facilitation in the
vehicle and truck cargo area, inspectors feel they are less able to
use their observational and interviewing techniques. The fact is,
that’s how most contraband is caught.”
Cash smuggling a concern
Another concern is money moving illegally through airports.
Terrorists trained in Afghanistan and Sudan have fanned out into
more than 30 independent anti-U.S. groups, said Ambassador Heraldo
Munoz, the Chilean diplomat who chairs the United Nations Security
Council’s al-Qaeda sanctions committee. And “finding the money”
that funds attacks is “absolutely fundamental,” Munoz said.
Today, with more banks monitoring transactions, terrorists “are
using, now, couriers, bags of money,” he said. “For example, we
know the Bali bombing was financed by about $100,000 and a second
amount of about $35,000 brought into Indonesia in suitcases.”
A recent customs spot check at DIA found a London-bound passenger
carrying $17,000 in cash he had not declared. The man told agents
he was going on vacation. The legal limit for undeclared cash is
$10,000.
A federal agent relaying that incident on condition of anonymity
said there’s no systematic enforcement of financial controls at DIA
and that customs agents need an ink-sniffing dog to conduct that
work effectively.
Federal supervisors acknowledged those challenges, though they
declined to comment on specific cases. Dealing with “an enormous
problem” of cargo containers and better enforcement of financial
controls “are in the scope,” TSA chief Ahlstrom said. “You focus
on what you can afford to do at the time and try to develop plans
for other pieces as you are able to get some resources.”
America must set priorities: “Look at all the holes you have at
once and then decide how many of those you can afford to deal
with,” said Page Stoutland, program leader for radiological and
nuclear countermeasures at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,
which does homeland security work.
Stoutland supervised recent testing, at Federal Express cargo
facilities in Denver, of a device placed beneath a cargo conveyor
belt to detect possible dirty bombs. The device proved effective
and is available at a cost of about $50,000, he said.
“There is no way to predict with high confidence” what terrorists
might do, he said. But “our security (system) can’t be one where
we fix one hole and then fix the next because we’ll never get
done.”
Two weeks ago, customs agents scrambled when they learned that an
uninspected shipping container from Uzbekistan was moving by rail
toward Denver. It had been targeted overseas for inspection in
Houston. A recipient’s name and address in Denver proved to be
fake. Authorities figured that the manifest describing the
container’s contents – motorcycles – also might be fake.
Inspectors in Houston let the container pass. It arrived in Denver
around March 25 and sat in a Union Pacific freight yard north of
downtown. Customs agents here, speaking on condition of anonymity,
said they sealed it and notified Union Pacific that they wanted to
examine it.
But for lack of a proper inspection facility in the freight yard,
the white container sat unattended for seven days. “We couldn’t
shield it from the public. We wanted it moved to an indoor facility
so we could contain it” if dangerous material was inside, one
agent said.
Finally on Thursday, at a contract cargo warehouse in Aurora, a
team of three customs agents wearing radiation monitors on their
belts opened the container – and found motorcycles. Old,
broken-down antique ones, brown and green, with black sidecars.
They were hauling out the bikes for further inspection that night.
“Something that ends up in Denver is always considered low risk”
because port inspectors presumably have cleared it, a customs
supervisor said.
“We had to look to make sure.”
December 2, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Pakistan-Afghanistan Borderlands, Security
As sea shrinks, danger grows
MUYNOQ, Uzbekistan – Once it was anthrax island.
But now the shrinking Aral Sea is leaving a land bridge to a
windswept site north of here where Soviet scientists tested deadly
bio-weapons and dumped enough of a supervirulent brown powder to
extinguish humanity.
For years, Pentagon insiders and locals, including Uzbek
cargo ship captain Aygali Tankimanov, who steered past the island
regularly, have known that anthrax alive in the soil could spread.
Via burrowing gophers or antelope.
Or unemployed fishermen who cross to the island seeking scrap
metal to sell.
Or government crews interested in drilling for oil.
Or terrorists.
“Even though Americans are far away,” 62-year-old Tankimanov
warned, “it could still reach them.”
Only now – after the Sept. 11 attacks, the surfacing of
anthrax in the U.S. mail, and the possibility a terrorist could
reach the once-remote island on foot – are U.S. officials
beginning to act on such warnings.
The island named Vozrozhdeniye (“Rebirth”) served as the main
open-air testing site for the vast Soviet germ-warfare machine
that, during the Cold War, perfected methods of killing Americans
en masse.
Scientists tied hundreds of monkeys to poles on
Vozrozhdeniye, set off bombs that puffed yellowish brown clouds of
anthrax and other biological agents, then monitored how long it
took for the monkeys, bleeding from their mouths, to collapse and
die.
In the late 1980s, Soviets buried more than 100 tons of
Anthrax 836 – enough to extinguish Earth’s population several
times over if delivered efficiently – just a few feet underground,
said Ken Alibek, a Soviet bioweapons program leader who defected
to the United States.
U.S. soil tests a decade later revealed that the anthrax was
alive.
By then, multiple U.S. government programs had emerged to
deal with the Soviet bioweapons complex that mobilized an
estimated 65,000 scientists at 40 or more factories and labs.
Yet for years, Uzbek authorities refused to let Americans
work on Vozrozhdeniye. Uzbekistan controls airpsace and two-thirds
of the island. Kazakstan claims the northern tip.
U.S. involvement
Last April, White House officials launched a review of all
spending on programs to help Russia and former Soviet states
dismantle Cold War weapons facilities. Some U.S. analysts and
lawmakers long have challenged such spending, warning that Russia
might take the money and still secretly develop bioweapons in four
military labs off-limits to U.S. officials.
Then hijackers killed nearly 4,000 people on Sept. 11. And
policy makers now view containing weapons of mass destruction as
more of a priority for U.S. international policy.
“I won’t say people have been doing any cartwheels. But you
can see, in bits of pieces, that there is not only heightened
awareness on our part but also on the part of our allies,” said
Brian Hayes, the Pentagon project director entrusted with
Vozrozhdeniye. He and other U.S. experts, wearing protective
suits, have visited the island. They are developing a plan to
clean up the anthrax and raze testing facilities “within six months.”
Rather than cut spending, Congress now is considering adding
$40 million or more to the $17 million allotted for Vozrozhdeniye
and other bioweapons threats, said Jim Reid, chief of the
Pentagon’s Cooperative Threat Reduction program.
A bioweapons attack on America now is seen as “more possible
sooner, and therefore warrants a more intense, earlier
(prevention) effort,” Reid said.
On Oct. 22, Uzbekistan, too, got moving, granting U.S.
officials permission to begin work.
Meanwhile, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s forces already
may have developed bioweapons. A U.S. commander announced last
week that American soldiers in Afghanistan found widespread
evidence of tinkering with bio-agents.
Soviet weapons sold
Leaders of anti-American groups stated as far back as 1999
that they’d bought biological and chemical ingredients in former
Soviet states for possible attacks on Israel and the United States.
Yet still, there’s no visible security out here on the sandy
scrub land between Muynoq and Vozrozhdeniye’s deadly spores.
“To grow even a ton of this agent (Anthrax 836), it would be
enough if you get just a small vial of it,” Alibek, 51, said in an
interview from his home outside Washington D.C. Obtaining such a
vial from Vozrozhdeniye would require “three or four days” and no
particular scientific expertise.
“A technician” could collect it, said Alibek, who rose to
second-in-command of the Soviet “Biopreparat” weapons-developing
system before defecting in 1992.
“Something needs to be done. If we don’t do anything, there
is some probability that this thing could come to the United
States in the form of actual weapons.”
In meetings with members of Congress, Alibek has advocated
aggressive action to neutralize bioweapons facilities and help
employ Soviet scientists who receive only $50 to $100 a month if
they’re lucky.
“We’ve already seen what could be caused by a very small
amount of anthrax” delivered inefficiently in letters, Alibek
said.
“Such biological agents are becoming attractive to terrorists
from two standpoints: First, as weapons which could kill people.
Second, as weapons that can keep the entire country hostage for
weeks, even months. We saw a very severe psychological effect.”
During the Cold War, Soviet and U.S. military scientists
began developing bioweapons along with nuclear weapons.
But Soviet biowarfare efforts surpassed anything U.S.
military scientists even tried. Soviet scientists developed
hundreds of tons of weaponized anthrax, plague and possibly
smallpox. They had isolated incurable viruses including Ebola and
Marburg by the early 1980s, Alibek said, and then melded them into
weapons.
Americans had an inkling early on. U-2 spy planes flying over
Vozrozhdeniye in the late 1950s photographed the evenly spaced
posts where Soviets tied up animals and building configurations
resembling America’s own bioweapons testing facilities in Utah.
Soviet programs progressed steadily at least through 1992,
Alibek said, with Mikhail Gorbachev and other leaders viewing
bioweapons as insurance “in case of war” even after the 1972
Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, which banned bioweapons.
Alibek said he personally developed a weapon using an anthrax
strain three times more lethal than the Anthrax 836.
On Vozrozhdeniye, Soviets disposed of massive quantities of
Anthrax 836 from other bioweapons facilities because of the
island’s seemingly remote Central Asian location, in the windswept
Aral Sea, surrounded by sparsely populated desert.
Spores remain
Soviet soldiers poured hydrogen peroxide onto the anthrax in
stainless steel drums, let the mix sit, then repeated the process
three times, according to Alibek, who added that spores certainly
survived. A Western analyst in the Uzbek capital Tashkent, who
spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed the account.
Then the Soviets dug shallow pits and emptied the stainless steel drums,
containers they may have considered valuable, and buried the
anthrax a few feet underground, Alibek said. U.S. officials
sampled soil here in 1997 and found live, lethal spores.
Hayes, the Pentagon project chief, confirmed U.S. officials
have “firsthand knowledge” of the threat.
All this time, the Aral Sea has been shrinking.
Large-scale irrigation projects to produce cotton across arid
Central Asia drained the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers that once
fed the sea.
Now Vozrozhdeniye Island is practically connected to the
mainland. Already, people in Muynoq say, they can walk across
marshes to the island during dry months. An international team of
scientists reported in August that the sea, with average depth
down to about 50 feet, soon will be just a cluster of
pesticide-laced lakes.
On Vozrozhdeniye, dilapidated dorms and a playground stand
near an airfield. Soviet researchers and their families lived on
the island during tests.
An emerging Pentagon plan likely would require use of
respirators. Hayes described the plan as “manpower intensive”
involving “a lot of dirt moving,” but he declined to give details
for security reasons.
Alibek says drilling thousands of holes no deeper than 5 feet
and pumping in disinfectant hydrogen peroxide and formaldehyde
chemicals also might work. Capping the contaminated areas would
not be sufficient, he said.
Cancers, birth defects
For years, residents of Muynoq and other former seaside towns
have been leaving. Partly that’s because of the demise of Aral Sea
fishing, and partly because millions of people in this region
suffer health problems. Over the years, unexplained mass deaths of
animals and a high incidence of rare cancers and birth defects
raised public concerns about pesticide dust storms and the impact
of bioweapons testing.
But retired captain Tankimanov says he can’t afford to leave.
He tries to stay healthy, taking walks by the ramshackle gray
wood warehouses of what once was his port, looking nostalgically
at boats beached in sand where bony cows nibble weeds. Beyond
terrorists, he said he worries about viruses spreading through
wildlife.
“People here could die. There are many rats on that island.
If the land connects more with the island, all those rats could
come out here,” he said. “America should try to kill the rats. And
then you must clean that whole island completely.”
November 11, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Pakistan-Afghanistan Borderlands, Security
ALONG THE AMU DARYA RIVER, Uzbekistan – The fall of a key
northern Afghan city to U.S.-backed rebels offered a military and
humanitarian breakthrough in America’s campaign against terrorism.
Northern Aliance rebels captured Mazar-e-Sharif, about 35
miles south of this river that forms the Afghanistan-Uzbekistan
border, after several days of attacks from the south supported by
American airstrikes.
Taliban officials said their forces withdrew. But it wasn’t
immediately clear how far, for how long, or whether Taliban forces
north of Mazar-e-Sharif (population 200,000) may still threaten
the supply route.
Mazar-e-Sharif is considered strategic because of its link
to Uzbekistan – a relatively good road south from the river, with
access to Kabul that is not as vulnerable to weather as the many
mountain passes in Afghanistan. The city also has an aiport that
the Northern Alliance reportedly controls.
Anti-Taliban troops who were massed at the front about 30
miles north of Kabul cheered at reports of Mazar-e-Sharif’s fall,
with villagers crowding around radios to hear the news.
“This is the beginning of the collapse of the Taliban,” said
Nur Agha, a 22-year-old fighter.
Alim Khan, a Northern Alliance commander, said anti-Taliban
forces would launch a major attack on the capital within three
days.
He said that 1,000 opposition troops would assemble today at
Bagram, site of an opposition-controlled air base near the front
line.
Mohammad Afzal Amon, the commander of the opposition’s elite
Zarbati troops north of Kabul, said 600 fighters had been sent to
his area since the victory in Mazar-e-Sharif.
But the opposition will likely face a much tougher battle for
Kabul, a city of about 1 million people, than it did at
Mazar-e-Sharif. Taliban forces are more numerous and the terrain
more mountainous. And the United States – whose warplanes would be
vital to any advance – has expressed reservations about the
alliance taking the capital.
Speaking at the United Nations, President Bush said he wants
the Northern Alliance forces to steer clear of Kabul, part of an
effort to assure that power is eventually shared among the various
tribes of the country.
“We will encourage our friends to head south but not into the
city of Kabul itself,” Bush said.
While Northern Alliance commanders relished their success at
Mazar-e-Sharif, signs of division are emerging in the group’s
political leadership.
Alliance officials say two factions have emerged in the two
months since the assassination of the alliance’s leader, Ahmed
Shah Massood: the younger, pro-Western, religious moderates and
the older, religious conservatives, who are more skeptical of the
West.
A senior alliance official said the power struggle had
emerged because officials and commanders feared they would lose
the power, wealth and status they enjoyed if a new government was
formed.
The more conservative wing includes the alliance’s president,
Burhanuddin Rabbani, and one of its more senior Pashtun leaders,
Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the official said.
The more moderate wing, he said, includes the foreign
minister, Dr. Abdullah Adbullah; the interior minister, Yunos
Qanooni; and Anwari, leader of ethnic Hazara forces fighting in
the alliance, who has only one name.
The capture of Mazar-e-Sharif and the planned Kabul offensive
increase urgency for forming a post-Taliban government. But so
far, government-building has moved slowly, in part because of the
struggle within the alliance.
The prospect of humanitarian aid getting through may be the
most immediate impact of the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif.
United Nations officials in countries around Afghanistan
warned again of a humanitarian crisis with more than 100,000
children and women in Afghanistan dying if more humanitarian aid
doesn’t move soon. The Taliban has seized aid and made it
difficult to deliver, aid workers say.
Along this river at the port town Termiz, U.N. relief
agencies have amassed more than 1,000 tons of food. Crates of
biscuits and milk for babies sit in storage, as do rudimentary
health kits. A long runway at Termiz allows direct delivery of aid
from abroad.
But security concerns about terrain immediately across the
Amu Darya – sand dunes and scrub land recently controlled by
Taliban forces and possibly mined – blocked aid efforts Saturday.
Government officials from Uzbekistan said they planned to
visit the border today to assess the situation.
The U.N. also is taking stock, said Rupa Joshi, a UNICEF
regional spokeswoman.
“Our mission is to get as much aid across as possible as soon
as possible,” Joshi said.
A senior U.S. aid official is scheduled to arrive today in
the Uzbekistan capital, Tashkent.
U.S. officials said Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S.
Agency for International Development, will meet with U.N. and
other aid agency officials at Termiz this week. The visit is part
of a multicountry swing planned before the latest military action.
The Friendship Bridge at Termiz spans the mile-wide, muddy
river.
Uzbek tribal leader Rashid Dostum first captured
Mazar-e-Sharif, where ethnic Uzbeks live, in the mid-1990s after a
siege. Taliban forces recaptured the city in 1998 after another
deadly battle. Each side committed atrocities, according to a UN
investigation.
Uzbeks agreed last month to let barges loaded with
humanitarian aid cross the river at Termiz to Afghanistan. From
there, Afghan employees of international aid groups could move
supplies to Mazar-e-Sharif and points along the way, UNICEF
spokeswoman Joshi said.
Rather than military maneuvers, aid officials focused on
moving a first barge on Wednesday if possible, said Mohammaed
Kumbakumba, UNICEF’s logistics chief at Termiz. It doesn’t matter
who controls what, he said, as long as the supplies reach the
children.
The New York Times and The Associated Press contributed to this
report.
November 11, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Pakistan-Afghanistan Borderlands, Security
GARAM CHASHMA, Pakistan – If ever an Afghan was likely to
help America’s war against the Taliban, it’s Abdul Qahar.
Taliban authorities kidnapped and ransomed his cousin. They
chased Qahar from Kabul. And fighting for warlords runs deep in
his culture.
Yet Qahar and fellow Afghans holed up here in the Hindu Kush
mountains that cover much of Afghanistan are ambivalent,
reluctant, skeptical about the future.
The fall of one Taliban-held city, Mazar-e-Sharif, can be
seen as significant for the military campaign against
Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, and as a crucial step in efforts to
bring aid for some of the nation’s poor.
But it does little to resolve the concerns of some Afghans.
Veteran U.S. diplomats such as Richard Holbrooke, former U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations, say defeating terrorism depends
on creative nation-building rather than simply bombing.
“Things like who controls Mazar-e-Sharif and even Kabul are
important, but they do not directly affect the chances for more
terrorist attacks,” Holbrooke said in a recent interview.
Poverty, political and ethnic fragmentation, and mistrust of
outsiders are among challenges faced by the U.S. in coping with
war-weary Afghanistan. Governing, interviews with Qahar and others
indicate, may be challenging for whoever ends up in charge.
“This is actually an attack against Afghanistan,” Abdul said
recently, as American warplanes bombed Taliban positions around
Mazar-e-Sharif, Kabul and other areas.
“Our airports, the roads, all the development work is being
destroyed. Afghanistan is already a very poor country,” he said,
as others nodded around him in a teahouse while wet snow and dry
gold leaves fell. “Now it’s going to be even harder for us. What
is happening now in Afghanistan, it tells me our children will be
nothing in the future.”
This sense among fighting-age men from rebel Northern
Alliance territory that they have little to gain from taking on
the Taliban – despite the Afghan government’s support for
suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden – is one of many challenges
facing the U.S. campaign.
Poverty across the Hindu Kush is so extreme that the
predominantly rural people, tapped for decades to supply fighters,
don’t dwell much on politics or war.
They try to just survive.
Herders cross 15,000-foot passes in plastic shoes without
socks to try to earn money for tea and rice. Farmers migrate from
pro-Taliban turf to toil as sharecroppers on Pakistani farms.
Afghan infrastructure – roads or railroad or air links or
telephones – barely existed outside major cities even before the
past month of bombing.
Knots of mountain peaks 20,000 feet and higher ensure
isolation.
In the Birir valley south of here, Kalash tribal people just
over the mountains from Afghanistan weren’t even aware of the war.
“We can’t understand the radio,” said RabiJaan, a mother of
two.
And even the unifying influence of Islam hasn’t broken the
fierce, self-reliant parochialism that divides Afghanistan, a
nation in name yet with no agreed-on flag.
Aid workers point out that Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara factions
all have vied for years to control the strategic city of
Mazar-e-Sharif.
U.S. leaders appear to be eyeing Afghanistan’s future even
as they make plans to continue bombing through winter and Ramadan.
President Bush, addressing the United Nations on Saturday,
sympathized with the Afghan people and pledged to help rebuild
Afghanistan once the Taliban are ousted.
“The Afghan people do not deserve their present rulers,” Bush
said. “The Taliban’s days of harboring terrorists, and dealing in
heroin, and brutalizing women are drawing to a close.”
Holbrooke, a player in peace talks from Vietnam to the
Balkans, said in a recent interview: “The events of Sept. 11 were
not micro-managed by someone with a cellphone from a cave in
Afghanistan. It is important to remember that there were no
Afghans involved in the events of Sept. 11.”
“Now we just want peace’
The U.S. goal in Afghanistan must be “simply to stabilize it,
give it a chance to be back on its feet and slowly pull itself
together,” he said.
As Holbrooke and others who have visited the Hindu Kush know,
this is a beautiful place, a storybook land of snow leopards,
towering crooked peaks, and spiral-horned Markhuur goats.
“Now we just want peace, as soon as possible,” said Mohamad
Ibrahim, driving goats and sheep from the Badakshan region of
northern Afghanistan through a sheer granite canyon cut by the
whooshing, muddy Lotkoh River.
“We want the kind of government that can keep peace, not
cause all this trouble. We are hoping the Americans can help us in
making Northern Alliance territory independent and give it to us.”
Traders Ali Ahmad and Islam ud-Din left their families in
Krone, Afghanistan, hauling 1,400 kilos of blue lapis lazuli rocks
they hacked out of cliffs. They rested their donkeys for a few
days while negotiating with Pakistani border police, then entered
Garam Chashma and sold the lapis to shopkeepers.
“It would be better for us if there was no bombing,” Ahmad
said, though they’d had no trouble crossing. “We pray to God, if
possible, stop the war.”
Many worked this high country when the passes served as
supply routes for U.S.-backed mujahedeen fighters during Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan. The passes remain supply routes today
for both Taliban and rebel forces. Loads of blankets and emergency
food also move through on donkeys.
Afghans here identify themselves in relation to warlords –
you might be from Massood’s territory or one of Rabbani’s men. And
they hang together in tribal groups whose loyalty or enmity can
span political boundaries. Those north of Lowarai Pass are mostly
Tajiks, speaking Farsi. Uzbeks inhabit Mazar-e-Sharif.
On pro-Taliban turf south of Lowarai Pass live Pashtun people
who make up an estimated 40 percent of Afghanistan’s 25 million
population.
Over the years, alliances have shifted, warlords have changed
sides. Rashid Dostum, the ethnic Uzbek whose fighters helped take
Mazar-e-Sharif, often has switched loyalties and has clashed with
many Northern Alliance commanders.
And the tribes themselves aren’t always unified. Pashtun men
from Pakistan and Afghanistan dominate the Taliban regime. Yet
Pashtun leaders such as the Wali Khan family bristle at Taliban
fundamentalist rule. “We are losing our identity in our religion,”
Sangeen Wali Khan lamented recently on the family estate down at
Charsadda, Pakistan.
East of Charsadda last week, the family of Mir Rahim settled
into a peanut field for share-cropping work after crossing through
heavily-bombed terrain near Jalalabad, Afghanistan.
Civilians are suffering
Poverty, not war, drove them out, said Rahim, who set up a
grass-and-canvas hovel for his daughter and wife.
“The Taliban has not been affected at all,” he said. “It is
the civilians who are suffering.”
Afghan men in the borderlands described a system in which
every family must supply one soldier to fight for the local
warlord in return for protection and money.
“My brother has gone while I stay here,” Abdul Nasir
explained in Garam Chashma. A former mujahideen, he wore a U.S.
Army-style camouflage jacket against the cold.
Now if Northern Alliance warlords request it, and his brother
returns “to stay with my family, I will go,” Nasir said. “Afghans
were made for fighting. We will never get tired.”
But he said he doubted that Americans really would roust
Taliban and al-Qaeda forces from caves, as Bush has promised.
“When we were fighting the Russians, that’s exactly what the
Russians told us: “We will get you out of your caves.’ But they
never bothered us.”
Nasir and others here say they mainly oppose the Taliban
because of the death of alliance warlord Ahmed Shah Massood. Two
days before Sept. 11, men posing as journalists killed him.
Rather than a drawn-out military campaign, they suggest a
swifter solution through a loya jirga, a tribal council.
“I want a government that can bring peace. I don’t care which
side rules,” Abdul Qahar said as Afghan boys peered through a
doorway of the teahouse.
“For us, the Americans and the Russians are the same. The
only way Afghanistan can be governed is by representatives from
each tribe, the loya jirga system. But we don’t know if America
will like that. We don’t know if America really wants to help us
or not.”
Some people in this isolated realm, such as the black-robed
Kalash people in canyons southwest of Chitral, remain only dimly
aware of the war. The women weave belts. Centuries of Islam have
failed to convert them from an ancient polytheism that includes
animal sacrifices.
In the hillside village of Guru, Kalash-speaking men in a
wooden house squatted around a fire recently trying to keep warm.
Families stockpile barley and wheat for the winter in their
one-room abodes.
“We heard America is killing women and children,” said Jamil,
a villager who left to work in Pakistani cities and now has
returned. “We are not happy about this. Some people say it’s
Osama’s fault. Some people say it’s America’s fault. We’re not
sure what to believe.”
In the area led by Burhannuddin Rabbani, a Northern Alliance
chief, Jan Mohamad was herding nine mules on a 16-day journey from
Haran toward Chitral, where he hoped to buy tea and shoes for his
children.
“We don’t know who these Americans are,” he said. “We don’t
know much about the Taliban either.”
November 9, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Pakistan-Afghanistan Borderlands, Security
PESHAWAR, Pakistan – In the private Beacon House School, second-grade teacher Zermina Khan, who conducts class in English, recently led studies of the Sept. 11 attacks with an emphasis on American suffering.
At a public school nearby, Ghuam Mohammad and other black-uniformed boys crowded 80 to a classroom where Urdu-speaking teachers focused more on Pakistan than world affairs.
And in one of Pakistan’s proliferating religious “madrassa” schools, Hameed Jan’s students memorize the Koran word for word along with concepts such as “jihad” struggles against enemies. “America is doing terrorism against us,” says Jan.
The three schools show different forces shaping Pakistan – and much of the Muslim world from Morocco to Malaysia.
For Americans, the schools offer a glimpse into divergent versions of the future their own children will enter.
Pakistani educators say the approach to schooling will, along with economic conditions, help determine whether a new generation sees the next Osama bin Laden as Robin Hood or menace.
Currently, the future looks shaky, said Nasreen Kasuri, founder of Pakistan’s 90-school Beacon House System and leading advocate for increased spending on public schools.
“I wish we were headed toward Turkey. I am afraid we are headed more toward Iran,” said Kasuri, who knows a bit about U.S. schools from visiting friends in Colorado. “It is important for the West, by whatever means, to support liberal education in this country.”
Less than 10 percent of Pakistani families can afford private schools, which are generally Western-oriented and often comparable with the best U.S. schools. Instead most Pakistani children attend crowded government-funded public schools.
Pakistan, with 144 million people, does not invest heavily in public education. The country is poor and heavily populated, with as much as a quarter of its government revenue coming from foreign loans and grants, and about half its expenditures going to pay off debts. The government spends heavily to support the military’s costly confrontation with India.
The lack of school spending creates a vacuum met in part by the madrassas, which over the past decade have increased in number to about 7,000, educators say.
Today, all three types of schools in Pakistan convey a critical perspective on the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan that isn’t widely heard in the United States.
Yet some schools are more pro-American than others.
Consider the $500-a-year Beacon House school in Peshawar. Students here aim to attend British and U.S. universities. Second-graders recently clipped out photos and stories from newspapers – images of Sept. 11 attack victims such as a woman caked with dust in World Trade Center wreckage – and pasted them into collages.
“Hell on earth, yes, this was New York,” Faiza Shams wrote on hers.
Students “should know right from wrong exactly. They have to know what is fanaticism,” teacher Khan contends in the hall outside her room.
Principal Humaira Mustafa agrees that students “must know what’s happening.”
“We haven’t been able to recover after the Sept. 11 attacks,” Mustafa said, adding that civil disturbances here closed their school for several days. Children “are scared, they feel insecure. Mothers will call in during street protests asking: “Are you going to close?”
For the majority of Pakistani children, a school with materials for collages and teachers who encourage children with notes saying “wonderful work” isn’t possible.
They attend the more than 150,000 public schools that are financially strained to the point that many teachers work without paper or books. Fifty-seven percent of the population over the age of 15 can’t read and write, and among women the illiteracy rate is about 71 percent. Adding to the problem: education statistics are iffy.
At the government high school in the northwestern town of Chitral recently, principal Amir Zada lamented that he receives only $6,660 a month to run his 15-classroom, 688-student school. Teachers receive $53 a month.
“Not nearly enough,” he said.
And while the practice of teaching in Urdu instead of English is no problem, the difference is “big as that between earth and sky” in how students think of the world, said Mahmood ul-Hasan, a gym teacher waving a short “Soti” switch recently as students enter by 8 a.m. for the morning assembly at the all-boys school.
“The students who study here can only aspire to be clerks,” ul-Hasan continued. Yet commitment is high. Some of the 28 staffers work without pay. Patriots, ul-Hasan calls them.
In the assembly, boys around a concrete courtyard listened to a reading from the Koran, sang the national anthem and recited a prayer “that my life will be a beacon for the rest of the world.”
Then class began. Sitting for his Arabic exam, seventh-grader Sajjad Ahmad pulled a pencil out of a metal case with pictures of fighter jets on the cover. “I want to be a pilot,” Ahmad said. “To spread the name of Pakistan.”
Public schools are free. Teachers say the uniforms help minimize social and economic distinctions.
Yet in many public schools, officials say, teachers don’t show up. Even in the efficient Chitral schools, books are scarce, and students cram three and four to a bench behind rickety desks.
Today more and more parents are inclined to send their children to madrassas funded by Mosque communities. These schools also are free and offer the benefit of meals and dorm rooms for students.
A security chief at one of Pakistan’s largest madrassas at Akora Khattak recently refused to allow a complete visit. This was the madrassa where many of Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers studied, including Mullah Mohammed Omar.
Teacher Hameed Jan explained how most of the 4,000 students were gone, preparing for the Ramadan period of fasting. Beyond memorizing the Koran as he has done, Jan said, students learn a little math and English. No military training is conducted here.
Anyone who joins the “jihad against America” goes to holy war on his own, Jan said.
But as a teacher he feels “happy to know they have gone for jihad.”
Last week, Pakistani pro-Taliban forces amassed northwest of Peshawar, preparing to cross into Afghanistan. Jan said students who go there can receive weapons.
“Mohammad has said you must do jihad until doomsday,” he added. “When the land war starts, I will go, too.”
November 4, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Pakistan-Afghanistan Borderlands, Security
PESHAWAR, Pakistan – Jamshed fiddled with a black plastic bag
that held his most treasured possession – a prosthetic eyeball.
“I had this artificial eye once, but now it does not work,”
he said.
Six years ago, half of Jamshed’s life, he saw something
sticking up alongside a dusty road in central Afghanistan.
“I thought it was a pen,” he recalled. “I pulled it out.”
It was a land mine. The explosion ripped off his right hand
and wrist. Shards shot into his forehead and left eye.
Now, Jamshed wanders with other Afghan invalids – all missing
limbs – scuffing through the orange dust in an adobe Afghan
settlement.
As the United States continues to bomb Afghanistan, with
prospects of a ground war ahead, the issue of civilian casualties
has become one of the most volatile in the debate over President
Bush’s war on terrorism. “Collateral damage” in the language of
the military means, in Afghanistan, lost lives and limbs to people
too poor to get adequate care.
In Afghanistan, civilians continue to be maimed by the legacy
of fighting long ended.
Afghans for a decade battled troops of the Soviet Union,
which invaded their country in 1979. The Soviets and their
supporters scattered between 5 million and 10 million land mines
throughout the country, few of which have been cleared out.
Areas bordering Pakistan, and the Kabul region where Jamshed
was injured, are among the most heavily mined, according to the
group Physicians Against Land Mines.
When the Soviets left, internal factions battled. The Taliban
took power in 1996 and still is fighting the Northern Alliance,
which the U.S. supports.
In 1998, Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar
supported a world ban on land mines, condemning them as
“un-Islamic and anti-human.” Recently, however, organizations
working to get rid of mines criticized Omar’s ruling Taliban for
obstructing their work.
Internationally funded efforts cleared 2,791 anti-person and
anti-tank land mines from Afghanistan last year and, according to
several anti-land-mine groups, casualties dropped by about half
since 1999 to fewer than three a day earlier this year.
But Physicians Against Land Mines notes, “Recent unconfirmed
reports indicate that the flow of refugees through mine-affected
areas has substantially increased this number.”
Another result of the U.S. bombing campaign is that efforts
to remove mines are on hold. On Oct. 9, the second night of U.S.
bombing, four Afghan mine clearance workers were killed when a
bomb hit the building they were in east of Kabul.
Learning to improvise
All of which brings customers to Shamsul Haq, a leading
Afghan prosthetics dealer with clinics in the Afghan cities of
Kabul and Jalalabad, and in Peshawar. He said many can’t afford to
replace lost limbs with artificial ones.
“For one arm, the price is 15,000 rupees,” or about $250,
said Haq, 48. “This is too difficult for Afghan people. Most have
been living with no home or land for 23 years.”
Throughout the Soviet occupation and the civil war, he
supplied hundreds of people with arms, legs, hands, feet, hips,
corsets that support broken backs – “87 different devices for the
human body,” he says.
International Red Cross workers helped train Haq, whose
customers have ranged from a 1-year-old boy whose leg was blown
off by a Russian bomb to a man from Kandahar, Afghanistan, who
lost both legs and an arm last year.
The man’s brother wheeled him in, Haq said, and presented a
note from Taliban leader Omar: “Please make him feet and a hand.”
“If American ground troops come, American people will need
amputations, and more Afghan people will need amputations,” Haq
figured. “They will lose their feet and hands.”
With so many impoverished people in need of his services, Haq
sometimes supplies arms and legs at reduced rates. Instead of
offering only imported products from Germany and Britain that cost
up to $1,000, he designed a hinged lower leg using cheap steel
piping that costs only $83.
Bombing sand, not people
Haq’s cousin Abdul Ghafoor, 36, a factory owner in Kabul who
had just entered Pakistan over a mountain pass last week with his
5-year-old son, Taher, said the U.S. bombing is not inflicting
widespread casualties. Many bombs dropped by Americans appear to
be hitting hilltops and deserts, he said, not people.
Ghafoor added that Taliban forces set lanterns and campfires
on some out-of-the-way ridges as decoys. U.S. warplanes “bomb and
bomb and bomb,” Ghafoor said, “but they only get one or two
people.”
If the war moves to the ground, many civilian casualties
likely would have to be treated within Afghanistan. Pakistan
continues to block official border crossings. The only way out is
over mountain passes that require climbing or riding on donkeys.
Haq plans to be ready for any influx. When a customer comes
in, first his men measure their limbs, then show various materials
and models. Then they go to work with saws, drills, files. Dust
and fiberglass shavings soften the shop’s cement floor. Boys hang
about and fetch drinks for people waiting.
Beyond limbs, Haq said, he tries to help heal souls. He
offers words from the Koran justifying struggles against those who
would hurt Muslim people.
“When we are victimized by aggression, then we are supposed
to fight,” he says. “You may have lost something. On your death,
God will make you a whole human being.”
That sort of consolation seldom reaches the Shamshatu
settlement southeast of Peshawar, where a dozen Afghan amputees
recently gathered outside a makeshift mosque that serves as a
refugee town center.
All lost at least one limb in the war with the Soviets. Most
had crutches. Few had functioning artificial limbs. One man’s leg
healed bent in half – never treated.
“I’d climbed up in the top of a tree,” said Mohammad Kasim, a
former commander who lost his right leg fighting Soviet forces on
a road between Kabul and Jalalabad. A helicopter approached. “I
was trying to shoot down the helicopter. Then it shot me.”
In this group, the 12-year-old Jamshed is the youngest victim.
“I need money,” he said.
Not so much for an arm or a leg, he said, but for medical
attention to stop a near-constant stinging in his empty eye
socket.
“I’m in pain,” Jamshed said, voice rising faintly in the
wind. “I just want my pain to end.”
For more information
In Afghanistan, where people have coped with warfare for two
decades prior to the U.S. bombing campaign, land mines are an
enormous threat. UNICEF estimates that Afghanistan ranks sixth in
the world for land mines per square mile. Here are some websites
where you can learn more.
Two UNICEF sites have statistics and overview information:
www.unicef.org/sowc96pk/hidekill.htm
www.unicef.org/graca/mines.htm
The International Campaign to Ban Landmines has information at
www.icbl.org/
Physicians Against Land Mines is at www.banmines.org/ and has
a fact page on Afghanistan: www.cirnetwork.org/news/lmfacts.htm
The Landmine Survivors Network, whose work in Bosnia was
publicized in August 1997 by Diana, princess of Wales:
www.landminesurvivors.org/
October 31, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Pakistan-Afghanistan Borderlands, Security
Thousands near border await call from Afghans
MATTA, Pakistan – Seated around an earthen-floor living room
in this mountain village on Tuesday, a group of armed men awaited
word from Afghanistan to start fighting for the ruling Taliban.
“Our blood is the same. Whenever the Taliban needs us, we are
here,” said Qari Abdullah, a teacher who is among thousands
gathering on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border to help fight
Americans and defend Islam.
But Abdullah and his cohorts, who represent a challenge to
United States policy and, potentially, military efforts in the
region, haven’t crossed into Afghanistan.
Pakistani officials say they can’t.
And Taliban officials don’t want them – yet – saying the
battle only involves air assaults that would endanger the men.
Late Tuesday night, movement leader Mulana Soofi Mohamad
traveled to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to talk with Taliban officials
about a strategy for the volunteers, said Abdullah, spokesman for
the forces, which he said numbered 35,000. Pakistani officials
have put the number at 8,000.
Armed supporters around Abdullah in the room included a
nephew wielding an M-16 assault rifle that he said Americans
supplied to mujahadeen forces enlisted in the 1980s to fight the
Soviet Union.
“America’s President Bush said in one of his speeches that
this is the beginning of a crusade. He uttered that word,”
Abdullah said. “He challenged the faith of Muslims.
“Now we here are poor people. We work for our food, and
because of our work we survive. We don’t have time to leave our
beautiful children, our innocent children, and go away from our
homes.
“We had two options’
“But we had two options. Stay home. That would hurt our
faith. Or the other way, sacrifice our blood, head, body, heart.
This was the only gift we had to give the Afghan people. If they
don’t want this gift, we will still be ready all the time.”
This sort of resistance isn’t what U.S. officials had in mind
when they launched a military campaign in Afghanistan after the
Taliban refused to give up suspected terrorist leader Osama bin
Laden.
This week’s amassing of Pro-Taliban forces along the border,
south of Dir in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, is one of
several challenges facing the United States and Pakistani
President Pervez Musharraf, who supports efforts to hunt down bin
Laden.
North of Islamabad, another group blocked the Karakoram
highway this week in the latest of many protests against
cooperation with the United States. They agreed Tuesday to reopen
that key route.
Bin Laden remains alive and uncaptured. The Taliban remains
in power. Rebels fighting Taliban troops say they want more help
and appear to have made little progress.
“Very few Taliban are dying,” said Abdul Ghafoor, 36, a
businessman who crossed from the Afghan capital Kabul five days
ago with his 5-year-old son.
“The Taliban were bad. I wanted to change the government. But
now my whole life has gone bad because of the Americans. Now
everyone is siding with the Taliban.”
Pakistan Frontier Police Sgt. Yousaf Khan said people are
suspicious of the United States because of past policies.
“They feel that Osama is not responsible for the Sept. 11
attacks as accused. They say: “First Americans used the Afghans to
fight the Soviets. Now the Americans want to fight the Afghans.'”
A network of recruiters organized the volunteer forces
drawing from valleys including this one, ringed by mountain peaks
with farms down below between busy little towns where strict
Islamic codes prevail and uncovered women are seldom seen.
It’s easy to enlist volunteers, with thousands of men
entering recruiting offices to join the jihad, or holy war, said
Tariq Mehmood, 28, a bearded teacher from Khawazkhela in the upper
Swat Valley.
For seven years, he said, he’s been recruiting in Mingora and
towns to the north. First he interviews candidates to test their
faith, he said. “We ask the question: “For what do you fight?'”
Before the air assault on Afghanistan, “we have to arrange
only one vehicle for taking them to training. Now, we have to
arrange seven or eight vehicles for training.”
The training camps, he said, are those that U.S. agents once
helped establish across this region when the Soviet Union was the
enemy. Training consists of 40-day to six-month sessions heavy on
physical drills and demonstrations of how to carry and load
weapons.
If Taliban leaders call for the forces along the border to
enter, and Pakistani guards still block them, Mehmood said, “then
we will make a plan what to do.”
“We are all Afghans’
Though they come from Pakistan, the men at the border speak
the same language, Pushtu, as a majority of Afghan people. Many
have relatives in Afghanistan.
“By culture, we are all Afghans,” said journalist Hameed
Ullah Kahn, 24, of Mingora, down the Swat valley from Matta.
“If Osama bin Laden is the bad guy, why are Americans
victimizing the Afghan people?” he said. “Think about those people
you are bombing. What might you see in their faces? If I bring a
Kalashnikov, put it on your head, that is the effect you have on
the Afghan people.”
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.
July 7, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Security
Global security, politics collide in big defense test
CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN OPERATIONS CENTER – You won’t see the
rockets’ red glare tonight in the U.S. military’s landmark test of
missile defense technology.
But expect plenty of political heat.
Other countries rail against U.S. plans to deploy a shield
against enemy missiles, warning this could start a new arms race.
And with presidential candidates George W. Bush and Al Gore both
supporting missile defense in concept, critics contend short-term
election jockeying is intruding on global security.
The success or failure of the test tonight – an attempt to
obliterate a mock warhead high over the Pacific Ocean by aiming a
122-pound interceptor very carefully – is billed as the best
indication yet whether the proposed $60 billion shield against
enemy missiles is feasible. President Clinton is to decide this
year whether to move ahead on first-phase deployment.
The system would be run from a “battle management center”
here, a mile inside Cheyenne Mountain west of Colorado Springs
where early warning operations were set up during the Cold War.
The proposed defense system is designed to protect Americans from
what U.S. officials describe as serious potential threats from
North Korea, Iran, Iraq and other nations.
“More and more nations in the future are going to invest in
ballistic missiles,” said Vice Adm. Herbert Browne, deputy chief
of the U.S. Space Command, headquartered near Colorado Springs.
“Some of those will be able to reach North America. We’re
convinced that we need to defend our country from this growing
threat. Yes, we believe the threat is real.”
Today, military crews are poised for action in Colorado
Springs, at Vandenberg Air Force Base north of Los Angeles and on
Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific. Sometime after 8 p.m. MDT,
they’ll launch a rocket from Vandenberg carrying the mock warhead
and a deflated Mylar balloon to serve as a decoy.
Satellites and ground-based radar stations are to detect the
warhead and decoy balloon in flight, then send the data to early
warning system operators in Colorado Springs.
Those computer operators then are to relay the location and
trajectory of the mock warhead to Kwajalein, 6,000 miles away.
That data will be programmed into the 55-inch interceptor, what
military officials call an exoatmospheric kill vehicle, atop
another rocket. Crews on Kwajalein will launch it. As it thunders
up, high-powered X-band radar on Kwajalein is to track the warhead
and send even more detailed data to the interceptor in flight.
About 20 minutes into the exercise, if all goes as planned,
the non-explosive interceptor, moving at about 15,000 mph, will
distinguish between the 6-foot-diameter decoy balloon and the mock
warhead. Pentagon planners are hoping to see a big flash as the
force of impact destroys the mock warhead.
“Everybody will be happy if we hit the target,” said Lt. Gen.
John Costello, commander of the U.S. Army Space and Missile
Defense, also based in Colorado Springs.
This is the third of 19 planned tests. Pentagon planners
claim one hit and one miss. Critics have questioned whether the
hit was for real.
“That’s baloney,” Costello said.
In January, an interceptor missed a mock warhead, Pentagon
officials said, because a cooling system clogged and shut down
heat-seeking sensors.
The first-phase missile defense deployment, should Clinton
approve it, would begin with construction of X-band radar on
Shemya Island above the Arctic circle off Alaska. Construction
would begin next spring to have a limited defense system
operational by 2005 when, according to a 1999 U.S. intelligence
estimate, North Korea could have the capability of attacking the
United States.
Other countries adamantly oppose U.S. plans.
The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a cornerstone of
arms control, limits the development of missile defense systems.
U.S. officials are negotiating to change the treaty. For nearly a
year, U.S. diplomats have been broaching the idea of missile
defense with Chinese, European and Russian leaders.
No one’s on board.
Russia views the perceived threat from North Korea
skeptically, said Mikhail Shurgalin, spokesman for the Russian
Embassy in Washington.
“We fear this could, at a certain point, start up a new arms
race, a new cold war,” Shurgalin said. “We think those threats in
general are probably exaggerated. We understand that other
countries are concerned, too, like China and European countries.
The world is a fragile thing. Before you make a move, it is better
to find out what other people think. It is better to work out a
compromise.”
As for China, negotiations are said to be equally difficult. A
senior Clinton administration official, speaking on condition of
anonymity, said China plans to modernize its nuclear arsenal
whether or not the United States moves ahead with missile defense.
The question, critics say, is how many missiles China will build,
and whether that motivates India and perhaps Pakistan to build
more missiles.
France has led European opposition. French officials took no
position on today’s test. But more consultation is needed before
anything is deployed, said Francois Delattre, spokesman at the
French Embassy in Washington.
“We think there are many questions,” Delattre said, such as
“the nature of the threat, the evolution of the threat, and a
possible arms race.”
Nobel laureate scientists this week urged Clinton to reject
the proposed missile defense. And today, critics plan
demonstrations, including one outside Peterson Air Force Base east
of Colorado Springs, headquarters for U.S. Space Command. Critics
contend missile defense won’t work, costs too much and causes more
international conflict than it promises to resolve.
Yet Democratic political concerns – not leaving Gore
vulnerable to Bush on whether Americans are adequately protected –
are likely to force Clinton to approve a deployment he otherwise
might reject, said John Pike, weapons analyst for the Federation
of American Scientists.
“For the political tacticians who are not worried about
Chinese nuclear missiles, who are only worried about getting their
candidate elected, this decision is very simple,” Pike said. “I
think these people are playing politics with national security. I
am an American, and I am unhappy about it.”
Gore and Bush were awaiting word on the outcome of tonight’s
test, their campaign spokesmen said. White House officials
rejected the charge that Clinton’s decision will be influenced by
presidential politics.
Clinton hasn’t decided yet and will base his decision on
objective criteria, national Security Council spokesman P.J.
Crowley said.
“We’re in a situation where whatever decision the president
makes is not going to please some groups,” Crowley said. “So he’s
just going to do what’s right for the country.”
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.
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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.
