March 21, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
China, Globalization, Human Rights
Webb to open office in nation at odds with U.S.
On the surface, Beijing and Washington spar over destroyer
sales to Taiwan, missile defense and human rights.
But behind the scenes, U.S. business and local governments,
including Denver’s, conduct taxpayer-funded courtships of China,
forging closer and deeper relations than ever before.
This week, when Denver Mayor Wellington Webb departs for
China with 47 executives, scholars and city officials, he’ll push
the courtship to a new level by opening the first U.S. city office
in China.
Webb lined up a carpeted, bedroom-size sixth-floor office in
central Shanghai to serve as a conduit for business and pro-Denver
buzz. Connecting with China’s 1.3 billion people will propel
Denver “ahead of the curve,” Webb said in an interview, promising
local economic growth and “a relationship that will last long
after I am mayor.”
The City Council approved $160,000 for the China project, and
the eight-day trade mission is expected to cost another $36,000.
Shanghai-based trade representative Roland Tong’s salary will be
$84,000 to serve city interests across China.
An office-opening ceremony is set for Thursday with
Shanghai’s mayor.
Then, after swings through China’s ancient capital of Xi’an
and Beijing, Webb hopes to meet with Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji.
Webb and Colorado Gov. Bill Owens hosted Zhu in Denver two years
ago. Zhu oversees China’s economy and access by foreign companies.
Corporate executives accompanying Webb want to win
construction contracts in China, line up direct flights to Denver,
supply television programs and help China land the 2008 Olympics.
But they’re pursuing their interests as a high-level drama
between Washington and Beijing tilts U.S.-Chinese cooperation
toward competition. President Bush soon must decide whether to
defy Chinese President Jiang Zemin by selling four high-tech
destroyers to Taiwan. A Chinese diplomat last week warned of a
very serious setback if the sales go through. Diplomats also
dicker over Pentagon plans for missile defense, and evidence that
China recently aided Iraq. A new U.S.-backed United Nations
resolution would condemn China for human rights abuses – just as
Beijing seeks the Olympics.
Yet state and city ties to China and elsewhere deepen as
mainstream America connects with the global economy.
Over the past 30 years, states established at least 132 trade
offices worldwide, according to state records. Governors and
mayors also lead more trade missions and typically support
international sister-city links. In contrast, U.S. federal
government representation abroad, with 257 posts, stayed
relatively steady through the 1990s.
Relations with China in particular are growing. China
supplies U.S. families with affordable toys, shoes, clothing and
other merchandise worth $100 billion a year. In China, 15 states
run mainland or Hong Kong offices.
Among cities, Houston, too, is considering an office in China.
“If China is our strategic competitor,” Webb said, “one of
the ways to address that is to find areas where we agree, and
where we disagree. … It’s better to trade and tie your economies
together than have military buildups.”
Possible drawbacks
But even proponents see risks.
A risk that China won’t open up. China agreed to lower
tariffs as a condition for its expected entry into the World Trade
Organization this year. Currently, Colorado-based ConAgra Inc.
faces 40 percent tariffs to sell beef in China. In Fort Morgan,
sunflower seed entrepreneur Mike Erker, whose sales to China
topped $1.5 million last year, pays 32 percent tariffs that he
suspects back-channel seed sellers from Taiwan avoid.
A risk that strife between between Beijing and Washington
could stifle business. Englewood-based Jeppesen-Sanderson, which
makes navigational charts for airlines, can’t obtain coordinates
for some Chinese runways because Chinese military officials
object, chief executive Horst Bergmann said. “The political
climate is important for the business climate,” Bergmann said. “If
Washington would open up, I think China would possibly be more
lenient.”
A risk that even if China does cut tariffs and bureaucracy,
companies from Colorado still won’t be able to compete. U.S. trade
with China is increasingly imbalanced in favor of China. The
United States recently posted a record $83.8 billion deficit.
In the Rocky Mountain region, imports from China topped $883
million last year, up from $32 million in 1990, according to U.S.
customs data analyzed for The Denver Post by federal trade
specialists. The region includes Colorado and parts of Wyoming,
Idaho, Utah and Montana. The specialists said state-by-state
import statistics aren’t available but that the bulk of the
regional imports probably went to Colorado.
Meanwhile, exports of Colorado goods and services to China
were valued at just $164 million, up from $41 million in 1996.
Mainland China ranks 14th among Colorado trading partners. If
exports to mainland China are combined with the $233 million to
Hong Kong and $196 million to Taiwan, the “Chinese Economic
Region” looks more promising. Colorado’s top trade partner is
Canada, which bought goods and services worth more than $1 billion
last year, followed by Japan.
Human rights concerns
Beyond the risks, critics question whether cities and states
should deal with China, a communist dictatorship, on principle.
“China has the most repressive government on the planet,”
said Denver Councilman Ed Thomas, who tried unsuccessfully to
block public funding for Webb’s venture. “I don’t think we should
be over there shaking their hand.”
Thomas lambasted Webb for courting China when Webb previously
led city efforts to boycott South Africa under apartheid.
“People are setting themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square.
How much more odious do you want to get?” Thomas said. “You can’t
justifiably shut the door on South Africa and then offer an olive
branch to the government in China, where people are setting
themselves on fire in demonstrations.”
Chinese dissident Harry Wu, an author and lobbyist in
Washington, D.C., contends China’s treatment of political
dissidents, religious believers and labor activists is worsening.
Denver taxpayers “have to stop courtship like this,” Wu said.
“This is using the common people’s money for business, business
associated with a communist government. Why do you want to set up
all kinds of relations with this regime? You never wanted to do
this with the former Soviet Union because it was the “Evil
Empire,’ right?”
At least Webb should “strongly raise concerns,” said Jie Sun,
a Chinese immigrant in Denver devoted to the Falun Gong spiritual
movement, which China’s government has banned.
“To sacrifice human rights for a good trading relationship is
to sacrifice the American value of freedom of belief.”
In Washington, conservatives press for a harder line on
China. U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Littleton – a House International
Affairs committee member who opposed granting China permanent
normalized trade relations last year – denounced Webb’s overtures
as “ridiculous, naive at best. This will only increase our trade
imbalance with China, not improve it. There will be these little
sops they throw. We’ll get a contract here, a contract there.”
Yet Webb is adamant. He says human rights in China is a
serious issue but that economic engagement will increase U.S.
leverage and improve human rights and labor conditions.
Cheap labor beckons
And China with its 1.3 billion people – many of them willing
to work for 20 cents an hour – entices. More Colorado
businesspeople attend programs on China than on any other country,
said Jim Reis, chief of the Denver-based World Trade Center and an
architect of Denver’s trade mission.
For them to profit from China, veteran U.S. diplomats say,
support from political leaders helps.
Politician-led trade missions “have reasonable paybacks”
though generally nothing immediate, said Craig Johnstone, a
retired U.S. ambassador now serving as president of the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce Center for Corporate Citizenship.
“Very few are boondoggles,” he said. “It’s a shame more
public officials don’t do more of this.”
Most of the 30 or so businesspeople accompanying Webb already
have connections in China. They represent large companies such as
CH2M Hill, the Gates Corporation, Harza Engineering and RNL
Design, and a few smaller firms such as Chi Investments and Revis
Asbestos.
Few see Webb’s help and a trade office as crucial.
“We probably don’t need it as much as maybe some other
companies,” said Jim Nelson, vice president and general counsel
for Gates.
But Nelson and others said Webb, if effective, could boost
Colorado business by opening doors. In China, government approval
is required for just about everything, and building relationships
with ministry officials is seen as crucial. Often there’s no
occasion to do that without politicians and pomp – supported by
taxpayers.
Going to China with Webb will give “access to people and
resources that you would not have going alone,” said Michael
Burke, vice president for Startek, a supply chain management
company with offices in Denver, Greeley and Grand Junction.
Some executives also hoped to get a better feel for the human
rights climate in China. It’s not a matter of questioning
government policies but rather understanding project-level
procedures such as how Chinese partners would treat contract
workers.
“If we can’t agree on certain principles, it would be
impossible for us to work,” said Dean Nelson, vice president of
Mortenson Construction, a top U.S. contractor that built Denver’s
Pepsi Center and Coors Field and is exploring opportunities in
China.
“From the humanitarian side, I think there are issues
everybody has trouble with,” Nelson said. “How are we going to
control safety for these people? … We simply couldn’t accept a
project or work under conditions where we would put people at risk.”
The businesspeople met with city officials last week – a
session city officials closed to reporters.
They also received guidance from Hai Yan Zhang, an
interpreter and cultural consultant who grew up in Beijing. She
said she always dreamed of building bridges between Colorado and
China.
Her advice to Webb and crew: Avoid the impatience, arrogance
and ignorance that often plague Americans in China. And pay
attention to image. Denver’s sixth-floor office in central
Shanghai – adjacent to a Ritz Carlton hotel in an
internationalized district with a Starbucks Coffee outlet – sends
the appropriate signal. A basement office would give “no face, no
status,” she said.
“In China, who you are and what you are doesn’t matter. It’s
what people think.”
November 26, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
China, Globalization, Human Rights
Low wage workers fuel world economy
LOTUS MOUNTAIN, China – The shiny blue and maroon fabric that worker No. 0391 guides into a Chinese factory sewing machine could be on your back this winter.
The worker, Lu Huikun, makes ski jackets, including this U.S. Ski Team model, for Colorado-based Spyder Active Sports. The jackets cost up to $529 in Denver-area stores.
Lu is paid 31 cents an hour if she keeps a brisk pace at the rattling machine.
A 36-year-old mother of two, she considers herself lucky. Bulldozers making room for factories scraped away her family’s rice field 12 years ago. Lu’s job sewing sportswear for Spyder, Adidas, Champion and other companies helps sustain her family.
“May you all be champions,” she says to those who would buy her jackets this fall.
But Lu’s eyes are tired from overtime shifts. Her thin legs tremble as she pedals her bicycle down People’s Road. More overtime lies ahead.
Lu’s daughter is gradually going blind. She needs special glasses that cost $250 – five months’ wages. When Lu reaches home, crosses a brick courtyard and bends to pump water, the 9-year-old clings to her leg, frightened by a world growing cloudier each day.
Behind many of your possessions – and goods you may buy in the holiday shopping blitz that began Friday – are desperate laborers like Lu in low-wage countries worldwide.
They are the invisible backbone of today’s world economy. But their presence increasingly raises policy questions in corporate boardrooms, spawns riots at trade summits from Seattle to Prague, ruffles consciences of some shoppers in malls.
This report will show you how these workers – in most cases the only people to touch your possessions before you – count on your purchases to survive. Still, they lack many things Americans take for granted.
And in the corporate drive for flexibility and low-wage efficiency, some are treated in ways Americans won’t tolerate at home.
A Denver Post examination of the system traced the origins of products into China, where U.S. firms farm out production of everything from ski coats to computers. Many companies try to shield this information from the public.
Once, such products might have been labeled “Made In USA.”
But today if you buy one of those trendy collapsible scooters, odds are it was made in China. Same with many skateboards, snowshoes, inline skates. The fireworks you shoot on the Fourth of July? Made in China. Your child’s school backpack or the one you wear hiking? Stitched and inspected in China.
The Post gained access to eight factories and interviewed dozens of workers and managers. Compulsory overtime here is the norm. Uniformed guards patrol gated factory compounds, where up to eight workers reside in dormitory rooms. Workers are paid based on quotas that punish any lapse. Wages in China vary, but 30 cents an hour is common; factories producing for Americans typically pay roughly minimum wage. Sometimes workers can’t leave factory compounds. Police on motorcycles cruise industrial zone streets looking for factory workers who cause trouble.
China’s central government requires 40-hour weeks, limits overtime to no more than three hours a day or 36 a month, and bans workers under 16.
Yet with tens of millions fleeing rural areas to seek work, factory managers say the labor law is seldom enforced. Workers often don’t receive extra pay for overtime and can’t refuse to stay late, said Kent Guo, a U.S. Foreign Commercial Service officer posted in Guangzhou.
“The employers say, “If you don’t want to work overtime, I’ll fire you.’ Or they find another reason to fire you.”
Compound-restricted workers proudly build “gliding boards’
Inside the Circle Skater Corp. factory – about two hours north of Hong Kong near Dongguan – 1,500 workers run by Taiwanese managers produce many things sold in America.
It’s a typical factory, a gated cluster of three-story buildings. The workers are migrants who live at the compound where, as at many factories, room and board is provided. Normally they’re allowed out three times a week, factory manager Circle Yan said. A team of 30 ex-soldiers in blue-and-white uniforms patrols 24 hours a day, registering who comes and goes.
The factory supplies sporting goods including skateboards, beginner snowboards bearing Bugs Bunny and the Time Warner logo, plastic snowshoes and inline skates, elbow and kneepads. One of the hottest products made here for U.S. consumers, Yan said, is a silvery collapsible scooter. The Chinese call these “gliding boards.”
Factory sales of all products top $23.6 million a year. You can find stuff made here in Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney, and Toys ‘R” Us among others, Yan said.
Soon after receiving an order, he mobilizes assembly lines that roar, hum and shake as workers rivet, glue, hoist and haul. Workers seldom speak in the process.
Boxed products roll out of workshops on conveyor belts leading into shipping containers mounted atop trucks. The trucks travel new concrete highways to Hong Kong for shipping to the United States. The journey from Chinese factory to Colorado store can take as few as 14 days.
Workers earn an average of 20 cents an hour, Yan said. That’s based on a quota tied to how much and how well they produce. The official work week is eight hours a day for six days – more days than China’s law allows. About 12 hours of overtime is typical, he said – again, more than permitted.
The workers are restricted in leaving the compound, Yan said, because he needs them close to respond quickly to orders from the United States.
“We are very busy. Most of the time they work.”
The restriction breeds bitterness.
“Here there’s a lack of freedom,” said 19-year-old Huang Changbin, a migrant villager diligently assembling scooters.
“We can’t go out when we want. I want to go out and play.”
Huang and his crew of 60 workers assemble 2,000 scooters in 12 hours, a foreman said proudly. Each scooter retails for about $75 in the United States. That’s about $150,000 worth of scooters for U.S. retailers. The workers combined, at 20 cents an hour each, earn about $144 for their part – one one-thousandth of the market value of their products.
Like many here, Huang migrated from a village in western China after completing junior high school. “There was nothing to do,” he said. He paid $25 for a third-class train ticket, a huge burden for his subsistence-farming family, and rode for 36 hours to Dongguan.
This Pearl River Delta region in South China – where Lu Huikun works too – draws millions of migrants into what may be the world’s biggest industrial zone. From Lotus Mountain, a 1,000-foot-high knoll in the middle of it, gray-black factories splay out spewing noise and smoke into a thick acid haze.
Here, Huang can earn up to $50 a month. “My family will save it for when I return,” he said. “I wanted to see the world, what’s going on here.”
He shares a room with seven others. Homesick and confined to the compound, he devotes off hours to writing letters to his parents and 16-year-old sister Changyan.
His advice to his sister: “Stay at home. Study. Read more books.”
But he’ll gut this out.
He’s worked as much as 70 hours in one week. He wants more, maybe a better job sewing. “I can get more money.”
He characterized his life as “not very good, not very bad.”
There was one high point.
He got to try out one of the “gliding boards” he assembles. He smiled as he described zipping across a factory floor on the scooter. Supervisors waived company rules for that test ride.
Back assembling handlebars, Huang takes consolation imagining he is an instructor for young riders in America showing them how to set up the scooter, watching them glide down a street.
“I know American little friends will enjoy playing with this,” Huang said, looking up from the factory line. “Let them play happily.”
U.S. companies try to respond to labor concerns with codes
Few U.S. corporations that sell things made in China allow scrutiny. Many won’t even identify who makes their products.
Wal-Mart spokesman Tom Williams declined repeated Denver Post requests to visit any Wal-Mart supplier factory, saying locations of factories are a closely held secret because “everybody watches everybody else and where they buy.”
Target spokeswoman Susan Eich said “we don’t have any such list” of supplier factories in China.
Kmart, too, counts on China. Chinese suppliers of electronics, bicycles and other products are required “to notify us of who their subcontractors are,” said Dale Apley, Kmart’s public policy director. But he wouldn’t give details or allow a visit.
Colorado-based corporations such as bicycle maker Schwinn, ski clothing company Obermeyer, and Crazy Scrubs – colorful medical wear – take a similar approach.
Meantime, public concern is growing about globalization hurting human rights. Street riots that shut down Seattle during World Trade Organization meetings last year were motivated in part by a sense of injustice in factories abroad.
“We get dozens of letters every month. A lot are form letters: “We want you to stop exploiting children,'” said Tim Lyons, spokesman for J.C. Penney, which sells products made in China at 1,100 stories across 50 states. The ideological anti-corporate tenor of some critics is such, Lyons lamented, that “you can’t win.”
Many corporations have responded. Target, Kmart, Wal-Mart and J.C. Penney officials say their suppliers must agree to obey local labor laws, pay prevailing wages, and ban child or forced labor.
Some companies such as Nike and Levi Strauss established elaborate codes of conduct that are posted on factory walls. Some firms hire auditors to review supply-chain conditions, sometimes visiting factories unannounced and conducting off-site interviews with workers.
In Colorado, Spyder this fall began negotiating a code of conduct with 24 suppliers in Asia. Chris Okazaki, formerly with Nike, is helping lead Spyder’s effort.
Fireworks industry an example of raw capitalism of China
Still, shoppers eyeing foreign-made products generally can’t tell from packaging the conditions in which those products were made.
And tracing products to specific factories “is probably one of the toughest things you could ever try to do,” said John Colledge, the U.S. Customs chief of forced-labor investigations. “We need substantive information to tie the product back to the factory. That’s what the consumer is going to need too.”
A 1930 U.S. law prohibits import of products made with forced labor. U.S. investigators say access in China in particular is so restricted that they’ve resorted to offering money over the Internet for tips.
And even inside factories in China, the source of a product isn’t always obvious.
Just as U.S. companies farm out production to factories in China, many big factories in China farm out work to smaller and smaller factories down to informal village-level “cottage” labor.
U.S. fireworks companies such as Rocky Mountain Fireworks in Denver rely on factories in China. Rising labor costs and safety regulations forced closure of factories at home, said Bill Stonebraker, president of Rocky Mountain Fireworks.
And demand is growing. U.S. consumers bought $625 million worth of fireworks in 1999, a figure that increased by about $25 million a year through the decade, according to Julie Heckman, director of the American Pyrotechnics Association.
One of the emerging new suppliers handling orders from Stonebraker and others is Brothers Pyrotechnics, based in Beihai, in a rural area near Vietnam along China’s southern coast.
Much of China’s fireworks industry is struggling after a series of explosions at factories. Most recently, an explosion July 1 at a plant in Guangzhou killed 40 workers, and central government officials shut down factories nationwide.
But by mid-September, Brothers was up and running. U.S. industry safety inspectors stationed in Beihai give the company high marks.
In charge is Garry Wang, 38, the son of a fisherman turned into flamboyant entrepreneur. Relying on a network of 20 rural Chinese factories, he sells $20 million worth of fireworks a year to Stonebraker and others.
Wang lives in a mansion with marble floors in Beihai. Recently at midnight, he strolled outside across his manicured grounds, fountains burbling, to practice golf.
Gardeners teed up balls and Wang swung away. A day later, he sat beneath a full moon by his swimming pool with two old friends, after a feast and footrubs, and addressed the matter of U.S. sensitivity about working conditions in China. The capitalism emerging here is raw, he said, like in the United States last century, with huge rich-poor gaps and also huge opportunity.
“Comparatively speaking, I think the United States is more important to China than China is to the United States,” he said. “Imagine what would happen if Americans stopped buying all these products. So many Chinese people would lose their jobs.”
Indeed, workers at Wang’s supplier factories said they were grateful for their jobs.
But some doubt they’ll ever get ahead.
“I know people enjoy these,” said Mou Qijuan, 30, piecing together a golden cardboard “Mighty Dragon” firework in a room at one factory with a dozen other women. The Mighty Dragons, which when lit roll around spitting sparks, sell for $3 or so at U.S. fireworks stands. Silently she and her co-workers folded, twisted and glued labels on hundreds of small fireworks every hour. Mou said she earns 15 cents an hour if she works at top speed.
Life for Mou is “just work, nothing exciting.”
She does a lot better than the cottage-worker villagers who make cardboard tubes for fireworks outside factories. They earn the least of all.
As Mou and her colleagues worked, she allowed that “sometimes my back hurts.” She added: “No rest.” Still, any overtime work was welcome. “If I am paid more,” she said emphatically.
The problem, she said, is that she isn’t paid enough.
Now that her son Lu Tiehua is 6, she said, she pays $12.50 a month – half her earnings – for child care so she can work. Not to mention money for food, and medicine when he falls sick.
“How can you save?” Mou asked indignantly.
As she spoke, Zheng Daji, 41, the factory manager, looked on. He’s run this compound with 2,200 workers since 1985.
Zheng acknowledged the plight of his workers. “If we don’t have orders for more fireworks, we have to ask people to leave,” he said.
He often hears complaints, usually about money. ” “Can you pay more?'” He always says no, fearing others would make demands too. He said he’s worried about growing unrest. “I’m afraid it will happen.”
But Brothers assistant business manager Judy Zhu, who accompanied Zheng as an overseer of his factory, hastily downplayed this. Jobs are too scarce, there are too many workers, she told Zheng. “I don’t think it will happen.”
Back in Colorado, Stonebraker at Rocky Mountain Fireworks said conditions that look harsh to Americans must be seen in the different context of China. He suggested U.S. consumers, not human rights groups, should guide how the United States handles standards in the global economy.
“It’s what you are going to pay for that product that governs what the manufacturer has to do,” Stonebraker said.
And for Chinese people “their recreation is work, more than in the United States. We don’t know what work is anymore. These people are happy in their way of doing things. We need to leave them alone. They do well by themselves. And they are advancing themselves at a pace they can stand.”
Villagers chase dreams with assembly-line jobs
Many villages offer Chinese workers little opportunity beyond subsistence farming.
In western China’s impoverished Yellow River Basin, landowner Hou Jianguo, 46, found growing crops in the dry clay soil of Gansu Province too hard. The family barely survived, eating almost all that they grew.
So in 1997, Jianguo decided to move his family. He, his wife and 19-year-old daughter rode a train for three days and two nights to China’s eastern coast south of Shanghai.
He found work burning holes into nylon pullstraps for Colorado-based Samsonite at a factory the company owns in Ningbo.
He calls his $112-a-month wages “very good.” He lives apart from his wife and daughter. His daughter works and lives at a garment factory nearby. His wife lives with a relative in town taking care of children while the relative works.
Jianguo’s family will endure the separation, he said on the Samsonite assembly line, because eventually they’ll attain their dream: returning to Gansu and opening a small tailoring shop.
“I’ll work until I’m old,” he said looking down at a stack of nylon pullstraps he’ll prepare for “Worldproof” suitcases. “Then I’ll return to my hometown.”
Similarly, Yiana Zhenghai, 24, left her village near Ningbo when she had a son in hopes that he might live more like American children. Her mother watches the boy each day while Yiana works in a backpack factory.
Workers there recently were stitching up wallets for Esprit and “America’s No. 1” backpacks for Jansport. Manager Sunshine Gui walked across the factory floor picking up odds and ends from the floor. Workers at sewing machines eyed her nervously as she passed.
At the end of the line, Yiana inspected every stitch. She and the others amaze manager Gui with how intensely they work for piecework wages. During lunch break many continue to work, she said, to earn a little more money.
“Of course I will spend the money I earn on my son,” Yiana said.
Despite the economic lure, the factory system also traps workers such as 22-year-old Zhang Youyan.
Now tending a juice shop near Dongguan, she made clothing for export since age 14. The juice job is easier but a dead end.
“People like me,” she said, “we just live one day at a time. We don’t think about the future. … It’s not that I don’t dream. I do dream. I just don’t have the opportunity to make it.”
Consumer group aspires to “fair labor’ labels
While the laborers churn out consumer goods, a growing debate about corporate responsibility is taking a new twist. Beyond street protests, a fledgling movement aspires to give U.S. consumers information about how products are made in hopes they’ll discriminate carefully. Leaders of the effort contend workers bear disproportionate burdens and that Americans would respond if they knew.
“If you believe that you are your brother’s keeper, you have some obligation to the people who are the least advantaged in the world,” said Sam Brown, director of the Fair Labor Association in Washington, D.C. “If your prosperity is built on the backs of people who are being exploited, then you have an obligation.”
Brown said retail discount giants in particular are perpetuating a shameful global “race to the bottom.” Within two years, he said, companies that adhere to humanitarian standards will be able to put “fair labor” labels on their products and gain a competitive boost.
But manager Yan at the scooter factory figures codes of conduct and labeling won’t amount to much. It’s window-dressing for image-conscious companies, he said, sitting in the office where he receives orders.
U.S. executives “only care about good products,” Yan said.
“They don’t care about human rights. They are businesses.”
Worker sadly, proudly toils to earn glasses for daughter
Lu Huikun and her colleagues at the sportswear factory doubted Americans who buy their products think about factory workers.
Even if Americans did care, they “can’t do much to help me,” Liang Qianzhen said, finishing some Adidas trousers. “There are too many people in this country.”
The best hope is that Americans consume as much as they can while workers here toil as fast as they can, Lu said. “I just want more work from you so I can make more money.”
She’s given up travel plans she and her husband, a delivery motorcycle driver, once shared. Now, instead of imagining a family vacation in Beijing, she thinks of her daughter’s future, and worries about her impending blindness.
Her daughter is bright and talks of becoming a doctor or teacher. “Mommy and Daddy save money,” the girl says.
Doctors insist there’s no cure. “Sometimes my daughter feels bad that she can’t see clearly,” Lu said. “When that happens, I tell her: “Don’t think too much about this problem. You were born with it.'”
So Lu toils and saves for special glasses. Tears streaked her face as she spoke. She sees no end to her struggles for her child.
And making things for Americans probably won’t meet her needs. She sat silently at her machine for a moment. But rather than dwell on consumers far away, she resumed sewing.
“I’ll try,” she said proudly, “as hard as I can.”
November 19, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Globalization, Human Rights, Security
Israeli, Arab long for peace
Colorado camp drew girls together
HADERA, Israel – Blue police lights flashed at the central bus
depot. Israeli soldiers swarmed with machine guns. A plainclothes
commander barked into a cellphone, chasing a tip about a
Palestinian. The Holy Land pulsed, again, as if something was
about to explode.
Ignoring this blitz, a Jewish girl, 16-year-old Adi Meidan,
and a Palestinian girl, 17-year-old Moran Zhalka, ran toward each
other, smiling. They embraced.
“I believe in Adi. She will never kill anyone,” said Zhalka.
“Moran has this magical smile. She can really cheer me up
when I’m down,” said Meidan.
This unlikely friendship – surviving in the face of an
escalating Mideast war and skepticism from their segregated
communities – began five months ago in Colorado. At a three-week
“Bridges For Peace” camp in the San Juan Mountains, Meidan and
Zhalka met far from the pressures of their charged home environment.
The Colorado camp over seven years has introduced more than
200 Jewish and Palestinian girls to each other – a youth version
of the 1993 Norway retreat that, until this fall, had Israeli and
Palestinian leaders working toward peace. Building peace is an
ideal role for Americans, said camp director Melodye Feldman.
“We’re not rioting and shooting in our streets. We have something
to teach. We have a democracy that works and a society that is
pluralistic in its views. It’s something other nations can learn from.”
She and her Jewish and Arab-American supporters plan to
expand the camp to include boys. They talk of inviting teens from
Belfast to Bosnia.
But in the Mideast, seven weeks of killing as Palestinians
and Jews clash over land they both covet is thwarting those
efforts to open young minds. Teenagers are among the most furious
fighters, say parents in Israel and Palestinian territories. And
unlike Meidan and Zhalka, Feldman finds most of the girls who met
in Colorado now feel hopeless.
Internet conversations between the girls grew contentious,
even angry, during recent hostilities: Israel’s Sept. 30 shooting
of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy as he huddled against his father
for protection; the Oct. 12 Palestinian mob slaying of two Israeli
soldiers; and Israel’s Nov. 9 helicopter-missile attack on a
Palestinian leader. The death toll has topped 230. Most of the
dead are Palestinians.
The new war “definitely has set us back, probably by 10
years,” Feldman said, adding that she may have to change camp next
summer because fewer families are willing to participate and
Palestinian girls may face travel restrictions.
Yet the friendship of Meidan and Zhalka has survived. The
two say they are determined to defy any challenges. In a few
months, Meidan is supposed to begin her compulsory military
service in Israel’s army. Two of Zhalka’s schoolmates recently
were shot by Israeli soldiers who fired into an “intifada” rally.
Since returning from Colorado in July, the girls called each
other almost every day, sometimes surreptitiously.
In her Hebrew-speaking Jewish suburb of Tel Aviv, Meidan
slinks upstairs to the phone in the family office while her
brother, two older sisters and parents get ready for bed. The
escalating war has left her so distracted that her grades have
dropped. She says a million thoughts race in her head.
Zhalka may be “the only one who really understands me,” she
said.
They talk about everything, from family arguments to
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Lately they dwell on the Army
decision that looms more heavily than anything Meidan has had to
do.
Refusing her required service would cause problems: no
admission to some universities and difficulty finding jobs and
obtaining loans.
“On one hand, it’s my duty,” Meidan said. “On the other, it’s
an organization that is using violence. I’m against violence and
don’t want to be part of it.”
About 90 minutes to the north, Zhalka retreats upstairs to
her room with a Boyzone poster on the wall and a telephone. A
rooftop porch looks out across Kfar Qara, an Arabic-speaking
Palestinian town amid olive trees just north of the West Bank
territories.
Outgoing and self-confident, Zhalka is a natural class leader,
according to a teacher. But like Meidan, she can’t concentrate
these days in class.
The killings “make me angry all of the time” and unleash
feelings that cut to the core of her identity as an
Arab-Palestinian. As Israel emerged as a nation where he and his
forefathers have grown olives for centuries, Moran Zhalka’s
father, Ali, gave her the Jewish first name Moran in hopes it
would bring better opportunity in her life.
“Sometimes I want to change my name and make it an Arabic
name,” she said.
But as hostilities intensified, the girls learned to control
their own anger and maintain mutual respect.
Consider what happened after the Sept. 30 incident when
Israeli bullets killed 12-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Al-Dura as
he huddled against his father for protection.
Zhalka was so enraged that she questioned whether she could
still be friends with Meidan. She spoke first with her father, who
told her that “this girl, your friend, is not guilty.” He’s an
elementary school principal who, after recent riots, arranged a
roadside peace rally including some Jewish principals from Hadera.
They passed out bumper stickers that say, “Enough. Don’t Destroy
Our Home.”
When Zhalka spoke with Meidan after the shooting, she felt
conflicted, she said, swallowing thoughts she hesitated to
express, worried about making Meidan angry and defensive.
“When I talked to Adi about the kid being killed, I didn’t
want to say this at first: “You see? This is your army.’ Because
Adi is a special girl. You want to say: “They are a killer.’ But
what does she have to do with that? I know Adi. She would start to
cry. She would be in her room for a week. So, I didn’t say anything.”
On Oct. 12, a Palestinian mob killed two Israeli soldiers in
Ramallah and flashed bloody hands to the world.
Meidan fumed. “It’s murder. You can’t defend it.”
Zhalka agreed. Yet she understood, even shared, the anger
motivating the slaying. Every day in Kfar Qara, she and other
Palestinians hear menacing thuds of Israeli soldiers taking target
practice – perhaps “to make us afraid.” In October, when some of
her classmates joined a local “intifada” demonstration against
Israeli killings, Israeli soldiers opened fire and injured two.
After the slaying in Ramallah, an Israeli helicopter fired a
missile into the central Palestinian police station. Sad and
confused, Meidan forgot her anger and called Zhalka and three
Ramallah girls she had met in Colorado. She didn’t want to argue
about what happened. She wanted to see if they were all right.
They were. They told her they were scared, the shooting was so
close to their homes. They told her they were happy she cared
enough to call.
Meidan must decide soon about the army. She’s scheduled for
interviews and tests in January. Her sister is in the army, along
with a boyfriend who serves in the West Bank. Her mother and
father want her to serve. “Maybe, if I go, I can make a little
change,” she said.
Zhalka holds back her comments on this too.
“I’m afraid she will change,” Zhalka confided away from
Meidan, “that she may begin to agree with what the army will do.
I’m afraid when I think about it.”
Yet when Meidan cries, flip-flopping about what to do, Zhalka
tries to respond comfortingly. “I tell her: “You have to go.’ I
think we can still be friends.”
While the girls grew closer, their communities grew more and
more tense – and disapproving of the girls talking, let alone
meeting face-to-face.
Meidan’s father, Rami, 51, an accountant, said he let her go
to the Colorado camp for a broadening experience, not to change
the world. He says he doesn’t believe in peace camps. His own
experience has imbued deep wariness. His father, a Jewish tailor,
was expelled penniless from Iraq. Rami grew up knowing hunger.
Fighting for Israel against Egypt in 1968, he lost his right arm.
He looked ahead to the Mideast he figures his daughter will face
in two decades, and said sadly: “There will be fighting. Small
wars.” The only question, he said, is whether a nuclear bomb
destroys everything.
At school, Meidan and Zhalka are regarded at best as dreamers.
At worst, their siblings, friends and neighbors accused them of
disloyalty.
Zhalka’s older sister Ann, 20, “doesn’t like that I have a
Jewish friend,” she said. Ann and her other sisters warn that
hanging out with Jews could corrupt her, lead her into forbidden
behavior such as drinking beer. “And my sisters think that,
because I have a Jewish friend, maybe I won’t talk to my Arab
friends.”
Palestinians pushed Zhalka to reconsider what she’s doing.
One girl said: “Maybe her father would kill your father. How can
you be friends?”
Jewish boys at Meidan’s school told her “Arabs are bad.”
“I feel so alone,” Meidan said.
Now the girls idealize Colorado – Meidan remembered it as
“this special warm place full of love and happiness.” They long to
return to camp next summer.
In Colorado, nobody asked for identification, Zhalka
marveled. “It felt great. And I found myself. Before, I didn’t
know for what I was living. I wanted another goal, not just to
study and be someone. I want to live so that, after I die, people
will say: “She changed something.'”
And in Colorado, the girls can get together – something that’s
nearly impossible here. In Israel, Jewish and Palestinian
communities mostly are segregated, similar to apartheid-era living
that split people racially in South Africa.
The girls’ parents say meeting face-to-face is too dangerous.
Fighting once concentrated in Gaza and the Palestinian West
Bank territories – where 3.1 million Palestinians reside –
threatens to spread closer to the girls’ homes. As the killing
continues, Israelis increasingly question the allegiance of the 1
million Arab-Palestinians living outside the West Bank in Israel.
Riots against Israeli killing recently erupted in
Palestinian-Israeli towns including Zhalka’s home, Kfar Qara.
In early November, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat still were refusing to talk.
Bloodshed was increasing daily. Fighting escalated toward all-out
guerilla combat.
Meidan and Zhalka resolved that their relationship also had to
take a new course.
They launched an offensive of their own.
Their mothers immediately said no.
The girls persisted.
They proposed a meeting in Hadera – a Jewish coastal city
between their homes.
On a sunny afternoon, Meidan called Zhalka to say even that
was refused, but promised she’d keep pressing anyway. Zhalka then
sat with her father on the porch overlooking the hillsides where
olive trees were heavy with fruit.
Just then, the phone rang again – Meidan with a breakthrough.
“OK!” Zhalka reported to her father. “We will meet in Hadera!
Her mother agreed to meet in Hadera. She said her mother asked her
why Moran can’t come here. And she told her mother: “The same
reason you don’t let me go there.’ OK!”
Her father’s face furrowed. How would Moran get to the bus
depot in Hadera? His car was broken. Taxis wouldn’t go to Kfar
Qara. Israeli soldiers were shaking down Arabs everywhere.
Zhalka begged. Finally, Ali Zhalka got up and hastily
arranged to borrow a car.
Off they went to Hadera’s bus depot.
And they saw the flashing police lights and soldiers. Ali
drove past them, pulled over. Moran got out. That’s when Meidan
saw her and ran.
After they hugged, the girls climbed into the back of the
borrowed car.
Ali Zhalka felt tears in his eyes as, in the rearview mirror,
he saw the girls happily sitting together talking.
“When you see something like that, you hate this conflict,”
he said. “You hate everything that would keep two girls who want
to be friends apart.”
He drove the girls to the Odd Cafe on Hadera’s main street.
Meidan had an hour. He waited nearby while the girls sat at a
table and ordered two cups of hot chocolate.
While machine guns crackled across the West Bank and Gaza,
they sipped and talked.
While Arafat and Barak stayed deadlocked, the girls made new
plans. Swim together. Go for a walk on the beach. Eat pizza
together. Attend a concert.
While military commanders honed strategies for stepped-up
action, the girls honed a strategy too. Soon, they vowed, they
will visit each other’s homes.
February 14, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Globalization, Human Rights, Iraq Under Saddam Hussein
A group of Coloradans sees the nation firsthand and joins members of Congress in asking that restrictions be lifted
AMARA, Iraq – Iraqi Lt. Khaled Ramady stands proudly in front
of a dilapidated brick fort after a Colorado peace group passes
by.
He and his troops consider themselves “at war” with U.S. and
British warplanes that regularly bomb Iraq. And they won’t let
visitors check their guns, just as their leader Saddam Hussein
won’t let United Nations inspectors look for possible chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons.
Kuwait is “our right,” 24-year-old Ramady adds.
“As long as you want to dominate my country, we will fight
you.”
Now much of the world is starting to believe that and
wondering what to do.
For nearly 10 years, a United Nations economic and military
crackdown – the most comprehensive in history – has tried to
control Saddam Hussein. And he’s still having his way, while 24
million working Iraqis struggle. U.N. officials say average
incomes have dropped from around $1,200 to $10 a month.
The United States remains firmly committed to defeating
Hussein. U.S. policy calls for “containment until regime change” –
making sure he doesn’t threaten other countries or amass weapons,
and eventually removing him from power.
But the Colorado peace group, which was in Iraq recently on a
12-day fact-finding mission, is not the only such organization
calling for a new course of action to ease the plight of ordinary
Iraqis.
Some 70 members of U.S. Congress this month asked President
Clinton “to turn a new page in our dealings with Iraq” and lift
the economic sanctions.
And the 50-nation coalition marshaled to fight the Gulf War
against Iraq “is certainly deteriorating,” said Diane Rennack,
foreign policy analyst for the U.S. Congressional Research Service.
U.N. Security Council members France, China and Russia for
months have challenged U.S. and British efforts to ensure rigorous
weapons inspections in Iraq. Commercial interests in oil-rich Iraq
are growing.
On Feb. 2, a Russian tanker was caught smuggling Iraqi oil in
violation of the embargo. U.S. Navy SEALs seized that tanker.
Embargo-defying trade is on the rise, U.S. officials warn,
reaching an estimated $25 million worth of illegal oil exports a
month.
Inside Iraq, the nine Coloradans encountered European and
Chinese business groups edging into the once-prosperous country
they expect will bounce back if sanctions are lifted. Taxi drivers
running the road between Amman, Jordan, and Baghdad say they move
more and more French, Russian, Chinese and Canadian businessmen
scoping out opportunities. Private-sector patience with sanctions
is wearing thin.
Hans von Sponeck, the senior U.N. official in Iraq,
questioned the morality of continuing “to keep a nation in the
refrigerator. … We must give each other a chance.” On Sunday,
von Sponeck asked to be relieved of his duties – he’d be the
second U.N. chief in Baghdad to resign.
And senior Iraqi officials, in interviews around Baghdad,
insisted Iraq wants only to live in peace.
So what does this mean for U.S. influence in the 21st century
– especially when it comes to maintaining multilateral economic
sanctions?
Dozens of countries are targets of unilateral U.S. sanctions
– a traditional foreign policy tool, short of war, designed to
further U.S. interests. But in a global economy where commerce is
ever more fluid, experts believe that only by building
international consensus can the United States really bring
pressure to bear. That requires serious diplomacy.
“To the extent the United States pushes too hard, it will
stimulate resistance” from other world powers, warns Richard
Haass, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings
Institute in Washington, D.C., and a senior adviser to President
Bush during the 1991 Gulf War that repulsed Iraq’s invasion of
Kuwait.
Yet Haass said he’s baffled by critics of sanctions against
Iraq. Ordinary Iraqis may be suffering, he said. “It’s just
important that people not blame the sanctions for what is the
cynical result of Iraqi policy.”
Sanctions must continue, he said, lest Hussein do something
outrageous. “It’s only a question of when, not if. Clearly the
best outcome is he’s out of power.”
But he’s not. And some U.S. officials say he may be re-arming.
So, the U.S. government is lobbying hard for a new U.N. plan
that would return weapons inspectors to Iraq in return for
eventually lifting sanctions. Hussein “is still a threat to
Kuwait,” contends Beth Jones, deputy assistant U.S. Secretary of
State focusing on Iraq. “Inspectors would make it better.”
In preparation for their January trip, members of the
Colorado peace group wanted to speak with a weapons inspector.
They turned to U.S. Air Force Capt. Eric Jackson, 31, raised in
Buena Vista and now stationed in Wyoming.
An aerospace engineer, Jackson spent four and a half months
in 1996 and 1997 working in Iraq with Richard Butler on the United
Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspection team.
He traveled up and down roads – including the one in front of
Lt. Ramady’s fort – stopping everywhere from fertilizer plants to
storage bunkers in search of weapons material.
Iraq “was probably six months away from having the (nuclear)
bomb in 1991,” Jackson told the Coloradans. And Iraqis may well
have learned, from U.S. military advisers in the 1980s, details of
U.S. satellite surveillance, he said.
But “sanctions are not going to work,” he contends. They are
a crude “continuation of the medieval approach of surrounding
castles and trying to starve people out.”
Moreover, current U.S. demands for Iraq to allow more
inspections amount to “an untenable position,” Jackson said,
because chemical and biological weapons in a relatively
industrialized country such as Iraq can be practically impossible
to detect.
In Baghdad, senior Iraqi officials insisted Hussein has no
territorial ambitions – and the top U.N. official backed up their
case for easing economic sanctions.
“We want only to maintain our sovereignty as a nation. We
would like to have peaceful coexistence between Iraq and its
neighbors,” Usama Badraldin, a senior foreign ministry official,
said in a Denver Post interview.
Yet the new U.N. plan to end sanctions after bringing in
inspectors “is unworkable,” he said, because it would prolong a
process already tainted by allegations that some inspectors shared
information with intelligence agencies.
Iraqi officials didn’t express any urgency toward breaking
today’s deadlock. “It’s up to the United States,” Badraldin said,
“to decide how to roll the ball. We are open. We are ready. We
have no precondition other than: Respect our dignity. Respect our
sovereignty.”
A senior official of Saddam’s ruling Baath Party, Abdul
Hashemi – a Boston University graduate who later served as Iraq’s
ambassador to France and as education minister – spoke for the
government in a meeting with the Colorado group.
“What Iraq wants: Just leave us alone,” he said. “We have
oil. The United States wants oil. The oil we have, we will sell
it. We can’t drink it. We will not prevent you from getting it.
And we will not let Iraqi oil be used against you.”
He denounced U.S. efforts to “liberate” Iraq by toppling
Hussein, and challenged the Coloradans to see today’s conflict
from a broader perspective.
“If you are really for human rights,” he implored, “then
respect those rights for me.”
Meantime, weapons inspections vehicles were lined up and
ready to go outside von Sponeck’s U.N. office.
Von Sponeck warned that today’s standoff between governments
is creating an angry generation of Iraqis whose education and diet
are deteriorating under economic sanctions.
Millions of working Iraqis “have nothing to do with whatever
was done by their leaders,” von Sponeck said in a Denver Post
interview earlier this month.
“So why should they be hooked in the first place? It’s
regrettable that, in the confrontation of Iraq, the population
itself is taken for granted. This is the call that any responsible
person has to make: end the singling out of a population to
continue to suffer.”
Back in the United States, some of the 70 Congress members
who signed a Jan. 31 letter asking President Clinton to lift
economic sanctions planned to introduce Iraq legislation this
week. It aims at easing the humanitarian situation while
continuing an embargo on weapons.
Current policy “is not compassionate, and it’s not consistent
with our moral position in the world,” said U.S. Rep. Tom Campbell
(R-Calif.), a co-author of the letter to Clinton. “And we’re not
accomplishing what we set out to do. … You’re not pressuring
Saddam with these economic sanctions. You’re hurting his people.”
In Iraq, from civil servants to mothers depending on food
rations in slums, people begged the visiting Coloradans for
relief.
“I just want to raise my children,” implored Sabeha Taher, a
single mother of five, in a crumbling home in the ancient city of
Samarra.
“It’s my duty,” she said. “What can we do?”
February 13, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Globalization, Human Rights, Iraq Under Saddam Hussein
Nine Coloradans recently visited Iraq to reach out to its people and try to mend hatred wrought by nine years of warfare and sanctions.
QURNA, Iraq – Nine Coloradans walked reverently into what
religious scholars consider the Garden of Eden.
They found muddy trash, a skeletal tree and a swarm of unruly
boys.
The Adam Ice Cream stand and a tourist hotel were long closed.
A U.S. warplane had just bombed Iraqi positions nearby.
Nasser Adnan, 10, eyed the visiting peace group.
“I don’t like Americans,” he declared.
Hatred seems to be the only thing growing in the cradle of
civilization.
Move 500 miles up the Tigris River to the Al-Zanabiq primary
school. There, teacher Mashall Abrahim’s classroom windows
shattered last November when an errant U.S. bomb fell next door.
Shrapnel shrieked across a playground that one minute later would
have been full of children. Now, student drawings show Iraqi
soldiers shooting blindfolded enemies hanging from trees.
And students ask: “”Why do the Americans hate us?'” said
Abrahim, a devout Christian woman with a fiery gaze.
“I tell them: “I have the same question. I have no answer.'”
“What is the crime that these children should bear all this
tension in their lives? I have no way or God or justification to
teach these children not to hate. They are learning it by their
own eyes and ears. It’s a daily event. I can’t turn it around
unless the bombing stops and they lift the sanctions. Then I could
try to tell the children there’s another way.”
That’s what the Coloradans are trying to do – find another way.
For nearly a decade, a U.S.-led military and economic crackdown
has effectively held Iraq’s 24 million people in a box.
The goal is containing their president, Saddam Hussein, who
set off the six-week Persian Gulf War when his forces invaded
Kuwait in 1990, and who amassed fearsome chemical, biological and
possibly nuclear weapons.
A United Nations-enforced embargo shuts off Iraq’s oil-rich
economy – blocking at least $6 billion of goods and services since
the war. This is meant to deny Iraq all but essential resources
until the United Nations certifies the weapons are gone.
About every three days, U.S. and British pilots bomb Iraq, in
response to Iraqi gunfire, while patrolling no-fly zones covering
most of the country.
Without this crackdown, U.S. officials maintain, Hussein
could re-arm and threaten other countries. U.S. policy includes
the goal of removing the president from power.
Hussein “only responds to negative pressure,” said Beth
Jones, the deputy assistant U.S. secretary of state focusing on
Iraq.
But the longer this goes on, the longer Iraq’s people are
trapped.
Consequently, Iraqi parents say, children waking up in Denver
this morning can be virtually assured of someday facing grownup
Nassers trained never to forget or forgive. And Colorado
agribusiness, oil exploration and high-tech companies can only
watch as European and Asian competitors edge into a lucrative
Persian Gulf market.
The crackdown wasn’t supposed to do this.
The Coloradans who met teacher Abrahim and young Nasser want
to change course. They are a diverse group of professionals who’ve
been following the U.S.-Iraq standoff for years, demonstrating on
Denver streets, warning of an endless entanglement abroad that
they believe is morally wrong.
Their recent 12-day mission in Iraq was designed to challenge
U.S. policy, which increasingly pits the United States against
Russia, China, France and other world powers.
They paid their own expenses – about $1,800 each. Journeying
under official supervision throughout Iraq, they tried their best
to bypass governments and forge peaceful relations with ordinary
people – even if that meant getting caught in the crossfire.
Accompanying this group offered a rare opportunity to get
inside Iraq. That led to a series of interviews with government
and United Nations officials, and dozens of Iraqis from many walks
of life, as well as U.S. officials back home.
The Denver Post found evidence that, after nearly 10 years,
the crackdown is incurring humanitarian costs that could fuel
future conflicts – and that it also may be working against the
stated U.S. goal of defeating Iraq’s president:
The embargo and bombing have led to a rallying, not
weakening, of power behind 62-year-old Hussein, U.N. and Iraqi
officials say.
The Coloradans saw no sign of serious dissent in the nation
he rules by fear and control over distribution of food and
medicine. United Nations officials in Baghdad confirmed nobody’s
challenging Hussein. The Coloradans saw that Iraq’s elite has a
stake in today’s standoff: They drive new BMW and Mercedes cars.
They dine at the likes of the Iraqi Hunting Club in Baghdad, where
the sound of clinking teacups is drowned out by bulldozers at work
on a massive new university nearby.
While Hussein and his elite live high, the sanctions weaken
an educated middle class that otherwise could be the backbone of
an open society. Hyperinflation has cut salaries that averaged
around $1,200 a month in the early 1980s to less than $10. Mothers
lament they can rarely afford meat. Still, with few other options,
working Iraqis toil tenaciously for small gains – farmers harvest
more and more wheat that few can afford to buy.
“We hear the American government say they are against the
government, not the people,” said an architect-turned-shopkeeper
in central Baghdad, whose brothers fled all over the world because
they can’t make a decent living here. “But the embargo isn’t
hurting the government. It’s hurting the people.”
Though working Iraqis suffer, Iraq’s overall economy is
moving ahead despite sanctions – due in part to rapidly increasing
U.S. consumption of Iraqi oil. U.S. purchases fall within
UN-supervised sales, with proceeds earmarked for food, medicine
and Gulf War reparations. Iraqi sales to the U.S. doubled last
year, averaging 712,000 barrels a day, making Iraq our
fifth-largest supplier, according to the American Petroleum Institute.
The Coloradans saw an aluminum smelter and brick factories in
operation, rebuilt bridges, bustling markets, shops stocked with
fresh fruit and vegetables, honking traffic jamming streets on
nickel-a-gallon gas, new construction of mosques and government
facilities.
A recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a
London-based think tank, predicts double-digit economic growth in
Iraq over the next two years.
UNICEF’s director in Iraq, Anupama Rao Singh, confirmed the
economy has “stabilized” over this past year.
“There’s been no further decline,” Singh told the Coloradans
at her office in Baghdad. But an emerging class of “profiteers and
operators” benefits, thriving on back-channel trade, rather than
middle-class Iraqis, she said.
Meanwhile, more and more people in Iraq’s secular society
seek solace in mosques. Some Muslim leaders are bold enough to
speak independently of the government. Yet they may be even more
opposed than Hussein to the U.S. government.
Moving a finger across his bearded throat – a gesture showing
what authorities could do – Shiite Imam Sayed Kysei, in long black
robes, shrugged off warnings from his assistants. “It’s the duty
of an imam to speak the truth,” Kysei said in a Denver Post
interview.
“What you see, officials clapping for officials, it’s nothing
more than a setup,” he declared. But that doesn’t make U.S. policy
less criminal in his view. He blamed Israeli influence in
Washington. “The undeclared part of the war is to kill the science
and Islamic knowledge here,” he said. “Iraq is a source of
knowledge for the world. We are objecting to the new (weapons)
inspectors because they represent the American policy.”
A U.S. taxpayer-supported insurgency led by Iraqi exiles is
going nowhere.
Most of the money Congress has released so far under the
Iraqi Liberation Act appears to have gone for consultants, rented
offices, and the like, U.N. officials in Baghdad say. Shiite
leaders failed to show for a recent expenses-paid Iraqi opposition
conference in Washington. People in Iraq are unaware of exiled
leaders.
Instead, working Iraqis are preoccupied with making ends
meet. Some seem genuinely to support Hussein. Many more rally
around his belief – widespread in Arab world – that U.S. leaders
motivated by oil, and Israeli influence, want unfairly to control
a rising Arab power.
Intellectuals who once might have questioned Iraqi leadership
now question U.S. motives instead, said Professor Zuhair
Al-Sharook, education dean at the University of Mosul. “Now I
wouldn’t think of doing anything against my country,” he said,
“because I know my real enemy is the American government.”
Friends, relatives worry as group heads for Iraq
The Coloradans set out for Iraq Jan. 17.
The United States was pushing a U.N. compromise plan that
would bring back inspectors and then lift sanctions if no weapons
are found. Iraq was calling the plan “unworkable.”
“What’s morally right here?” said Byron Plumley, 52, a
lecturer in religious studies at Regis University.
Down a Denver International Airport walkway he and the others
went: Elaine Schmidt, 66, a University of Northern Colorado
librarian; Andrea Fuller, 28, a University of Denver graduate
student; Karen Norder, 27, Metro State political science graduate;
Stephanie Phibbs, 28, a University of Colorado Health Sciences
Center research project manager; Gretchen Hawley, 67, grandmother
and former missionary in Africa; Mohamad Jodeh, 58, delicatessen
owner and Muslim community leader; Mark Schneider, 28, thrift
store worker; Jeri Kharas, 39, adoption agency case manager.
Friends and relatives worried. “As long as there’s no
bombing,” Schneider’s mother said, wiping a tear from her cheek
with her wrist as he left.
The U.S. government forbids most civilian travel to Iraq,
though officials haven’t prosecuted the growing number of peace
groups purposefully violating the rules. Telephone links are
limited. Modems, satellite dishes and Internet communication are
forbidden. No airline flies in or out of Baghdad. No U.S.
officials work in Iraq.
The Iraqi government wasn’t entirely welcoming. Officials
warned the Coloradans they’d have to submit to $50 AIDS blood
tests, using Iraqi needles, at the border.
The Coloradans flew to Jordan.
For 11 hours they rode in rented orange-and-white Suburbans
across the Syrian desert. They passed hundreds of trucks moving
Iraqi oil into Jordan. Here and there a dead sheep or camel was
lying. They patiently waited through a three-hour border stop.
“Can you help me find a job in America?” one guard asked
adoption caseworker Kharas.
Border officials waived the blood tests, thanks to letters
and lobbying from Michigan-based Life For Relief and Development,
an Iraqi-American agency that helped coordinate this mission.
A midnight sandstorm blocked out the moon. Inside one
vehicle, Phibbs practiced Iraqi greetings such as “Sabah Noor!”
(“Morning Light On You!”) and Arabic words describing sand. The
sandstorm delayed arrival in Baghdad (population: 5 million) until
2 a.m.
The city bombed in 1991 and 1998 looked good. Well-lit. Clean
streets. Fountains full of water. Statues and murals at traffic
circles.
Everywhere they went, each Coloradan carried a note written
in Arabic. The message: “Hello. We are part of a peace delegation
from the United States and we work to end U.N. sanctions and U.S.
bombing. We are here to meet Iraqi people and take their stories
back to the United States. We are sorry for any harm U.S. policy
has caused you and your family.”
The group planned to distribute $572,000 worth of medical
supplies – from IV packs to pacemakers – donated by Denver-based
Project Cure. But the shipment never arrived; it’s unclear what
happened.
Iraqi officials informed the group that Iraq refuses charity
and they’d rather the Coloradans lobbied Congress against
sanctions. The president of Iraq’s Red Crescent Society, similar
to the Red Cross, brusquely told the group that if the suppplies
ever did arrive, Iraqis would distribute them to hospitals.
Meeting among themselves later, the Coloradans weighed
staying on in Iraq to make sure the supplies reached people, or
sending someone back later. “I mean, we came here to do this,”
Schmidt said.
Foreign ministry staffers monitored the Coloradans, escorting
them around in three white government Oldsmobiles and a Chevy. The
ministry handlers arranged visits with officials who voiced Iraqi
positions.
But the group managed also to converse casually with dozens
of ordinary Iraqis from the southern oilfields near Kuwait to
northern Iraq, where U.S. warplanes scream down from Turkey. They
visited truck stops, schools, markets, hospitals, and ruins of the
earliest civilizations where agriculture, writing and the wheel
first appeared. They stayed in Iraq’s three main cities – Baghdad,
Basra and Mosul. Officials nixed an excursion into the Kurdish
region that is largely self-governed.
The system here is ruthlessly authoritarian. Agents of
Hussein’s ruling Baath Party operate in every neighborhood, as
ward bosses once controlled U.S. communities.
The president’s picture hangs everywhere: behind counters, in
offices, on either side of the podium in university auditoriums
and again at the back looking over students. Civil servants wear
wrist watches displaying his face. His initials adorn bricks in
restored ruins of Babylon and Hatra.
Soldiers are everywhere. Anti-aircraft guns perch on roofs
and alongside bridges. Military compounds line main roads. Tanks
lurk in trenches. Slogans on forts declare “Down USA” in English.
A gunner protected by sandbags flashes two fingers – signaling
victory, not peace – at the passing Americans.
Civilians being killed in low-intensity war
Shortly before the Coloradans traveled the 350 miles south from
Baghdad to Basra, Iraq’s Catholic archbishop, Gabriel Kassab,
traveled the same route, returning from the capital to his parish.
Conversing with the Coloradans in his office, he said he
witnessed a bombing. American fighter jets were patrolling.
An explosion seemed to lift the archbishop’s car off the
road, Kassab said. “I was afraid.” Similar bombings were a factor
in Pope John Paul II’s December decision to delay a visit to Iraq,
Kassab said.
Nobody’s sure how many civilians are dying in this
low-intensity war. Authorities in Mosul reported 51 civilian
deaths last year.
U.S. officials say Iraqis exaggerate post-war deaths. But
U.S. and British pilots bombed Iraqi targets 186 times since
January 1999, Pentagon spokesman Pat Sivigny said. “Pilots take
every effort to avoid collateral damage,” Sivigny said. “As long
as Hussein targets coalition aircraft, the Iraqi people will
continue to be at risk.”
Walking down dusty Al-Jamhorai street in Basra to get a feel
for middle-class life, the Coloradans heard about a stray missile
that landed amid row houses on Jan. 25, 1999, killing four
civilians and injuring 67. Residents insisted there were no
anti-aircraft guns or other weapons in the neighborhood.
Five-year-old Mustafa Saleh held up his left hand for the
visiting Coloradans. Two fingers are missing. His back is riddled
with scars from shrapnel. He and his brother, Haydar, were playing
in the dirt street when the missile fell, said their mother Iqubal.
“The missile came in. Then I go out into the street. I saw
both of them lying on the ground. The blood covered their legs and
their heads. All over was debris from the missile. When I called
them, Mustafa looked up. He called “Mama.’ But there was no word
from Haydar.”
He was dead.
“People here don’t need war and missiles,” the mother said.
“What can we do?”
Then there’s the economic hardship caused by the shutout from
the world economy.
Iraqi authorities wanted to emphasize this and encouraged
group visits to several hospitals. Inside the Basra children’s
hospital, where the group once hoped to deliver supplies, Dr. Ali
Jawad spoke of widespread malnutrition and falling birth weights.
Jawad led the group to a ward where four tiny newborns
struggled for breath inside incubators. One blue tank supplied
oxygen to all the incubators. It was the last tank, the doctor
said. “If that oxygen stops, all of them die,” he said. “We have
enough for half a day.”
Gazing at one of those babies, Karen Norder wept. Plumley
cried out: “It’s so, so sad!”
Suddenly perturbed, Jawad snapped: “We don’t need people to
cry here. Let him go and cry to his president and senators.” He
asked the Coloradans to leave.
Some medical supplies are allowed into Iraq under the
economic embargo. Jawad blamed shortages at his hospital on
embargo restrictions and a generally weakened economy. U.S.
officials accuse Hussein of keeping supplies away from his people.
The truth is, Iraq’s humanitarian troubles are due both to
sanctions and government spending priorities, UNICEF director
Singh said. “A bit of both.’
U.N. officials estimate sanctions have cost Iraq’s economy
about $6 billion. Rich with oil, Iraq once could spend heavily on
almost everything including public health and schools. Now U.N.
officials review all purchases and block anything deemed “dual
use” – materials ranging from graphite pencils to chlorine that
while needed for water purification could also fuel chemical
weapons. Meantime, Hussein’s government is spending millions of
dollars on new government facilities, a lakeside resort west of
Baghdad for ministers and their families, a new Islamic
university, massive mosques.
Impoverished families like Sabha Neimeth’s struggle to
survive on food rations that don’t include meat. Neimeth said
she’s hard-pressed to keep track of her 10 kids as she scrambles
to make ends meet. Garbage infests her once-tidy neighborhood in
central Basra.
A pile of trash captivated Neimeth’s youngest son, Husein
Salem, 5, a determined preschooler she dotes on. He was playing
with three friends the day before Neimeth met Colorado Muslim
leader Jodeh in a hospital.
Fluent in Arabic, Jodeh bowed his head listening, frowning,
as Neimeth spoke angrily from behind her black robes. Something, a
land mine or bomb, exploded, she said. It blew off Husein’s tiny
hands. It ripped and burned his face beyond recognition.
On a bed, his soft chest still rose and fell. Through swollen
bloody flesh, two eyes looked out at this world in terror. And
Neimeth couldn’t bear to touch him.
“My heart is shredding,” she told Jodeh. “I don’t know where
it came from. It was just in the trash. This is what is left from
the war. Can you help treat my boy?”
The Coloradans heard dozens of stories. Some surprised them.
Walking through a library in Mosul, Gretchen Hawley, whose husband
taught at the University of Denver for years, met Mahmood
Mohammed, a 1984 DU graduate. Turns out he lived a few blocks from
the Hawleys.
“I stopped receiving letters five years ago,” Mohammed said
sadly. “Many friends.”
Some of the questions Iraqis asked challenged the Coloradans.
“Are we part of this world?” one Iraqi professor wanted to know.
“Or are we to be excluded?”
DU graduate student Andrea Fuller, raised on a Western farm
and not wanting to sound like she hated her country, worried as
she rode south from Mosul that, “We are becoming imperialists.”
Visiting Iraq prompted a constant, mentally exhausting sifting of
facts. “I’ve played devil’s advocate with myself while I’m here. I
want to know the truth. I’m really trying to get my mind around it.”
Sitting beside her as the car passed military fortifications,
Kharas concurred. “I’m feeling so many conflicting thoughts,” she
said. “I’d heard Iraq is being strangled. Now that I’m here, I
don’t see that.”
But the idea of continuing a policy that holds 24 million
people back to get at their president – whom many of them support
– began to feel more and more wrong.
“Who are we,” Kharas said, “to think we can starve these
people into submission?”
Shopkeepers befriend peace group with offers of free treats
To foreign policy experts, Iraq remains one of the most
vexing challenges the United States has faced since the Cold War.
Yet ordinary Coloradans and Iraqis mingling on the streets
said simply talking might be a first step to resolving the
standoff.
The visiting Americans brought genuine friendship, said
Layla Ismail, headmistress at State Girls Orphanage No. 22 in
Basra, where the Coloradans handed out toys.
“I hope the friendship will grow,” she said. “And that might
bring peace between the governments.”
One night in Mosul, a musty northern city that once was a
stop along the ancient Silk Road trading route, the Coloradans
took an unplanned walk down Dawasa Street. Hundreds of heads
turned. Men looked up from domino games.
“As long as you are a peace group, you are welcome,” one man
said.
A classic Ford Galaxy parked on the street. On a movie
marquee, Stallone gazed down, armed with a big gun. Music blared
from a shop.
The owner of a juice bar thrust crushed mint into the hands
of the Americans. “From the north of Iraq,” he said. He poured
them a clear purplish drink called zabeb, made from half-dried
grapes and the mint. They loved it. He said it relieves pain and
stress.
Shopkeepers shared other morsels, and wouldn’t accept money.
As Phibbs nibbled candied almonds, an Iraqi man abruptly collapsed
on the sidewalk, writhing in an eplieptic seizure. Vicki Robb, the
group coordinator and a nurse, jammed a wad of Kleenex between the
man’s gnashing teeth. When his seizure subsided, she helped him
sit up against a wall. Then he went on his way.
The dean of a major university told the Coloradans relations
must improve lest Iraqi children become forever embittered.
“We don’t want our children to have hate inside them,” said
Ryad Al-Dabbagh, dean of Al-Mustinsariya University in Baghdad and
a father of three.
He and the Coloradans agreed to petition universities that
once hosted Iraqi students – including Colorado State University,
the University of Colorado and the University of Denver _ to begin
exchange programs again.
Now, back in Colorado, some in the group plan to press a
political case against sanctions. They talk about blizzarding
congressional offices with phone calls, shadowing presidential
candidates.
But working Iraqis, while desperate for economic breathing
room, were equally interested in developing contacts with the
outside world.
Individual people mixing “might make a difference” in
forestalling conflict, Iraqi actress Azadouhi Samual suggested.
Sitting at a table, she leaned over an imaginary small cup of
tea. She pressed her forefinger and thumb tips together. She
pretended to spoon out bad blood.
“If everybody take out one spoonful of bad things,” she said,
“then maybe we can make it clear.”
Reporter Bruce Finley will discuss his trip to Iraq on 9News
This Morning between 7:30 a.m. and 8 a.m. today. The Colorado
peace group will be featured in a Channel 9 report at 10 tonight.
« Previous entries
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.
