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.”
June 15, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
But “non-immigrant’ visas not a cure-all
Broadmoor hotel manager Bob Keesler relies on foreign-born
workers to fill 35 percent of the jobs at his complex in Colorado
Springs.
He’s still posting 190 openings, which he says U.S. citizens
ignore. His $8-an-hour maids from abroad each already work an
average of 500 overtime hours a year. He wants to hire people from
Honduras, India, Pakistan – anywhere.
Keesler and thousands of other U.S. employers are counting on
a new class of work visa proposed by a Colorado immigration lawyer
that would allow this move to happen. The proposal has developed
into a national Essential Worker Initiative to fill tens of
thousands of jobs by bringing unskilled and semi-skilled workers
from abroad.
Advocates plan to unveil the concept today at the American
Immigration Lawyers Association annual conference in Chicago.
Panelists will discuss the initiative Friday, then circulate draft
legislation in Congress.
This would be the latest in an alphabet soup of so-called
“non-immigrant” worker programs approved by Congress in recent
years to keep the economy growing without extending citizenship to
newcomers.
Rather than full-fledged immigration – a high-stakes issue
that presidential candidates have avoided – U.S. leaders
increasingly have focused on temporary non-immigrant programs
tailored to meet business needs. High-tech industry lobbyists say
they need 300,000 new white-collar workers; the federal Bureau of
Labor Statistics projects a shortage of 10 million workers within
the next decade.
First up in Congress this summer is a proposed increase in
“H1B” visas, which bring college-educated workers from abroad.
Support is strong from Silicon Valley to the White House for
raising the limit from 115,000 to about 200,000 visas a year. H1B
workers stay for up to six years.
The support comes despite charges the program is riddled with
abuse. The Denver Post has learned that federal labor officials
essentially rubber-stamp H1Bs with little scrutiny of the effects
on U.S. workers. And the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service violated the existing H1B cap by letting in 21,888 too
many H1B workers last year. INS spokeswoman Eileen Schmidt said
the “overage” was because of a counting mistake.
Other legislation in Congress would streamline the H2A visa
program that brings agricultural workers from abroad.
Various proposals to give amnesty to some or all of the
estimated 6 million undocumented workers also are at play in a
packaging and repackaging designed to marshal congressional votes.
AFL-CIO labor union leaders support a broad amnesty for current
undocumented workers, which could increase union membership.
It all reflects a sea change in the immigration landscape.
Four years ago, Congress focused on deportation. Some
politicians worried that a new wave of immigration, the greatest
since the turn of the 20th century, would threaten national unity.
But in July, Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan warned
labor shortages threatened the national economy. Greenspan said
increased immigration could ease labor shortages and reduce
inflationary pressure.
Ever since, coalitions pushing for more foreign-born
non-immigrants have been gaining momentum. The population of
non-immigrants residing in the United States tops 3 million, based
on INS figures. That’s in addition to an annual flow of more than
900,000 immigrants (660,000 legal and 250,000 undocumented).
“What we are doing now is we are building up a huge reservoir
of temporary, non-immigrant residents in this country who are
trying to fit through a bottleneck of limited green cards,” said
Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration
Reform, which opposes the efforts.
The influx, Stein said, “is killing the American worker’s
ability to get any kind of wage increase.”
The Essential Worker proposal that will circulate today in
Chicago is designed to help employers such as nursing homes,
hotels and motels, restaurants and construction companies.
An existing H2B program for temporary unskilled workers fails
to meet employer needs, said Donna Lipinski, the Denver-based
lawyer and AILA board member who proposed the essential worker
visa two years ago.
This year, AILA leaders resolved to back an essential-worker
initiative. They mobilized a coalition of 21 business groups.
Coalition leaders are considering coupling their proposal to
create essential-worker visas with proposals to grant amnesty for
undocumented workers.
Leaders are weighing whether to call for a specific number
of visas or tie the program to a national unemployment figure
above which essential workers would be sent home, advocacy
director Judy Golub said.
Even without specifics, the initiative has won some political
support.
U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., backs efforts to ease labor
shortages, said his spokesman, Sean Conway. “He’ll consider any
legislation.”
Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush supports
H1B and H2A legislation, but hasn’t taken a position on essential
workers. Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic candidate,
supports H1B visa increases, too, though he wants to attach
amnesty provisions for some undocumented workers. Gore backs H2A
reforms in principle. He hasn’t decided on essential workers.
Labor unions strongly oppose allowing any more workers from
abroad. “The reason employers can’t fill their jobs here is they
don’t pay enough money,” said Bob Greene, president of the
Colorado AFL-CIO. Employers want non-immigrant temps, Greene says,
because “they can not only pay them low wages, they can also force
them to do anything they want them to do.”
In the meantime, the agencies administering current
non-immigrant programs are strained. The needs of a soaring U.S.
economy, domestic workers and a global workforce hungry for
American jobs are colliding:
U.S. Department of Labor officials, traditionally charged
with watching U.S. worker interests, is focusing on easing
shortages for business. Congress required labor officials to
essentially rubber stamp 300,000 H1B certifications for 1 million
jobs, senior U.S. labor administrator John Fraser in Washington,
D.C, told The Post.
Yet, Fraser said, 19 percent of H1B workers are underpaid
in violation of those certifications. And government
investigations – 194 completed with 80 percent showing violations
– can only be done when H1B workers complain. Few do that, he
said. “We’ve tried to point this out over and over again, that
these workers are beholden to their employers.”
A pool of money set up to counter H1B effects on U.S. workers
is largely unspent. Job-training grants worth $12.4 million were
given this year. At least $40 million more is unspent, labor
officials said.
The INS – its enforcement budget has tripled since 1993 to
$4.3 billion a year – may go unpunished after violating the H1B
visa cap. H1B legislation contains “forgiveness clauses,” INS
spokeswoman Schmidt said. “The legislation contains language that
allows INS – it basically just forgives the overage.”
Foreign-born workers themselves are strained by the notion
that, in the future, the United States would use them temporarily,
legally, yet with no possibility of becoming U.S. citizens.
At the Burnsley Hotel in central Denver, maid Gabriela
Flores, 28, of Mexico, says she vacuums, wipes toilets and
polishes chandeliers because of a dream. She, her parents and nine
siblings migrated north hoping to become U.S. citizens who can
work into better jobs, vote and build a better life.
To work at unskilled jobs and perhaps be sent home if the
economy falters would make her feel “sick,” she said. “I want to
go to college. I want to be a kindergarten teacher.”
At the Broadmoor, Keesler would prefer “a long-term steady
workforce that’s local.” Any essential-worker legislation ought to
include provisions to send foreign-born workers home if the
economy slumps, he said.
But with few U.S. workers responding to his postings for
$6-an-hour-plus-tips and $8-an-hour jobs just getting permission
to hire foreigners is urgent.
Keesler tries to bolster spirits by giving out awards. He
sets an example by working long hours himself, and only ducking
out for fast food.
But when he approached a nearby Arby’s last month, Keesler
was dismayed. A note was posted on the drive-thru window. “Only
two people working today,” it said. “Drive-thru closed.”
May 8, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Uncategorized
Exiled in the Persian Gulf emirate Dubai, in a house by a
mosque, Pakistan’s former prime minister Benazir Bhutto sat down
at her personal computer.
“The days that I am too busy to worry about what my opponents
are doing to me are the good days,” Bhutto typed. She was
responding to interview questions from Colorado, where she’ll
arrive today for a speech at the Buell Theatre as part of the
Unique Lives and Experiences lecture series.
Bhutto has battled political opponents, and they’ve battled her – accusing each other of corruption – for most of her adult life.
Educated at Harvard and Oxford, she originally wanted to be a
journalist. But when she returned to Pakistan in 1978, her beloved
father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had just been replaced
in a coup by General Zia ul-Haq. In 1979, she watched as Zia’s
agents hanged her father. Then she endured frequent detentions. By
1986, she’d taken on the role of an opposition political leader.
And after a mysterious midair plane explosion killed Zia in August
1988, Bhutto became prime minister.
At age 35, she was one of the youngest heads of state in
modern times – and the first woman to lead an Islamic nation. She
tried to improve health and education for the 150 million people
of Pakistan, an emerging power west of India where the average
income is $500 a year.
Yet politics is a deadly game in Pakistan, and Bhutto soon
was absorbed in the climate of sectarian violence and corruption
that have plagued her country since Britain created it in 1947 as
a home for India’s Muslims.
Dictators claiming to combat corruption toppled Bhutto twice,
in 1990 and 1996.
Her two brothers were murdered, one allegedly poisoned, the
other shot by police. Her husband, Asif Zardari, has been jailed
for four years on corruption charges that are under appeal.
A year ago, Bhutto was convicted of embezzling hundreds of
millions of dollars and barred from holding public office. She
denies any wrongdoing, blaming “a kangaroo court” led by the son
of the man who ordered her father’s execution.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s other main political figure, former
prime minister Nawaz Sharif, faces worse trouble: a life jail
sentence inside Pakistan for hijacking and terrorism. Sharif was
overthrown last October in a military coup that installed Gen.
Pervaiz Musharraf.
This leaves Bhutto at 46 – exiled yet still committed to the
Pakistan People’s Party her father founded – positioning herself
for a return to power if ruling generals allow an election.
On frequent visits to England and the United States, she
projects an image of serene self-confidence, hiding any personal
anguish she may feel.
“When I think of the tragedies in my life, I break down in
tears,” Bhutto wrote. She especially misses her murdered brother,
Murtaza. “I can still feel the warmth of his cheek on mine as we
kissed goodbye and the smile on his face as he waved.”
Part of her mission in Denver is building understanding of
the Islamic world in general, as well as Pakistan and South Asia.
This is a region State Department officials see increasingly as a
hotbed of anti-U.S. sentiment, a fundamentalist refuge for
terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, where opium production gives
rise to global drug dealing.
On the fundamentalist forces emanating from Pakistan’s
Taliban-ruled neighbor Afghanistan, Bhutto said women in
Afghanistan are concerned about education and career
opportunities. But women support the Taliban, Bhutto acknowledged.
They do so, she said, “out of fear.”
Bhutto praised President Clinton’s recent visit to Pakistan
for highlighting choices she believes Pakistan must make between
becoming a closed fundamentalist society, or a democracy committed
to building peace in the region.
And in that region, she said, persistent U.S. bombing of Iraq
is “a sad reflection on our international systems of conflict
resolution.” Children are suffering; the bombing “hurts innocent
people,” Bhutto said.
“Iraq made a critical mistake in invading Kuwait. Some way
should now be found to guarantee peace.”
Worldwide, she believes that U.S. women, relatively affluent
and well-educated, are in a position to make a difference. They
collectively hold power, in her view, to confront Pakistan’s
current deadly mix: religious fervor, hungry masses, widespread
disillusionment and nuclear weapons.
“Do something about it,” Bhutto said. “We are all part of one
world, one humanity, one global family. Do something. Donate a
dollar to a (nongovernmental organization), write a letter to a
congressman, speak at a seminar against proliferation, raise your
voice for tolerance. To stay quiet is to acquiesce, and to
acquiesce is to surrender to the forces of darkness.”
There are plenty of critics – well-informed
Pakistani-Americans among them – who view Bhutto as a has-been.
She comes from a noble family and, in the eyes of some, never
broke rank. Her conviction by a Pakistani court and inability to
improve life for Pakistan’s impoverished masses lead some to
question her image as a liberal democratic heroine.
But Bhutto also is popular, especially among women in the
United States, according to surveys conducted as part of the
Unique Lives and Experiences program bringing her to Denver.
Program director Howard Szigeti, based in Toronto, said in a
survey of 2,700 women in Denver, only former British Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher, author Toni Morrison, National Public
Radio analyst Cokie Roberts, and NBC morning show host Katie
Couric rated higher than Bhutto. Bhutto proved more interesting to
American women, according to the survey, than Coretta Scott King,
Barbara Bush, Gloria Steinem, Susan Sarandon and Martha Stewart,
among others.
And despite her traditional “shalwar-kameez” attire and
headscarf, she shares much in common with the western audiences
she meets.
She enjoys reading books.
She loves the time she spends with her three children – they
go on walks, eat out, drive to see the lights in the city, watch
movies and plays.
She laments that over the past two years – since her last
visit to Denver – she hasn’t been able to follow a health club
routine or develop any new interests.
Most of all she’s just busy. Beyond Denver this week, Bhutto
is scheduled to speak in Boston and Edmonton, Alberta, then visit
friends in Washington, D.C.
“Slow days are few and far between,” she said. “Life is still
a big rush.”
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.
March 26, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Migration
While snow pelted Denver, aspiring Russian bards huddled
recently in a borrowed conference room, where visiting folksinger
Vladimir Berezhkov serenaded them with tales of life in the shadow
of the Kremlin.
Similarly, 6-year-old Maria Valershteyn hunkered over
Russian language texts this past year to supplement her Denver
Public Schools studies.
And every Saturday morning, Russian-speaking parents hustle
children to the Glendale Community Center for lessons in
traditional dancing.
“We want to keep our culture,” says Lyuda Zatureuskaya, who
supervises the lessons. “We are from a rich culture.”
That preoccupation eclipses today’s election in Russia for
many of the estimated 25,000 Russian-speaking people in Denver.
They form one of the fastest-growing and, by many accounts, most
prosperous communities of recent immigrants from the former Soviet
Union. The United States has admitted more than 450,000 since
communism’s collapse.
Their accents suggest they might well be engrossed in the
fate of President Vladimir Putin as voting begins across Russia
this morning. Yet Putin – a hard-liner who took charge when Boris
Yeltsin resigned New Year’s Eve – draws lukewarm attention at best.
“For me, American politics is a lot more important,” said
Yuliya Fridman, 24, a US West employee whose family moved from
Minsk in 1991. “This is where I live. This is where I plan to have
my family. I do care about what’s going on in Russia. But I’m
planning to make my life here.”
Rather, Russian-speaking immigrants focus on establishing
cultural institutions in Denver.
They’ve set up two Russian schools that teach children
traditions from music to chess.
An association of 11 clubs draws hundreds of adults for
discussions, concerts, fitness activities and poetry.
Grocery stores such as Dmitri Gershengorin’s European Mart on
Leetsdale Drive supply Russian sausages, pastries, smoked fish,
salads – and Russian videos for rent.
The Denver-based Moscow String Quartet plays classical music
that many immigrants love.
A Russian Orthodox Church at South Colorado Boulevard and
East Iliff Avenue is one of several where Russian-speaking
immigrants worship.
Their cultivation of Russian-ness while sinking roots here
stands out at a time when other immigrants use the United States
simply as a money-making center for building a better life
elsewhere.
Russian poetry in Denver trumps politics in Russia in the
view of Moscow-born Will Kaufman, 35, a member of the Russian Bard
club here and a successful computer programmer. “I am very cynical
about Russia, very cynical about this war in Chechnya.” Kaufman
called today’s elections “a travesty” masking control of Russia by
wealthy oligarchs.
Many Russians here won’t vote for lack of interest, said
Leonid Reznikov, a researcher at the University of Colorado Health
Sciences Center who also edits the Russian newspaper Horizon.
Reznikov presented election information in Horizon. He also
advised Russian consular officials who plan to supervise absentee
voting today at the Glendale Public Library. About 200 Russian
immigrants with passports voted in Russia’s parliamentary election
last fall.
“I believe some people may come to support Grigory Yavlinsky
(one of 11 candidates challenging Putin),” Reznikov said. “But
there is no real choice. Putin will win anyway. Hopefully he will
not bring a real dictatorship to Russia. It may be a soft
dictatorship. We already have some signs that censorship is
starting in the Russian press.”
In Denver, the Russian-speaking community emerged in the late
1970s with the arrival of a few Jewish dissidents. It took off
around 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed.
Nationwide, at least 454,628 immigrants have arrived from
former Soviet countries since 1990, according to federal
statistics. Of those, about 372,335 entered as refugees. The
United States gives special priority to Jews and evangelical
Christians in ex-Soviet countries who claim they face persecution.
Thousands more migrated to the United States for economic
opportunities or as spouses of previous immigrants. And the
454,628 figure doesn’t include a growing number of
Russian-speaking temporary workers.
The emphasis on sinking roots in America, rather than
investing earnings back home, reflects that “things have not gone
as smoothly as they might have in the countries they came from,”
said Terry Rusch, director of refugee admissions for the U.S.
Department of State. “Overall, it’s been a very positive
experience. They’ve come, they’ve enriched this country.”
Economically, Russian speakers in Denver say they are getting
ahead. The elderly rely heavily on public support. But working-age
immigrants find their solid education in Russia pays off here.
More than 44 businesses run by Russian-speaking immigrants
advertise in the Denver-based newspapers Horizon and Vestnik.
Businesses here include a crew of carpenters, Vartan
Tonoian’s jazz club “Vartan’s” in Downtown Denver, the Astoria
restaurant serving borscht, chicken Kiev, plove (a rice and meat
dish from central Asia) and more, a pharmacy in Cherry Creek
North, two Russian bookstores, and Little Russian Cafes.
Russian speakers in Denver often say they are lonely. They
say they need to cultivate a distinct identity in America.
Parents lament that their children, who tend to hang out with
other Russian-speaking children, converse predominantly in
English.
“People miss the closeness they had in Russia – closeness
with friends sitting at the kitchen table drinking vodka talking
about anything at all,” Kaufman said while handling a computer job
last week. “Here their relations with Americans at work and with
neighbors are very superficial. “How’s work? How’s the weather?’
Their soul yearns for some sort of really close contact.”
The main challenge now is just finding some place to meet.
Community leaders talk of raising money for a Russian Cultural
Center.
Until now, Russian speakers have borrowed rooms for club
gatherings. The Glendale Public Library, with Russian-speaking
staffers, serves as an unofficial center.
Occasionally, Jewish Community Center auditoriums are
available.
“We need it,” school director Zatureuskaya said of the
proposed cultural center. Enrollment at her Science, Art and Sport
Center for Children has doubled over the past three years to 150
students. They range from 6-year-old girls in ballet attire to a
sheepish 15-year-old boy who wasn’t inclined to give his name
after practicing for a recent dance performance. “Half of it, my
parents make me come,” he said. “Half of it is fun.”
Former actress Inna Valershteyn is passionate about ensuring
that her 6-year-old daughter, Maria, studies Russian in addition
to Denver Public Schools classes. In the family Volvo, she drives
Maria to private classes with Olga Sventuh at a rented facility.
“I don’t want to lose this language,” Valershteyn said. “If a
child has more than one language, it makes life richer.”
Political freedom here enables activity that once proved
risky in Russia. For example, free-thinking bards raised
suspicions during Soviet times. The Russian bard tradition
involves composing poems, then singing them while playing guitar –
a bit like Bob Dylan. The bards gather in forests to do this.
Last summer, club leaders booked space for 40 at a campground west
of Denver. More than 70 aspiring bards arrived, setting up tents
beneath pine trees, tuning guitars, sipping wine. They sang out
their poetry until dawn. Coordinating all these cultural
gatherings on top of fast-paced U.S. work schedules is a difficult
job. But the Russian-speaking community found a solution: Mikhail
Timashpolsky, 76, president of the Denver Russian Community
Cultural Center, who once ran government cultural “palaces” in
Russia. A pensioner with time to make phone calls, Timashpolsky
devotes most of his waking hours to keeping his countrymen together.
“In the former Soviet Union, people were going for community,
rather than individuality,” he said. “That’s why, when
Russian-speaking people come here, they still have this desire to
be in a community. Many feel they have no outlet for their
creativity. These people, they want to preserve their culture and
knowledge.”
March 24, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
Webb steps in to broker deal in fatal no-knock raid
Denver Mayor Wellington Webb brokered a $400,000 settlement
Thursday with the family of Ismael Mena, the Mexican migrant
worker Denver police killed in a botched no-knock drug raid last
fall.
The deal sets a monetary record for Denver in wrongful-death
cases involving police. City attorneys say the previous high
payment was $260,000.
It begins to resolve a major fiasco. The fatal raid on Sept.
29 prompted Mexican government officials to raise concerns in
Washington. The FBI launched an investigation into possible
criminal civil-rights violations.
Denver’s mistake – police hit the wrong house – was a factor
in Police Chief Tom Sanchez’s resignation. And it sparked scrutiny
of how hundreds of no-knock search warrants are issued.
A key legal factor in the settlement was Mena’s immigration
status. He had entered the United States without proper documents.
To work, he showed employers fake papers, family attorney Robert
Maes said.
Mediator Jim Carrigan “kept telling us the ultimate value
of this case was between $200,000 and $500,000,” Maes said. A
former federal judge, Carrigan “reminded us several times that he
was really a potential felon by illegally living in the country,”
Maes said.
Lead city attorney Ted Halaby confirmed that this factor “was
considered.”
The $400,000 falls far short of the $5.5 million Maes
initially sought for Mena’s family in Mexico. Denver initially
offered $150,000. A migrant worker for much of his life,
45-year-old Mena was working here to support his wife and seven of
their children, ages 8 to 20, on his farm near San Julian in the
central Mexican state of Jalisco. Two sons work in Los Angeles.
Mena’s widow, Maria del Carmen, was forced to sell his
animals. She traveled to Denver to attend negotiations last week
and, according to Maes, grasped the implications of a protracted
court battle. Then she returned to Jalisco. Mena’s eldest son,
Heriberto, 21, a restaurant worker, stayed in Denver to represent
the family.
“I don’t know if that’s good,” Heriberto said of the
$400,000, “but this is the best for my family.”
Mexico’s representative in Denver, Consul Carlos Barros,
immediately praised the deal. The money “is going to be good
enough to guarantee that Mena’s children get an education, which
is a main concern,” Barros said. “I’m very happy the whole case is
solved. It was always a deep concern to have this family with no
means of survival. … Now we can do some more productive work.”
Webb said: “What we tried to do was come up with what was
fair. … I frankly don’t think you can put a price on a person’s
life.”
Thursday afternoon, Webb intervened when both sides were
deadlocked in arbitration in a Lower Downtown conference room.
Attorneys agreed only on calling out for Quizno’s at lunch.
At 2 p.m., Maes said, the city was offering $275,000 while he
was asking for $600,000.
That’s when Webb went to the room. “I thought I might be able
to get it solved,” Webb said later.
Webb listened for the better part of an hour, Halaby said.
Then he gave the go-ahead for a compromise offer of $400,000.
Today, Mena family attorneys are structuring an annuity that
will pay the family $1,700 a month for 20 years, plus $100,000 up
front for a house in the town of San Julian. Maes said he and his
legal team will take 25 percent of the settlement money.
The move to San Julian will improve the lives of Mena’s
children, he said. There’s a school there, and running water.
Mena’s two oldest sons plan to keep working in the United
States.
Mena preferred life on the farm, which he struggled to
maintain from afar. The settlement, Mexican Consul Barros
suggested, amounts to “a transformation of his dream.”
Heriberto Mena said Thursday that he’s considering moving
from Los Angeles to Denver if possible. “I like it a lot here.
Good people here.”
Legal experts said the settlement was low compared with what
other cities have paid in wrongful-death suits. Denver “maintains
its reputation for never capitulating on these kinds of cases,”
lawyer Craig Silverman concluded.
But the city’s lawyers “should be commended for
stepping up to the plate when there’s a reason to do it,” lawyer
Scott Robinson added. Happy over settlement
Denver Police Union President Kirk Miller declined to comment
on the settlement except to say police need better training.
And lawyer David Bruno, representing Denver police officer
Joseph Bini, who faces perjury charges in the no-knock raid, said
he’s happy the city and family have settled. “Any time you can
settle a case you’re better off.”
Yet the settlement left sadness and rage. “I want to cry a
little,” Maes confided after a city hall news conference. “I wish
I could have got them $2 million.”
Mena’s illegal immigration didn’t keep him from working for
dozens of U.S. employers for years – earning more than $10,000 in
1998, Maes pointed out. He worked most recently at the Coca-Cola
bottling plant in north Denver.
Beyond Mena’s death, the tragedy exposed “an unspoken”
agreement between Mexico and the United States that is wrong, Maes
said.
“He had a green card, and it was a false green card,” he said.
“We let ’em in so long as they don’t create waves. We’re not going
to enforce on the employers. I know who pays the price: It’s the
people who come north looking for an opportunity. And their
families pay a price, too. … We’re not only complicit, we are
hypocritical. Our corporate culture takes advantage of this labor
pool.”
Webb declined to comment on that broader situation.
He said the settlement concerned only this case.
“This doesn’t mean if there are future cases we would do them
the same way,” Webb said.
Denver Post staff writers Peter G. Chronis and Mike McPhee
contributed to this report.
MAJOR POLICE SETTLEMENTS IN DENVER
December 1999 – Antonio Reyes-Rojas received a $30,000
settlement after he was shot by Denver police officer Kenneth
Chavez.
November 1998 – Relatives of Jeffery Truax accepted a $250,000
settlement with the Denver Police Department for the March 1996
shooting death of Truax outside a Denver nightclub by Chavez and
officer Andrew Clarry. A jury had awarded the Truax family $500,000.
June 1998 – Mauricea Gant received an undisclosed settlement for
the September 1992 killing of her father, Steven Gant, by Denver
police officer Michael Blake.
May 1998 – A jury awarded the family of teenager William “Bill’
Abeyta $400,000. Abeyta was shot to death in January 1995 as he
allegedly drove a stolen Jeep at police. The Denver City
Attorney’s Office, however, says a payment that high was never made.
October 1993 – A federal jury awarded $330,000 to the family of
Leonard Zuchel for the 1985 fatal shooting of Zuchel by Denver
police officer Frederick Spinharney.
ELSEWHERE IN THE STATE
April 1996 – Juan Pablo Rocha-Gallegos was awarded a $225,000
settlement against the city of Greeley after being shot seven
times by a police officer during a massive drug raid in Eaton in
1993.
July 1988 – Derek Scott Powell, 25, was killed by a Boulder
County sheriff’s deputy after Powell allegedly pointed a rifle at
the officer. A federal jury awarded $1 million to Powell’s family.
A federal judge threw out the verdict, but the family settled with
the county and the deputy.
March 16, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
Talks start today in no-knock death
SAN FELIPE JESUS DE LAS CASAS BLANCAS, Mexico – Ismael Mena’s three-room adobe house gives shelter from hot wind.
Nine children once chattered by flowers in the courtyard
where, today, their 80-year-old grandmother putters alone.
An adjoining stable Mena built for his beloved red horse sits
empty; the saddle gathers dust. His cornfield fights weeds.
The 14-acre farm here was Mena’s dream.
To keep it alive – traditional lifestyles are dwindling as
Mexico goes modern – Mena had to toil in the United States for
much of his life. Most recently, he worked the night shift for
Coca-Cola in a graffiti-splotched north Denver neighborhood where
drug deals are done. He fixed wooden pallets. He lifted hundreds
of red plastic crates, each packed with eight 2-liter plastic
bottles of Coke, and hoisted them into red trucks.
The money he sent home sustained his wife and seven children
on the farm. Two older sons had moved to work in Los Angeles.
Now Mena’s dead. Denver police shot the 45-year-old migrant
mistakenly in a botched no-knock drug raid last fall; they went to
the wrong house. Once a policeman in Mexico, Mena had been
sleeping off his night shift.
Five months later, Mena’s family is torn. Without him
working, Maria del Carmen saw fit to sell his 10 cows, one mule
and the horse. She has moved the children in with her parents 5
miles closer to the nearby town of San Julian and the doctor her
diabetic son needs.
“We are wondering how we will live,” she said.
Today, negotiations for wrongful-death compensation begin in
Denver, where Maria, eldest son Heriberto, and attorney Robert
Maes, referred by the Mexican government, square off against
Denver’s legal team.
The city’s offer – $150,000 – falls short of the $5.5 million
Maes seeks for the family. Former federal Judge James Carrigan is
to guide arbitration today.
The only reason Maria didn’t sell her husband’s land, too, is
that Mena’s mother, Dona Julia, absolutely refuses to leave it.
While water trickled from a tap into buckets, Julia conjured
images of Ismael talking to his cows as he milked them.
“Why did they have to kill my son? I loved him so,” she said,
drawing a black shawl across her wrinkled face. If she left the
farm, Dona Julia said, “everything would be over. It would all
fall down. That’s why I don’t want to go.”
Meantime, Ismael’s 20-year-old daughter, Rosalilia, is in
charge of the children surviving here on beans and tortillas,
cooked over a wood fire in an adobe house with no bathroom. Ismael
Jr., 17, injects himself each morning with insulin. Rosalilia’s
twin, Rosaelia, cradles Mena’s 1-year-old grandson, also named
after him, whom he never saw.
Little Maria del Carmen, 8, and Alejandro, 11, attend a small
rural school; no secondary school is reachable for Juanita, 11,
Irene, 14, and the others. The younger children grasped that their
father was dead when they saw his body at the funeral. Now they
treasure his clothes.
“We try not to talk about it too much,” Rosalilia said.
“Thinking about their father makes them feel very bad.”
The pastoral lifestyle Mena preferred to modern city life is
also a dream for thousands of other migrant workers in the United
States. For lack of money as Mexico modernizes, they travel north,
sometimes at great risk, to fill proliferating U.S. jobs that pay
$8 an hour or less. Our humming economy depends on their labor.
U.S. big business is lobbying Congress to allow more migrant
workers, especially those with basic skills, lest labor shortages
force up wages.
Yet rather than settle in the United States, many like Mena
work solely to build up what’s theirs back in Mexico, using their
savings to expand rural houses and herds. Here in rugged
6,000-feet-high eastern Jalisco, electricity lines installed
around 1993 and telephones more recently raise the possibility of
comfortable rural living.
For one fleeting moment in 1997, Maria del Carmen said, she
felt Mena had achieved his Mexican dream. Water holes were full.
Green maize shoots poked up from the field. Mena strode proudly
from the adobe house to the field. “I was walking with him. We
were walking with all the children too.”
She wanted that togetherness every day.
“I’d tell him: “Come back and live with your brother and
sisters and horses,'” Maria del Carmen said. “He’d say he’d come
back when he got some more money.”
His mother Julia said she regularly reminded him: “Save the
money. Send it to Mexico. Or bring it. So that you can stay here
and not have to leave so much.”
Mena was born during hard times. His father moved from the
town of San Miguel across what is called “El Canon” to a mesa.
Drought soon drove the family away again to the current farm near
the stone church and a dozen or so homes that together are known
as San Felipe Jesus de las Casas Blancas.
They sold a little maize.
Mena loved horses, his brother Salvador, 58, said in the
dirt-floor house where he lives nearby. “Charro” horsemen are
local heros to this day.
School for Mena lasted only a few years. Work beckoned. At 18,
he left Mexico, crossing to Arizona, where he drove a tractor.
Back from that first stint abroad, he was playing soccer one
day when Maria del Carmen and friends stopped to watch. He
remembered her. A few weeks later at a fiesta nearby in Jalpa, he
approached. “He said: “I want you to be my girlfriend,'” Maria del
Carmen recalled. “I said: “Yes.'”
They married. “He wanted a family.”
To that end, Mena moved north again – the migration that would
repeat itself again and again over nearly three decades. In the
United States he worked as a meatpacker, cook, busboy while she
raised their babies. Family photos show Mena working at one
restaurant in California. He wore a clean white shirt with black
bow tie and cap. He tended bar, washed dishes in the kitchen,
wiped tables and, after closing time, swept the floors.
When he returned to Mexico, his children said, he brought them
presents: bicycles, dolls, a tape deck. Once he brought a
television. The kids spend hours watching a wide commercial world
from the countryside here.
The children especially remember his way with horses. “He
could make one lie down, and then he’d motion and it would get
up,” Rosalilia said.
Ismael Jr. recalled: “He would say “Never hit an animal. Talk
with them, chat. Feed them well. And stroke them.'”
He also worked on roads. Once, his brother Salvador said, he
cracked a rib trying to pry loose a rock. For days he wheezed.
Unable to work on his farm, he arranged to serve as policeman
in the sleepy town of San Diego de Alejandria. A family photo
shows Mena standing with a pistol tucked into the waist of his
trousers. Six months later, he turned in the pistol and the
bullets. “He thought police work might be dangerous,” Salvador
said. “He wanted to get back to the ranch.”
Yet to buy animals, Mena had to migrate, carrying a crinkled
Virgen de Guadalupe prayer card in his wallet.
Mena left last in August 1997. He worked for a beef company in
Idaho, earning more than $18,000 in 1998, according to records
attorney Maes collected.
Last year he moved to Colorado, staying first with cousins in
Fort Lupton, cleaning apartments and landscaping.
He moved into Denver as pressure mounted back home: Ismael Jr.
had collapsed. Maria del Carmen and her parents hauled him to San
Julian. “He was almost in a coma,” said Dr. Ismael Macias, who
gave basic treatment and then sent the boy to a hospital in
Guadalajara. He lay for 15 days on intravenous fluid. The final
diagnosis is that “his pancreas does not work at all,” Macias
said. He needs insulin daily.
Mena began building up savings when he landed what his son
Heriberto described as a $300-a-week job at the Coca-Cola bottling
plant.
Heriberto recalled their last telephone conversation: “It was
difficult for him to sleep at day. But he was happy with this
work,” said Heriberto, a restaurant worker in Los Angeles.
Mena also “asked about the family. He said he was going back
to Mexico this year.”
Coca-Cola managers said they were preparing Mena to drive
forklifts.
At daybreak, Mena would walk two blocks past public housing
and an alley where dealers and junkies would hang out. He’d climb
the 15 stairs in the house at 3738 High St. where he rented an
8-by-8-foot room. The window looked out on the Coca-Cola plant and
a round brick smokestack in the distance. And he’d sleep.
Penciled Xs still mark the spot where bullets pierced walls
in Mena’s room during the midday raid on Sept. 29. A
Spanish-speaking little girl from another family now sleeps there.
Mena was sleeping when police burst in.
They’d been paying an informant who once used drugs to make
undercover purchases in the area. Based on his information, they
secured a no-knock warrant for the two-story house where Mena
lived. The informant apparently got mixed up.
Police said they shouted “Police!” and “Policia!” as they
entered. They pinned down Antonio Hernandez in the room next to
Mena’s.
Earlier in September, police apparently had confiscated a gun
Mena was carrying illegally. They say he had another one on Sept.
29, a Burgo .22 – untraceable so far – and that, despite their
warnings, he fired three shots.
Police fired too. Eight bullets tore into Mena’s face, chest
and arms. He died at the scene. Here in Mexico, his sister Maria
de Jesus figured he had the gun “for his protection” in a
dangerous big city.
The shooting was “a violation of basic human rights,” Dr.
Macias contends.
“Police shouldn’t be able to do things like this,” Mena’s
brother Salvador said.
“Who fired first?” nephew Sergio, 26, wanted to know.
Sergio feels the “indignity” acutely. When he was headed to
the United States for work in 1992, his mother Maria de Jesus told
him to go with her brother. The men crossed near Tijuana. Though
Mena knew the way well, he hired a “coyote” guide for $800, Sergio
said. “He wanted to be more sure we’d make it because of me.” In
tense moments crossing, Sergio recalled, Mena encouraged him.
“He said: “We’re going to go work … We’ll go and earn a
whole lot.'”
Today the farming lifestyle Mena loved is generally
threatened. His relatives hanging on here still contend “nothing’s
better.”
At night, cattle low amid nopal cactuses, dogs howl, and
constellations light the sky: Virgen de San Juan in the north,
Ojos de Santa Lucia overhead, and the Cruz de Mayo to the south.
But shoe factories run by transnational companies are the
focus of economic action in the region. Small farming in Mexico
“doesn’t work economically,” said Dr. Macias The land is too poor
and there’s not enough water, he said. “It doesn’t pay. Fertilizer
costs. Seeds cost.”
Dr. Macias worries that Mena’s children still are “suffering
a lot.” He and others advise Maria del Carmen to move into San
Julian so her children can salvage some education. Then they could
work in small business.
Maria del Carmen has a sewing machine. With money from Denver,
she said, she might afford a house. Living in San Julian would
cost about $1,000 a month, she figured. Rosalilia says she’s
interested in designing clothes. She wants to make up the school
she’s missed over the last eight years.
“I’d say it would be justice to help my brothers and sisters
with their studies. Because my father can’t help us. We don’t have
any help.”
The decision to sell off the animals was painful, Maria del
Carmen said, and if immigration papers were available she’d
consider leaving Mexico altogether and moving to the United States.
“It’s over,” she said of the farm. Yet nobody’s ready to
really accept that, least of all Dona Julia.
In Mena’s empty stable, she tried to fix his bridles and
lassos. She nailed a stirrup on the wall above a crucifix and
broken television.
She envisions everybody back in the house. “Como antes,” she
said. “Like before.”
Money from Denver might help at least fix up the farm,
“starting with Ismael’s room,” she suggested. She envisions white
paint on the walls, a tiled floor “not cement,” a new door, with a
tractor and little cow outside.
The last time she spoke with Ismael, “he told me, “You know, I
love you too much.’ I cried,” she said, crying again.
“He told me: “Don’t cry. When you think about me, just make a quick prayer. Nothing more.'”
March 1, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Migration
Ruling affects criminals whose native countries won’t allow them back home
Federal appeals court judges in Denver on Tuesday backed the
government’s power to detain indefinitely immigrant criminals
whose countries won’t take them back.
Weighing into a national dilemma, their 10th Circuit Court of
Appeals ruling asserts that this growing class of deportable
immigrant criminals has lost basic rights under the U.S.
Constitution.
The ruling upholds a 1996 law requiring deportation of
immigrants convicted of crimes and detention of those who can’t be
deported. Under the law, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service is holding 4,566 immigrant criminals, filling up a fourth
of INS detention center beds.
The appeals court case concerned two Vietnamese men detained
at a 340-bed regional INS detention facility east of Denver.
Now they and other detainees – including a Laotian named Sia
Vang who appeared in a separate federal court case Tuesday –
depend more than ever on INS discretion if they ever are to rejoin
their families.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Babcock delayed a decision on
Vang, who was sentenced to 24 years of probation in 1996 for
sexual assault on two preteen girls.
In addressing the constitutional concerns, the appeals court
judges declined to interfere with the law Congress passed in 1996,
which set no time limit for detention.
“This court will not substitute its judgment for that of
Congress by reading into the statute a time limit that is not
included in the plain language of the statute,” Appellate Judge
Michael Murphy, a Clinton appointee, wrote in the 33-page ruling.
Releasing the two Vietnamese detainees who sought freedom
under the Constitution would amount to awarding them “the very
right denied them as a result of the final (deportation) orders,
the right to be at large in the United States,” the judges
reasoned. “The relief they seek is indistinguishable from a
request to be readmitted to this country.” But these and other
immigrant criminals whose countries won’t take them back are
indisputably here, critics emphasized after the ruling. The cost
to U.S. taxpayers tops $100 million a year.
Appellate Judge Wade Brorby, a Reagan appointee, issued a
sharp dissent to the ruling: “Governmental conduct that so reduces
an individual to a “non person’ to permit such imprisonment most
assuredly shocks my conscience,” he wrote.
The ruling immediately drew calls for reconsideration from
immigrants’ rights advocates nationwide.
“We’re going to continue fighting,” said Judy Rabinovitz, a New
York-based senior lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union,
who argued the case with local lawyer Jim Salvator last July.
Immigrants convicted of crimes “are human beings,” Rabinovitz
said, “and our Constitution protects all persons from deprivation
of life, liberty and property. The two-judge majority
fundamentally misconstrued the constitutional issues presented in
this case.”
A former INS legal chief joined in the outcry.
“Anybody in the United States subject to government power is
entitled to the protection of the Constitution,” said Alex
Aleinikoff, chief INS counsel from 1994 to ’97 and now a professor
at Georgetown University Law Center.
“The conclusion that there are people in this country who can
be arbitrarily detained indefinitely, on the theory that they have
no rights is inconsistent with developments in due process law
over the last century.”
And University of California law professor Charles
Weisselberg, a veteran immigration lawyer, suggested that U.S.
moral authority will suffer. “This makes it harder for us to hold
other countries accountable (for jailing people indefinitely) when
we give people in our country the back of the hand.”
The decision in Denver begins to firm up an uncertain
landscape for detention of immigrants. It’s the second appellate
court ruling supporting the 1996 immigration law that has led to
hundreds of cases in federal district courts nationwide. The Fifth
Circuit Court, covering Texas and Louisiana, ruled last August.
The Ninth Circuit Court in California is expected to rule soon
after hearing arguments earlier this month. Circuit court
decisions are binding in their areas for federal judges ruling on
similar cases.
Federal district judges have been divided, and rulings for
and against the law are mulitiplying.
INS officials took Tuesday’s ruling as less than a green
light for future detentions. They’re reluctant to use their powers
too frequently in part because they don’t have room for many more
long-term detainees.
“The fact that you’ve got two circuit courts that have
basically upheld that the law is constitutional is certainly
significant,” INS spokesman Russ Bergeron said. “But it does not
resolve, finally resolve, the issue. And it may be that ultimately
you will need a Supreme Court decision given the varying district
court rulings.”
The burden of housing growing numbers of immigrant criminals
has forced INS leaders to ask to transfer some to regular federal
prisons. And INS officials say they want their $4.4 billion annual
budget increased this year to afford more beds. INS agents in some
parts of the country who catch illegal immigrants are forced to
release them simply for lack of space.
“Detention is a crucial component of our overall enforcement
effort,” Bergeron said. “The greater our capacity to detain, the
greater our ability to return credibility to the nation’s
immigration laws.”
In Colorado, INS District Director Joe Greene awaits further
instructions from the appellate court.
But Greene said he doesn’t plan on changing his approach to
Vang and other detainees or the reviews and voluntary releases
that the INS began a year ago aimed at easing constitutional
concerns.
At least 1,000 immigrant criminals, convicted of crimes from
manslaughter to misdemeanor drug offenses, were released into U.S.
cities this past year.
All this is bad news for Vang, because Green still considers
him a threat to public safety. “I have to wait,” Vang concluded
glumly Tuesday morning.
The good news for the INS, Greene said, “is that the circuit
has spoken. At least the law for my region has been settled –
until the Supreme Court chooses to decide. That means a little
less litigation, doesn’t it?”
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.
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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.
