OPINION
12
Monday, January 4, 2010
THE LEADING INDEPENDENT DAILY IN THE ARABIAN GULF ESTABLISHED 1961
Founder and Publisher
YOUSUF S. ALYAN Editor-in-Chief
ABD AL-RAHMAN ALYAN EDITORIAL : 24833199-24833358-24833432 ADVERTISING : 24835616/7 FAX : 24835620/1 CIRCULATION : 24833199 Extn. 163 ACCOUNTS : 24835619 COMMERCIAL : 24835618 P.O.Box 1301 Safat,13014 Kuwait. E MAIL :info@kuwaittimes.net Website: www.kuwaittimes.net
issues
The Undie Bomber and the war of ideas By Bernd Debusmann
W
ho is winning the war of ideas between the West and Al-Qaeda’s hatedriven version of Islam? It is a question that merits asking again after a 23-year-old Western-educated Nigerian of privileged background, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, attempted to murder almost 300 people by bringing down a Detroitbound airliner on Christmas Day with explosives sewn into the crotch of his underpants. The administration of President Barack Obama, averse to the bellicose language of George W Bush, has virtually dropped the phrase “war of ideas”. But that doesn’t mean it has ended. Or that Obama’s plea, in his Cairo speech this summer, for a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world has swayed the disciples of Osama bin Laden, whose 1998 fatwa (religious ruling) against “Jews and Crusaders” remains the extremists’ guiding principle. “To ... kill the Americans and their allies - civilians and military - is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it,” the fatwa said. “This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah (to) fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together.” That this exhortation is as appealing today, to a fanatical minority, as it was 11 years ago underlines that the United States has had scant success in meeting the objective the Bush administration set out in its 2003 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism. “Together with the international community, we will wage a war of ideas to make clear that all acts of terrorism are illegitimate, to ensure that the conditions and ideologies that promote terrorism do not find fertile ground in any nation ...” That aim was spelt out just weeks before the United States invaded Iraq, an event that provided ample ammunition for the extremists’ assertion that the West was stepping up an unrelenting war it has waged against the Muslim world for centuries. Such claims, and Al-Qaeda itself, should be easy to discredit, write two political scientists, Peter Krause and Stephen Van Evera in the fall issue of the Middle East Policy Council Journal. Instead, they say, “AlQaeda has so far fought the world’s sole superpower to a stalemate in the worldwide struggle for hearts and minds. As a result, US prospects in the larger war against Al-Qaeda are uncer-
tain.” They make an important point. By many accounts, the United States has been making more progress on the military front than in the war of ideas. In Afghanistan, the number of Al-Qaeda elements has shrunk to fewer than 100, according to Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones. In Pakistan, missile strikes have thinned out the ranks of Al-Qaeda leaders who use the frontier region as safe havens. In Yemen and Somalia, air attacks and covert operations have killed “high-value targets”. But Al-Qaeda is more than an organization, it is an idea, and killing ideas is much more difficult than killing people. Especially when the propagators of mediaeval concepts use 21st century technology - websites, social networks, videos - more nimbly than the country that invented the Internet, in the view of communications experts. One of the most cutting critiques of America’s shortcomings on the ideas front came this summer, from the country’s top soldier, Admiral Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Writing in the Joint Force Quarterly, a publication of the National Defense University, he complained about “a certain arrogance” in strategic communications and of gaps between what the United States says and what it does. “Each time we fail to live up to our values or don’t follow up on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are,” he wrote. As to Al-Qaeda and the Taleban, “they intimidate and control and communicate from within, not from the sidelines. And they aren’t just out there shooting videos, either. They deliver. Want to know what happens if somebody violates their view of sharia law? You don’t have to look very far or very long. Each beheading, each bombing and each beating sends a powerful message or, rather, IS a powerful message.” More powerful, perhaps, than Obama’s promise, after the underwear bomber’s failed operation on the most joyful day in the Christian calendar, that “we will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable”. That sounded a lot like George W Bush, a week after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on Manhattan and the Pentagon, the greatest mass murder in American history. Talking about the elusive bin Laden, he said: “I want justice. And there’s an old poster out West that says, ‘Wanted: Dead or alive.’” — Reuters
All articles appearing on these pages are the personal opinion of the writers. Kuwait Times takes no responsibility for views expressed therein. Kuwait Times invites readers to voice their opinions. Please send submissions via email to: opinion@kuwaittimes.net or via snail mail to PO Box 1301 Safat, Kuwait. The editor reserves the right to edit any submission as necessary.
Bolivian Indians see rocky exodus from serfdom By Frank Bajak
J
uan Vasquez didn’t have much of a childhood. He never went to school, began to work as a ranch hand at age 12, married three years later and has nine children. But in all his 55 years, Vasquez says with moistening eyes, he never got paid - not unless a daily meal from a communal pot can be called compensation; or a twice-yearly allotment of used clothing. “I didn’t know what it was to earn money,” Vasquez says through a half-set of teeth stained evergreen from chewing coca leaf. With re-election last month of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first Indian president, and with Indians of Vasquez’s Guarani people winning seats in congress for the first time, the end may soon be at hand for a system the UN has classified as “forced labor and servitude.” Though the Guarani account for only about 85,000 of Bolivia’s more than 6 million Indians, they have been the most downtrodden, and that makes them a priority for Morales in his mission of eradicating all vestiges of colonial repression. For now, several thousand newly “liberated” Guarani, including Vasquez, live in a penniless limbo, waiting for the government to make good on its promises to give them land. But Bolivia already has taken giant steps toward ending a centuries-old legacy of what Morales calls endemic mistreatment of its third-largest ethnic group by white overlords. His landslide re-election was a ringing endorsement. Another expression of the Guaranis’ political awakening came in the same election, when voters approved autonomy for Indians in two Guarani-dominated municipalities. In April, the Guarani are poised to win a number of mayoral races for the first time here in their traditional homeland in southeastern Bolivia, where Andean foothills meet broad plains of dry scrub that extend east to Paraguay
This Nov 28, 2006 file photo shows a protester tied to a rope and a chain as a symbolic protest against the working conditions of the indigenous Guarani people, during a rally demanding land reform in La Paz, Bolivia. – AP and south to Argentina. Since the Dec 6 election the government has seized ranches totaling 15,500 hectares from two powerful white opposition leaders in Bolivia’s eastern lowlands, stronghold of Morales’ most bitter foes. The government said the land met the main criteria for confiscation - obtained by fraud and serving no “social or economic purpose.” With the electoral rise of the Guarani, the opposition’s grasp on power is rapidly eroding in the Alto Parapeti region, at the intersection of Santa Cruz, Tarija and Chuquisaca states where the government says exploitation of the Guarani has been most severe. Juan Vasquez is at the epicenter of the struggle. He walked away from one of five ranches encompassing 37,000 hectares in the Alto Parapeti whose owners are fighting government expropriation orders. The government says it found servitude on those ranches. The ranch-
ers, who include American Ronald Larsen and his son Duston, deny it. “We’re hoping for the best. That’s all we can do,” Duston Larsen, 31, told the AP of the legal battle to save the family’s 15,000-hectare spread. He said they had always paid their workers twice the minimum wage and provided free healthcare and schooling - but were now down to about 15 workers from twice as many in 2007. Along with the other cases, the Larsens’ is stalled in the National Agricultural Tribunal since last year. But the new, pro-Morales congress is expected to abolish that court and replace it with a new tribunal of popularly elected judges. “There has been an uprising, to reclaim the right to land and liberty,” says Celso Padilla, a senior official with the Guarani People’s Assembly, his people’s national governing body. Under Morales, of the Aymara, the largest Indian group, this poor
South American country has been steadily chiseling away at white minority control of politics. The keystone is a new constitution, enacted in February, that established Bolivia as a “plurinational republic”. It gives the country’s 36 ethnic groups, well over 60 percent of the population, the right to selfdetermination at municipal level. Eventually there will be autonomous territories, though the new congress still needs to define how that will work. The Guarani, Bolivia’s thirdlargest ethnic group, are now rattling ranchers far beyond the Alto Parapeti. Many ranchers are treating their workers better and have begun to pay the minimum wage of 647 bolivianos ($92) a month, after previously paying only half as much, says Walter Herrera, an official with the Guarani’s Capitania, or local council, in Monteagudo in hills to the west. “A lot remains to be done,
but the human rights situation is improving,” he said. But other ranchers have simply fired their workers with severance payments averaging $565, while as many as 350 Guarani families still live as peons on smaller ranches deeper in the hills, economic prisoners of their bosses, Herrera added. The claims of serfdom are unfounded, said Javier Antunez, president of the cattlemen’s association based in nearby Camiri. “The government has made a lot of proclamations about servitude but it hasn’t produced anything solid to be able to prove it irrefutably,” he said in an interview. Antunez dismissed Bolivia’s indigenous empowerment as “a new experiment born in Europe”, because German, Swiss and Spanish nongovernmental organizations have helped the Guarani. He said it could impede Bolivia’s development, putting the country at a competitive disadvantage with neighboring Brazil and Argentina. Some ranchers violently resisted the government inspections that led to the expropriation orders. Several times in 2008, ranchers shot out or slashed tyres of government inspectors accompanied by Guarani. In one incident, 46 Guarani and officials were injured - 11 of them seriously - when ranchers hurled rocks at them in Alto Parapeti, the UN noted in a May report. An Uruguayan Roman Catholic priest, Rev Nacho Aguirre, delivered food and medicine afterward to those still living in servitude in remote communities only accessible by fourwheel-drive vehicle. But he left Bolivia this year after the bishop of Camiri, his superior, emailed him that the ranchers hated him and “swore they would kill you”. No rancher interfered with an AP reporter’s trip to Alto Parapeti in December for interviews with Vasquez and others who said they had lived most of their lives trapped in abusive labor relationships with ranchers. “I earned 5 kilos of sugar a week, plus some herbs and a bar of soap. Those were my wages,” said
Felicia Florez, 78. She said she was born into forced labor on the ranch of Ernesto Chavez, working first as a nanny, then as a cook. Speaking to the AP by phone, Chavez’s son, Roberto, accused Florez and Vasquez of lying. But when asked how much they were paid, he gave no answer. Miriam Campos, who led anti-servitude efforts in the Justice Ministry for a decade until recently stepping down, said she had confirmed Vasquez’s story and many similar cases - “testimony we could not publish precisely because of people’s security, because they’ve been threatened.” A mission of the Organization of American States in June 2008 determined that “people of all ages, including boys, girls, adolescents and seniors” had for decades been subject to “excessive physical labor”, in some cases under threat of corporal punishment. Mission members were also told that “in many cases, the (ranch) owners were either local political leaders or directly connected to them”. Indian servitude dates back to Bolivia’s 1825 independence from Spain. Until then, even the Incas who once dominated the Andean highlands couldn’t conquer the Guarani. But their gradual subjugation was final by 1892, when some 6,000 were killed in an uprising against ranchers, who Padilla says treated the Guarani “like animals”, buying and selling their land as if they didn’t exist. It was so thorough that the Alto Parapeti’s landlords were spared in a 1952 land reform that broke up large estates elsewhere in Bolivia and continued to take advantage of the politically inert Guarani. Che Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary, tried to organize a leftist uprising in southeastern Bolivia in the following decade. But the Guarani didn’t join, and Guevara was captured by the army and killed. The Guarani didn’t organize until the early 1980s after the fall of Bolivia’s right-wing dictatorship. — AP
Desperate Somalis seek ‘backdoor’ route to US By Amy Taxin
T
he asylum seeker from Somalia hung his head as an immigration judge grilled him about his treacherous journey from the Horn of Africa. By air, sea and land he finally made it to Mexico, and then a taxi delivered him into the arms of US border agents at San Diego. Islamic militants had killed his brother, Mohamed Ahmed Kheire testified, and majority clan members had beaten his sister. He had to flee the Somali capital Mogadishu to live. The voice of the judge, beamed by videoconference from Seattle, crackled loudly over a speaker in the mostly empty courtroom near the detention yard in the desert north of Los Angeles. He wanted to know why Kheire had no family testimony to corroborate his asylum claim. Kheire, 31, said he didn’t have email in detention, and didn’t think to ask while writing to family on his perilous trek. It seemed like the end of Kheire’s dream as he waited for the judge’s ruling. He clasped his hands, his plastic jail bracelet dangling from his wrist, and looked up at the ceil-
ing, murmuring words of prayer. Kheire is one of hundreds of desperate Somalis in the last two years to have staked everything on a wild asylum gamble by following immigration routes to the United States traditionally traveled by Latinos. With the suspension of a US refugee program and stepped-up security in the Gulf of Aden and along Mediterranean smuggling routes, more overseas migrants from Somalia are pursuing asylum through what one expert calls the “back door.” “The US has closed most of the doors for Somalis to come in through the refugee program so they’ve found alternative ways to get in,” said Mark Hetfield, senior vice president for policy and programs at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. “This is their new route.” About 1,500 people from around the world showed up in US airports and on the borders seeking asylum during the 2009 fiscal year, according to statistics from US Customs and Border Protection. Somalis were the biggest group to make the journey, with most arriving in San Diego. More than 240 Somalis arrived during that period - more than twice the num-
In this Nov 16, 2009 photo, Somali asylum seeker Mohamed Kheire waits to consult with Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project detention attorney James Lyall at the Los Angeles Catholic Charities. – AP
ber from the year before. Like Kheire, they have been shuttled to immigration detention centers in California while legal advocates have scurried to find lawyers and translators to help them navigate US immigration courts. Many end up defending themselves. Those who lose may remain temporarily. Somalis may be deported, but immigrant advocates say authorities often do not send them back immediately because of difficulties making the trip. For many, it has become increasingly dangerous to stay in Somalia. The African nation has not had a functional government since 1991 when warlords overthrew longtime dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and then turned on each other, plunging the country into chaos. Somali refugees say they are fleeing repression by armed militias defending majority clans and the Islamic militant group Al-Shabab, which has been labeled a terrorist organization by the United States. “There are stories about houses being blown up by rocket launchers that you don’t hear coming out of other countries as a normal occurrence,” said James Duff Lyall, an
attorney for the Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project, who has represented several Somali asylum seekers in Lancaster. “The consistently horrific stories are striking.” In 2007, Kheire’s brother was shot in the head in his music store in Mogadishu after refusing to bow to al-Shabab’s demands that he shutter the shop. A year later, Kheire’s sister was beaten with a stick and left bleeding outside a school.That night Kheire, whose family belongs to a minority clan, was visited by three men who rammed his chest with a rifle butt and debated whether to kill him. Once they left, Kheire decided to leave. His wife and then-nearly 4year old son went to stay with family. He sold his taxi and used the money to go to Kenya, where a smuggler arranged for him to travel to Dubai, then to Cuba, using fake documents. He then went to Ecuador and Colombia, where he boarded a small boat with about 20 African migrants. It took them a week to reach Costa Rica. They traveled by night, bailing out sea water with plastic bins. During the day, they hid in forests along the shoreline and waited for smugglers to bring them food.
In Nicaragua, Kheire was herded into the back of a sweltering truck container for 18 hours, fearing he would die of suffocation or be caught by police. In Guatemala, he crossed a river atop two rubber tires bound together to reach Tapachula, Mexico. He spent 12 days in immigration detention before authorities released him with a piece of paper ordering him to leave the country in 30 days. He would carry the paper on a plane to Tijuana and in the taxi to the US border. Immigration experts say such circuitous paths are routes of last resort. “I always call it the backdoor,” said Bob Montgomery, director of the San Diego office for the International Rescue Committee. “When the refugee program is not robust, we see more people trying to come through the asylum system,” he said. Most Somalis have reached the United States - there are some 87,000 here - through US-sponsored refugee resettlement programs. But the State Department in 2008 suspended a family reunification program for refugees over fraud concerns. The number of Somalis admitted by refugee programs dwindled to about 4,000 last year. — AP