Five Years Later

Five Years Later
John Maxwell

Five years ago tomorrow. nineteen youngish men, middle-class Arabs,
mostly from Saudi Arabia, commandeered four commercial airplanes and
flew them into the World Trade Centre buildings in New York city, into
the Pentagon in Washington and into the ground in Pennsylvania.
I want to look back, however briefly, at my own reactions to that
horrific event.
In my column that week I wrote :
'On Tuesday I like you, watched in fascinated horror as airliners
slammed into the World Trade Centre, and desperate people threw
themselves off the buildings to certain death, preferring to kill
themselves than to await destruction by fire. The catastrophe brought
the United States of America face to face with a reality which had
always existed, but which most Americans had never faced before:
American behaviour has stimulated many people around the world to
hate the USA to the point where they will sacrifice themselves to
damage the nation and its interests.'
I thought at the time that those who were urging immediate violent
reaction were wrong;
'On the day of the latest outrage, it was easy to understand the
anger and bitterness of those who want to "declare war", those who
spoke of a second Pearl Harbour, those who looked for identifiable
enemies and found the usual suspects.
'In a column in Wednesday's New York Times , William Safire lashed
out:
'"Waiting for absolute proof is dangerous ... when we reasonably
determine our attacker's bases and camps, we must pulverize them -
minimizing but accepting the risk of collateral damage".
'Safire forgets that collateral damage is unlikely to be limited to
one side.
'Clyde Haberman in the same edition of the New York Times , tried
to explain to Americans the nature of the Enemy in the "War against
America". Haberman instanced the suicide bombers whose efforts have
brought misery, terror and suffering to hundreds of Israelis. Haberman
suggests that what has happened in Jerusalem will happen in America."
Five years later, a few days ago, Mr Bush was repeating the same
mantra:If Americans don't fight the terrorists abroad they will have
to fight them in American cities.
The basic outlines of the war on terror were, it is hard to believe,
established within days of 9/11, as if somehow, God had vouchsafed to
certain people truths unfathomable by ordinary people. I thought at the
time that the world needed to spend a little time trying to understand
what had happened.
'No matter how violent and horrific, the terrorist action on Tuesday
remains an act of criminal violence, not an act of war. Various
spokesmen and supporters of the US government, including Tony Blair,
the British PM, speak of attacking and defeating Terrorism as if there
were some central directorate, a sort of Terror International, with
identifiable officials and institutions. Retired Israeli General Efi
Eitam: "This is a declaration of war by a consortium of terrorism with
an infrastructure from Sudan to Afghanistan, and this passes through
Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank."
'Mr Bush, whose own legitimacy has been questioned,, speaks, even
more ominously, of "ending states " that support terror, as if politics
were a video-game in which the baddies can simply be zapped into
non-existence. One of his spokesmen, a Mr Wolfowitz, is even scouting
the possibility of targeted assassinations of foreign leaders. Dead
terrorists, of course, can't be punished. Someone else must therefore
pay."
Extremism was the order of the day. Erstwhile civilised people like
Jonathan Alter of Newsweek and the civil rights lawyer Alan Dershowitz,
were publicly advocating torture as an investigative technique.
This week Mr Bush denied that the United States had used torture to get
various Al Qaeda biggies to spill the beans. He was announcing his
intention to comply with the US Supreme Court ruling that all those
held in secret CIA dungeons should be brought before the courts and
tried. Mr Bush would not explain how the CIA had got these tough
criminals to babble like babies. The method was classified, but it was
clearly safe and humane!
At the time I said that we really needed to find out why these horrific
acts had been committed. For the past few weeks Mr Blair, Mr Bush and
Mr Rumsfeld have been talking about 'Islamofascism' which
apparently is dangerously contagious and is seen as the ultimate
challenge to Western Civilisation.
Five years ago I suggested another possibility.
'Globalising Desperation
"Much of the horror of last Tuesday is caused by the grisly fact that
the most peaceful symbols of international trade, passenger aeroplanes,
were turned into high explosive weapons of mass destruction against the
most potent symbols and Crown Jewels of the very culture which
produced them. The system was turned against itself, a kind of
political HIV/AIDS in which the body is made to self-destruct. Imperial
arrogance has globalised desperation.
'In all the millions of words about Tuesday's horrific tragedy, few
have been used to ask Why? to seek the real reasons. Blasting the
visible manifestations of a cancer may achieve cosmetic improvement,
but the concealed body of the parasitic tumour will not disappear.
'Injustice is the most eloquent recruiter for terrorism. Injustice
breeds desperation. Suicidal behaviour is almost always a desperate
call for help. People who are willing to destroy themselves along with
randomly selected groups of innocents are speaking the language of
violence, which they know their enemies understand. Unfortunately,
while their enemies understand the language, they do not usually listen
to the message.'
And finally, I said at the time that what was needed to deal with
terrorism was not war, but good police work. Mr Bush's speech this
week and the news from Scotland Yard over the last several weeks,
suggest that I may have been right.
Another Gulag

Now that Mr Bush has officially admitted the existence of an American
run international system of secret prisons, he may find it useful to
disclose the existence of another gulag, even larger and even more
oppressive than the system used to confine the Al Qaeda suspects. And
the disclosure may even lead to the closing down of the best known
gulag in the Caribbean, at Guantanamo Bay. But there is another, much
larger gulag in the Caribbean, also run by the United States, this one
not by the CIA but by USAID and elements of the Republican Party's
National Committee.
This gulag is called Haiti, and it has a long and often miserable
history. It wasn't always so. Two hundred years ago, after a war of
independence lasting nearly twenty years, the mainly African people of
Haiti, most of them slaves, managed to free themselves from the bondage
of the French. In the process they also had to beat back the armies of
the British and Spanish and so, by the time they declared their
independence they had driven off the three superpowers of the time. In
modern terms, the closest parallel is with the Vietnamese who chased
both the French and the Americans out of their country. The French were
more formidable in the 18th century than they were in the twentieth and
the Vietnamese had external support and arms supplies. The Haitians won
their freedom on their own. If Vietnam were to equal the Haitian
performance they would have to have beaten the Americans, the Russians
and the Chinese.
The Americans have never been able to come to terms with the idea that
the Caribbean archipelago is not an extension of the United States and
they have been particularly irritated by the independence of Cuba,
Haiti and Jamaica. Cuba and Haiti particularly offended them: Cuba when
it declared its political and economic independence of the US in 1959
and Haiti, when it elected a black, socialist Roman Catholic priest as
its president in 1991. The little black priest, Jean Bertrand Aristide
has been twice elected and twice overthrown by surrogates of the
United States. The first occasion was by the army. On the second
occasion the coup was carried out by what the Americans hoped would be
a more externally palatable combination of "civil society"
organised by USAID and the CIA, and a bunch of cutthroats left over
from the Duvalier dictatorship.
In an attempt to make the bondage of Haiti less visible and offensive
to the civilised world, the corrupt puppets installed to replace
Aristide two years ago were sent packing three months ago after
arranging an election which was designed to elect a titular president
owned by the United States. Unfortunately, the plan did not work as
designed and the election was won by a onetime protege of Aristide,
René Preval.
Preval is the titular president, but it is clear that he is not the de
facto president of Haiti.
During the American interregnum the fledgling institutions intended to
restore democracy in Haiti were destroyed by the US puppets.
And the same cutthroats who had supported the Duvaliers and the
usurpers after them were allowed to return to Haiti and be ceremonially
cleared of the horrific crimes for which they were responsible -
rapes , torture and. massacres.
The people of Haiti know they are not free and continue to try to
express their dissatisfaction with the situation. They are inhibited by
the presence of an imported force assembled by the UN Security Council
and mandated to restore order and good government. THe UN Force in
Haiti, known by the (French) acronym MINUSTAH, has proved to be a
force for repression rather than law and order.
There is considerable evidence that MINUSTAH, in the guise of restoring
peace and dealing with bandits, have been attacking and killing the
leaders of the poor Aristide supporters in the huge slums round Port au
Prince.
The people of the slums fear the MINUSTAH, considering them to be an
extension of the armed paramilitary gangs organised by the
light-skinned elite. The slum-dwellers are continually libelled. They
are accused of being lawless gangsters and their habitats are
frequently free fire zones.. The slum dwellers say that their so-called
gang leaders are in fact political ;leaders targeted by the elite.
In addition to the persecution by MINUSTAH, during the La Tortue regime
ordinary Haitians were mercilessly persecuted by the returned
gang-leaders and their private armies.
A survey conducted by US social workers and published in the English
medical journal, the Lancet two weeks ago, confirmed a massive
campaign of repression against the poor who support President Aristide.
According to the Lancet study, under La Tortue, more than 8,000
Haitians were murdered in and around the capital, Port-au-Prince,
almost half them killed by government forces or "outside political
actors" -- mostly armed gangs opposed to Mr. Aristide and his Lavalas
political party..
When Aristide was first overthrown the murder and rape of his
supporters created such a stink in the United States that it provoked
intervention by President Clinton. This time the terror was just as
fierce, but provoked no reaction from the 'civilised world'.
The Lancet study estimated that 35,000 women and girls were sexually
assaulted, more than half of them younger than 18 years old, mostly by
criminals, by the Haitian National Police (14 per cent) and armed
anti-Lavalas groups (11 per per cent). Many of the victims were
"restaveks" -- unpaid child domestic servants from rural areas who work
and live in the city.
The study reported that kidnappings and extra-judicial detentions,
physical assaults and death threats and threats of sexual violence
were also common,
Fourteen per cent of the people interviewed accused foreign soldiers
and police, including UN personnel, of all three types of threats.
Because President Preval is not in control of his country's
administration a number of outrageous abuses committed under the La
Tortue regime still remain unresolved. As Brian Concannon, director of
the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti reports, "Three
months into constitutional President René Préval's term, most of
the high-profile members of Haiti's Lavalas movement jailed by the
brutal Interim Government of Haiti over two years have been released.
But if the cases demonstrate the democratic transition's promise,
they also illustrate its pitfalls.

"The high-profile cases were all easy calls from a legal standpoint.
They were in some ways easy from a political standpoint as well,
because President Préval comes from the same Lavalas movement.
Nevertheless, the new government took three months to release the
prisoners, because of strong resistance within both the justice system
and Haitian civil society. That resistance spells delays, and trouble,
as Préval's government tackles the much harder and more numerous
cases of low-profile political prisoners." (JURIST - Forum: Haiti's
Political Prisoners: Not Preval's Fault, But His Problem)
The scandalous arrests and false imprisonment of the former Prime
Minister and other Lavalas officials and of "Sister Anne" Auguste,
(the Haitian Louise Bennett) and Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste are fairly well
known. But there are hundreds of others languishing for no good reason
in Haitian hellholes. And massacres by elite-sponsored murderers such
as Lame Timanchet (Small Machetes), continue.
There is more, much more to complain about, but I believe that what I
have reported here should give Mr Bush something to get his teeth into,
and a chance to make a really serious impression on one gulag
situation about which he, perhaps, is less well informed .
Copyright©2006 John Maxwell
jankunnu[at] yahoo.com