Hussein Opens His Prison Doors to Trouble

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Original story found here.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein released thousands of political and other prisoners from jails across his country last Sunday, including from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. The broad amnesty was no doubt welcomed by many Iraqi families whose loved ones disappeared years, if not decades, ago because of their real or suspected opposition to his regime. Hussein’s spokesmen said he freed the prisoners in gratitude, after Iraqis allegedly voted unanimously to reaffirm their support for his rule. But the act of amnesty only angered some families, whose relatives remain missing.

Many regimes around the world have brutalized their own citizens, but few have tortured and killed as many people as Hussein’s has. Eleven years ago a French photographer, Alain Buu, and myself, then a stringer for CBS News radio, spent two weeks in Abu Ghraib after we were captured traveling with Iraqi rebels during anti-Hussein uprisings following the Persian Gulf War. In prison, we saw Hussein’s guards select individual Iraqi captives, ranging from men to even one frail boy, to torture for fun at night, while intelligence operatives painfully interrogated the same prisoners during the day. Hussein’s amnesty seems to show that he is concerned about his political image as the Bush administration marches toward war. The Iraqi leader may be trying to avoid a military contest that even he, this time, knows he cannot win, and he is showing his alleged compassion to Iraqis and others whom he finally sees he could use on his side.

Ironically, he now has something in common with President George W. Bush. Each leader has recently betrayed his own instincts to try to broaden his own respective political coalition: While Bush previously announced his goal to change the Iraqi regime unilaterally if necessary, lately the administration has been negotiating with France and Russia in the UN Security Council over the terms for UN arms inspectors to return to Iraq. Not unlike Hussein, the Bush administration seems to be learning the hard way that more allies are better than one or none.

There is no need for Bush to act alone. Hussein is more widely despised than almost any other world leader, with enemies spread not only around the globe but within Iraq as well. His Iraqi enemies go far beyond the relatively few Iraqis associated with the U.S.-backed opposition based in London. The U.S. Defense Department is training 500 Iraqis recommended by the Iraqi National Congress, led by ex-monarchists.

Hussein’s opponents cut across Iraqi politics, ethnicity and religion. Human rights abuses by Hussein’s regime against his people have been widely documented, and even the Iraqi Communist Party’s Web site includes many reports about torture and mass executions at Abu Ghraib. Emptying his largest gulags may only backfire; Shia women in particular have become emboldened to demand information about their disappeared sons.

One Hussein detractor outside Iraq includes none other than Osama Bin Laden. Whether or not any ties between Bin Laden’s Al-Qaida organization and Hussein’s regime are ever firmly established, these two anti-American leaders are indeed enemies. In the summer before Sept. 11, bin Laden broadcast his contempt for Hussein through Al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite television network, in the video that Al-Qaida released last year. Bin Laden calls Hussein “a false Muslim,” who only worships himself and his ruling Ba’ath party. It wasn’t until the eve of the Gulf War when Hussein for the first time raised an Islamic banner, adding the words “God is Great” — written in his own handwriting — to the Iraqi tricolor. According to Bin Laden, the Iraqi leader is a cynic, not a fundamentalist.

As Bush talks about regime change in Iraq, the administration and its supporters should keep in mind that Iraqis have heard it all before. In 1991, during the Gulf crisis, then-President George H.W. Bush urged “the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands to force Saddam … to step aside.” Millions of Shias in the south and Kurds in the north did just that, joining thousands of defecting regular Iraqi troops and officers against his regime. At different times, Iraqi rebels controlled 14 out of 17 Iraqi cities, including the outskirts of Baghdad. But the former Bush administration was hoping for a coup and not a popular insurrection, so it ordered American troops that were then in southern Iraq to stand by — and Hussein’s elite forces crushed the rebels in four weeks.

Many of the prisoners whom Hussein just released have been jailed since that spring, and most of them are either Shi’as or Kurds. Despite his professed gratitude, this was a calculated act by a threatened despot newly willing to play any card in his hand. The freed prisoners include many Iraqis who have fought his regime in the past, and letting them go remains a gamble. No one should underestimate what he might do next.

OK, It’s a Smoking Gun, but for Whom?

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Yesterday, the Bush administration finally released the homemade movie that officials say U.S. military forces discovered in a house in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. If one believes the tape is real, as I do, it implicates Osama bin Laden in planning the Sept. 11 attacks.

The tape is consistent with bin Laden’s press interviews before Sept. 11, as he has long promised that he and his followers would attack the United States. While the radical Saudi did not become a household name in America until this fall, he has been our most-wanted man since the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998.

Unfortunately, however, what we Americans see clearly on our TV sets as a smoking gun will look like no more than a smokescreen to countless others abroad, and the Bush administration’s media policies are no small reason why. Top administration officials tried to control the on-screen images that not only we have seen but that non-Americans, too, have seen around the world. But, instead of enhancing our security, these heavy- handed efforts have only undermined the best evidence we now have against our principal enemy.

Propaganda is a factor in most wars, and bin Laden scored a coup when his face appeared on Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite network, only hours after the United States started bombing Afghanistan. The White House panicked. First, administration officials pressured the Emir of Qatar to censor Al-Jazeera, before they rushed one official after another, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, on Al- Jazeera to make the administration’s case through translators into Arabic. And the Bush administration took no chances at home, either, as Rice asked American television network executives to be wary of bin Laden’s messages and to avoid running his videos.

Censorship is often subtle, but the fist that imposes it is usually transparent — and afterward, few trust the news or what they see on TV. By intervening against the press both here and overseas, the United States squandered the opportunity to be believed now that U.S. forces have seized the videotape. For no matter how Americans perceive the tape, how many non-Americans will agree? Those who already see bin Laden as vile no doubt still will, probably even more so, while too many of those who have defended him will maintain he is not responsible for 9/11.

The price of censorship is credibility, and America is the loser in this case.

We also wear blinders here in the United States. The many videos produced and distributed by bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda organization provide insight into not only his plans but how he wants to be perceived in a Muslim world that extends way beyond the Mideast. Take the 90-minute-plus recruitment video that al-Qaida released to Al-Jazeera this summer. Much of it has the feel of a U.S. Marines TV commercial, with men dressed in black running obstacle courses. We cannot afford to discount the depth of bin Laden’s appeal in many quarters.

Destroying known Al-Qaeda operatives is one U.S. goal. But cooling the feverish climate that their deadly networks thrive in is another. Why do “they” hate us so much? It has less to do with the fact of our power than the arrogant way we tend to use it, serving our immediate interests while being callous about others. The world sees how the so-called defenders of democracy censor when they feel it is needed. By suppressing bin Laden’s publicity, we have unwittingly provided a way for him and his countless supporters to claim that the movie, with its poor soundtrack, was somehow doctored by us.

America needs both military and political tools to disarm terrorism, and our quick success in Afghanistan is as limited as the many strings of Al-Qaeda are long. While most of the September hijackers came from either Saudi Arabia or Egypt, Al-Qaeda networks are found in countries including Algeria, Tunisia, Bosnia, Tajikistan, Chechnya, the Philippines, Syria, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda, Somalia and Indonesia, as well as the United States.

No one expected the top terrorist to be so cocky as to allow a confidant to film him incriminating himself in the 9/11 attacks. The tape leaves no doubt as to his culpability in my mind and probably yours. But to countless others elsewhere, our censorship only protects him like a screen from his own captured image.

Our Missiles Won’t Crush This Terrorist

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At least one suspect in the two U.S. embassy bombings on Aug. 7 has reportedly implicated a wealthy Saudi, Osama bin Ladin. Finally U.S. prosecutors might now have a chance to indict bin Ladin, who was linked to but never charged with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But the Clinton administration’s unilateral cruise-missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan last Thursday have only made it harder to bring him to trial.

When it comes to making incriminating statements, bin Ladin is his own worst enemy. Unlike other radicals who tend to hide in the dark, bin Ladin threatens his enemies, namely the United States, in the glare of publicity. Just last May, he told, ABC News, “America will see many youths who will follow Ramzi Yousef” — the convicted mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing. (He fled afterwards to a safe house funded by bin Ladin in Peshawar, Pakistan.) Bin Ladin further warned, “We predict a black day for America. . . [which] will retreat from our land and collect the bodies of its sons back to America, God willing.”

Bin Ladin issued an even more ominous threat in February, when he and other Islamic fundamentalist radicals signed a declaration of holy war against the United States. Calling themselves the World Islamic Front, they declared that killing “Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim.” The CIA’s Counterterrorist Center noted that this was the first such religious decree to justify attacks against civilians.

Though bin Ladin has a steadfast following among radical fundamentalists in many countries, he is only part of a fringe element within the Islamic community worldwide. “He does not represent the values that we hold to be true,” said Salah Obdidallah of the Islamic Center of Passaic County in New Jersey. How can he “take human life with such a cavalier attitude and hide behind a beautiful religion?”

But however marginal he may be to Islam, bin Ladin is serious about attacking the United States. In many interviews, he paints a dangerously simple portrait: Muslims are struggling against non-Muslims worldwide, and he and his followers must do everything they can to support their brethren.

Bin Ladin, for one, has long done his best. It was the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan that radicalized him. Along with up to 20,000 other young idealists, bin Ladin joined the anti-Soviet resistance, which soon became known as the mujahedeen.

And he put his money where his mouth was. The 17th of 52 sons born to Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest construction magnate, Osama bin Ladin himself has about $250 million. He built roads, tunnels and training camps for the mujahedeen. Ironically, he did it alongside another (then) anti-Soviet group — the CIA, which is now trying to find him.

Bin Ladin was not content to merely finance the resistance. He himself fought in many battles, including the 1989 siege of Jalalabad — a key contest near the Khyber pass that helped compel the Soviets to finally leave Afghanistan. It left a big impression on him. “[The biggest benefit,” he told CNN last year, “was that the myth of the superpower was destroyed.” Bin Ladin, incidentally, credits the mujahedeen, not President Ronald Reagan, for crippling the Soviet Union enough to make it collapse. Now he forthrightly claims that his followers will prevail against the United States. Bin Ladin’s main demand is that the United States withdraw from all Muslim lands, especially from the Arabian peninsula. Saudi Arabia is the home of Mecca and Medina, the two most revered places within Islam, and many Saudis and other Muslims feel the same way he does. It is perhaps no coincidence that the two embassy bombings detonated on the eighth anniversary — to the day — of the first U.S. troop deployment in Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Storm.

Before last Thursday’s Tomahawk missile strikes against Sudan and Afghanistan, authorities in Pakistan were already cooperating with the U.S.-led investigation. Sudan offered to assist the investigation as well, and there was a sense that the United States might even persuade Afghanistan’s ultra-fundamentalist Taliban regime, which seeks international recognition, to expel bin Laden.

All these joint efforts, however, are now in doubt. According to all reports, bin Ladin and nearly all of his followers survived the Tomahawk attacks. And the backlash that they have produced among key Muslim countries only makes it less likely that they will help us catch him now.

The Changing Face of Power in Africa

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With Laurent Kabila’s successful overthrow of Zairean President Mobutu Sese Seko, American policy makers need to conduct a long-overdue reappraisal of the contours of African politics. Rather than unfolding as an isolated insurgency, Kabila’s rise to power signals the latest in a series of victories for a new breed of African leaders. While their political futures remain uncertain, they still constitute a distinctive, and important, political bloc.

Most of the continent’s old, post-colonial leaders were despots. Typically they, like Mobutu, had served as national army officers, went on to lead post-independence coups and consolidated their power with military force and internal political repression. The new ones like Kabila led insurgencies that defeated these despots and their armies in battle. Other guerrilla commanders include Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame in Central Africa, as well as Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi and Eritrea’s Isaias Afwerki on the African Horn. Uganda’s Museveni came to power in 1986. The rest did so only after the Cold War.

This recent vintage of these leaders means, among other things, that they are relatively free of the Cold War’s obsolete ideological baggage. While Kabila and company were all once influenced by Marxism, none espouses the Marxist faith anymore. Instead they have shed their ideology for pragmatism, with Eritrea’s Afwerki, for example, stating that corruption — rather than capitalism or colonialism — is the greatest threat to development. The new generation of African leaders has been looking for new development strategies that combine state-led economic growth with free-market reforms.

At the same time, none of these new soldier-statesmen could be easily called democratic: Each runs a de facto one-party state.

The Clinton administration, which has so far leaned little on these soldier-statesmen, now says that it will encourage the Congo’s Kabila to share power and ultimately hold elections. But all these other new leaders have yet to open their societies fully, making it unlikely that Kabila, whose own forces have already committed horrendous crimes, will be the first to open his.

This confusion is symptomatic of a wider policy drift in the Clinton administration. Clinton and his advisers have yet to develop an effective policy for Africa. As a point of departure, they should recognize that these new soldier-statesmen have begun to form a new, independent bloc.

It is a bloc, first of all, midwifed by a vigorous nationalism. Both Eritrea’s and Ethiopia’s guerrillas fought first against Haile Selassie, backed by the United States, and later against Mengistu Haile-Mariam, backed by the Soviet Union. Similarly, Rwanda’s long-time dictator, Juvenel Habyarimana, was backed by France until the end, just as Zaire’s Mobutu had been.

During the Cold War, Mobutu was backed by both France and the United States, in particular the CIA. Now the political landscape is different. Russia abandoned Africa after the Cold War, while Kabila and others have been pushing France out. At the same time, the U.S. presence on the continent has grown.

Most of Africa now seeks closer ties with the United States. But these new soldier-statesmen are not the type to come forward with their palms extended. This year Eritrea suspended the operations of all non-governmental organizations, fearing both that foreign funding to human rights groups, for example, might spur too much independence within civil society, and that it would lead to a welfare-like dependency among its people.

Rwanda has even more cause to distrust the international community. The reasons, not surprisingly, lurk in the country’s recent history, which is intimately linked with the fall of Mobutu’s Zaire. In fact, Kabila was just an old guerrilla-leader-turned-mineral-thug until Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. In addition to flagging the decline of France, it continues to help change the region. It is against this background that Rwanda lent the most important foreign troops, foreign advisers and other resources to Kabila’s campaign.

Rwanda is a central player in the new politics of nationalist independence. And to address Rwanda’s stature effectively, policy makers must squarely acknowledge that all their previous responses to Rwanda’s bloody internal strife have not only failed, but worsened it. Before the genocide against Rwanda’s Tutsis (and moderate Hutus) began in 1994, France armed and trained the Hutu government led by President Juvenel Habyarimana, despite its then-escalating massacres against Tutsis. The United States and other outside powers merely watched. The French, meanwhile, created a safe haven not for Tutsi survivors but for Hutu refugees, including the Hutu militias — known as Interahamwe — which led the attacks.

After the attacks ended, the United Nations stepped in, providing aid to these Hutu refugees now in camps across Rwanda’s border in eastern Zaire. It continued to do so over the next two years, even though UN officials were well aware that many of these camps were controlled by the Interahamwe. The Hutu militias used the camps as sanctuaries from which to launch new raids back into Rwanda. Both sides were guilty of abuses, and hundreds more people were killed.

By late 1996 it became clear to many observers that the Interahamwe’s ongoing presence in the refugee camps had to be stopped. But while the United Nations agreed to send a peacekeeping force to eastern Zaire, it did not have the mandate to pursue and arrest the Interahamwe.

Enter Laurent Kabila. Last November as this UN force was preparing to deploy, Rwanda and Kabila decided to deal with them on their own. Kabila’s guerrillas defeated both Zairean army troops in eastern Zaire and put the Interahamwe on the run in just a few weeks. Then Kabila’s forces, feeding off of 32 years of popular discontent with Mobutu’s despotic rule, spread into Zaire, finally taking the country last week after a surprisingly short, seven-month campaign.

Kabila’s success in Zaire reminds us of another important trait that Africa’s new soldier-statesmen share in common: They all lead military forces that are, by any standard, highly competent and well trained. Nonetheless, after winning battles, Kabila’s troops systematically hunted down and killed unarmed Rwandan Hutus suspected of association with the Interahamwe, as well as Zaireans suspected of being ex-government soldiers.

This doesn’t bode well for the Congo’s future, and whether Kabila will become just another despot remains to be seen. He is the least impressive of all these new soldier-statesmen. Though he fought Mobutu on and off for more than 30 years, Kabila is better known for being a strongman among his country’s lucrative diamond and gold trades in Eastern Zaire. Kabila has limited experience and education; Africa’s other new soldier-statesmen are better prepared to lead their nations.

Politically, however, all these countries face an uphill task, and the always troubled question of ethnic conflict looms as one of the greatest potential sources of instability. Take the Congo, Kabila himself is a member of the Luba ethnic group, while most of his troops are Tutsi. Both are a minority, among the country’s more than 200 ethnic groups. Much the same pattern holds for the minority leaders of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Tigrean-led regime of Ethiopia. (Eritrea, whose Tigrean leader, Afwerki, governs a Tigrean majority, is the only exception.) Though other individuals from other ethnic groups hold even top formal posts in all their governments, these new soldier-statesmen have yet to develop any real plans to provide for the peaceful transfer of power — a key feature of any fledgling democracy. Nevertheless they all represent regimes that are far more responsive, accountable and egalitarian than any of the respective despots they’ve overthrown.

If American policy makers want to see democracy take root in Africa, they will take advantage of the new opportunities that statesmen like Kabila offer them. Freed of the worst ideological and human-rights excesses of their predecessors, the new breed of African soldier-statesmen could harbinge a new continental order that is more open to the benefits of market economies and civil society. Yet to nudge this new bloc of African regimes toward egalitarian rule, the United States needs to understand that they are a bloc in the first place.