Five Years Later

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Five years ago tomorrow, 19 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.

The twin towers of the World Trade Centre billow smoke after hijacked airliners crashed into them early September 11, 2001. The terrorist attack caused the collapse of both towers. (Photo: AFP)

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 pulverise them - minimising 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 said: "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 20 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 20th 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 protégé of Aristide, René Préval.

Préval 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 around 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 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 Gérard 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.