As Barack Obama ends his first year in office, there is much talk about disillusionment with the president among progressives. The litany of complaints is obvious: unemployment still at 10 percent, economic policies unduly favorable to Wall Street, the surge in Afghanistan, compromises on health care, the failure to close down Guantánamo, and a general inability to bring about the transformative change that Obama spoke of during his campaign.
Policy has certainly not moved as fast or as far as many of us would like. But perhaps because I never shared the political fantasies about Obama in the first place, I don't feel let down, and I don't think other liberals should. No president was about to turn the country around on a dime -- the structure of our government doesn't allow it. And anyone who paid attention to what Obama said as a candidate about specific matters of policy would have realized he wasn't the lefty some imagined and others feared.
It is a myth, as the historian David Greenberg argues in the January issue of The Atlantic, that great presidents always leave their mark in the first year. Abraham Lincoln had an inglorious debut; John F. Kennedy's first year was a failure. Even Franklin Roosevelt, who is the model for whirlwind transformation because of the bold initiatives of his first 100 days, got off to a false start with the National Recovery Administration. It took another two years to pass Social Security and the Wagner Act, and it was not until the war that necessity drove FDR to adopt Keynesian policies sufficient to end the Depression.
A year ago, as the nation spiraled into the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, many were comparing Obama to Roosevelt or at least to an image they had of FDR. Obama may never meet that standard, but if we measure where we are today against the threat to the economy as 2009 began, he has done well enough. The financial system is no longer near collapse, the hated bailout is being repaid faster than expected, and the evidence is that the stimulus plan is working -- though it isn't big enough, and more needs doing. The president has a thorough grasp of the fiscal imperatives, short- and long-term, as he showed in a reply to a question from my colleague Bob Kuttner at the jobs summit in early December. Action has been too slow on financial regulation, but it is too early to pronounce that a lost cause.
Obama has placed his biggest bet in domestic policy on health reform, setting it as his top priority but leaving the specifics to Congress -- and that strategy seems to be working. If Congress enacts a bill that extends insurance to some 30 million Americans and puts health-care finance on a new foundation, albeit with many compromises, it will be a signal triumph for the president -- and the single biggest measure on behalf of low-income Americans in more than 40 years.
On Afghanistan/Pakistan, it's impossible to know whether Obama's strategy will work. But I am persuaded (as I was in the aftermath of September 11) that the United States has cause to be in Afghanistan. Because Obama made it clear as a candidate that was his view, no one who voted for him should be surprised by his decision. I take some confidence from the fact that he gave the policy an intensive and skeptical review, immersed himself in analysis and intelligence, and heard out competing views espoused by top members of his administration, including the vice president. His speech at West Point was crisp and, on the general logic of his approach, convincing.
In the first few months of his presidency, commentators were accusing Obama of trying to do too much. Now people are deriding him for getting nowhere. He was right to take on a wide range of tough problems, and no one should be shocked at the obstacles in his path. His party's congressional majority is no guarantee of action since the Democrats are more ideologically diverse than the Republicans. That is the reason they are in the majority -- and the reason they cannot take full advantage of it. As a result of the now-routine use of the filibuster, nothing but the budget can get through the Senate with fewer than 60 votes, and those 60 include Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson.
Of course, Obama will be even more constrained if Democrats suffer major losses this coming November because of discouragement among the party's progressive base. To mobilize voters in the fall, he has to be inspiring; to get things done before then, he has to be patient and analytical. Fortunately, Obama combines those qualities better than anyone else in politics today.
Sometimes journalists can only describe, not explain. Certainly that was the case when the tattered freight ship the Golden Venture beached itself on New York's Rockaway peninsula in June 1993, disgorging from its fetid hold a cargo of 286 undocumented Chinese, ten of whom died while struggling to swim to shore. The national reaction was one of shock--at the time there was little public awareness that Chinese were sneaking into the country in this manner, in such numbers and at such expense: $30,000, it was soon revealed, was the starting price of the squalid passage. Passengers in this rust bucket had lived below decks for months without sanitation or adequate food, and been subject to harassment by representatives of the "snakeheads," or smugglers, who set the whole thing up. But who the snakeheads were; why it was happening now; why the nighttime landing, inside New York City, within miles of the Statue of Liberty, was so brazen--all cried out for explanation.
I knew about smuggling over the Mexican border from crossings I'd made for my book Coyotes. So when TheNew York Times Magazine assigned me to write a follow-up to all the news stories--the sort of now-take-a-deep-breath-and-try-to-explain exercise that can only be done well after the fact--I figured I could come through with the goods. I visited Golden Venture detainees in prison in Pennsylvania, talked with recent immigrants from China, fixers in Chinatown and Chinese-American professors, and got everything I could out of the FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service. After a couple of months I had a fine collection of puzzle pieces--but only hunches about how they fit together. Those who knew weren't talking yet. Lacking the big picture about the Golden Venture, I wrote instead of the state of political asylum (see below) and waited for the day when the explanations would come.
Well, sixteen years later, that day is here. In Patrick Radden Keefe's The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream we finally have a satisfying, comprehensive account of the Golden Venture debacle and its place in the larger story of people smuggling and US immigration policy. In fact, it is not only satisfying; it is excellent. Keefe, a contributor to Slate and The New Yorker with one previous book to his name (Chatter: Dispatches From the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping), has done an immense amount of research around the globe; if the Golden Venture beaching was the tip of an iceberg, then here, finally, is the iceberg.
Our enlightenment begins with context: most of the migrants came from Fujian Province in southeastern China. This was known soon after the Golden Venture grounded, but Keefe tells us about the place (poor, mountainous, situated on the coast across the strait from Taiwan) and about precedents for "this peculiar type of population displacement, in which the people of a handful of villages seem to relocate en masse to another country within a short span of time"--in New York City they include Calabrians relocating to Mulberry Street in Little Italy at the turn of the twentieth century. Such regional migrations can take on a momentum of their own; Keefe writes, enlighteningly, that they are driven not simply by poverty but, once under way, by the disparities in income between families related to emigrants (who receive remittances allowing them to live large) and families who are not.
He also describes the pull factors, which included not simply the perennial economic opportunities of the Golden Mountain, as the United States is known in China, but the declaration by President George H.W. Bush in 1990 that the United States stood by those whose childbearing rights were trampled by oppressive governments. Bush's executive order made this, if not a matter of law, a clear statement of his preferences, and Chinese had no difficulty reading the tea leaves.
Keefe's main narrative strand is the tale of Cheng Chui Ping, also known as Sister Ping, a Fujianese who immigrated legally in 1981. During an interview for her visa, Cheng Chui Ping had expressed a desire to work as a domestic servant. But it seems that was never in the cards. Not long after her arrival, she responded to the burgeoning demand for passage from her homeland by establishing a smuggling operation out of her variety store in New York's Chinatown. (She also ran a money transfer business by undercutting the fees charged by the huge Bank of China, which had a branch right across the street from her shop.) She arranged for Chinese to be smuggled over the border with Mexico, and over the border with Canada, too. The Coast Guard stopped a boat heading to Florida from the Bahamas that was carrying twelve undocumented Fujianese. When authorities checked the phone records of the man who leased it, they found he had made one call to New York City on the day of the voyage--to Sister Ping's variety store. Not that she actually guided clients herself; it seems that in most cases, Sister Ping instead was more like a general contractor. She would oversee an operation, handling the money, guaranteeing the result and, with her husband, supervising subcontractors who managed the logistics of transport.
Other criminals in the Chinatown underworld were jealous of her success. One of them was a young man named Ah Kay, the head of a Chinatown gang known as the Fuk Ching. Ah Kay, famous for his brutality in shaking down restaurant owners and other businesspeople, twice in the 1980s tried to rob Sister Ping, whom he figured had a lot of cash squirreled in her residence from the money transfer business. Both times her children were held at gunpoint while Ah Kay's men searched for money. The first time they netted only $1,000; the second, they scored $20,000 from her refrigerator.
Despite this history, business came first for Sister Ping. In September 1992, she had a boat off the coast of Boston loaded with more than 100 illegal migrants who needed to be brought to shore. Ah Kay had provided this "offloading" service to other snakeheads, but he had a different history with Sister Ping. When she approached him for help, according to courtroom testimony, he hastened to apologize for the armed robberies. "Sorry, Sister Ping," he said. "Everyone has their past." She replied, "That's what happened in the past. We're talking business now." In exchange for $750,000, Ah Kay sent a deputy on a fishing boat 200 miles out to Sister Ping's boat. The immigrants were deposited quietly on a wharf in New Bedford, Massachusetts, shortly after midnight: mission accomplished.
They would work together again on the Golden Venture, but this time the collaboration was very different. A third smuggler, Weng Yu Hui, who had himself been brought into the United States by Sister Ping in 1984, was the snakehead in chief behind an aging ship, the Najd II, which left Bangkok for the United States with 240 passengers in July 1992. The vessel ran aground briefly in Malaysia, then developed engine trouble en route to the island of Mauritius, where its Australian captain abandoned ship. Finally, in October, it limped into the port of Mombasa, Kenya, and went no further.
Trying to salvage the enterprise, Weng Yu Hui met with, among others, Ah Kay, who agreed to put up the money for the new boat. Weng also spoke with Sister Ping, assuring her that space would be saved on the boat for twenty clients of hers who happened also to be stuck in Mombasa. She still owed Ah Kay $300,000 for the offloading in New Bedford, and wired it to the people who would purchase a replacement craft.
Among the many interesting revelations of The Snakehead is that the US government knew that a cargo of undocumented Chinese was headed here from Mombasa months before they arrived. Soon after the Najd II docked in Mombasa, Keefe writes, "representatives from Mombasa's Missions to Seamen contacted the small US consulate in the city and explained the situation." Months later, an INS agent based in Kenya alerted American officials that the Najd II had been emptied and a different boat full of Chinese, the Gold Future, was possibly headed for the United States via the Cape of Good Hope. He had the right idea but the wrong ship; American intelligence reports at the time were full of partial and conflicting information.
"Ironically enough," writes Keefe, "the officials could have gained a much better understanding of the situation if they had simply consulted the newspaper." On April 4, 1993, the South China Morning Post correctly reported that "a ship carrying hundreds of illegal Chinese immigrants is on its way to the United States." Keefe writes, "The Hong Kong-based newspaper exhibited no confusion about the names of the ships or the sequence of events, and explained that the immigrants were now bound for the United States 'aboard a Honduran-registered fishing trawler MV Golden Venture.'"
Unfortunately, the ship's arrival in the United States would not go as smoothly as the arrival of the vessel that had unloaded at New Bedford in 1992. Ah Kay, though a major investor in the trip, had had to go into hiding in the meantime because of strife with another gang. Nobody could be found to offload the passengers; while the smugglers looked, the Golden Venture waited. And the Coast Guard, Keefe reports, noticed: a surveillance plane spotted the ship southeast of Nantucket the morning of June 4, 1993, and reported it as DIW (dead in the water)--in other words, not moving. It "was quite close to shore, and as it approached New York its course took it on a trajectory that ran directly perpendicular to the shipping lanes in the area--a dangerous move, and one that might have attracted some notice," he writes, adding that, as the boat sailed slowly toward Rockaway the next evening, "the Coast Guard dispatched boats to intercept it. But they couldn't find it." (Unfortunately, Keefe is unable to offer further information about why this would be.)
Other disturbing revelations abound. Government officials had Sister Ping and her husband in custody long before the Golden Venture disaster, in connection with smuggling schemes including an incident near Niagara Falls in which four people died. But apparently they figured Sister Ping and her husband for bit players; he never went to prison, and she served only a four-month sentence. Well before the Golden Venture grounded, an INS employee, Joe Occhipinti, had perceived the scope of the smuggling from China and proposed that a multi-agency task force be formed to take it on; the suggestion was never acted upon. Ah Kay, the Fuk Ching gang leader responsible for several murders and untold other violence, became a government witness against Sister Ping and others and in exchange was quietly released from prison. (He is now under witness protection.) And even though there was an active warrant out for his arrest, Sister Ping's husband was naturalized in 1996.
Americans are sadly accustomed to bureaucratic incompetence regarding most matters involving immigration. Ultimately more worrying, however, is our national ambivalence about new citizens; it's hard to find a better example of this than President George H.W. Bush's actions with regard to immigration and China. Following the Tiananmen Square uprising, Bush was clearly tortured. He wanted to show American disapproval while preserving a working relationship with the Chinese. He halted sales of military equipment to the People's Liberation Army, for example, but rejected the idea of broad economic sanctions. He also wanted to protect dissidents, such as the Beijing astrophysicist who sought refuge at the US Embassy during the crackdown, and it was in connection with this that he issued the fateful executive decree. First, said Bush, any Chinese citizen who was in the United States before the crackdown should not be forcibly removed by immigration agents. Keefe, noting that the directive effectively offered safe haven to 80,000 Chinese students, calls it "a kind of founding document for the Fujianese community in America."
A second part of the order, writes Keefe, "would unwittingly facilitate the snakehead trade and set the stage for an epic influx of undocumented Chinese." This was Section 4, where Bush directed officials to provide for "enhanced consideration" under immigration laws for people "who express a fear of persecution upon return to their country related to that country's policy of forced abortion or coerced sterilization." In Keefe's words, "the breadth of the provision led to the de facto result that any fertile Chinese person, whether a parent or not, suddenly became a potential political refugee in the United States." It was an "unambiguous invitation," and the effects were unmistakable: "in 1992 political asylum was granted to roughly 85 percent of the undocumented Chinese immigrants who requested it, a rate almost three times higher than for immigrants from other countries. 'The Fujianese thank two people,' a Chinatown real estate broker who emigrated in the 1980s observed. 'One is Cheng Chui Ping [Sister Ping]. And one is George Bush the father.'"
Keefe consulted an impressive array of sources in piecing together this book. Many were in law enforcement--agents of the FBI and the immigration service seem to have been especially forthcoming. Where others were not, Keefe dug deeper. His source notes reveal that many details of the scene from that horrific night on Rockaway Beach come from Keefe's Freedom of Information Act requests for the reports of first responders, such as agents of the US Park Service Police. Outside law enforcement, Keefe spoke to attorneys, White House staffers and all kinds of people in New York's Chinatown. In York, Pennsylvania, where many of the migrants spent more than three years in prison, he spoke with volunteer lawyers and a committee of advocates for the men in prison. And he interviewed many of the migrants, including one, Sean Chen, who left Fujian with snakeheads in 1991; traveled overland through Burma to Thailand; languished in Bangkok until July 1992, when he boarded the Najd II; languished in Mombasa until April 1993, when he boarded the Golden Venture; and then languished in York until President Bill Clinton ordered him and all other Golden Venture detainees freed on Valentine's Day 1997.
Sister Ping's life, however, was moving in the opposite direction. In 2006 she was convicted of smuggling-related crimes and sentenced by then-judge Michael Mukasey to thirty-five years in prison. (When Keefe wrote her there asking for an interview, she replied, "What's in it for me?")
Keefe's book ends with his visit to the man who was head of the regional immigration service office in New York at the time of the Golden Venture landing, the man who decided that, instead of releasing the migrants pending disposition of their cases in immigration court, as was the common practice, he would detain them indefinitely. I remember thinking at the time how heartless William Slattery was and, with his inflammatory pronouncements, how nasty. But with a fairness that's characteristic of his approach, Keefe explains some of Slattery's thinking. There was a snakehead boom under way; Chinese asylum seekers were arriving by the boatload. At the top of his agency there was a vacuum: Bill Clinton had been in office only six months, and his nominee for INS commissioner, Doris Meissner, had not yet been confirmed. Slattery tells Keefe that no higher-up told him to detain the migrants, but nor did they say not to. Washington, in Slattery's mind, was "terrified, paralyzed by its own indecision." The brazen landing inside New York City "was a final, unmistakable fuck you from the smugglers to the United States government, and Slattery took it personally." "I led. Washington followed," he brags to Keefe.
Slattery's anger probably reflected that of many; snakeheads like Sister Ping were clearly out to exploit the good will of the United States. Now retired in Florida, Slattery "to this day...is skeptical about the asylum claims of the passengers aboard the Golden Venture," writes Keefe, and once you have in hand this larger picture, it's hard not to share that skepticism. Or to agree with Slattery's current, pragmatic position that, having been here so long, the Golden Venture passengers should of course be allowed to stay.
The immigration official is not the only player in this tale that has found its final resting place in Florida. After being auctioned off by the US Marshals in 1993 (and repainted, and renamed the United Caribbean), the former Golden Venture carried cargo for a while before the new owner abandoned it in the Miami River. Keefe reports that eventually local authorities decided to sink the ship and turn it into an artificial reef for divers. That's its final act, out in the Boca Raton Inlet. I think no one was sad to see it go.
About Ted Conover
Ted Conover is a writer in residence at NYU. His new book, The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today, is forthcoming from Knopf
President Obama displayed his usual rhetorical brilliance in Oslo and acknowledged important principles of peace and nonviolence. But his speech gave a distorted view of America's role in the world and reflected a shallow understanding of the concept of just war.
The president asserted that US military power has helped to "underwrite global security." I almost choked on that line. I thought I heard him say "undermine," which would have been more accurate. Many of Washington's misadventures have eroded global security--Vietnam, the wars in Central America, the invasion of Iraq, to name just a few. Millions of people have died and many continue to suffer because of unjust and illegal American military interventions.
The president claimed that the United States "has never fought a war against a democracy." But he failed to mention that CIA operations have subverted democracy and overthrown legitimately elected governments in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973) and other countries. Our closest friends, he said, "are governments that protect the rights of their citizens." Is he referring to our "friends" in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan?
The president invoked the concept of just war and identified a few of its ethical criteria--just cause, last resort, proportionality--but he failed to mention the most important principle, the presumption against the use of force. The principles of justice begin with the assumption that war is almost always unjust and can be warranted only under the most dire circumstances, and only if strict ethical criteria are satisfied.
Conspicuously missing was any mention of the ethical standard of "probability of success." Military power should not be used in a futile cause or in circumstances where disproportionate force may be needed to succeed. The prospects of the United States prevailing in a prolonged counterinsurgency war against the Taliban are highly uncertain. Afghanistan's reputation as the graveyard of empires is well earned, derived from a long history of fierce resistance to foreign intervention. Are we so certain of military victory, however that might be defined, that we are justified in unleashing the destruction of war?
The president said that when force is used civilians should be "spared from violence." True, but how does that square with his administration's increasing use of remote-controlled drone airstrikes in Pakistan? According to the Congressional testimony of former Pentagon adviser David Kilcullen, from 2006 through early 2009 these strikes killed many more civilians than militants. Other studies of the "drone war" have reported different numbers, but all find that many civilians are being killed in these attacks. These strikes "are deeply aggravating to the population," said Kilcullen, and have "given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism."
The president asserted that the cause of preventing terrorist strikes is just. True again, but that does not make war a legitimate or appropriate means of combating terrorism. There are many just causes, but few just wars. A RAND Corporation study released in 2008 shows that terrorist groups are thwarted usually through political processes and effective law enforcement, not the use of military force. An examination of 268 terrorist organizations that ended during a period of nearly forty years found that the primary factors accounting for their demise were participation in political processes (43 percent) and effective policing (40 percent). Military force accounted for the defeat of terrorist groups in only 7 percent of the cases.
The military's counterinsurgency doctrine calls for winning hearts and minds, which requires a campaign that is 80 percent nonmilitary. The US effort in Afghanistan is the reverse, more than 80 percent military.
War policies are not only inappropriate but counterproductive, arousing widespread anger at US policies. President Obama lamented the "reflexive suspicion of America" that exists in many countries, but he failed to acknowledge that American war policies often arouse that suspicion. The invasion and occupation of Iraq generated what Francis Fukuyama termed a "frenzy of anti-Americanism" around the world. The presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan is the principal factor driving the insurgency and mobilizing support for the Taliban.
The president identified many important principles of peacemaking--multilateral cooperation, defense of human rights, commitment to economic development. To enforce international law he advocated the use of nonmilitary sanctions combined with the incentive of diplomatic engagement. He acknowledged "the moral force of nonviolence" and praised the centrality of the "creed and lives of Gandhi and King."
Yet this message of hope was overshadowed by Obama's role as a war president--by his defense of a foreign policy that systematically undervalues nonmilitary approaches and that devotes far more resources to war than to development and diplomacy.
About David Cortright
David Cortright is co-chair of the Win Without War coalition and author of Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (Cambridge).
REBECCA HAMILTON is a Fellow at the Open Society Institute, a Visiting Fellow at the National Security Archive, and the author of a forthcoming book on the impact of advocacy on Darfur policy.
At a clandestine meeting in a nondescript Khartoum suburb, a man started reading a list of numbers to me. "Between the census conducted in 1983 and the one conducted in 1993, the nomadic population in South Darfur decreased by just over 5.5 percent," my informant summarized. "This was largely due to the drought, which led to a loss of livestock and forced many nomads into the towns." He resumed his list of numbers. "If we are to believe the recent census, this same nomadic population has increased by 322 percent."
Last year's census was conducted to determine how many parliamentary seats would be allocated to each geographical area in Sudan's April 2010 election. Sudan's ruling party refused to release its raw census data, but anomalies like this one are widespread. With numbers unexpectedly high among populations that support the current regime and lower than anticipated in opposition-dominated regions, many Sudanese believe that the census has been manipulated for political purposes. Distorted census figures like these are just one of many tactics being used to ensure that next year's election will come out in favor of the ruling National Congress Party (NCP), led by Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, an indicted war criminal.
Over the past few years, international engagement with Sudan has focused on the western region of Darfur, where more than 200,000 civilians died and 2.7 million remain displaced as a result of a conflict that the U.S. government characterized as genocide. The catastrophic events in Darfur certainly warranted international attention, but this attention came at the cost of monitoring other important domestic developments. While the global spotlight has focused on Darfur, Bashir has been quietly consolidating power, emulating such despots as Hugo Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who have adopted the trappings of democracy while working to subvert it.
Bashir belongs to the Jaali -- one of the northern riverine Arab tribes that, despite being a minority, have maintained control of Sudanese political life for as long as anyone can remember. In 1989, Bashir and his allies launched a military coup that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister, Sadiq al-Mahdi. Once in power, Bashir banned political parties, dissolved trade unions, and prohibited demonstrations. He was reelected after running unopposed in 1996 and again, with 86.5 percent of the vote, in 2000 -- the second rigged election of his tenure.
Sudanese politics are best understood as a struggle for control by an elite center over a vast and marginalized periphery -- a long-standing dynamic that was entrenched under British rule, from 1899 to 1956. During Bashir's reign, the most visible manifestation of this center-periphery tension has been the civil war between his NCP government and the main opposition group in the country's south, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) -- a conflict that led to the deaths of two million people over the course of two decades. And it was just as this war was coming to an end that rebel groups in Darfur took up arms to fight for representation in their marginalized area of the country.
The idea of a democratic election was put on the Sudanese agenda largely at the behest of the United States during negotiations to bring the north-south war to an end. The concluding document of those negotiations, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), was signed in January 2005. It set out an ambitious program for a multistage transition period to democratic rule and promised southerners a referendum on secession from Sudan in 2011.
At the time, neither the NCP nor the SPLM was particularly keen to hold an election that risked diminishing the seat allocations assigned to them for the pre-election period. But the U.S. government insisted there could be no democratic transformation of Sudan unless citizens went to the polls. Steeped in U.S. President George W. Bush's foreign policy agenda of democracy promotion, the architects of this grand vision focused not only on representation for the marginalized south but envisaged citizens in all of Sudan's peripheral areas voting for representatives who would serve their interests.
Back in 2005, there was a compelling logic to this. The six-year interim period between the signing of the CPA and the 2011 referendum was designed to sell southerners on the benefits of remaining part of a unified Sudan. They would see development in their region, the theory went, and get a taste of a new Sudan -- where repressive laws would be revoked and human rights would be respected. A national election held halfway through the period would reinforce these changes, and southerners would have over two years between the election and the referendum to experience life under democratic rule.
But nearly five years later, progress toward democratization has, if anything, gone into reverse. It is already clear that if the election takes place in April 2010, it will be under conditions that make a mockery of democratic principles. And since the elections have been delayed on multiple occasions, they are now scheduled to take place a mere eight months before the referendum in which southerners are almost certain to vote for independence. The international community is pouring millions of dollars into the formation of a government that will likely be dissolved just months after taking office.
Driving into town from Khartoum's international airport, visitors are greeted by a slew of pro-NCP billboards featuring heavily airbrushed images of Bashir in military or religious attire. "Bashir is our dignity!" they proclaim. Even Bashir's indictment by the International Criminal Court has been spun by the NCP. As the state-run media tell it, Bashir's indictment was an attack on the Sudanese people; voting for him, therefore, is an act of patriotism.
Meanwhile, for Sudan's opposition parties, making even the most basic political statement entails extreme risk. In mid-August, I met with Hassan al-Turabi, a key Islamist involved in orchestrating the 1989 military coup that brought Bashir to power. (They later had a falling out after Bashir suspected Turabi of plotting to overthrow him.) Midway through our interview, one of his several attendants insisted he take an urgent call. The leader of the Sudan Congress Party, a minor opposition group, was being detained by Sudan's omnipresent security services for trying to hold a public meeting. "How can we hold an election if we can't even hold a meeting?" Turabi asked. "We are living under an absolute dictatorship."
As a former host to Osama bin Laden, Turabi is not the most trustworthy of characters, but when it comes to the topic of repression, he is not exaggerating. Sudan's National Security Act has long enabled security forces to detain anyone without any justification for renewable periods of up to 90 days. Parliament has "reformed" the law to reduce the time detainees can be held, but the NCP-controlled intelligence service retains the power to detain its opponents. This means that the "ghost houses," where intelligence agents torture detainees, are unlikely to disappear.
The government may not be willing to reform repressive laws, but it is prepared to use its largesse to attempt to reform potential dissidents. The first thing I noticed at the Khartoum residence of the former Darfur rebel Minni Minawi was the Sudanese government license plate on his brand-new black Mercedes. Appointed a presidential adviser after being the only rebel leader to sign the ill-fated 2006 Darfur Peace Agreement, Minawi has been living comfortably in Khartoum, doing nothing for those he once claimed to represent.
Most dispiriting of all my meetings was the one with Ghazi Suleiman -- the man once referred to as "the godfather of human rights in Sudan." Responding to allegations of rape in Darfur, Suleiman now parrots Bashir's line, "They are all false. . . . I have been to Darfur and met a woman who had claimed she was raped," he said. "I asked her what does this word 'rape' mean? She had no answer." It seemed fruitless to point out that a woman who had been raped might not want to tell her traumatic story to a skeptical male stranger. According to Suleiman, "Now is the best time in the history of Sudan."
For those who cannot be co-opted, intimidation seems to be the NCP's preferred tactic. While I was in Khartoum, the government threatened to lift the parliamentary immunity of Yasir Arman, the head of the SPLM's northern delegation, for speaking out against public order laws. These vaguely worded morality laws serve as ideal vehicles for harassing anyone who has fallen out of favor with the government. "Yasir Arman is an MP, a prominent figure -- and they manage to bully him," said Salih Mahmoud Osman, a globally acclaimed human rights activist and a member of the Sudanese parliament. "Imagine what it is like for ordinary people. How can they possibly vote freely? "We've been hearing the U.S. government has agreed to donate $21 million for elections. We know the Carter Center has been holding workshops. But elections are supposed to be about the will of the people. To hold an election in this climate . . ." Osman's voice trailed off in despair.
Sudanese citizens are being asked to go to the polls for their first "democratic" election in over two decades under decidedly undemocratic circumstances. Even in the semi-autonomous south of the country, where repression is less overt, potential voters face significant hurdles. In an area where the UN reports a literacy rate of 24 percent (only 12 percent for women), voters are being asked to complete 12 separate ballots. Members of the international community -- which has signed up to fund a significant portion of the election (the UN has just announced a $91 million donation to the Bashir-appointed National Elections Commission) -- must ask whether they should be supporting this election at all. As one Sudanese academic who requested anonymity put it: "Elections with what objective? Legitimating an illegitimate regime?"
Bashir and the NCP have maneuvered themselves into something of a win-win situation. If the election goes forward, they are assured of a victory; if the election does not take place, they stay in power. As the NCP sees it, the key difference is that if the election happens, the indicted war criminal Bashir will become the democratically elected Bashir, granting the ruling regime a veneer of legitimacy. For Sudanese citizens and their outside supporters, this will undermine any push for a true democratic transformation.
While the world's attention has been on Darfur, the ruling regime in Khartoum has not lost focus on their primary goal: survival. An election was forced upon them, and they have risen to the challenge. Always a step ahead, they have put the pieces in place to ensure that they will be the ostensibly democratic choice of the Sudanese people on election day. In the NCP's best-case scenario, Sudanese citizens will simply accept this fraud.
But public dissent, a rarity in Sudan, is brewing. Following the CPA, civil society activists had hoped that constitutionally mandated legal reforms would prohibit NCP security agents from arresting and detaining citizens and that other laws used to suppress dissent would be repealed. Nearly five years on, cosmetic reform notwithstanding, little has changed. In the past two weeks, anti-NCP demonstrations have erupted both in Khartoum and in the south, suggesting that even if the international community does not take a stand against the failure to establish the conditions for a free and fair election, it is conceivable that the Sudanese people will.
To date, the NCP has responded to the protesters with tear gas, arrests, and an announcement that such demonstrations are illegal. But this may not be enough to suppress dissent among a population with long-standing and legitimate grievances in a country awash with arms.
January/February 2010 Jessica Stern JESSICA STERN is Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School.
Is it possible to deradicalize terrorists and their potential recruits? Saudi Arabia, a pioneer in rehabilitation efforts, claims that it is. Since 2004, more than 4,000 militants have gone through Saudi Arabia's programs, and the graduates have been reintegrated into mainstream society much more successfully than ordinary criminals. Governments elsewhere in the Middle East and throughout Europe and Southeast Asia have launched similar programs for neo-Nazis, far-right militants, narcoterrorists, and Islamist terrorists, encouraging them to abandon their radical ideology or renounce their violent means or both.
The U.S. government would do well to better understand the successes and failures of such efforts, especially those that target Islamist terrorists. This is important, first, because, as General David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, has noted, the United States "cannot kill [its] way to victory" in the struggle against al Qaeda and related groups. Although military action, especially covert military action, is an essential part of the strategy against the Islamist terrorist movement, the United States' main goal should be to stop the movement from growing. Terrorists do not fight on traditional battlefields; they fight among civilians, which increases the risks of collateral damage. Indeed, Islamist terrorists provoke the governments they oppose into responding in ways that seem to prove that these governments want to humiliate or harm Muslims. Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and "extraordinary rendition" have become for Muslim youth symbols of the United States' belligerence and hypocrisy.
Second, the effectiveness of deradicalization programs aimed at detained terrorists have direct and immediate effects on U.S. national security. This is especially true regarding the detainees at the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Because it is difficult to gather evidence that is usable in court, some truly bad actors, along with some not so bad ones who have been held unfairly, will inevitably be released. Effective deradicalization programs could help make such individuals less dangerous. Abdallah al-Ajmi, who was repatriated to Kuwait in 2005 on the order of a U.S. judge and was acquitted of terrorism charges by a Kuwaiti court, subsequently carried out a suicide bombing on Iraqi security forces in Mosul that killed 13 Iraqis. Had he received the kind of reintegration assistance and follow-up (including surveillance) now available in Saudi Arabia after his release, he might not have traveled to Iraq.
Third, the success, or failure, of terrorism-prevention programs outside the United States is important to Americans. For one thing, people who carry European passports can enter the United States relatively easily, and so the presence of terrorists in Europe can threaten U.S. national security. For another, terrorism-prevention programs presently under way in, for example, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, could be models for at-risk groups in the United States, such as the Somali community in Minnesota, from which some young men have been recruited to fight alongside al Shabab, the radical Islamist organization that controls southern Somalia and claims to be aligned with al Qaeda. These men do not seem to be plotting attacks in the West, but it is important to think now about how to integrate Somalis into American society more fully in order to reduce the chances that they will carry out attacks in the United States.
The fight against al Qaeda and related groups is not over: Saudi Arabia's deputy interior minister was nearly killed by a terrorist posing as a repentant militant in August 2009; in September, U.S. government officials interrupted a plot in New York and Denver that they believed was the most significant since 9/11; and in October, the French police arrested a nuclear physicist employed at the CERN accelerator, near Geneva, who reportedly had suggested French targets to members of the Algerian terrorist group al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. But in the long term, the most important factor in limiting terrorism will be success at curtailing recruitment to and retention in extremist movements.
Now is the moment to try. Counterterrorism efforts have significantly eroded al Qaeda's strength in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia since the "war on terror" began in 2001. U.S. Predator strikes in Pakistan have killed top al Qaeda leaders, disrupting essential communications between the group's core and its affiliates and new recruits. Testifying before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs last September, Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said that such activities were "potentially disrupting plots that are under way" and "leaving leadership vacuums that are increasingly difficult to fill."
Even though anti-American sentiment remains strong, especially in Pakistan, al Qaeda's popularity is waning. Polls continue to show that many people in Muslim-majority states doubt that the true aim of U.S. counterterrorism efforts is self-protection. A 2007 study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes of public opinion in Egypt, Indonesia, Morocco, and Pakistan, for instance, found that majorities in each of the four countries believed that Washington's primary goal was to dominate the Middle East and weaken and divide the Islamic world. According to another PIPA poll, conducted last spring, anti-American sentiment remained high in Pakistan, where over 80 percent of respondents viewed the Predator strikes as unjustified. Crucially, the report also noted "a sea change" in popular attitudes toward al Qaeda and other religious militants: over 80 percent of the Pakistanis polled said they thought these groups were national security threats -- representing more than a 40-percentage-point rise since 2007. Al Qaeda's reputation as the brave vanguard against Western oppression has been tarnished by the tens of thousands of Muslim civilians killed in Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, and elsewhere since the "war on terror" began. Several Islamist leaders who once supported al Qaeda, including Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, the organization's ideological godfather, have publicly turned against it, as have many ordinary Muslims. If the deradicalization of Islamist extremists is ever going to work, now is probably the time to try.
DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT IDEOLOGY
I first got involved in deradicalization efforts in 2005, soon after the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Islamist militant. The city of Rotterdam recruited me to help develop a new concept of citizenship that would include Dutch natives as well as immigrants and their children; the city government worried that the idea of jihad had become a fad among not only Muslim youth but also recent converts to Islam. In 2007, a company under contract with Task Force 134, the task force in charge of U.S.-run detention centers in Iraq, asked me to help develop a deradicalization program for the 26,000 Iraqis held at Camp Bucca and Camp Cropper (Camp Bucca has since been closed). Last winter, together with a group of current and former U.S. government officials and analysts, I visited Riyadh's Care Rehabilitation Center, an institution that reintegrates convicted terrorists into Saudi society through religious reeducation, psychological counseling, and assistance finding a job. And in the spring of 2009, I visited a youth center supported by the Muslim Contact Unit, part of the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police in London, which works with leaders of the Muslim community there, including Islamists, to isolate and counter supporters of terrorist violence.
These experiences made one thing clear: any rehabilitation effort must be based on a clear understanding of what drives people to terrorism in the first place. Terrorist movements often arise in reaction to an injustice, real or imagined, that they feel must be corrected. Yet ideology is rarely the only, or even the most important, factor in an individual's decision to join the cause. The reasons that people become terrorists are as varied as the reasons that others choose their professions: market conditions, social networks, education, individual preferences. Just as the passion for justice and law that drives a lawyer at first may not be what keeps him working at a law firm, a terrorist's motivations for remaining in, or leaving, his "job" change over time. Deradicalization programs need to take account -- and advantage -- of these variations and shifts in motivations.
Interestingly, terrorists who claim to be driven by religious ideology are often ignorant about Islam. Our hosts in Riyadh told us that the vast majority of the deradicalization program's "beneficiaries," as its administrators call participants, had received little formal education and had only a limited understanding of Islam. In the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, second- and third-generation Muslim youth are rebelling against the kind of "soft" Islam practiced by their parents and promoted in local mosques. They favor what they think is the "purer" Islam, uncorrupted by Western culture, which is touted on some Web sites and by self-appointed imams from the Middle East who are barely educated themselves. For example, the Netherlands-based terrorist cell known as the Hofstad Group designed what one police officer described as a "do-it-yourself" version of Islam based on interpretations of takfiri ideology (takfir is the practice of accusing other Muslims of apostasy) culled from the Internet and the teachings of a drug dealer turned cleric.
Such true believers are good candidates for the kind of ideological reeducation undertaken by Task Force 134 in Iraq and by the prison-based deradicalization program in Saudi Arabia. A Saudi official told the group of us who visited the Care Rehabilitation Center in Riyadh last winter that the main reason for terrorism was ignorance about the true nature of Islam. Clerics at the center teach that only the legitimate rulers of Islamic states, not individuals such as Osama bin Laden, can declare a holy war. They preach against takfir and the selective reading of religious texts to justify violence. One participant in the program told us, "Now I understand that I cannot make decisions by reading a single verse. I have to read the whole chapter."
PREJUDICE AND PRIDE
In Europe, Muslim youth describe themselves, often accurately, as victims of prejudice in the workplace and in society more generally. Surveys carried out in 2006 by the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (now subsumed by the Fundamental Rights Agency), an EU body, showed that minorities and immigrants in the European Union experience greater levels of unemployment, are overrepresented in the least desirable jobs, and receive lower wages. After the van Gogh murder, the native Dutch, who are famously proud of their tolerance, grew visibly less so: they started complaining about rising rates of criminality among Dutch Moroccan youth and the rhetoric of radical imams who preach that homosexuality is a sickness or a sin. Rightly perceiving that this growing prejudice against Muslims could become a source of social conflict, local governments and nongovernmental organizations put in place various programs to integrate young immigrants into broader Dutch society.
Group dynamics are as important as social grievances. Young people are sometimes attracted to terrorist movements through social connections, music, fashion, or lifestyle and only later come to understand fully the groups' violent ideologies and goals. Al Shabab, spurred by a member who calls himself Abu Mansour al-Amriki, and other groups affiliated with al Qaeda have begun using anti-American hip-hop -- "jihad rap" -- in their recruitment videos; the British rap group Blakstone and the defunct but still popular American band Soldiers of Allah promote violence against kafir (nonbelievers). The first- and second-generation Muslim children I interviewed for a study of the sources of radicalization in the Netherlands seemed to think that talking about jihad was cool, in the same way that listening to gangster rap is in some youth circles. Most of these children will not turn to violence, but once youth join an extremist group, the group itself can become an essential part of their identity, maybe even their only community. And so deradicalization requires finding new sources of social support for them. The Saudi program takes great pains to reintegrate participants into their families and the communities they belonged to before their radicalization by encouraging family visits and getting the community involved in their follow-up after they are released. The program rightly assumes that group dynamics are key to both radicalization and deradicalization.
Then there is economics. For some, jihad is just a job. According to studies by the economist Alan Krueger, now the U.S. Treasury Department's assistant secretary for economic policy, and Alberto Abadie, a professor of public policy at Harvard, there is no direct correlation between low GDP and terrorism. Nonetheless, poor people in countries with high levels of unemployment are more vulnerable to recruitment. Of the 25,000 insurgents and terrorist suspects detained in Iraq as of 2007, nearly all were previously underemployed and 78 percent were unemployed, according to Major General Douglas Stone, the commander of Task Force 134 at the time. Because these insurgents took up the "job" of fighting a military occupation, typically targeting soldiers rather than civilians, at least some of them could conceivably be rehabilitated once foreign troops leave Iraq.
According to Christopher Boucek, an expert on Saudi Arabia and Yemen at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Advisory Committee, which helps run the deradicalization program in Saudi Arabia, has reported that most detainees are men in their 20s from large lower- or middle-class families; only three percent come from high-income backgrounds. Boucek says that according to Saudi officials, 25 percent of the detained terrorists who had participated in jihad had prior criminal records, approximately half of them for drug-related offenses; only five percent were prayer leaders or had other formal religious roles. For such individuals, job training and career counseling may be the best deradicalization strategy -- or at least a strategy as important as religious reeducation.
ALL IN THE HEAD
Psychology also matters. One element worth examining in particular is the potential impact of sexual abuse on radicalization. Much has been written about the role of radical madrasahs in creating terrorists in Pakistan and elsewhere, some of it in these pages. Outside of the Pakistani press, however, little note is made of the routine rape of boys at such schools. Also troubling is the rape of boys by warlords, the Afghan National Army, or the police in Afghanistan. Such abuses are commonplace on Thursdays, also known as "man-loving day," because Friday prayers are considered to absolve sinners of all wrongdoing. David Whetham, a specialist in military ethics at King's College London, reports that security checkpoints set up by the Afghan police and military have been used by some personnel to troll for attractive young men and boys on Thursday nights. The local population has been forced to accept these episodes as par for the course: they cannot imagine defying the all-powerful Afghan commanders. Could such sexual traumas be a form of humiliation that contributes to contemporary Islamist terrorism?
Similarly, one need not spend many days in Gaza before understanding that fear and humiliation, constants of daily life there, play at least some role in certain Palestinians' decisions to become martyr-murderers. If terrorism can be a source of validation, then surely helping adherents come to terms with the humiliation they have experienced could help bring them back into the fold. To that end, the Saudi rehabilitation program includes classes in self-esteem.
Aside from the question of preexisting personal trauma, consider the impact of a terrorist's lifestyle on his psychology. Exposure to violence, especially for those who become fighters, can cause lasting, haunting changes in the body and the mind. Terrorists are "at war," at least from their perspective, and they, too, may be at risk of posttraumatic stress disorder. Moreover, those who have been detained may have been subjected to torture and left with even more serious psychological wounds. The Guantánamo detainees sent back to Saudi Arabia have posed a particular problem for the Saudi government, for example. One graduate of the facility in Riyadh told me privately that although he was taking psychotropic medications, which helped, he was still suffering from terrible nightmares and feeling hypervigilant. (He claimed to have been tortured with electrodes in Afghanistan, prior to being moved to Guantánamo.) It will be critically important to incorporate some of what the medical community learns about posttraumatic stress disorder. This is not because terrorists deserve sympathy -- they do not -- but because understanding their state of mind is necessary to limiting the risk that they will return to violence.
Some individuals join terrorist movements out of conviction but evolve over time into professional killers. Once that happens, the emotional, or material, benefits of belonging can overtake the spiritual benefits of believing. This suggests that some terrorists might develop enduring reasons -- perhaps even a compulsion -- to pursue violence. Such individuals should be detained preventively and the key thrown away, as some governments do with sexual predators. But in cases in which the law precludes indefinite detention, governments may be forced to release suspects. In those instances, officials will have to choose whether to ignore the threat posed by these people or work with other governments to develop tools to reduce the chance that they will resume being terrorists. Regarding lower-level operatives, governments must consider risky tradeoffs. On the one hand, how great is the chance that graduates of deradicalization programs will return to terrorism or other forms of violent crime? On the other hand, are incarcerated terrorists recruiting in prison among the ordinary criminals or the guards, or can preventive detention, or the prison itself, become a symbol of injustice to potential recruits?
REHABILITATION AND RECIDIVISM
After participating in a 1974 survey of 231 case studies of rehabilitation programs for criminals in prisons, the sociologist Robert Martinson wrote that "with few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism." This observation sparked a "nothing works" movement throughout the United States. Academics continued to study the rehabilitation of criminals, however, and there is now a fairly broad consensus that some measures do work. The most successful rehabilitation models focus on the motivations of individual offenders. The ideal approach includes three components: prison-based rehabilitation programs, services to help released prisoners reintegrate into society, and postrelease services. The community's involvement in the postrelease services, in particular, is essential to reducing recidivism rates.
Terrorists are different from ordinary criminals in many ways, of course, but it is worth noting that according to the Saudi government, its deradicalization program -- which relies on prison-based rehabilitation programs, transitional services, and postrelease services -- has been extraordinarily successful. The Saudi government has not disclosed the total number of people who have completed its program, but as of 2009, 11 graduates had ended up on the country's most-wanted terrorist list. Still, according to official statistics, the rate of recidivism is 10-20 percent, far lower than that for ordinary criminals. In order to gain a more complete understanding of what works, and what does not, in deradicalization efforts, it will be important for the Saudi government to give outsiders greater access to the program and to statistics regarding it.
That said, some of the Saudi program's main features, and thus its results, may be difficult to replicate elsewhere. The project is extremely expensive; it is constantly being updated, based on input from the staff and participants. It includes psychological counseling, vocational training, art therapy, sports, and religious reeducation. Former Guantánamo detainees who graduate from the program are given housing, a car, money for a wedding -- even assistance in finding a wife, if necessary. They receive help with career placement for themselves and their families. There is an extensive postrelease program as well, which involves extensive surveillance. The guiding philosophy behind these efforts, the program's leaders explained, is that jihadists are victims, not villains, and they need tailored assistance -- a view probably unacceptable in many countries.
Could aspects of the program nonetheless be replicated elsewhere? The U.S. government has been trying to persuade the Saudi government to assist in reintegrating into mainstream society 97 Yemeni terrorist suspects who remained in Guantánamo as of October 2009. According to Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, these Yemenis "include many of the worst of the worst." Repatriating them to Yemen, Wittes adds, is not an attractive option because of the fragility of the Yemeni state and its notoriously leaky jails: ten terrorist suspects escaped in 2003; in 2006, 23 suspects did. And because the Saudi program depends on relatives to police the behavior of the detainees once they are released, Boucek, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, describes the U.S. proposal to send the Yemenis to the Saudi program as "a catastrophically bad idea," unless the detainees grew up or have relatives in Saudi Arabia. Boucek favors giving U.S. assistance for a new program in Yemen that would be modeled in part on the one in Saudi Arabia.
GANGPLANK
Both radicalization and deradicalization typically involve several steps, including changes in values and changes in behavior. The changes in values do not necessarily precede the changes in behavior, John Horgan, director of the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Pennsylvania State University, has found. Individuals often join extremist groups in the same way that they might join gangs -- through social connections, to gain a sense of belonging -- and only later do they acquire extremist views. The literature on gangs, for its part, suggests that the most productive time to intervene in this process is before an individual joins the group.
It is based on this understanding that, alongside their deradicalization projects, several governments are devising programs to forestall radicalization altogether. Youth programs developed by the Institute for Multicultural Development (also known as FORUM), in the Netherlands, help adolescents and young adults in the country resist radicalization and recruitment into terrorist groups by encouraging them to "express their possible disappointments and (justified) feelings of exclusion in peaceful and democratic ways and turn their genuine concerns into positive social action." FORUM focuses on "problem neighborhoods," namely, ethnic neighborhoods with high levels of unemployment.
The Saudi government also runs a terrorism-prevention program, which monitors religious leaders, schoolteachers, and Web sites. It recently arrested five individuals for promoting militant activities on the Internet and recruiting individuals to travel abroad for what the government called "inappropriate purposes." Meanwhile, it also supports a nongovernmental organization called the Sakinah Campaign (sakinah means "tranquility"), which helps Internet users who have visited extremist sites interact with legitimate Islamic scholars online, with a view to steering them away from radicalism.
Such projects may serve as models or at least as a source of inspiration for similar efforts elsewhere. Washington should study them, even though the United States has so far been relatively immune from the kind of homegrown Islamist terrorism that has afflicted Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and other European countries. This may be because American Muslims tend to be more fully integrated into American society and tend to be better educated and have higher-paying jobs than the average American. In the last few years, however, a small number of Somali immigrants who had settled as refugees in the United States, especially in Minnesota, have joined al Shabab in Somalia. (One of them is the first known American to become a suicide bomber.) These immigrants have less in common with other American Muslims and more resemble Pakistanis in the United Kingdom and Moroccans in the Netherlands, who face discrimination in school and on the job market. Unlike previous waves of Muslim immigrants to the United States, these Somalis arrived with little knowledge of English or the United States. Partly as a result, they have had difficulty assimilating into American society: according to the most recent census, Somali Americans have the highest unemployment rate among East African diasporas in the United States and the lowest rate of college graduation.
U.S. officials devising social programs for Somali American youth can learn not only from previous anti-gang efforts in the United States but also from the experiences of European governments and their efforts to lure lower-achieving immigrant youth away from gangs and terrorist groups. As part of these efforts, it makes a great deal of sense to back anti-jihadi Muslim activists. But that is also a risky move. Antifundamentalist groups that get official backing risk being perceived not just as opposing violence but also as opposing Islam. The Quilliam Foundation, an anti-extremism think tank in the United Kingdom that was started by two former members of the Islamist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir, has received nearly one million pounds from the British government -- and has lost credibility among ordinary Muslims.
But there are hopeful signs: Hanif Qadir, together with his brother and a former member of a local gang, created the Active Change Foundation in 2003, an organization that runs a youth center and a gym in Waltham Forest, a culturally diverse and gang-infested borough of northern London, and is supported by the Metropolitan Police. Qadir told me that he had been recruited by al Qaeda in 2002 and was on his way to Afghanistan expecting to fight when he changed his mind after hearing that volunteers were being used as "cannon fodder." Now, he explained to me, he encourages youth to express their rage about the mistreatment of Muslims in Iraq, Palestine, and elsewhere and channel it into peaceful political action. Having been involved in its gangs or violent extremist groups themselves, he and the other program leaders know the community well. The foundation's ambition, as it puts it, is to "work behind the 'wall of silence'" with people who are marginalized by mainstream British society.
Terrorism continues to pose a significant threat to civilians around the world. If every terrorist could be killed or captured and then kept locked up indefinitely, the world would be a safer place. But there are limitations to this approach. Often, the only evidence implicating captured terrorists is not usable in court, and some terrorists will inevitably be released if they are returned to their countries of origin. The destructive ideology that animates the al Qaeda movement is spreading around the globe, including, in some cases, to small-town America. Homegrown zealots, motivated by al Qaeda's distorted interpretation of Islam, may not yet be capable of carrying out 9/11-style strikes, but they could nonetheless terrorize a nation.
Terrorism spreads, in part, through bad ideas. The most dangerous and seductive bad idea spreading around the globe today is a distorted and destructive interpretation of Islam, which asserts that killing innocents is a way to worship God. Part of the solution must come from within Islam and from Islamic scholars, who can refute this ideology with arguments based on theology and ethics. But bad ideas are only part of the problem. Terrorists prey on vulnerable populations -- people who feel humiliated and victimized or who find their identities by joining extremist movements. Governments' arsenals against terrorism must include tools to strengthen the resilience of vulnerable populations. These tools should look more like anti-gang programs and public diplomacy than war.
By Steve Fainaru and William Booth Thursday, December 31, 2009; A06
The Flores brothers had never looked like much in the eyes of local narcotics agents. But by the time it all came crashing down this year, the drug-distribution network allegedly run by the 28-year-old twins from the Mexican American barrios of Chicago was one of the largest and most sophisticated ever seen in the U.S. heartland, according to interviews and federal indictments.
Pedro and Margarito Flores allegedly operated as an American annex to a major Mexican drug mafia, and their arrest and the dismantling of their purported network opened a window on how powerful Mexican cartels operate in the United States, distributing cocaine and heroin with the corporate efficiency of UPS, while back home competitors are tortured and beheaded.
The fortunes of the Flores twins changed because the war on the cartels being waged in Mexico with U.S. help has reshaped the criminal landscape in both countries, generating unprecedented violence but also contributing to the kinds of vicious splits and betrayals that helped in the brothers' arrests, according to narcotics agents and federal indictments.
The sprawling drug operation was essentially a $700 million-a-year distributorship for the Sinaloa cartel, the largest criminal organization in Mexico. It used tractor-trailers to import two tons of cocaine each month for distribution from Chicago warehouses, with cash proceeds shrink-wrapped and shipped back across the border.
The crackdown launched by Mexican President Felipe Calderón has cost more than 16,000 lives and been widely criticized in both countries as ineffective in reining in the drug barons and slowing the flow of drugs into the United States. But the campaign has exposed networks such as the one allegedly run by the Flores brothers, which shipped cocaine from Los Angeles to Chicago and then distributed it to cities across the Midwest, according to interviews and the indictments.
Other than the indictments, few court papers have been filed in the case. The Flores brothers are in U.S. custody; attempts to reach their attorneys were unsuccessful.
Chicago is hardly alone as a home to Mexican cartels; the traffickers operate in 230 U.S. cities, the Justice Department says. But the competition in Chicago might be unusually fierce, with each of the five major Mexican cartels vying for business.
"Much like any legitimate corporation, the drug organizations utilize Chicago as both a distribution and trans-shipment point for their product," Stephen A. Luzinski, acting special agent-in-charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration office here, said in an interview. "The extensive accessibility to various modes of transportation, as well as the large and diverse population with an established customer base, makes Chicago an ideal location as a hub."
Pedro and Margarito Flores were born into a Mexican immigrant family with strong ties to the narcotics trade. Chicago detectives say their father ran drugs for the Sinaloa cartel, as did an older brother. The family melded into the culture in rough neighborhoods such as Little Village and Pilsen, where the Latin Kings and Two-Six gangs fight for turf.
The brothers eventually took over a barbershop and a Mexican restaurant called Mama's Kitchen. They moved to a more expensive neighborhood and drove better cars. But unlike in Mexico, where high-level traffickers are household names, the twins had low profiles.
In Chicago, "you are only as good as your connection," said a former drug dealer who served 10 years in prison and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns. And the Flores brothers reportedly had the best connections in town.
Authorities said the brothers worked for two factions of the Sinaloa cartel. One was headed by JoaquÃn "El Chapo" Guzmán, the most wanted man in Mexico, recently named by Forbes magazine as the 41st most-powerful person in the world. The other was by Arturo Beltrán Leyva, whose self-appointed nickname -- the Boss of All Bosses -- frequently appeared on messages displayed next to mutilated corpses.
Factional trade, warfare
As described in court documents, the brothers' reach extended deep into Mexico, where Guzmán, Beltrán Leyva and their associates used Boeing 747 jets, private aircraft, submarines, container ships, fishing vessels and speedboats to consolidate enormous shipments of cocaine from Central and South America, including Colombia and Panama.
The Sinaloa cartel in Mexico was tasked with getting the drugs across the border for pickup in a warehouse outside Los Angeles. The Flores brothers allegedly employed dozens of operators to bring the drugs north, including truck drivers who concealed the contraband amid shipments of fruit, vegetables and other consumer goods, and off-loaded cocaine and heroin in the Chicago area at nondescript warehouses, condominiums and brick duplexes managed by their criminal gang. The drugs were split into smaller quantities and "fronted" to customers, who would pay after they sold the contraband on the street.
But the two Sinaloa factions split last year over the Mexican government's arrest of Beltrán Leyva's brother. The resulting violence consumed several Mexican states and, ultimately, Chicago, as the factions fought over "control of lucrative narcotics trafficking routes into the United States, and the loyalty of wholesale narcotics customers, including the Flores Brothers," according to an indictment filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
The brothers were said to be caught in the middle, with both Sinaloa factions threatening violence against them to maintain control over the critical distribution network. Ultimately, U.S. authorities were able to infiltrate the purported Flores crew, setting up sham cocaine sales to make dozens of arrests and to seize more than three metric tons of cocaine.
Pressure on both sides
It is not clear whether the Flores brothers are cooperating with the authorities, but they face life in prison if convicted, and authorities are seeking the forfeiture of more than $1.8 billion. In August, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney for the district, called the indictments "the most significant drug importation conspiracies ever charged in Chicago."
Authorities and people familiar with the drug trade say violence in Mexico and increased enforcement -- symbolized by the Flores case -- are having a dramatic effect on Chicago street sales, at least for now. The wholesale price for a kilo of cocaine -- about 2.2 pounds -- has surged in the past 18 months, from $18,000 to $29,000 and often more, according to authorities.
U.S. officials declined to discuss specifics of the case or whether information from the investigation helped lead Mexican authorities to Beltrán Leyva, who was killed this month during a two-hour gun and grenade battle with Mexican forces in the city of Cuernavaca.
But Anthony Placido, chief of intelligence for the DEA, said in an interview that pressure on both sides of the border has forced the cartels to rely increasingly on inexperienced operators such as the Flores twins.
"There have always been gatekeepers -- people who use their familial relationships to facilitate the movement of drugs across the border," Placido said. "Those people used to be gods, and they would control an area for years. Now they often last months before they are arrested or assassinated.
"What that creates is opportunities for a 28-year-old who . . . isn't worried about dying," he said.
Staff writer Kari Lydersen and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
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