In Evin Prison

Image by Sylvia Westenbroek via Flickr

By Claire Messud

My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran

by Haleh Esfandiari

Ecco, 230 pp., $25.99

Extraordinary events in Iran over the past six months have brought us images, voices, and narratives until recently unimaginable; they reveal, among other things, how little we understand about quotidian life in that country since the revolution. In the United States, we are nevertheless aware, with a dark tremor, of Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, the black hole of the hard-liners' repressive system. Emblematic of the regime, it is a site of torture and interrogation, of isolation, and of emotional as well as physical violence. It is a prison for the breaking of souls.

Prominent intellectuals, politicians, activists, and journalists have vanished into its maw. Many, like the Canadian-Iranian photographer Zahra Kazemi, who died in 2003 after being brutally beaten, or the twenty-nine Iranian prisoners executed in July 2008, have not survived to speak of their ordeals there. Many others remain incarcerated, among them scores of reformists arrested during the summer's demonstrations and, in particular, the Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, originally arrested in 2007 at the same time as Haleh Esfandiari, and recently shockingly condemned, at a show trial, to at least twelve years in prison.

In this company, Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., is one of the lucky ones. An apparently unlikely candidate for arrest—a sixty-seven-year-old grandmother at the time of her imprisonment in 2007, Esfandiari was in Iran to visit her ninety-three-year-old mother—she was sucked into the surreal vortex of the nation's Intelligence Ministry, interrogated for months, and held in solitary confinement for four months. Her release was apparently the direct result of an exchange of letters between Lee Hamilton, her employer and the director of the Wilson Center, and the office of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei; although Esfandiari's husband, the historian Shaul Bakhash, along with many others (including the editors of The New York Review) campaigned tirelessly for her freedom, both in the United States and around the world. As she makes clear, it is impossible to know exactly what confluence of events led her captors to set her free: so much of their understanding of the world and of her role in it remained opaque to the last.

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In the wake of her experience, Esfandiari has written a memoir of considerable delicacy and sophistication. My Prison, My Home is, primarily, an account of her annus horribilis, from the initial staged "robbery" when she was on her way to Tehran airport on December 30, 2006, that left her conveniently without a passport and unable to leave the country, through her lockup and eventual liberation almost eight months later. But Esfandiari also provides us with a lucid, concise history of Iran through the twentieth century and into the first years of the twenty-first, and with it an outline of her own remarkable life across continents and cultures. She is restrained in her telling—the book is filled with vivid details and facts, rather than emotional outpouring—a decision for which her narrative is only the more powerful; but her position as someone who fully understands both America and Iran affords her the opportunity to elucidate, for American readers, some of the apparent mysteries of her native culture.

In order for us to make sense of her imprisonment, we need to grasp both its historical background and Esfandiari's own particular life story. (This assertion may seem painfully rudimentary, but facts that are common knowledge to any Iranian, such as the people's abiding resentment of the 1953 CIA-backed coup that restored the Shah to power, seem frequently to have eluded our nation's policymakers.)

Cosmopolitan and intellectual, Esfandiari's own upbringing reminds the reader of Iran as the West once knew it. She is the older child of an Iranian botanist, himself the descendant of regional governors and politicians from the eastern city of Kerman, and of an Austrian mother. Her parents met at university in Vienna before the war. Raised between her mother's German-style home and her grandmother's traditional Iranian household, Esfandiari, like her parents, attended university in Vienna:

While I stayed clear of the student movement,...my time in Vienna had a huge hand in shaping my intellectual development and my love for Western culture.

Having completed her doctorate, she returned to Iran in 1964 at the age of twenty-four.

Esfandiari lays out the vital information of her nation's history alongside her own. The pivotal power struggle in the early 1950s between the Shah and his prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who sought to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, took place when Haleh was only a child, but

even as an eleven-year-old I was caught up in these currents, as were the rest of the students at the normally staid Jeanne d'Arc [a Catholic girls' school run by French nuns]. We had all become politicized and wanted the British out.

Unfortunately, the CIA did not agree with the schoolgirls. (The importance of the Jeanne d'Arc school in educating the young women of Iran's future elite in pre-revolutionary times is evident: a quick glance at contact information for alumnae shows them to be predominantly working professionals, with most of them living in the diaspora.) The Esfandiari household's relation to the Mossadegh uprising was complicated, moreover, because "the family was divided.... Mossadegh, the aristocrat who had emerged as a defender of the masses, was a close relative."

Esfandiari explains the increasing difficulties of the Shah's regime during the course of the 1960s and 1970s—although she does not provide the sort of lavish detail about his infamous material excesses that can be found in Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski's Shah of Shahs (1985) or Christopher de Bellaigue's riveting In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs (2005)—and she makes these problems concrete in relation to her own life. Her first career upon returning to Iran was as a journalist. She translated and wrote for the nation's largest daily newspaper, Kayhan, where she met her future husband, Shaul Bakhash, while they were both covering a visit to Iran by the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. (That Bakhash is Jewish and she a Muslim was, at the time of their marriage in 1965, "highly unusual," but by no means scandalous: her conservative Muslim grandmother blessed their union.) After leaving Tehran for several years so that Bakhash could pursue his academic career at Harvard and Oxford, the couple returned in 1972.

Although she went back to Kayhan, Esfandiari found that she could not stay there long: "Increasingly the shah and the government showed less tolerance for even the mildest criticism, and the grip on the media of the emboldened Information Ministry grew tighter." When Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda's protégé, Amir Taheri, was appointed editor of the paper, Esfandiari quit, and went to work for the Women's Organization of Iran (WOI), a women's rights group founded in 1966.

In a moving aside—and one that feels particularly significant, given the growing influence of women in the current Iranian reform movement and their heightened presence on the streets during last summer's demonstrations, as was noted in the anonymous "Letter from Tehran" published in The New Yorker in early October—Esfandiari comments on her work with WOI, which lasted until 1975:

After the revolution, the clerics sought to undo as many of our accomplishments as they could.... But I believe the WOI played a role in making a new generation of women conscious of their rights, and these women were determined not to be relegated to second-class status again. For these reasons, my three years at the WOI remain among the most rewarding of my working life. I became, and remain, an unrepentant feminist.

From there, Esfandiari went on to the Shahbanou Farah Foundation, a cultural organization set up by and named after the Shah's third wife (herself a graduate of the Jeanne d'Arc school), through which she oversaw museums and cultural centers. From this vantage, she watched the Shah's Iran crumbling around her:

By 1977, for example, Tehran's "poetry nights" at the German-sponsored Goethe Institute had taken on a decidedly political color. Large gatherings listened while poets read from works praising liberty and criticizing oppression. Lawyers and intellectuals addressed open letters to the prime minister and the shah calling for the reinstitution of basic freedoms and the release of political prisoners.

In this setting, Esfandiari explains, the popular appeal of Khomeini—who had publicly and volubly denounced the Shah since the early 1960s, and had lived in exile in Turkey, Iraq, and France—gained inexorable momentum. While the Shah's opponents were politically diverse, ranging from Communists to intellectuals to civil servants, "Khomeini's clerical lieutenants came to dominate the movement, and Khomeini emerged as its undisputed leader." During 1978, demonstrations grew exponentially in size and force, and Esfandiari writes that "the regime, hammered by strikes, shutdowns, demonstrations, and violence on the streets, was in a hopeless situation."

While Esfandiari is clear about some sources of the unrest, she does not dwell on the people's grievances against the Shah. It is enlightening to read Kapus´cin´ski's account of life in the Shah's last years of rule, written at the time of the revolution, and to note how familiar the Pahlavi regime's methods sound to any of us reading the newspapers today:

More than a hundred thousand young Iranians were studying in Europe and America.... Today more Iranian doctors practice in San Francisco or Hamburg than in Tebriz or Meshed. They did not return even for the generous salaries the Shah offered. They feared Savak [the Shah's secret police, comparable to the contemporary Intelligence Ministry].... An Iranian at home could not read the books of the country's best writers (because they came out only abroad), could not see the films of its outstanding directors (because they were not allowed to be shown in Iran), could not listen to the voices of its intellectuals (because they were condemned to silence).

For Esfandiari and Bakhash, with a small daughter at the time, the upheaval of the revolution was too uncertain: Esfandiari took their daughter to London in early December 1978 for two weeks, to "wait things out."

In fact, however, she would not return home for many years. Khomeini returned to Iran in February 1979 and within ten days the Shah's monarchy collapsed. Now "armed revolutionary committees roamed the streets. Every day, grisly pictures appeared in the Tehran papers of executed members of the old regime—many I had known personally or had covered as a journalist." Bakhash had been offered a visiting professorship at Princeton, and the family moved to the United States, where they have lived since. Esfandiari taught Persian at Princeton until 1992. She then wrote her first book, Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution (1997), with the support of fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Center, and was asked by Robert Litwak, then the Wilson Center's director of the Division for International Studies, to start a Middle East program there, where she still works.

Esfandiari first returned to Iran in 1992, encouraged by the more liberal climate fostered by the relatively pragmatic President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his then minister of culture, Mohammad Khatami. After her father's death in 1995, she visited more frequently, to help care for her aging mother. She says of the late 1990s and early 2000s:

These were years when the possibility of fundamental change seemed real and when Iranians believed, for a brief moment, that they could take charge of their own lives and government. It was not to be, and it was heartbreaking to me to witness the snuffing out of so much promise and hope.

Following the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, however, the tenor of society changed so much that "I made it a point on these trips to stay away from even mildly 'political' people." Unfortunately, her efforts were insufficient to protect her from the roving eye of the Intelligence Ministry, "heir to the Shah's secret police, SAVAK," although far more murderous even than they, and responsible for the deaths of thousands of dissenters.

This institution defined Esfandiari's existence from December 30, 2006, when she was to have returned home to Washington, D.C., until September 2007, when she finally did; and her interactions with its emissaries make for astounding reading. The experience was absurd, horrendous, and disturbingly banal: in a final, blackly comic flourish, her principal interrogator, Mr. Ja'fari, presented her, on the eve of her departure, with a gift: "a large, beautiful inlaid box" containing a leather-bound volume of the poetry of Hafez, Iran's famed fourteenth-century poet: "I examined this curious gift, turning over and over in my mind its intended meaning. It was truly bizarre. The Intelligence Ministry was sending a message: 'No hard feelings. Let's be friends.'" As she says of them, "It's the way we play the game," and there is, about the surreal dance of her eight months in their hands, the quality of a game—destructive, potentially lethal, but a game nevertheless.

The Intelligence Ministry existed for Esfandiari primarily in the form of two men: her chief interrogator, Ja'fari, and his superior, Hajj Agha. Ja'fari she first met in early January 2007 at an interrogation center in a "house...modeled after the Petit Trianon," where he questioned her for long hours at a time, over a fortnight:

He was in his mid-thirties, of medium height, with a bit of stubble on his face. He wore an open-necked shirt beneath a modified safari jacket. A smirk never left his face. His manner alternated between solicitous official...and faceless bureaucrat.

Hajj Agha, the more gracious and apparently accommodating of the two men, with whom she had more dealings once she was imprisoned in early May 2007, emerges in spite of his urbanity as the more sinister: his name is honorific rather than personal ("Hajj" refers to one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca; "Agha" is a title for a military officer), so he is, in fact, nameless; and as Esfandiari was not permitted to see his face, and forced to face the wall, he remains, hideously, a cipher.

Ja'fari's line of questioning was, from the outset, clear: "He imagined that the Wilson Center was an agency of the American government, that we were implicated in some nefarious plot against the Islamic Republic, and that we routinely held secret meetings to plan strategy to this end." Esfandiari marvels, "How does one persuade a man with Ja'fari's mind-set that the Ford Foundation...is not part of a 'Zionist conspiracy'? How could I convince him that my husband was not an Israeli agent?"

More specifically, Esfandiari came to realize that Ja'fari and the Intelligence Ministry feared "that the Wilson Center was part of a conspiracy to bring about a velvet revolution...in Iran":

It was the National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Institute (OSI) that earned Ja'fari's most intense scrutiny. The OSI was part of the Soros Foundations.... [It] had been active in newly independent countries of the former Soviet Union.... In these countries, mass popular movements led by intellectuals and opposition parties had succeeded in bringing down Soviet-style governments. These movements became known as "velvet revolutions" or "rainbow revolutions" because of their peaceful, nonviolent nature and because protesters had adopted a particular identifying color—orange in the Ukraine, rose in Georgia, for example. In the twisted mind of Ja'fari and his colleagues, the Soros Foundations had caused these velvet revolutions, and since George Soros was a Jew, a shadowy, Jewish conspiracy hovered in the wings.

The wildness of this paranoia is of course all the more intriguing because it is not, in some details, so very far from reality: orange in the Ukraine, rose in Georgia, and green in Iran? This year's thwarted presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi may not have sought to provoke a "velvet revolution," but in their passionate cries for democratic reform, his supporters were not far from doing so, and their resistance, albeit less visibly, continues. While it is madness to blame the United States and Britain for supposedly coordinating and manipulating this discontent, Ja'fari is not wrong to be alarmed, or wrong to imagine that the West would wish for the reformists' success.

Nevertheless, to appreciate that a faction of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry (because it becomes clear, during Esfandiari's ordeal, that there are bickering factions behind the scrim: "one ready to let me go, the other determined to hold on to me") would seriously believe that the OSI was responsible for the revolutions in former Soviet countries, and intent on a similar strategy in Iran, is already to grasp the strange, novelistic, mutual incomprehensions that exist between Iran and the United States: we could not have imagined that they could genuinely imagine that. Suddenly, with Esfandiari's explanation, Tehran's apparently lunatic assertions about Western involvement in the events of June of this year take on a new tenor: it is vital that we understand that this is not mere rhetorical flourish. At least some portion of the Iranian establishment may believe, or believe they have to believe, these statements to be true.

Esfandiari's interrogations changed in nature, intensity, and locale. She was called upon to answer questions in writing, to provide documents and information pertaining to her work and life, and to speak on camera in a filmed "interview" that was broadcast nationally, along with those of two other prisoners: the political philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo (who had already been released, and who described the broadcast as "a page out of Stalinist Russia and George Orwell's 1984 ") and the social scientist and urban planner Kian Tajbakhsh. But the focus of the discussions never changed.

The questioning did, however, cease for a time: after the "Petit Trianon" interrogations and before Esfandiari's arrest, there were "eleven weeks of silence. It was a period of anxious waiting, which I tried to fill in various ways.... I spent my days in a figurative crouch...waiting for the blow to fall." This hiatus, during which she did not know what her fate might be, was nothing short of psychological torture:

My entanglement with the Intelligence Ministry meant I would never again feel safe in Iran, even at home. I could no longer carry out an unguarded conversation over the telephone. I believed the intelligence people were reading my e-mail. My nerves were always on edge.... I hated being cooped up in the apartment, but I was uncomfortable going out....

Mutti and I became increasingly isolated. The small group of academic "insiders" who had generously tried to help me began to disappear from my life....

I could no longer see the beauty of the landscape I had always loved. I saw only the gray ugliness of the streets, the piles of uncollected garbage, the potholes, the dirty water in the canals, the smog and the snarled traffic.

In this period, Esfandiari came to realize that while she "had always thought of my dual Iranian-American nationality as an accurate reflection of the two worlds and two cultures between which I shuttled," the reality was different: "My adopted country and the country of my birth were engaged in a dangerous, undeclared war; and I, and many others like me, were caught in their cross fire." The Americans' support for Saddam Hussein during the eight-year Iran–Iraq war; the Iranian funding of Hezbollah; the bombings in Lebanon in 1983 and the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996; the George W. Bush administration's "democracy promotion" program, "a policy of promoting regime change by trying to give money to dissidents"—all of this history played into the fate of a single woman on a visit to her aged, widowed mother in Tehran.

Finally, on May 2, 2007, Ja'fari announced that Esfandiari was being arrested and taken to Evin, to solitary confinement, where she would spend the next four months. Her vivid account of this experience, from her initial blindfolding upon entering the prison, provides us with a wholly unsensational picture both of her treatment and of her own psychological resistance. We learn what her cell looked like, how she slept and washed, what she ate, how she did her laundry, how the interrogations were conducted, what the guards were like—in short, all the details that enable us to imagine the imprisonment clearly. Esfandiari tells of her considerable weight loss, of her resistance to the prison doctors, and of the skin complaint that she worried might be cancer.

Inevitably, the mental toll of her incarceration is less readily communicable, but here, too, Esfandiari provides pragmatic explanations of her decisions and thoughts: "From the first day, I decided that if I were to avoid succumbing to despair, I had to impose a strict discipline on myself.... I knew I had to be mentally strong, keep my wits about me, remain focused on the interrogations," a decision that meant she would not dwell on her family and friends, and would instead devote much of her time to doing exercises to remain physically strong and fit. "While I exercised, I composed two books—not on paper but in my head. One was a biography of my paternal grandmother.... The other book was a children's story for my granddaughters." Eventually, she was allowed to borrow books from Kian Tajbakhsh, also in Evin at the time (although she did not meet him: "I never once spoke to another inmate").

Only once does Esfandiari speak of breaking down, following her one visit from her mother: not wanting her captors to see her vulnerability, she asked to take a shower: "In the shower, I let go of myself and cried copiously. I cried for what I had done to my mother. Instead of the calm, happy old age she deserved, she was experiencing a living hell." Even small moments of kindness in the prison proved hard to bear: when one of the guards, Hajj Khanum, brought her a flower, "a tiny rose, the size of my middle finger," or when another she had nicknamed Sunny Face brought in a rice dish that Esfandiari had taught her to cook, she was all but overcome.

Through these women guards, a number of whom were distinctly sympathetic to her plight, Esfandiari brings us a portrait of women's lives in contemporary Iran rather different from that of Azar Nafisi's lively literature students in her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003):

They seemed all to come from the same working-class or lower-middle-class background. They were all religious, prayed regularly, and observed a strict form of the hijab. They were raised in traditional homes, but their lives were in flux. All had finished secondary school; one had been to university; one had trained at a seminary and another aspired to do so. They had learned to care about their looks, their clothes, their weight, and their health. At least one aspired to go to America.

In her isolation, Esfandiari was almost wholly unaware of the extensive efforts underway to secure her release, including interventions from European governments. She did not know how long she might remain in isolation and was leery of all promising indications—such as Hajj Agha's question in June: "How do you know Obama?"

She fought back with rage and defiance—"I knew I must not let them break me"—and with her insistence, even when it was most difficult, on retaining perspective:

Outside prison, Ja'fari's and Hajj Agha's repeated references to "the triangle," "plots," and "conspiracies" seemed outlandish, even amusing. In solitary confinement, under interrogation, cut off from the outside world, accused of the most serious crimes against the state, I found these endlessly repeated assertions sin- ister: part of a world of secret cabals, plotters, and conspiracies in which I was supposedly involved without being aware of it. I had to be careful not to lose my grip on reality or to succumb to Hajj Agha's deceptive view of the world.

This, of course, is the struggle for any prisoner in such a situation; but it is also the struggle for the Iranian people at large: How not to succumb to the regime's view of the world? Theirs is a society of constant contradictions, of mirrors and masks, of both authority and a theater of authority, to which they must subscribe. They, too, are terrorized by prolonged uncertainty, never knowing the limits of what is allowed—can women show their hair in public this month without fear of arrest? Can weddings allow dancing in private homes this year, or will the morals police break down the door? Can the press question the regime this week, or will the newspapers be shut down? Can you demonstrate freely today, or might you be arrested, tortured, and killed?

For Esfandiari, even in her darkest hour, there was always the American knowledge of the actuality of "reality as it might be": it hovered almost in sight, a passport and a plane journey away. Whether, before Lee Hamilton's letter to Khamenei apparently led to her release, this knowledge made the ordeal more or less endurable is hard to say. But as an Iranian, she was also always aware of the ironies of her native society; she could be at once fully in the world and yet not of it, and this may have been her salvation. She knew that her guards, for the most part, were not her enemies; and while shocked, she was perhaps not surprised when Ja'fari and "the boys," his colleagues at the Intelligence Ministry, presented her with the gift of a book of poetry at the end of her time in Evin. Perhaps they thought that, in spite of the horrors they had inflicted upon her, the greatness of the poet Hafez was something on which they could all agree.

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Wikipedia article 'Haleh Esfandiari' with many additional resources

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After Salahi incident, some blacks say Secret Service isn't vigilant enough

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By Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 1, 2010; C07

Virginia socialites Tareq and Michaele Salahi's crashing of President Obama's first state dinner in the White House on Nov. 24 prompted a ripple of concern among African Americans nationwide that lingers still.

"You are talking probably 100 percent concern about the president's safety from my listeners," said Joe Madison, known as "the Black Eagle," who hosts a popular nationwide radio program that attracts mostly African American listeners. "People are worried. My callers think there's not the intensity to protect this president given his unique history. It shouldn't be business as usual."

On the streets of Washington last week, the concern was palpable.

Joseine Applewhite, a 40-year-old legal assistant from the District, said she is worrying about Obama's safety. "I think the Secret Service needs to step up their game a little bit," she said. "After all, the first lady was there on the night of the state dinner, and I believe the kids were also. I think a lot of black folks are angry about it. And why weren't the Salahis arrested? Black folks are asking themselves that question. I am just upset about all of it."

Doug Pierce, 38, who was touring downtown Washington with his family from Cleveland, Tenn., where he works as a cook, also questioned whether the Secret Service is doing an adequate job.

"They allowed that couple to get in there, so obviously someone's not doing their job," Pierce said, standing near the White House gates. "You can't help worrying about the president. He's a black man, and it's probably a lot of people out in the world trying to get to him."

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A poll conducted Dec. 9 by Fox News/Opinion Dynamics showed that 48 percent of black respondents were just somewhat or not at all confident in the Secret Service's ability to protect the president, compared with 37 percent who answered the same question in a poll conducted Jan. 9, less than two weeks before Obama's inauguration. The comparable figures for white respondents were 37 percent and 32 percent.

Many blacks as well as whites think Obama is in greater danger of assassination than some previous presidents because of his historic role. There are also some blacks who suspect -- rightly or wrongly -- that the Secret Service won't work as hard to protect a black president, a point of view that has its roots in the nation's complicated racial history.

Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, who recently was called before a congressional committee worried about the security breach at the White House, said the agency is well aware of this suspicion but disagrees with it. The Secret Service is committing more resources to the security of the first family than it ever has, Sullivan said.

"Regardless of who the president is, we know there's always someone out there who wants to harm the president," Sullivan said. "The fact that he's African American has never been lost on us."

Sullivan noted that citizens have been quick to contact the agency to report worries. "We want the public to be engaged," he said in an interview at his H Street office. "We know the consequences of what could happen if we don't do our job right."

Sullivan said the agency put corrective measures in place following the state dinner incident. "Nobody has beaten up on us more than we ourselves have," he said. "But we have to move on. We don't have the luxury of sitting back, and we are moving forward. Our people are focused."

But such sentiments have been met with skepticism among many African Americans, who have long suspected that law enforcement at all levels of government is tainted by racism. That includes the 6,000-employee Secret Service, which is embroiled in a class-action lawsuit filed by black agents who allege discrimination. (Ed Donovan, a spokesman for the agency, said it could not respond to questions about ongoing litigation.)

"When J. Edgar Hoover was running the FBI, the image of law enforcement in the black community was at its lowest," said Ronald Walters, professor emeritus of government and politics at the University of Maryland. "Hoover had a feeling that African American leaders were not as patriotic as he thought they should be. He systematically went after them."

One of Hoover's longtime targets was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., father of the modern-day civil rights movement. Hoover had King's conversations wiretapped and spread rumors about him that many would come to find repellent.

"It took a long time and a lot of experience," added Walters, "for African Americans to develop the attitude that domestic security services were no friend of the African American community." Incidents of police brutality during and after the civil rights movement haven't helped, he said.

Walters said he and other blacks were alarmed recently at the sight of armed protesters in Phoenix and Portsmouth, N.H., near where the president was talking about his proposed changes in the health-care system. "Look at all those people who showed up with guns," Walters says of the Phoenix incident. "You just couldn't imagine Ronald Reagan speaking within 1,000 yards and there being people with guns, and the Secret Service or law enforcement not doing anything about it."

The Secret Service says the incidents in both Arizona and New Hampshire did not catch the agency off guard, explaining that it could not trample over local jurisdictions that allow for the open display of firearms. "Those people were in very strict parameters of being able to carry a weapon," Donovan said. "If they were going to impact our route of the motorcade, they were going to be removed. Part of the myth out there is that they were in close proximity to our routes. We would not drive a protectee near someone with a weapon."

What is the reality of the physical threat against Obama? It's hard to pin down.

Presidents typically receive about 3,000 threats a year, Secret Service experts have said, although the agency refused to discuss specific numbers.

In strategic budget documents, officials acknowledged that the threat environment was especially high last year -- because of factors including wars overseas, domestic tensions and Obama's history-making presidential bid -- and is expected to remain high.

While hostility directed at former president George W. Bush and vice president Dick Cheney tended to be associated with U.S. policies abroad, antipathy toward Obama emanates from domestic extremists, Secret Service officials said. He received the earliest protection for a presidential candidate in history-- less than a hundred days after he announced -- because of threats; and at the most visible moments of his trek to the White House, threat levels reached historic levels, government officials said. However, the number of threats has since fallen back to levels seen by Bush and Bill Clinton at this point in their terms.

But threats are only one barometer of security concerns -- and a poor one in some ways, Secret Service officials said. Research into dozens of individuals who have actually attacked presidents in recent decades shows nearly all were previously unknown to the Secret Service.

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African Americans have expressed concern about the safety of other black public figures aspiring to the presidency. There were concerns about Jesse Jackson's safety during his two presidential campaigns. Alma Powell, wife of Republican star and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, who had been wooed to seek his party's nomination, famously said she preferred her husband didn't run, fearing for his safety. Powell chose not to run.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee and is in contact with the Secret Service on security issues, says blacks have worried about Obama's safety because they still vividly recall the mourning in the aftermath of King's assassination and that reverberates on the federal holiday commemorating King's birth.

Norton said she was as shocked as anybody when the Salahis were able to gain access to the White House uninvited. "As an elected official, I go to the White House quite often," she said. "I never expected anybody to get past the palace gates without ID!"

Even so, she said, "I have every reason to believe this is not your grandfather's Secret Service. I have no doubt that the Secret Service has a whole new game book when it comes to Obama. They just didn't have it when it came to getting inside the White House itself."

It would appear that Obama shares Norton's confidence.

"Three years ago, the men and women of the Secret Service undertook an historic mission -- to put their lives on the line to protect a presidential candidate and his family, earlier than ever before," White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said in a statement. "Every morning, President Obama wakes up grateful for their exceptional commitment to their job and their service to the country."

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In sharp contrast with Gaza, casualties decline in West Bank

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By Howard Schneider and Samuel Sockol
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 1, 2010; A08

JERUSALEM -- The first year in a decade without a suicide bombing, as well as an expanded Palestinian security force, resulted in a decline in the number of Israeli and Palestinian casualties in the occupied West Bank in 2009 -- a contrast to the hundreds of Palestinian lives claimed by last winter's war in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

Data from Israel's Shin Bet security agency and the United Nations showed a sharp drop in casualties in the West Bank, policed by a mix of Israeli security and intelligence agencies, as well as a Palestinian force that, under the control of the Palestinian Authority, has worked more closely with Israel.

According to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 27 Palestinians in the West Bank or East Jerusalem died in "conflict-related" clashes with Israelis during the year -- less than half the number in 2008. The agency, which monitors conditions in the West Bank and Gaza, has collected data only since 2005. But OCHA officials said the number of Palestinian fatalities in 2009 is probably the lowest in at least a decade, which included a violent uprising beginning in 2000.

Overall, 15 Israelis died in conflict-related violence in 2009, compared with 36 in 2008, according to the Shin Bet's annual security report.

Five of the deaths involved attacks in or emanating from the West Bank, said the agency, which documented a sharp drop overall in attacks on Israelis. The Shin Bet said there were 636 attacks in the West Bank and East Jerusalem during the year -- a reduction of about 30 percent.

About 90 percent of those attacks involved makeshift firebombs or Molotov cocktails, which typically do not cause injuries. There was a far sharper drop, of about 75 percent, to 35, in the number of West Bank shooting and bomb attacks against Israelis over the year. Of particular note, "no suicide attacks were registered," the Shin Bet reported.

Of the other 10 Israelis killed in conflict-related violence during 2009, nine were felled by militant attacks or friendly fire during Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces had left the strip by Jan. 21.

The death toll on the Palestinian side from the operation was far higher. OCHA data attributed 1,355 Palestinian deaths to the three-week operation, launched in response to Hamas rocket attacks on Israel. Israel estimates the figure at 1,166.

More than 566 rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel in 2009, a sharp decline from the year before. Most of them were fired during Cast Lead.

About 90 Gazans have since been killed, according to OCHA data.

Gaza remains under an economic embargo and a strict blockade, a point emphasized in recent days when hundreds of international protesters arrived in Egypt hoping to cross into the Mediterranean enclave through the town of Rafah for a planned Gaza Freedom March on Thursday.

Egypt, which typically keeps the Rafah crossing closed, allowed only about 100 members of the group to enter. A gathering of protesters in downtown Cairo was broken up by Egyptian security forces, according to a group member.

Those allowed to enter Gaza joined a rally that was complemented by a gathering of several hundred at the Erez crossing on the Israeli side of the border. There, a crowd of Israeli Arabs and peace activists waved Palestinian flags and criticized the restrictions that prevent the movement of people and goods into and out of the strip.

Sockol, a special correspondent, reported from Erez.

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Obama Year One

(White House/Pete Souza)

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.

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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.

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Human Traffic

Cover via Amazon

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.

The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream

by Patrick Radden Keefe

Buy this book

I knew about smuggling over the Mexican border from crossings I'd made for my book Coyotes. So when The New 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.

Cover via Amazon

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

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Peace and War in Oslo

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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."

Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr

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).

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Letter From Khartoum

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Sudan’s Empty Election

Rebecca Hamilton

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.

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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.

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