Effective diplomacy — the kind that produced Nixon’s breakthrough with China, an
end to the Cold War on American terms, or the Dayton peace accord in Bosnia —
requires patience, persistence, empathy, discretion, boldness and a willingness
to talk to the enemy.
This is an age of impatience, changeableness, palaver, small-mindedness and an
unwillingness to talk to bad guys. Human rights are in fashion, a good thing of
course, but the space for realist statesmanship of the kind that produced the
Bosnian peace in 1995 has diminished. The late Richard Holbrooke’s realpolitik
was not for the squeamish.
There are other reasons for diplomacy’s demise. The United States has lost its
dominant position without any other nation rising to take its place. The result
is nobody’s world. It is a place where America acts as a cautious boss,
alternately encouraging others to take the lead and worrying about loss of
authority. Syria has been an unedifying lesson in the course of crisis when
diplomacy is dead. Algeria shows how the dead pile up when talking is dismissed
as a waste of time.
Violence, of the kind diplomacy once resolved, has shifted. As William Luers, a
former ambassador to Venezuela and the director of The Iran Project, said in an
e-mail, it occurs “less between states and more dealing with terrorists.” One
result is that “the military and the C.I.A. have been in the driver’s seat in
dealing with governments throughout the Middle East and in state to state
(Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq) relations.” The role of professional diplomats is
squeezed.
Indeed the very word “diplomacy” has become unfashionable on Capitol Hill, where
its wimpy associations — trade-offs, compromise, pliancy, concessions and the
like — are shunned by representatives who these days prefer beating the
post-9/11 drums of confrontation, toughness and inflexibility: All of which may
sound good but often get you nowhere (or into long, intractable wars) at great
cost.
Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, wrote in an e-mail
that, “When domestic politics devolve into polarization and paralysis the impact
on diplomatic possibility becomes inordinately constraining.” He cited Cuba and
Iran as examples of this; I would add Israel-Palestine. These critical foreign
policy issues are viewed less as diplomatic challenges than potential sources of
domestic political capital.
So when I asked myself what I hoped Barack Obama’s second term would inaugurate,
my answer was a new era of diplomacy. It is not too late for the president to
earn that Nobel Peace Prize.
Of course diplomats do many worthy things around the world, and even in the
first term there were a couple of significant shifts — in Burma where patient
U.S. diplomacy has produced an opening, and in the yo-yoing new Egypt where U.S.
engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood was important and long overdue (and
raised the question of when America would do the same with the Brotherhood’s
offshoot, Hamas.)
But Obama has not had a big breakthrough. America’s diplomatic doldrums are
approaching their 20th year.
There are some modest reasons to think the lid on diplomacy’s coffin may open a
crack. This is a second term; Obama is less beholden to the strident whims of
Congress. The Republican never-give-an-inch right is weaker. In John Kerry and
Chuck Hagel, his nominees for secretary of state and secretary of defense, Obama
has chosen two knowledgeable professionals who have seen enough war to loathe it
and have deep experience of the world. They know peace involves risk. They know
it may not be pretty. The big wars are winding down. Military commanders may
cede some space to diplomats.
Breakthrough diplomacy is not conducted with friends. It is conducted with the
likes of the Taliban, the ayatollahs and Hamas. It involves accepting that in
order to get what you want you have to give something. The central question is:
What do I want to get out of my rival and what do I have to give to get it? Or,
put the way Nixon put it in seeking common ground with Communist China: What do
we want, what do they want, and what do we both want?
Obama tried a bunch of special envoys in the first term. It did not work. He
needs to empower his secretary of state to do the necessary heavy lifting on
Iran and Israel-Palestine. Luers suggested that one “idea for a New Diplomacy
would be for Hagel and Kerry to take along senators from both parties on trips
abroad and to trouble spots. This used to be standard practice. Be bold with the
Senate and try to bring them along.”
For diplomacy to succeed noise has to be shut out. There are a lot of
pie-in-the-sky citizen-diplomats out there these days blathering on about dreamy
one-state solutions for Israel-Palestine and the like. Social media and
hyper-connectivity bring huge benefits. They helped ignite the wave of
liberation known as the Arab Spring. They are force-multipliers for openness and
citizenship. But they may distract from the focused, realpolitik diplomacy that
brought the major breakthroughs of 1972, 1989 and 1995. It’s time for another.
When Ronald Neumann began his Foreign Service career in the
early 1970s, he sometimes carried a pistol to protect himself. It was a
reasonable precaution. American diplomats in those days lived without benefit of
blast walls or security advisers, even in volatile countries, and consulates
were at times housed on the ground floors of apartment buildings, with local
families living on the upper stories. Neumann worked with a freedom that is
scarcely imaginable for many diplomats today; he could go anywhere, by himself,
and talk to anyone. In the early ’80s, when he was the deputy mission chief in
Yemen, Neumann got wind of a threat to burn down the embassy building in the
capital, Sana. The Arab world was in turmoil at the time, after an Israeli
invasion of Lebanon and months of mounting violence. Much of the anger was
directed at Americans. The embassy was easily accessible to any passer-by, an
ordinary house in a residential neighborhood with no police protection. But
Neumann — whose boss was out of the country at the time — did not close it down.
Then things became more serious: there were rumors that angry Palestinians in
Sana were planning to attack Neumann’s house. Neumann, a taciturn Vietnam
veteran, took it in stride. “I brought a shotgun home from the embassy and
locked the front gate,” Neumann told me. “My wife asked me if there was anything
else we could do. I told her no. So she said, ‘In that case I’ve got some
curtains I’ve been meaning to wash; I might as well do it now.’ I remember
thinking, This is probably how they handled it when the Indian raids went down
in the old West; just stay inside and mend the saddles.”
Three decades later, after serving as an ambassador in three countries, Neumann
found himself marveling at how much his profession has changed. “The dangers
have gotten worse, but the change is partly psychological,” he told me. “There’s
less willingness among our political leaders to accept risks, and all that has
driven us into the bunker.”
Nothing illustrated those changes better than the death of J. Christopher
Stevens, after an assault by jihadis on the U.S. mission in Benghazi on Sept.
11. Stevens was a brave and thoughtful diplomat who, like Neumann, lived to
engage with ordinary people in the countries where he served, to get past the
wire. Yet his death was treated as a scandal, and it set off a political storm
that seems likely to tie the hands of American diplomats around the world for
some time to come. Congressmen and Washington pundits accused the administration
of concealing the dangers Americans face abroad and of failing Stevens by
providing inadequate security. Threats had been ignored, the critics said,
seemingly unaware that a background noise of threats is constant at embassies
across the greater Middle East. The death of an ambassador would not be seen as
the occasional price of a noble but risky profession; someone had to be blamed.
Lost in all this partisan wrangling was the fact that American diplomacy has
already undergone vast changes in the past few decades and is now so heavily
encumbered by fortresslike embassies, body armor and motorcades that it is
almost unrecognizable. In 1985 there were about 150 security officers in U.S.
embassies abroad, and now there are about 900. That does not include the
military officers and advisers, whose presence in many embassies — especially in
the Middle East — can change the atmosphere. Security has gone from a marginal
concern to the very heart of American interactions with other countries.
The barriers are there for a reason: Stevens’s death attests to that, as do
those of Americans in Beirut, Baghdad and other violent places. But the reaction
to the attack in Benghazi crystallized a sense among many diplomats that risks
are less acceptable in Washington than they once were, that the mantra of
“security” will only grow louder. As a result, some of the country’s most
distinguished former ambassadors are now asking anew what diplomacy can achieve
at such a remove.
“No one has sat back to say, ‘What are our objectives?’ ” said Prudence
Bushnell, who was ambassador to Kenya when the Qaeda bombing took place there in
1998, killing more than 200 people and injuring 4,000. “The model has become, we
will go to dangerous places and transform them, and we will do it from secure
fortresses. And it doesn’t work.”
When Chris Stevens was growing up in Northern California, American diplomats
organized their own security, for the most part. “Back then, you would exercise
your own judgment on what was dangerous, and plenty of guys were excited by the
risks,” said Richard Murphy, a retired diplomat who began his Foreign Service
career in 1955 and was ambassador to four countries. The term “terrorist” had
not yet acquired its modern force, nor had the idea that American diplomats
should not talk to certain unsavory groups. You were meant to talk to everyone.
One evening in 1962, Murphy was at the American Consulate in Aleppo, Syria, when
he heard about a coup attempt by military officers. It was a volatile time in
Syria; Murphy witnessed two other coups, with a revolving cast of generals and
revolutionaries. This time, there were large demonstrations. His bosses wanted
the Syrian authorities to provide reassurance that American citizens living in
the area would not be caught up in the conflict. So Murphy got into his car,
alone, and drove to the Aleppo Police Headquarters. There he found a scene of
chaos, with armed Syrian commandos shouting at one another. He recognized an
officer he knew lying dead on the floor. “The Syrians were not amused,” Murphy
recalled dryly. “They told me to get out of there.”
Even in the midst of the Lebanese civil war, diplomats in the field were free to
handle safety as they saw fit. On Sept. 18, 1982, Ryan Crocker, then the
33-year-old political section chief at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, drove to the
Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in southwest Beirut, where Christian militia
fighters had carried out a mass slaughter of Palestinians. “There was no
security, no nothing,” he told me. “That’s when I discovered what a massacre
looked like.” There were hundreds of bodies strewed on the ground inside the
camps, many of them mutilated; some had been booby-trapped with explosives. The
next day Crocker was asked to go back for a detailed body count. He drove to the
camps again, without a bodyguard. “No one gave it a second thought at that
time,” Crocker told me. “It was just what you did.”
That was about to change. Seven months later, on April 18, Crocker was in his
office at the embassy, making phone calls about the continuing security concerns
of Palestinian refugees. He was about to walk downstairs for lunch when a
tremendous blast knocked him across the room. He picked himself up off the
floor, scratched and dazed but unhurt, and opened the door of his office.
“Instead of looking at the suite of offices across the hall,” Crocker told me,
“I was looking out at the Mediterranean.”
The entire front of the building had been sheared off, and Crocker’s colleagues
in the neighboring office were dead. The bomb, delivered by a suicidal zealot in
a truck packed with explosives, killed 63 people, including most of the C.I.A.’s
Beirut staff and its top Middle East analyst. More bombings followed: at the
U.S. Marines’ Beirut barracks, where 241 servicemen died, and at the U.S.
Embassy again the following year. The bombings were an unprecedented blow to the
Foreign Service, and they reverberated in Congress.
One direct result of the attacks was the adoption of new standards for U.S.
embassies abroad: they were to have a 100-foot setback from the perimeter wall
to the building, along with barriers, blast-resistant materials and far more
restricted access. They were often removed to antiseptic suburbs, far from the
city centers where diplomats needed to be. I remember seeing an Arabic cartoon
produced years later that showed two tiny figures standing near the gate of a
towering fortress with an American flag on top. “How do you enter the U.S.
Embassy?” one figure asks. “You can’t,” the other replies. “You have to be born
there.”
Along with the new buildings came armies of security officers, who would
accompany American diplomats and advise them on what was safe and what was not.
They became an intrinsic part of the embassies’ engagement with host countries,
helping to determine who could go where and whom they could meet with.
“Before the Beirut bombings, we were prepared to take a substantially greater
risk than we did later,” Crocker told me. “You have to remember that ’83 was not
the first time we’d lost diplomats. I was an ambassador six times, and three of
my predecessors were assassinated. It was the cost of doing business in
dangerous zones. Congress accepted it; the public accepted it. The top priority
was getting the job done.”
By the time I became a foreign correspondent in 2003, the “Fortress America”
model was entrenched. In Lebanon, where I lived for several years, the U.S.
Embassy had long since moved to a well-guarded compound in the hills a half-hour
north of Beirut. In some ways it seemed more like a prison; diplomats based
there could not leave without advance permission, and when they did, they were
often surrounded by guards. Most journalists scarcely bothered to talk to them,
because we assumed they knew the country far less well than we did. It was not
quite so bad in other countries. But the U.S. Embassies in Yemen, Saudi Arabia
and, of course, Iraq, were so formidable that even I felt unwelcome visiting
them. British and European diplomats sometimes seemed more conversant with the
local culture than the Americans, despite their much smaller staffs and
resources.
In every post, I found dedicated and thoughtful American diplomats who knew the
country well and got out to meet people regularly (one of them was Chris
Stevens, whom I met in 2007). But many of them told me they had to put enormous
effort into overcoming the obstacles created by so many layers of protection.
All the ambassadors I spoke with said they had good working relationships with
the security chiefs, and they were grateful for their help in understanding
risks. But more junior diplomats told me the security officers exercised a
subtle influence on all kinds of decisions. “They don’t want to say yes because
it’s easier to say no,” one midlevel diplomat told me. “We all fight this battle
every day. My first thought on hearing about Chris Stevens’s death — aside from
the sadness — was that this is going to make it even harder for us.” Several
diplomats told me that if the security constraints get worse, they will consider
changing careers.
Outside the Middle East, the rules have shifted more slowly. Prudence Bushnell,
who became a deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs in 1993,
told me she roamed around the continent with little fear for her safety. “I
would go to warlords and tell them to knock it off,” she said. “I didn’t ask for
security. I was in Rwanda just before it blew up, and just afterward. No
security. The F.B.I. wanted to bring in guns, and I told them they were crazy.”
That changed on Aug. 7, 1998, when Al Qaeda operatives detonated a huge bomb
outside the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. Bushnell, who was then ambassador to Kenya,
was in a meeting with the Kenyan trade minister in a building next door. She was
knocked unconscious by the force of the blast and cut by shards of flying glass.
The bomb had shattered the lightly guarded embassy and left hundreds of mangled
bodies across a smoking landscape. Most of the victims were Kenyans. After being
treated by a doctor in a nearby hotel, Bushnell began supervising recovery
efforts. Her grief was mixed with deep anger: she had repeatedly asked
Washington to move the large and vulnerable downtown Nairobi embassy and
reported credible threats, including one that warned of a truck bomb. She had
even written a personal letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright,
Bushnell told me, urging her to do something.
Yet Bushnell, like other veteran diplomats who have witnessed some of the worst
horrors inflicted on Americans overseas, now wonders whether the reaction has
gone too far, leaving diplomats overseas at the mercy of Washington’s shifting
priorities. “I think we need to sit down and figure out, How do we do this?” she
told me. “We are in a new situation that requires a flexibility the State
Department doesn’t have.”
Barbara Bodine, who was the U.S. ambassador to Yemen during the Qaeda bombing of
the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, told me she believes that much of the security American
diplomats are forced to travel with is counterproductive. “There’s this idea
that if we just throw more security guys at the problem, it will go away,” she
said. “These huge convoys they force you to travel in, with a bristling personal
security detail, give you the illusion of security, not real security. They just
draw a lot of attention and make you a target. It’s better to fly under the
radar.”
To some extent, the increasingly militarized trappings reflect a more aggressive
posture: the United States now maintains a diplomatic presence in war zones like
Afghanistan and Iraq that might once have been seen as too dangerous for an
embassy. In the past, Washington instituted “tripwires” of deteriorating safety
that were supposed to compel an evacuation. “When in doubt, pull them out” was
an old State Department refrain. The United States pulled out of Afghanistan in
1989, after it descended into civil war and anarchy, and did not return until
2002. It pulled out of Somalia in 1992, after the collapse of the government
there, and has not returned. But in practice, the tripwires are ignored when
there is a compelling political reason to stay. And nowhere more so than when
the United States military is an occupying force.
Some argue that diplomacy and “soft power” are almost meaningless under such
conditions. Diplomats may be useful in gathering intelligence, but that is not
their primary purpose. For years, critics of the U.S. missions in Afghanistan
have been arguing that the billions of dollars spent there, and the noble
efforts to improve the lives of women, may prove wasted once the military is
withdrawn. “We’re still living as if it were the 19th century, where governments
control their territories and can guarantee the safety of a diplomatic mission,”
Bushnell said. “But in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, that is not true. If
you can’t influence, you leave.”
Chris Stevens was not a rebel or a Lawrence of Arabia, as some people suggested
after his death. He did not break the rules or fight with the security officers
who kept watch over him. He was a skilled and thoughtful diplomat, and like many
others, he chafed against some of the restrictions placed on him. He had an
unusual gift for empathy, according to his friends and colleagues, and that
allowed him to talk to people without seeming to pass judgment. It was a
valuable skill for an American working in a region where American policy often
inspires deep resentment. “Many American diplomats tend to stick to their own
community, at least socially, but Chris really sought out non-American
foreigners in Israel, and wanted to hear their point of view,” said Jonas Jolle,
a Norwegian diplomat who worked in Jerusalem when Stevens was posted there from
2003 to 2006. “Chris always listened enthusiastically, and everyone felt he was
on their side. This made him seem different to Arabs, even though he never
criticized Bush administration policy. Chris was one of the few diplomats I’ve
known who I really looked up to.”
When Stevens was named special envoy to Libya in April 2011, it was something of
a homecoming. He had spent two years there, from 2007 to 2009, a crowning moment
of a two-decade diplomatic career that had taken him to Syria, Saudi Arabia,
Egypt and Israel. So he was thrilled when he found himself climbing the gangway
onto a Greek cargo ship bound for Benghazi in early April 2011. It was a trip
that became almost legendary, both for the Libyans who came to love him and for
the myth that enveloped him after he died. The ship, crewed by crusty Greek and
Romanian sailors, was far from luxurious: Stevens shared a bunk bed with a
junior officer in a closet-size room. They soon found their toilet was broken,
emitting foul bilge-water smells as the ship rolled on the Mediterranean. They
were headed for a war zone, a city where Qaddafi sleeper cells and jihadists
lurked in the streets. Their assignment, to act as liaison to the rebels, was
wildly unorthodox by State Department standards; the new government was in
disarray, and no one knew how the war would end. But Stevens was in heaven. “He
found it romantic,” one of his colleagues on the ship told me. “It was an
adventure; he said we were like 19th-century diplomats, who sailed to their
posts.”
Stevens was not naïve. He had three decades of experience in the Middle East and
knew Libya as well as any American. He spoke the Libyan dialect of Arabic
fluently. He did not relish danger for its own sake. But in some ways, he really
was sailing back to an earlier era, when American diplomats were less tied down.
In Benghazi, Stevens and his team became de facto participants in a revolution.
They moved into the Tibesti Hotel, a 15-story tower overlooking a fetid lagoon,
where the lobby was a constant, promiscuous churn of rumors and frenzied
meetings among gunmen, journalists and spies. Unlike all his previous posts,
there was no embassy to enclose him. His room then was a dilapidated sixth-floor
suite full of gaudy gilded furniture and a four-poster bed; he seemed amused to
know that Abdullah el-Senussi, Qaddafi’s right-hand man, had often stayed there.
Stevens reveled in his freedom. He met people in their homes, ate with them on
the floor, Arab-style; cellphone photos were taken and quickly shot around the
Internet. He went running every morning and often stopped to chat with people on
the street, to the dismay of the security officer who ran alongside him. In
August, after a top rebel commander was killed by Islamists, Stevens drove out
to eastern Libya’s tribal heartland and spent hours sitting on the beach with
five elders of the Harabi tribe. The men ate grilled lamb and talked in Arabic,
sipping tea. Stevens did not push them for answers. He was building connections
that would pay off someday. “Chris said Benghazi was his favorite posting ever,”
said his friend Jennifer Larson, who later served as his deputy in Benghazi when
Stevens became ambassador this spring. “He was very, very happy.”
In the rush to assign blame after Stevens’s death, it was largely overlooked
that Stevens, as the top-ranking diplomat in Libya by that point, was the one
responsible for making final decisions about what kind of security was
appropriate there, how to use it and what qualified as safe and unsafe. He
decided to make the fateful trip from the embassy in Tripoli back to Benghazi in
September. That does not mean he was reckless. He knew the situation there far
better than any of the people who have commented on it since his death. He knew
that Libya’s government was both weak and politically sensitive; he had to weigh
his own safety against the risk of looking like an occupier.
In early September, Stevens’s girlfriend, Henriette von Kaltenborn-Stachau, flew
to Kabul for work. It was a routine trip, but Stevens was worried about her. “In
his last e-mail to me, he said, ‘I hope you will be safe in Afghanistan, that’s
the most important thing,’ ” she told me. “He never took danger lightly.”
Stevens and von Kaltenborn-Stachau had been involved for almost a decade, on and
off, though their careers prevented them being together as much as they wanted.
On the night of Sept. 11, von Kaltenborn-Stachau told me, she had a frightening
dream about Stevens. “In the dream, he was in a dark place, being pulled away
from me,” she said. “He didn’t want to go. I didn’t want him to go, but
something was pulling him away. I woke up, and saw the news from Benghazi.”
Two days after Stevens died, his body and those of the three other Americans
killed in the Benghazi attack arrived at Andrews Air Force Base, outside
Washington. As the families of the dead walked into a vast airplane hangar where
800 people were gathered, it was perfectly silent. “All you could hear was our
footsteps,” says Anne Stevens, Chris’s younger sister, a pediatrician in
Seattle. Four flag-draped coffins were carried in and laid on black tables. A
military band played “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” At one point during the
ceremony, Stevens’s mother, Mary Commanday, began to cry softly. President Obama
sat down next to her and offered her his handkerchief. During his speech, Obama
declared that the United States “will never retreat from the world.”
On the morning after Stevens’s death, Anne was the first family member Hillary
Clinton was able to reach by phone. She listened as Clinton explained what had
happened, and waited until there was silence on the other end of the line.
“Don’t let this stop the work he was doing,” his sister said.
Robert F. Worth is a staff writer for the magazine. He last wrote about a
Louisiana pastor turned atheist.
PARIS — To the long list of victims emerging from Europe’s
financial crisis, make room for a new one: the “Entente Cordiale” between
Britain and France.
A week after the British prime minister, David Cameron, refused to sign a
Europe-wide pact that leaders had hoped would stabilize the euro zone, a
cross-Channel spat has escalated into a full-blown war of words. Fears in Paris
have reached a fever pitch over the prospect that France is about to lose its
triple-A credit rating, the highest available.
President Nicolas Sarkozy started preparing the country this week for the
imminent loss of its gilt-edged status, though Fitch Ratings on Friday affirmed
France’s top credit rating while changing its outlook to negative.
A downgrade by Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services, which has put France on
review with a negative outlook, became more likely last week after a summit
meeting of European Union leaders was widely declared a flop.
But in the last two days, French officials have unleashed a diatribe suggesting
that Britain, not France, is far more deserving of a downgrade.
“At this point, one would prefer to be French than British on the economic
level,” the French finance minister, François Baroin, declared Friday.
The ruckus comes as Mr. Sarkozy prepares for a tense re-election campaign
heading into what promises to be a gloomy year economically for the country and
much of the rest of Europe.
Troubled by the crisis in the euro zone, France is probably already in a
recession, the government and the central bank warned this week, with a decline
in economic activity expected to continue at least through March. Business and
consumer sentiment have deteriorated, and unemployment is stuck at just below 10
percent.
Paris has embraced two austerity plans since the summer in a bid to reduce the
country’s chronic budget deficit and meet the demands from Berlin to set an
example for the rest of Europe to follow. Officials say those steps are also
necessary to prevent France’s international borrowing costs from rising to
unhealthy levels because of investors’ concern that France is losing the
capacity to foot a growing bill from the euro zone crisis.
The verbal onslaught seemed aimed at deflecting attention from those problems.
Within hours, headlines blared from British news Web sites taking exception to
the perceived French snub.
“The gall of Gaul!” read The Mail Online. An article in The Guardian accused
French politicians of descending “to the level of the school playground.”
Both countries are in poor economic shape. While the French are not suffering
anything like the distress being felt in Greece, Portugal and Ireland — which
cannot pay their bills without help from the European Union and the
International Monetary Fund — the French government is not immune to speculators
who see its rising debt levels as making it vulnerable to attacks in the bond
market.
France’s debt as a percentage of gross domestic product was 82.3 percent in
2010, a figure that is expected to rise in the coming years even after it
tightens its belt. Britain’s debt was 75 percent of its G.D.P. and also rising
fast despite a stringent austerity program that is, at least for now, only
adding to the country’s economic woes.
In France, the budget deficit was 7.1 percent of G.D.P. last year. Mr. Sarkozy
has pledged to reduce it to 3 percent by 2013, partly through higher taxes, but
he has been reluctant to spell out which social programs may have to be cut as
well, out of fear of further alienating already disenchanted voters.
A looming recession is making that fiscal dilemma even worse by adding to social
costs and reducing tax revenue.
“It is very bad news for people, because it means the unemployment rate will
increase as more firms will have to fire people or go bankrupt in the private
sector,” said Jean-Paul Fitoussi, a professor of economics at L’Institut
d’Études Politiques in Paris. “It’s also bad news for politicians. They are in a
kind of a trap because they have to say to the people that there is nothing they
can do for them.”
As he walked to his job in an affluent suburb of Paris, Steve Kamguea, 22, an
entry-level banker at AlterValor Finances, said he saw little hope for a revival
of economic growth in France.
“With the problems in the euro zone hitting us, people are anxious about what
will happen in the future,” Mr. Kamguea said. “Purchasing power is already low,
and it’s hard to get by,” he added, shielding his face from a driving cold rain.
“Many people don’t know if they can find a job, and if they do, how much it will
pay.”
The prospect of losing France’s sterling credit rating may throw more fuel on
the fire. Both Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s said they would review all European
Union countries for a possible downgrade soon after last week’s summit meeting.
On Friday, Fitch left France off a list of six euro zone countries that it
warned could be downgraded soon. The agency named Belgium, Cyprus, Ireland,
Italy, Spain and Slovenia.
But Fitch, in a separate statement reaffirming France’s AAA rating, revised its
outlook on long-term debt to negative from stable. It suggested that France
could lose the top rating over the next two years, saying it was the most
exposed of other euro countries to a further intensification of the crisis.
As for last week’s euro crisis summit and actions by the European Central Bank
to ease a banking credit crunch, Fitch said the commitments “were not sufficient
to put in place a fully credible financial firewall to prevent a self-fulfilling
liquidity and even solvency crisis for some non-AAA euro area sovereigns. In the
absence of a comprehensive solution, the euro zone crisis will persist and
likely be punctuated by episodes of severe financial market volatility.”
In the six-country announcement, Fitch was even more severe, concluding that
after the summit meeting, “a ‘comprehensive solution’ to the euro zone crisis
was technically and politically beyond reach.”
Also Friday, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Belgium by two notches to Aa1
with a negative outlook.
Because a potential credit downgrade has been widely telegraphed, most French
officials do not expect significant damage. Many cite the one-notch downgrade
S.& P. made to the United States’ AAA credit rating this summer, saying the move
did not stop investors from flocking to United States Treasury securities.
In Europe, “if everyone is downgraded at the same time, it may be a nonevent,”
said one high-ranking French finance official, who spoke on condition of
anonymity. In any case, the official added, French debt, and that of most other
euro zone governments, is already trading in financial markets as if the
downgrade had already happened.
A senior French banking official insisted that a downgrade would not affect the
French banking industry nearly as much as new regulatory requirements that banks
raise tens of billions of euros in new capital to help guard against a further
worsening of the debt crisis in the euro zone.
Some banks in France, Italy, Spain and even Germany have already started to pull
back on lending to consumers and businesses, analysts say. A number of European
banks are planning to sell assets to raise fresh capital.
Those issues are probably far more worrisome than the prospect of a credit
downgrade, but that has not stopped the rating question from infiltrating the
national psyche and dominating discussions of public affairs. It has even hit
the streets. “France will lose its Triple-A,” lamented a recent scrawl of
graffiti on the side of a commercial building in the chic Marais quarter.
Despite the growing nervousness, the high-ranking French official insisted
Friday that France was not calling on the ratings agencies to actually pull down
Britain’s own triple-A rating. “That would be stupid,” he said.
The message, the official added, was more to tell the ratings agencies that
there was “no ground to downgrade France, but if a downgrade does happen, there
are other countries that should be in the same spot.”
That did little to placate Britain’s political establishment. Nick Clegg,
Britain’s deputy prime minister, telephoned Prime Minister François Fillon of
France on Friday to object to France’s criticism.
Mr. Fillon “made clear it had not been his intention to call into question the
U.K.’s rating but to highlight that ratings agencies appeared more focused on
economic governance than deficit levels,” Mr. Clegg’s office said.
Mr. Clegg accepted the explanation but had a blunt reply of his own. “Recent
remarks from members of the French government about the U.K. economy were simply
unacceptable,” Mr. Clegg told Mr. Fillon, according to the statement. “Steps
should be taken to calm the rhetoric.”
September
28, 2011
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON
— The White House and State Department on Wednesday sought to temper remarks by
the nation’s top military officer last week that the insurgents who attacked the
American Embassy in Afghanistan this month were “a veritable arm” of Pakistan’s
spy agency.
The comments by Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
were the first to directly link the spy agency, the Directorate for
Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, with an assault on the United States, and
they ignited a diplomatic furor with Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders,
who have denied the accusation.
Asked on Wednesday whether he agreed that the Haqqani network, the militant
group blamed for the embassy attack, was “a veritable arm” of the ISI, Jay
Carney, the White House press secretary, told reporters, “It’s not language I
would use.”
He pivoted quickly to say the Obama administration is united in its assessment
that “links” exist between the Haqqani network and the ISI, “and that Pakistan
needs to take action to address that.”
Mr. Carney’s comments, echoed by State Department and other administration
officials, seemed aimed at supporting Admiral Mullen’s tough comments up to a
point, while giving Pakistan a small window to save face.
With American lawmakers considering legislation that would condition billions of
dollars in aid to Pakistan on that country’s cooperation in fighting the Haqqani
network and other terror groups associated with Al Qaeda, the administration is
trying to calibrate a response that prods Pakistan to act more aggressively
against the Haqqani network but does not rupture already frayed relations.
President Obama’s top national security advisers met Tuesday to discuss familiar
options — including unilateral strikes and a suspension of security assistance —
intended to get Pakistan to fight militants more effectively. So far, the
carrots and sticks have had little impact, American officials acknowledged.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday that the administration
was completing “the final formal review” to designate the Haqqani network a
terrorist organization, having already designated several of its leaders.
She discussed the matter with Pakistan’s foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar,
when the United Nations General Assembly met last week, Mrs. Clinton said at the
State Department. “We discussed the urgency, in the wake of the attack on our
embassy in Kabul and on the NATO ISAF headquarters, for us to confront the
threat posed by the Haqqani network,” she said, referring to the International
Security Assistance Force.
Mrs. Clinton, echoing private statements by American diplomats, acknowledged the
strain that the attack — and its links to Pakistani intelligence — had caused,
but she also emphasized the need for Pakistan to address what has become a
threat to its own society.
She added that the United States remained committed to attacking any threats,
“in particular against those who have taken up safe havens inside Pakistan,”
suggesting a willingness to act on its own. But she emphasized previous
Pakistani efforts against Al Qaeda and other extremists. “And we’re going to
continue to work with our Pakistani counterparts to try to root them out and
prevent them from attacking Pakistanis, Americans, Afghans or anyone else,” she
said in an appearance with Egypt’s foreign minister.
In remarks last Thursday to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Admiral Mullen
went further than any other American official in blaming the ISI for undermining
the United States-led effort in Afghanistan. However, two administration
officials said he had overstated the precision of evidence linking the ISI to
the recent attacks, and some Pakistan specialists said the ISI did not control
the Haqqani network as tightly as the admiral had stated.
A spokesman for Admiral Mullen, Capt. John Kirby, said Wednesday that the
admiral stood by his remarks.
Two senior military officials said that while there was no evidence that the ISI
had directed or orchestrated the attack against the United States Embassy in
Kabul, there was evidence that ISI officers had urged and supported the Haqqani
fighters to carry out strikes against those kinds of Western targets. Pakistani
military officials have denied this.
September
23, 2011
The New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The public assault by the Obama administration on the
Pakistani intelligence agency as a facilitator of terrorist attacks in
Afghanistan has been met with scorn in Pakistan, a signal that the country has
little intention of changing its ways, even perhaps at the price of the crumpled
alliance.
In injured tones similar to those used after the Navy Seals raid that killed
Osama bin Laden in May, Pakistani officials insisted on Friday that theirs was a
sovereign state that could not be pushed by America’s most senior military
officials, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Leon
E. Panetta, the secretary of defense.
The two Americans told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday that
Pakistan’s spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI,
worked hand-in-glove with the Haqqani network, a potent militant outfit
sheltering in the Pakistani tribal areas, to subvert American war aims.
Admiral Mullen accused the spy agency of supporting Haqqani militants who
attacked the American Embassy in Kabul last week, and he called the Haqqanis a
“veritable arm” of the ISI. Mr. Panetta threatened “operational steps” against
Pakistan, shorthand for possible American raids against the Haqqani bases in
North Waziristan.
The connection between the spy agency and the militants has been at the center
of American complaints about Pakistan since the start of the war in Afghanistan,
but never before has the United States chosen to expose its grievances in such
unvarnished language in the most public of forums.
In his public reply, the chief of the Pakistani Army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani,
said Mr. Mullen’s accusations were “not based on facts,” and suggested that they
were unfair given “a rather constructive” recent meeting. The ISI did not
support the Haqqanis, General Kayani said.
Similarly, the country’s defense minister, Ahmad Mukhtar, said Pakistan was a
sovereign nation “which cannot be threatened.”
The foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, said it was “unacceptable” for one
ally, the United States, to “humiliate” another, Pakistan. “If they are choosing
to do so, it will be at their own cost,” Ms. Khar said.
Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States who is close
to the military, underscored that point. “Relations are headed towards a
breakdown if the U.S. continues its coercive approach of threats and public
accusations,” Ms. Lodhi said. “What is its plan B if there is an open rupture
with Pakistan?”
The anti-American feeling in Pakistan, and within the army, surged after the
raid that killed Bin Laden, which was kept secret from Pakistan’s leadership. It
remains intense, making the idea of bowing to American demands to take on the
Haqqanis almost unthinkable, Pakistani politicians, businessmen and analysts
said.
They said General Kayani, who was under great pressure from his troops after the
humiliation of the Bin Laden raid, had recovered some ground and recouped some
prestige. He has no intention of giving in to the Americans now because he is
betting that they still need Pakistan as the supply route for the Afghanistan
war, they said.
But the larger reason is a divergence of strategic interests with the United
States. The Haqqani network is seen as an important anti-India tool for the
Pakistani military as it assesses the future of an Afghanistan without the
Americans, a situation Pakistan sees as not far off.
General Kayani has said he fears that as the Americans exit, India will be
allowed to have influence in Afghanistan, squeezing Pakistan on both its eastern
and western borders, Pakistani analysts say.
Thus, the Haqqani fighters who hold sway over Paktika, Paktia and Khost
Provinces in Afghanistan, and who are also strong in the capital, Kabul, and in
the provinces around it, present a valuable hedge against the perceived India
threat, which American officials say is overblown.
The precise relationship between the Pakistani military and spy agency on the
one hand and the Haqqani network on the other remains murky, American officials
say.
In talks with the Americans, the leader of the ISI, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha,
has said he has “contact” with the Haqqanis, a senior American official said.
“But he denies he has command and control.” The official said it appeared that
the Haqqanis had developed into such skilled fighters over several decades that
they had the Pakistani Army cowed.
According to American officials and Pakistani analysts, it appeared that the
Pakistani Army had struck a bargain with the Haqqanis: The Haqqanis would be
free to fight in Afghanistan, in part looking after Pakistan’s interests, and in
return, the Haqqanis would not attack Pakistan.
If the Pakistani army attacked Haqqani fighters in their bases in North
Waziristan, the blowback in the form of terrorist attacks in Pakistani cities
and towns could be overwhelming, Pakistani military analysts say.
In a startling image of the apparent symbiosis between the Pakistani military —
which controls the ISI — and the Haqqani fighters, both forces have bases in
Miram Shah, the main town in North Waziristan.
Five brigades of the Pakistani Army, about 15,000 soldiers, and the Frontier
Corps, a paramilitary force of about 10,000 men, have never touched the
Haqqanis, American officials familiar with the situation say. Visitors to Miram
Shah have said the army facilities are within sight of the Haqqani compounds.
Estimates of the Haqqani fighting strength in North Waziristan vary from 10,000
to 15,000. Technically, Sirajuddin Haqqani, who runs the group, is a member of
the Afghan Taliban leadership headed by Mullah Muhammad Omar and based in
Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan Province in southwest Pakistan.
The Pakistani Army struggled to defeat the Pakistani Taliban in battles in the
Swat Valley and South Waziristan in 2009 and 2010, but the Taliban are still
present in both places, a senior American military official said. “So why would
they take on the Haqqanis, who are world class fighters?” the official asked.
As much as the Americans criticize the Pakistanis for not taking on the
Haqqanis, the Pakistanis scoff at the inability of the Americans to deal with
the Haqqanis on the war front in Afghanistan.
In a sarcastic column in the English-language newspaper The News on Thursday,
Farrukh Saleem wrote, “If over the past decade the lone superpower has failed to
tame 10,000 to 15,000 tribesmen, then the American military-intelligence complex
has really failed and should be heading home.”
Pakistani military officers have contended that it is up to the American troops
in Afghanistan to prevent the Haqqanis from launching terrorist attacks in Kabul
and elsewhere.
In order to get to Kabul, the Haqqani fighters pass through provinces with large
American bases, they say. Mr. Haqqani is believed to spend much of his time in
Afghanistan, organizing his fighters.
In an interview with Reuters this week, Mr. Haqqani said he was working solely
in Afghanistan. It is the same argument that Pakistani officials have been
making this week as a way to rebut the American accusations that the Haqqanis
live in Pakistan at all.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who
helped bring peace to Bosnia and negotiated the release of American hostages in
Iran, died in California at age 85, news media reported.
Christopher "passed away peacefully, surrounded by family at his home in Los
Angeles" of complications from kidney and bladder cancer, KABC-TV quoted his
family as saying in a statement late on Friday.
As the top U.S. statesman under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1997,
Christopher was a behind-the-scenes negotiator. Often called the "stealth"
secretary of state, he was known for his understated, self-effacing manner.
"Careful listening may be the secret weapon," the New York Times quoted him as
saying in a 1981 speech when he was deputy secretary of state. "I observed some
time ago that I was better at listening than at talking."
That "secret weapon" helped Christopher weather diplomatic crises and bring
enemies together.
In 1995, he intervened during the crucial final days of the U.S.-brokered
Bosnian peace talks at Dayton, Ohio. He had an important role in closing the
deal, according to his then deputy, Richard Holbrooke, the force behind the
agreement.
Christopher not only spoke the language of diplomacy, he dressed the part.
Favoring elegant, tailored suits, he was once named one of the best dressed men
in America by People magazine for his "diplomatically dapper" style.
As secretary of state, Christopher devoted much of his time to the Middle East.
He made at least 18 trips to the region in pursuit of peace and a ceasefire in
southern Lebanon between Israel and the pro-Iranian Islamic group Hezbollah.
In 1994, he witnessed the signing of a peace treaty between Jordan and Israel.
As President Jimmy Carter's deputy secretary of state, he negotiated the release
of 52 Americans taken hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979. The
hostages were freed on January 20, 1981, minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn
in to succeed Carter.
Christopher received the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor,
for his efforts.
He also helped negotiate the Panama Canal treaty, worked on establishing normal
relations with China and played a major role in developing Carter's human rights
policies.
"Most talking is not glamorous," Christopher said in an address at Stanford
University months after the Iranian hostage crisis ended. "Often it is tedious.
It can be excruciating and exhausting. But talking can also tame conflict, lift
the human condition and move us close to the ideal of peace."
Christopher was born on October 27, 1925, in Scranton, North Dakota, and grew up
in Los Angeles.
December 13, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special
representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2009 and a diplomatic
troubleshooter who worked for every Democratic president since the late 1960s
and oversaw the negotiations that ended the war in Bosnia, died Monday evening
in Washington. He was 69 and lived in Manhattan.
His death was confirmed by an Obama administration official.
Mr. Holbrooke was hospitalized on Friday afternoon after becoming ill while
meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in her Washington office.
Doctors found a tear to his aorta, and he underwent a 21-hour operation. Mr.
Holbrooke had additional surgery on Sunday and remained in very critical
condition until his death.
Mr. Holbrooke’s signal accomplishment in a distinguished career that involved
diplomacy in Asia, Europe and the Middle East was his role as chief architect of
the 1995 Dayton peace accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. It was a coup
preceded and followed by his peacekeeping missions to the tinderbox of ethnic,
religious and regional conflicts that was formerly Yugoslavia.
More recently, Mr. Holbrooke wrestled with the stunning complexity of
Afghanistan and Pakistan: how to bring stability to the region while fighting a
resurgent Taliban and coping with corrupt governments, rigged elections, fragile
economies, a rampant narcotics trade, nuclear weapons in Pakistan, and the
presence of Al Qaeda, and presumably Osama bin Laden, in the wild tribal
borderlands.
One of his main tasks was to press President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan to take
responsibility for security in his country and to confront the corruption that
imperils the American mission there. At times, Mr. Karzai refused to see him,
but Mr. Holbrooke was undeterred.
“He’s an enormously tough customer,” Mr. Holbrooke said during one of the
periodic breakfasts he had with reporters who covered his diplomatic exploits.
“As you’ve heard,” he added with a smile, “so am I.”
He helped his boss, Mrs. Clinton, whom he had supported in her presidential bid,
to persuade President Obama to send more troops to Afghanistan, while pressing
for more aid and development projects to improve the United States’ image there.
But he died before anyone knew if the experiment would succeed.
A brilliant, sometimes abrasive infighter, he used a formidable arsenal of
facts, bluffs, whispers, implied threats and, when necessary, pyrotechnic fits
of anger to press his positions. Mr. Obama, who praised Mr. Holbrooke on Monday
afternoon at the State Department as “simply one of the giants of American
foreign policy,” was sometimes driven to distraction by his lectures.
But Mr. Holbrooke dazzled and often intimidated opponents and colleagues around
a negotiating table. Some called him a bully, and he looked the part: the big
chin thrust out, the broad shoulders, the tight smile that might mean anything.
To admirers, however, including generations of State Department protégés and the
presidents he served, his peacemaking efforts were extraordinary.
When he named Mr. Holbrooke to represent the United States at the United
Nations, President Bill Clinton said, “His remarkable diplomacy in Bosnia helped
to stop the bloodshed, and at the talks in Dayton the force of his determination
was the key to securing peace, restoring hope and saving lives.” Others said his
work in Bosnia deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.
Few diplomats could boast of his career accomplishments. Early on, Mr. Holbrooke
devoted six years to the Vietnam War: first in the Mekong Delta with the United
States Agency for International Development, seeking the allegiance of the
civilian population; then at the embassy in Saigon as an aide to Ambassadors
Maxwell Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.; and finally in the American delegation
to the 1968-69 Paris peace talks led by W. Averell Harriman and Cyrus R. Vance.
Mr. Holbrooke was the author of one volume of the Pentagon Papers, the secret
Defense Department history of the Vietnam War that cataloged years of American
duplicity in Southeast Asia. The papers were first brought to public attention
by The New York Times in 1971.
As assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the Carter
administration, Mr. Holbrooke played a crucial role in establishing full
diplomatic relations with China in 1979, a move that finessed America’s
continuing commitment to China’s thorn in the side Taiwan and followed up on the
historic breakthrough of President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 visit to China.
During the Clinton presidency, Mr. Holbrooke served as ambassador to Germany in
1993-94, when he helped enlarge the North Atlantic alliance; achieved his
diplomatic breakthroughs in Bosnia as assistant secretary of state for European
affairs in 1994-95; and was chief representative to the United Nations, a
cabinet post, for 17 months from 1999 to 2001.
At the United Nations, he forged close ties to Secretary General Kofi Annan,
negotiated a settlement of America’s longstanding dues dispute, highlighted
conflicts and health crises in Africa and Indonesia, and called for more
peacekeeping forces. After fighting erupted in the Democratic Republic of Congo
in 1999, he led a Security Council delegation on a mission to Africa. He also
backed sanctions against Angolan rebels in 2000.
While he achieved prominence as a cabinet official and envoy to many of the
world’s most troubled arenas, Mr. Holbrooke was frustrated in his ambition to be
secretary of state; he was the runner-up to Madeleine K. Albright, Mr. Clinton’s
choice in 1997, and a contender when Mr. Obama installed Mrs. Clinton in the
post in 2009.
Foreign policy was his life. Even during Republican administrations, when he was
not in government, he was deeply engaged, undertaking missions as a private
citizen traveling through the war-weary Balkans and the backwaters of Africa and
Asia to see firsthand the damage and devastating human costs of genocide, civil
wars, and H.I.V. and AIDS epidemics.
And his voice on the outside remained influential — as an editor of Foreign
Policy magazine from 1972 to 1977, as a writer of columns for The Washington
Post and analytical articles for many other publications, and as the author of
two books. He collaborated with Clark Clifford, a presidential adviser, on a
best-selling Clifford memoir, “Counsel to the President” (1991), and wrote his
own widely acclaimed memoir, “To End a War” (1998), about his Bosnia service.
Mr. Holbrooke also made millions as an investment banker on Wall Street. In the
early 1980s, he was a co-founder of a Washington consulting firm, Public
Strategies, which was later sold to Lehman Brothers. At various times he was a
managing director of Lehman Brothers, vice chairman of Credit Suisse First
Boston and a director of the American International Group.
Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was born in Manhattan on April 24, 1941, to Dr.
Dan Holbrooke, a physician, and the former Trudi Moos. He attended Scarsdale
High School, where his best friend was David Rusk, son of Dean Rusk, the future
secretary of state. Richard’s father died when he was 15, and he drew closer to
the Rusk family.
At Brown University, he majored in history and was editor of the student
newspaper. He intended to become a journalist, but after graduating in 1962 he
was turned down by The Times and joined the State Department as a foreign
service officer.
In 1964, Mr. Holbrooke married the first of his three wives, Larrine Sullivan, a
lawyer. The couple had two sons, David and Anthony, and were divorced. His
marriage to Blythe Babyak, a television producer, also ended in divorce. In
1995, he married Kati Marton, an author, journalist and human rights advocate
who had been married to the ABC anchorman Peter Jennings until their divorce in
1993. He is survived by Ms. Marton; his two sons; his brother, Andrew; and two
stepchildren, Christopher and Elizabeth Jennings.
After language training, he spent three years working in Vietnam. In 1966, he
joined President Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House staff, and two years later
became a junior member of the delegation at the Paris peace talks. The talks
achieved no breakthrough, but the experience taught him much about the arts of
negotiation.
In 1970, after a year as a fellow at Princeton, he became director of the Peace
Corps in Morocco. He quit government service in 1972 and over the next five
years edited the quarterly journal Foreign Policy. He was also a contributing
editor of Newsweek International and a consultant on reorganizing the
government’s foreign policy apparatus.
He worked on Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign in 1976, and was rewarded with
the post of assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs. When
Ronald Reagan and the Republicans took over the White House in 1981, Mr.
Holbrooke left the government and for more than a decade focused on writing and
investment banking.
When President Clinton took office in 1993, Mr. Holbrooke was named ambassador
to Germany. He helped found the American Academy in Berlin as a cultural
exchange center.
He returned to Washington in 1994 as assistant secretary of state for European
affairs. His top priority soon became the horrendous civil war in the former
Yugoslavia, a conflict precipitated by the secession of Croatia, Slovenia,
Macedonia and Bosnia. Massacres, mass rapes and displaced populations, among
other atrocities, were part of campaigns of “ethnic cleansing” against Muslims.
After months of shuttle diplomacy, Mr. Holbrooke in 1995 achieved a breakthrough
cease-fire and a framework for dividing Bosnia into two entities, one of Bosnian
Serbs and another of Croatians and Muslims. The endgame negotiations, involving
the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia and
President Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia, unfolded in Dayton, Ohio, where a peace
agreement was reached after months of hard bargaining led by Mr. Holbrooke.
It was the high-water mark of a career punctuated with awards, honorary degrees
and prestigious seats on the boards of the Asia Society, the American Museum of
Natural History, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Council on Foreign
Relations, Refugees International and other organizations. He was 59 when he
left the United Nations as the Clinton administration drew to a close.
But there was to be one more task. As Mr. Obama assumed office and attention
shifted to Afghanistan, Mr. Holbrooke took on his last assignment. He began by
trying to lower expectations, moving away from the grand, transformative goals
of President George W. Bush toward something more readily achievable.
But his boss and old friend, Mrs. Clinton, expressed absolute confidence in him.
“Richard represents the kind of robust, persistent, determined diplomacy the
president intends to pursue,” she said. “I admire deeply his ability to shoulder
the most vexing and difficult challenges.”
David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington.
November 28, 2010
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE
and ANDREW W. LEHREN
WASHINGTON — A cache of a quarter-million confidential
American diplomatic cables, most of them from the past three years, provides an
unprecedented look at back-room bargaining by embassies around the world,
brutally candid views of foreign leaders and frank assessments of nuclear and
terrorist threats.
Some of the cables, made available to The New York Times and several other news
organizations, were written as recently as late February, revealing the Obama
administration’s exchanges over crises and conflicts. The material was
originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to revealing secret
documents. WikiLeaks posted 220 cables, some redacted to protect diplomatic
sources, in the first installment of the archive on its Web site on Sunday.
The disclosure of the cables is sending shudders through the diplomatic
establishment, and could strain relations with some countries, influencing
international affairs in ways that are impossible to predict.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and American ambassadors around the
world have been contacting foreign officials in recent days to alert them to the
expected disclosures. A statement from the White House on Sunday said: “We
condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified
documents and sensitive national security information.”
The White House said the release of what it called “stolen cables” to several
publications was a “reckless and dangerous action” and warned that some cables,
if released in full, could disrupt American operations abroad and put the work
and even lives of confidential sources of American diplomats at risk. The
statement noted that reports often include “candid and often incomplete
information” whose disclosure could “deeply impact not only U.S. foreign policy
interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world.”
The cables, a huge sampling of the daily traffic between the State Department
and some 270 embassies and consulates, amount to a secret chronicle of the
United States’ relations with the world in an age of war and terrorism. Among
their revelations, to be detailed in The Times in coming days:
¶ A dangerous standoff with Pakistan over nuclear fuel: Since 2007, the United
States has mounted a highly secret effort, so far unsuccessful, to remove from a
Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that American officials fear
could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device. In May 2009, Ambassador
Anne W. Patterson reported that Pakistan was refusing to schedule a visit by
American technical experts because, as a Pakistani official said, “if the local
media got word of the fuel removal, ‘they certainly would portray it as the
United States taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons,’ he argued.”
¶ Thinking about an eventual collapse of North Korea: American and South Korean
officials have discussed the prospects for a unified Korea, should the North’s
economic troubles and political transition lead the state to implode. The South
Koreans even considered commercial inducements to China, according to the
American ambassador to Seoul. She told Washington in February that South Korean
officials believe that the right business deals would “help salve” China’s
“concerns about living with a reunified Korea” that is in a “benign alliance”
with the United States.
¶ Bargaining to empty the Guantánamo Bay prison: When American diplomats pressed
other countries to resettle detainees, they became reluctant players in a State
Department version of “Let’s Make a Deal.” Slovenia was told to take a prisoner
if it wanted to meet with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati
was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in Chinese Muslim
detainees, cables from diplomats recounted. The Americans, meanwhile, suggested
that accepting more prisoners would be “a low-cost way for Belgium to attain
prominence in Europe.”
¶ Suspicions of corruption in the Afghan government: When Afghanistan’s vice
president visited the United Arab Emirates last year, local authorities working
with the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered that he was carrying $52
million in cash. With wry understatement, a cable from the American Embassy in
Kabul called the money “a significant amount” that the official, Ahmed Zia
Massoud, “was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing the money’s origin or
destination.” (Mr. Massoud denies taking any money out of Afghanistan.)
¶ A global computer hacking effort: China’s Politburo directed the intrusion
into Google’s computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the
American Embassy in Beijing in January, one cable reported. The Google hacking
was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by
government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited
by the Chinese government. They have broken into American government computers
and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002,
cables said.
¶ Mixed records against terrorism: Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of
Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda, and the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar, a
generous host to the American military for years, was the “worst in the region”
in counterterrorism efforts, according to a State Department cable last
December. Qatar’s security service was “hesitant to act against known terrorists
out of concern for appearing to be aligned with the U.S. and provoking
reprisals,” the cable said.
¶ An intriguing alliance: American diplomats in Rome reported in 2009 on what
their Italian contacts described as an extraordinarily close relationship
between Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian prime minister, and Silvio Berlusconi,
the Italian prime minister and business magnate, including “lavish gifts,”
lucrative energy contracts and a “shadowy” Russian-speaking Italian go-between.
They wrote that Mr. Berlusconi “appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of
Putin” in Europe. The diplomats also noted that while Mr. Putin enjoyed
supremacy over all other public figures in Russia, he was undermined by an
unmanageable bureaucracy that often ignored his edicts.
¶ Arms deliveries to militants: Cables describe the United States’ failing
struggle to prevent Syria from supplying arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has
amassed a huge stockpile since its 2006 war with Israel. One week after
President Bashar al-Assad promised a top State Department official that he would
not send “new” arms to Hezbollah, the United States complained that it had
information that Syria was providing increasingly sophisticated weapons to the
group.
¶ Clashes with Europe over human rights: American officials sharply warned
Germany in 2007 not to enforce arrest warrants for Central Intelligence Agency
officers involved in a bungled operation in which an innocent German citizen
with the same name as a suspected militant was mistakenly kidnapped and held for
months in Afghanistan. A senior American diplomat told a German official “that
our intention was not to threaten Germany, but rather to urge that the German
government weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for
relations with the U.S.”
The 251,287 cables, first acquired by WikiLeaks, were provided to The Times by
an intermediary on the condition of anonymity. Many are unclassified, and none
are marked “top secret,” the government’s most secure communications status. But
some 11,000 are classified “secret,” 9,000 are labeled “noforn,” shorthand for
material considered too delicate to be shared with any foreign government, and
4,000 are designated both secret and noforn.
Many more cables name diplomats’ confidential sources, from foreign legislators
and military officers to human rights activists and journalists, often with a
warning to Washington: “Please protect” or “Strictly protect.”
The Times, after consultations with the State Department, has withheld from
articles and removed from documents it is posting online the names of some
people who spoke privately to diplomats and might be at risk if they were
publicly identified. The Times is also withholding some passages or entire
cables whose disclosure could compromise American intelligence efforts. While
the White House said it anticipated WikiLeaks would make public “several hundred
thousand” cables Sunday night, the organization posted only 220 released and
redacted by The Times and several European publications.
The cables show that nearly a decade after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the
dark shadow of terrorism still dominates the United States’ relations with the
world. They depict the Obama administration struggling to sort out which
Pakistanis are trustworthy partners against Al Qaeda, adding Australians who
have disappeared in the Middle East to terrorist watch lists, and assessing
whether a lurking rickshaw driver in Lahore, Pakistan, was awaiting fares or
conducting surveillance of the road to the American Consulate.
They show officials managing relations with a China on the rise and a Russia
retreating from democracy. They document years of effort to prevent Iran from
building a nuclear weapon — and of worry about a possible Israeli strike on Iran
with the same goal.
Even when they recount events that are already known, the cables offer
remarkable details.
For instance, it has been previously reported that the Yemeni government has
sought to cover up the American role in missile strikes against the local branch
of Al Qaeda. But a cable’s fly-on-the-wall account of a January meeting between
the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the
American commander in the Middle East, is breathtaking.
“We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Mr. Saleh said, according
to the cable sent by the American ambassador, prompting Yemen’s deputy prime
minister to “joke that he had just ‘lied’ by telling Parliament” that Yemen had
carried out the strikes.
Mr. Saleh, who at other times resisted American counterterrorism requests, was
in a lighthearted mood. The authoritarian ruler of a conservative Muslim
country, Mr. Saleh complains of smuggling from nearby Djibouti, but tells
General Petraeus that his concerns are drugs and weapons, not whiskey, “provided
it’s good whiskey.”
Likewise, press reports detailed the unhappiness of the Libyan leader, Col.
Muammar el-Qaddafi, when he was not permitted to set up his tent in Manhattan or
to visit ground zero during a United Nations session last year.
But the cables add a touch of scandal and alarm to the tale. They describe the
volatile Libyan leader as rarely without the companionship of “his senior
Ukrainian nurse,” described as “a voluptuous blonde.” They reveal that Colonel
Qaddafi was so upset by his reception in New York that he balked at carrying out
a promise to return dangerous enriched uranium to Russia. The American
ambassador to Libya told Colonel Qaddafi’s son “that the Libyan government had
chosen a very dangerous venue to express its pique,” a cable reported to
Washington.
The cables also disclose frank comments behind closed doors. Dispatches from
early this year, for instance, quote the aging monarch of Saudi Arabia, King
Abdullah, as speaking scathingly about the leaders of Iraq and Pakistan.
Speaking to another Iraqi official about Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime
minister, King Abdullah said, “You and Iraq are in my heart, but that man is
not.” The king called President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan the greatest
obstacle to that country’s progress. “When the head is rotten,” he said, “it
affects the whole body.”
The American ambassador to Eritrea reported last year that “Eritrean officials
are ignorant or lying” in denying that they were supporting the Shabab, a
militant Islamist group in Somalia. The cable then mused about which seemed more
likely.
As he left Zimbabwe in 2007 after three years as ambassador, Christopher W. Dell
wrote a sardonic account of Robert Mugabe, that country’s aging and erratic
leader. The cable called him “a brilliant tactician” but mocked “his deep
ignorance on economic issues (coupled with the belief that his 18 doctorates
give him the authority to suspend the laws of economics).”
The possibility that a large number of diplomatic cables might become public has
been discussed in government and media circles since May. That was when, in an
online chat, an Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, described
having downloaded from a military computer system many classified documents,
including “260,000 State Department cables from embassies and consulates all
over the world.” In an online discussion with Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker,
Private Manning said he had delivered the cables and other documents to
WikiLeaks.
Mr. Lamo reported Private Manning’s disclosures to federal authorities, and
Private Manning was arrested. He has been charged with illegally leaking
classified information and faces a possible court-martial and, if convicted, a
lengthy prison term.
In July and October, The Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the
German magazine Der Spiegel published articles based on documents about
Afghanistan and Iraq. Those collections were placed online by WikiLeaks, with
selective redactions of the Afghan documents and much heavier redactions of the
Iraq reports.
Fodder for Historians
Traditionally, most diplomatic cables remain secret for decades, providing
fodder for historians only when the participants are long retired or dead. The
State Department’s unclassified history series, titled “Foreign Relations of the
United States,” has reached only 1972.
While an overwhelming majority of the quarter-million cables provided to The
Times are from the post-9/11 era, several hundred date from 1966 to the 1990s.
Some show diplomats struggling to make sense of major events whose future course
they could not guess.
In a 1979 cable to Washington, Bruce Laingen, an American diplomat in Tehran,
mused with a knowing tone about the Iranian revolution that had just occurred:
“Perhaps the single dominant aspect of the Persian psyche is an overriding
egoism,” Mr. Laingen wrote, offering tips on exploiting this psyche in
negotiations with the new government. Less than three months later, Mr. Laingen
and his colleagues would be taken hostage by radical Iranian students, hurling
the Carter administration into crisis and, perhaps, demonstrating the hazards of
diplomatic hubris.
In 1989, an American diplomat in Panama City mulled over the options open to
Gen. Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian leader, who was facing narcotics charges in
the United States and intense domestic and international political pressure to
step down. The cable called General Noriega “a master of survival”; its author
appeared to have no inkling that one week later, the United States would invade
Panama to unseat General Noriega and arrest him.
In 1990, an American diplomat sent an excited dispatch from Cape Town: he had
just learned from a lawyer for Nelson Mandela that Mr. Mandela’s 27-year
imprisonment was to end. The cable conveys the momentous changes about to begin
for South Africa, even as it discusses preparations for an impending visit from
the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson.
The voluminous traffic of more recent years — well over half of the
quarter-million cables date from 2007 or later — show American officials
struggling with events whose outcomes are far from sure. To read through them is
to become a global voyeur, immersed in the jawboning, inducements and penalties
the United States wields in trying to have its way with a recalcitrant world.
In an era of satellites and fiber-optic links, the cable retains the archaic
name of an earlier technological era. It has long been the tool for the
secretary of state to send orders to the field and for ambassadors and political
officers to send their analyses to Washington.
The cables have their own lexicon: “codel,” for a Congressional delegation;
“visas viper,” for a report on a person considered dangerous; “démarche,” an
official message to a foreign government, often a protest or warning.
But the drama in the cables often comes from diplomats’ narratives of meetings
with foreign figures, games of diplomatic poker in which each side is sizing up
the other and neither is showing all its cards.
Among the most fascinating examples recount American officials’ meetings in
September 2009 and February 2010 with Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half brother of the
Afghan president and a power broker in the Taliban’s home turf of Kandahar.
They describe Mr. Karzai, “dressed in a crisp white shalwar kameez,” the
traditional dress of loose tunic and trousers, appearing “nervous, though eager
to express his views on the international presence in Kandahar,” and trying to
win over the Americans with nostalgic tales about his years running a Chicago
restaurant near Wrigley Field.
But in midnarrative there is a stark alert for anyone reading the cable in
Washington: “Note: While we must deal with AWK as the head of the Provincial
Council, he is widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker.” (Mr.
Karzai has denied such charges.) And the cables note statements by Mr. Karzai
that the Americans, informed by a steady flow of eavesdropping and agents’
reports, believe to be false.
A cable written after the February meeting coolly took note of the deceit on
both sides.
Mr. Karzai “demonstrated that he will dissemble when it suits his needs,” the
cable said. “He appears not to understand the level of our knowledge of his
activities. We will need to monitor his activity closely, and deliver a
recurring, transparent message to him” about the limits of American tolerance.
Not All Business
Even in places far from war zones and international crises, where the stakes for
the United States are not as high, curious diplomats can turn out to be
accomplished reporters, sending vivid dispatches to deepen the government’s
understanding of exotic places.
In a 2006 account, a wide-eyed American diplomat describes the lavish wedding of
a well-connected couple in Dagestan, in Russia’s Caucasus, where one guest is
the strongman who runs the war-ravaged Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan
Kadyrov.
The diplomat tells of drunken guests throwing $100 bills at child dancers, and
nighttime water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea.
“The dancers probably picked upwards of USD 5000 off the cobblestones,” the
diplomat wrote. The host later tells him that Ramzan Kadyrov “had brought the
happy couple ‘a five-kilo lump of gold’ as his wedding present.”
“After the dancing and a quick tour of the premises, Ramzan and his army drove
off back to Chechnya,” the diplomat reported to Washington. “We asked why Ramzan
did not spend the night in Makhachkala, and were told, ‘Ramzan never spends the
night anywhere.’ ”
Scott Shane reported from Washington,
and Andrew W. Lehren from
New York.
Reporting was contributed by Jo Becker, C. J. Chivers
and James Glanz
from New York;
Eric Lichtblau, Michael R. Gordon, David E. Sanger,
WEST POINT, N.Y. — President Obama outlined a new national security strategy
rooted in diplomatic engagement and international alliances on Saturday as he
repudiated his predecessor’s emphasis on unilateral American power and the right
to wage pre-emptive war.
Eight years after President George W. Bush came to the United States Military
Academy here to set a new course for American security in the aftermath of the
Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Obama used the same setting to offer a revised doctrine,
one that vowed no retreat against enemies while seeking “national renewal and
global leadership.”
“Yes, we are clear-eyed about the shortfalls of our international system,” the
president told graduating cadets. “But America has not succeeded by stepping
outside the currents of international cooperation. We have succeeded by steering
those currents in the direction of liberty and justice, so nations thrive by
meeting their responsibilities, and face consequences when they don’t.”
Mr. Obama said the United States “will be steadfast in strengthening those old
alliances that have served us so well” while also trying to “build new
partnerships and shape stronger international standards and institutions.” He
added: “This engagement is not an end in itself. The international order we seek
is one that can resolve the challenges of our times.”
The president’s address was intended not just for the 1,000 young men and women
in gray and white uniforms in Michie Stadium who could soon face combat in
Afghanistan or Iraq as second lieutenants in the Army, but also for an
international audience that in some quarters grew alienated from the United
States during the Bush era.
The contrasts between Mr. Bush’s address here in 2002 and Mr. Obama’s in 2010
underscored all the ways a wartime America has changed and all the ways it has
not. This was the ninth class to graduate from West Point since hijacked
passenger jets destroyed the World Trade Center and smashed into the Pentagon
and the Pennsylvania countryside. Most of those graduating on Saturday were 12
at the time.
When Mr. Bush addressed their predecessors, he had succeeded in toppling the
Taliban government in Afghanistan and victory of sorts appeared at hand, even as
he was turning his attention to a new front in Iraq. Forecasting a new
generation of threats, Mr. Bush vowed not to stand by as they gathered. “If we
wait for threats to fully materialize,” he said then, “we will have waited too
long.”
As Mr. Obama took the stage on a mild, overcast day, the American war in Iraq
was finally beginning to wind down as combat forces prepare to withdraw by
August, but Afghanistan has flared out of control and tens of thousands of
reinforcements are flowing there. Terrorists have made a fresh effort to strike
on American soil as a new president tries to reformulate the nation’s approach
to countering them.
“This war has changed over the last nine years, but it’s no less important than
it was in those days after 9/11,” Mr. Obama said. Recalling his announcement
here six months ago to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, he forecast
difficult days ahead, but said, “I have no doubt that together with our Afghan
and international partners, we will succeed in Afghanistan.”
Mr. Obama all but declared victory in Iraq, crediting the military but not Mr.
Bush, who sent more troops in 2007. “A lesser Army might have seen its spirit
broken,” Mr. Obama said. “But the American military is more resilient than that.
Our troops adapted, they persisted, they partnered with coalition and Iraqi
counterparts, and through their competence and creativity and courage, we are
poised to end our combat mission in Iraq this summer.”
Mr. Obama attributed the failures of an effort to blow up a passenger jet
approaching Detroit in December and of a car intended to explode in Times Square
this month to the intense pursuit of radical groups abroad. “These failed
attacks show that pressure on networks like Al Qaeda is forcing them to rely on
terrorists with less time and space to train,” he said.
And he defended efforts to revise counterterrorism policies that have generated
sharp criticism that he is weakening America’s defenses. “We should not discard
our freedoms because extremists try to exploit them,” he said. “We cannot
succumb to division because others try to drive us apart.”
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama, opening two days of high-level
talks with China, said the discussions could lay the groundwork for a new era of
''sustained cooperation, not confrontation'' in a relationship likely to shape
the 21st century.
Obama said that Washington and Beijing needed to forge closer ties to address a
host of challenges from lifting the global economy out of a deep recession to
nuclear proliferation and global climate change.
''I believe that we are poised to make steady progress on some of the most
important issues of our times,'' the president told diplomats from both
countries assembled in the vast hall of the Ronald Reagan Building.
Obama said he was under ''no illusions that the United States and China will
agree on every issue'' but he said closer cooperation in important areas was
critical for the world.
''The relationship between the United States and China will shape the 21st
century, which makes it as important as any bilateral relationship in the
world,'' Obama said.
The discussions in Washington represent the continuation of a dialogue begun by
the Bush administration, which focused on economic tensions between the two
nations. Obama chose to expand the talks to include foreign policy issues as
well as economic disputes over trade and currency values.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, welcoming the Chinese, said the two
nations were ''laying brick by brick the foundation for a stronger
relationship.''
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Vice Premier Wang Qishan, China's top
economic policymaker, both spoke of hopeful signs that the global economy was
beginning to emerge from its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Geithner said that the so far successful efforts of the two economic superpowers
to move quickly to deal with the downturns with massive stimulus programs marked
a historic turning point in the relationship of the two nations.
Speaking through a translator, Wang said that ''at present the world economy is
at a critical moment of moving out of crisis and toward recovery.''
State Councilor Dai Bingguo said that the two countries were trying to build
better relations despite their very different social systems, cultures,
ideologies and histories.
''We are actually all in the same big boat that has been hit by fierce wind and
huge waves,'' Dai said of the global economic and other crises.
Obama said that the United States and China have a shared interest in clean and
secure energy sources.
As the world's largest energy consumers, Obama said that neither country profits
from a dependence on foreign oil. He also said neither country will be able to
combat climate change unless they work together.
However, the discussions this week were not expected to bridge wide differences
between the two nations on climate change and officials cautioned against
expecting any major breakthroughs in other areas either. U.S. officials said
they hoped the talks would set a positive framework for future talks.
The administration did praise China for the help it has provided in the nuclear
standoff with North Korea.
With the global economy trying to emerge from a deep recession, the United
States and China have enormous stakes in resolving tensions in such areas as
America's huge trade deficit with China and the Chinese government's unease over
America's soaring budget deficits.
Three years ago, then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson used the initial
U.S.-China talks to press Beijing to let its currency, the yuan, rise in value
against the dollar to make it cheaper for Chinese to buy U.S. goods. U.S.
manufacturers blame an undervalued yuan for record U.S. trade deficits with
China -- and, in part, for a decline in U.S. jobs.
The U.S. efforts have yielded mixed results. The yuan, after rising in value
about 22 percent since 2005, has scarcely budged in the past year. Beijing had
begun to fear that a stronger yuan could threaten its exports. Chinese exports
already were under pressure from the global recession.
But the Obama administration intends to remain focused on the trade gap, telling
Beijing that it can't rely on U.S. consumers to pull the global economy out of
recession this time. In part, that's because U.S. household savings rates are
rising, shrinking consumer spending in this country.
For the United States, suffering from a 9.5 percent unemployment rate, the
ultimate goal is to help put more Americans to work.
While the U.S. trade deficit with China has narrowed slightly this year, it is
still the largest imbalance with any country. Critics in Congress say that
unless China does much more in the currency area, they will seek to pass
legislation to impose economic sanctions on Beijing, a move that could spark a
trade war between the two nations.
For their part, Chinese officials are making clear they want further
explanations of what the administration plans to do about the soaring U.S.
budget deficits. China, the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury debt --
$801.5 billion -- wants to know that those holdings are safe and won't be
jeopardized in case of future inflation.
Geithner said in his opening remarks that the United States was moving to repair
its financial system and overhaul how financial companies are regulated. He said
the administration was also determined to deal with a budget deficit projected
to hit $1.84 trillion this year, more than four times the previous high.
''We are committed to taking the necessary steps to bringing our fiscal deficits
down to a more sustainable level,'' he said.
------
Associated Press writers Foster Klug and Steven Hurst
PARIS — Radovan Karadzic, one of the world’s most wanted war
criminals for his part in the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys in
Srebrenica in 1995, was arrested Monday in a raid in Serbia that ended a 13-year
hunt.
Serge Brammertz, the prosecutor of the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The
Hague, hailed the arrest as an important step in bringing to justice one of the
architects of Europe’s worst massacre since World War II. He said Mr. Karadzic,
63, the Bosnian Serb president during the war there between 1992 and 1995, would
be transferred to The Hague in “due course.”
“This is a very important day for the victims who have waited for this arrest
for over a decade,” Mr. Brammertz said. “It is also an important day for
international justice because it clearly demonstrates that nobody is beyond the
reach of the law and that sooner or later all fugitives will be brought to
justice.”
Mr. Karadzic’s exact place of arrest was not announced, but Serbian government
officials said he was arrested by the Serbian secret police not far from
Belgrade, the capital. Officials from President Boris Tadic’s office said Mr.
Karadzic had appeared before an investigative judge at Serbia’s war crimes
court, a prerequisite for his extradition to The Hague.
Mr. Karadzic, a nationalist hero among Serbian radicals and one of the
tribunal’s most wanted criminals for more than a decade, is said to have eluded
arrest so long by shaving his swoopy gray hair and disguising himself as a
Serbian Orthodox priest.
He reportedly hid out in caves in the mountains of eastern Bosnia and in
monasteries. Before his political career, he was a medical doctor who worked as
a psychiatrist in Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital.
Prosecutors in The Hague and officials of the European Union have long suspected
that he was, in fact, hiding in Serbia, and in recent years have pressed
officials in Belgrade to hand him over. The failure to arrest Mr. Karadzic and
Ratko Mladic, the still fugitive Bosnian Serb general also indicted on war
crimes, has stood as a block to greater Serbian ties to the European Union after
the wars in Bosnia and later Kosovo.
“This is a historic event,” said Richard Holbrooke, who brokered the agreements
in Dayton, Ohio, to end the war in Bosnia in 1995. “Of the three most evil men
of the Balkans, Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic, I thought Karadzic was the
worst. The reason was that Karadzic was a real racist believer. Karadzic really
enjoyed ordering the killing of Muslims, whereas Milosevic was an opportunist.”
Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia allied with Mr. Karadzic and
Mr. Mladic, was arrested in 2001 and put on trial for war crimes in 2002. He
died there in 2006 before a verdict was reached.
Mr. Holbrooke said that despite Mr. Karadzic’s arrest, Serbia’s responsibility
was not over. “They have to capture Mladic,” he said.
On Monday night after the arrest, armed police officers were deployed near the
war crimes court in Belgrade, where about 50 nationalist supporters of Mr.
Karadzic gathered, waving Serbian flags and chanting, “Save Serbia, and kill
yourself Mr. Tadic.” Several protesters were arrested after attacking
journalists. Mr. Karadzic’s brother, Luka, was also seen arriving at the
courthouse.
Serbian officials said the police were also dispatched to protect the United
States Embassy, which was set ablaze in February by a mob protesting Kosovo’s
declaration of independence.
The arrest, more than a decade after Mr. Karadzic went into hiding, culminated a
long and protracted effort by the West to press Serbia to arrest Mr. Karadzic
for the massacres in the southeastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, in the most
heinous crime committed during the Balkan wars.
The arrest was just weeks after a new pro-Western coalition government in Serbia
was formed whose overriding goal is to bring Serbia into the European Union, the
world’s biggest trading bloc. The European Union has made delivering indicted
war criminals to The Hague a precondition for Serbia’s membership.
The arrest was hailed by Western diplomats as proof of Serbia’s determination to
link its future to the West and put the virulent nationalism of the past behind
it. The capture under the stewardship of the new government has particular
resonance because the government is made up of an unlikely alliance between the
Democrats of Mr. Tadic and the Socialist Party of Mr. Milosevic, which fought a
war against the West in the 1990s, but has now vowed to bring Serbia back into
the Western fold.
In a sign that the move would accelerate Serbia’s path to the European Union,
the bloc’s official in charge of expansion, Olli Rehn, said Monday that Mr.
Karadzic’s arrest was a “milestone” that would help clear the way for the poor
Balkan nation to join.
“It proves the determination of the new government to achieve full cooperation
with the tribunal,” he said. He said he and European Union foreign ministers
would meet with Serbia’s foreign minister, Vuk Jeremic, in Brussels on Tuesday
to discuss accelerated ties with Serbia.
The White House said the arrest was “an important demonstration of the Serbian
government’s determination to honor its commitment to cooperate with the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.” It said, “There is
no better tribute to the victims of the war’s atrocities than bringing their
perpetrators to justice.”
The United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague indicted the former leader
on July 24, 1995, just days after thousands of unarmed Bosnian men were executed
in and around Srebrenica, a United Nations-protected enclave that was overrun by
the Bosnian Serb military and the police. Their forces were assisted closely by
Serbian troops sent by Belgrade.
The prosecution charged him with genocide, persecution, deportation and other
crimes committed against non-Serb civilians in Bosnia during the 1992-95 war.
He was indicted together with his chief military commander, Mr. Mladic, who is
also believed to be in Serbia.
Natasha Kandic, director of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, a leading
human rights advocate, said by telephone from her home moments after hearing the
news: “I’m still in shock. This is historic news. Nobody believed anymore this
would be possible. I was sure Karadzic was under the protection of the church.”
Ms. Kandic said she had been in touch with friends in Sarajevo, in Bosnia, who
were still incredulous after hearing arrest rumors for so many years. “They are
saying they cannot and dare not believe it,” she said. “Finally the victims can
be satisfied.”
Mr. Karadzic’s wife, Ljiljana, told The Associated Press by phone from her home
near Sarajevo that she had been alerted about the arrest by her daughter Sonja,
who called her before midnight. “As the phone rang, I knew something was wrong,”
she said. “I’m shocked. Confused. At least now, we know he is alive.”
Even though indicted by the United Nations tribunal, he was often seen for at
least another year in and around Pale, his stronghold in Bosnia; NATO troops
stationed in the area often had the chance to arrest him but claimed that they
had no arrest orders, despite the international warrant issued against him.
Later, when NATO began to look for him in earnest, he moved around the
mountainous regions of Bosnia and in neighboring Montenegro, where he was born.
Although the United States and others offered rewards for information leading to
his capture, Mr. Karadzic seemed protected by his status as a Serbian hero.
He is charged with genocide for the murder of close to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men
and boys in Srebrenica in 1995.
The indictment charges that Mr. Karadzic also committed genocide, persecutions
and other crimes when forces under his command killed non-Serbs during and after
attacks on towns throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, rounded up thousands of
non-Serbs and transferred them to camps set up by the Bosnian Serb authorities.
The charges state that forces under Mr. Karadzic’s command killed, tortured,
mistreated and sexually assaulted non-Serbs in these camps.
Further, he is charged with responsibility for the shelling and sniping of
civilians in Sarajevo, during the 43-month siege of the city, which led to the
killing and wounding of thousands, including many women and children.
Nicholas Kulish contributed reporting from Berlin.
