Tina Susman

Iraq: Hiding in Plain Sight

Los Angeles Times
May 23, 2008 Friday
Home Edition
COLUMN ONE;
The Iraqi who wasn't there;
Abu Hassan's fear for his life and his family rose with the sectarian killings in Baghdad. So he went into hiding -- without leaving home.

Tina Susman and Raheem Salman, Times Staff Writers

BAGHDAD _ Abu Hassan took deep breaths of joy as he crossed the double-decker bridge spanning the Tigris River. The water below may have stunk of sewage. The air may have been choked with traffic fumes. It didn't matter to Abu Hassan.

He was free after nearly a year hidden inside his house, the only place he had felt safe from the gunmen and killers who had taken over his neighborhood in south Baghdad.

"To breathe, to see people, to feel that I am still alive," he said recently, recalling his decision that day last winter to drive across the bridge leading from the Dora neighborhood to central Baghdad.

All he did was buy gas, turn around and go back into his house, but Abu Hassan, a Shiite Muslim living in a mainly Sunni Arab area, had taken his first tentative steps back into the world that had terrified him for so long.

This is one man's story of survival in the midst of the capital's deadly sectarian war, but it is also the story of how fear paralyzed a city by driving people underground or out of their homes.

The International Organization for Migration estimates that since February 2006, when the bombing of a Shiite mosque in Samarra unleashed massive Sunni-Shiite bloodshed, 1.5 million Iraqis have been displaced within the country, most of them Baghdad residents who fled their neighborhoods. There is no estimate of how many people locked themselves away and pretended not to exist, as Abu Hassan did.

For Abu Hassan, it was a year in which time had no meaning. He would not sleep until 3 or 4 a.m. He would eat meals and devour nuts, coffee, tea and soda all day while watching TV. He would try to read, but it was difficult to concentrate.

"I was thinking about what would happen after one hour, tonight, tomorrow," he said.

After the mosque bombing, Dora quickly became one of the capital's worst killing grounds. Sunni insurgents loyal to Al Qaeda in Iraq began moving in, targeting Christians and Shiites, who were minorities in the area. The once-thriving Dora market fell into ruin, and the streets became dumping grounds for bodies of people who refused gunmen's orders to leave their homes and businesses.

An influx of U.S. and Iraqi security forces in the last year, along with the growth of neighborhood security groups known as the Sons of Iraq, has changed Dora and brought the number of attacks down to about one or two a week, according to the U.S. military.

But the people of Dora are wary of pushing too far, too fast.

Abu Hassan, for example, went back into hiding for weeks after his drive over the bridge and finally emerged fully in December. He reluctantly began telling his story a few weeks ago, but is terrified that insurgents will come after him if they learn he was living in their midst.

So he refuses to give his full name, going only by a moniker that identifies him as the father of Hassan. He will not identify the Shiite uncle and cousin who were killed by insurgents last year when they refused gunmen's orders to close their shop.

He won't allow visitors into the home he shares with his parents and his wife and son. Nor will he come to where foreigners live. He won't let his house be photographed or permit a physical description of himself to be published, other than to say he is 32 and fat -- a result of his overeating during his self-imposed house arrest.

He fidgets and squirms as he speaks and glances around frequently, as if looking for a stalker. He chain-smokes, forcefully shoving each butt into the ashtray at a hotel cafe before lighting the next one. Still, he is impeccably dressed and unfailingly polite as he finally tells his story after canceling plans to meet several times.

Abu Hassan made the decision to hide the month his son was born: November 2006. Worried for his family's safety, he sought advice from a Lebanese friend who had survived his own country's civil war.

"You have the experience of 15 years of sectarian killing," he said to the friend. "What is the best to do?" The friend advised him to shut himself off from the violence.

That wasn't easy. Abu Hassan was a car salesman who commuted to another part of town. Insurgents favored his upscale neighborhood because of the comfortable houses, the highway that offered a quick escape route and the vast fields nearby that were ideal for stashing weapons and for hiding from security forces.

"Day by day, things got worse," Abu Hassan said. "The highway was witnessing killings, kidnappings and explosions. It was not possible even for the security forces to put checkpoints in some of its parts. The checkpoints there were always attacked."

The insurgents targeted men and usually left women and the elderly alone, so Abu Hassan went into hiding and his mother and wife, both teachers, went to work, did the shopping and updated him on the world outside: the killings, the bombings, the deterioration of the neighborhood and eventually the turnaround. His wife is a Sunni, which helped ensure her safety, as long as nobody knew her Shiite husband was hiding at home.

From November 2006 until December 2007, he remained inside except for the day he drove across the bridge and the rare times he ventured into his walled garden at night.

His father, a grocer, joined him in hiding after a friend at the market warned him that as a Shiite, he was sure to be killed. It had happened to several fellow shopkeepers. Abu Hassan rattled off the ones he remembered: a man selling food, a shoe salesman, a humble man who sold tea from a small wooden kiosk.

"All of them were killed for sectarian reasons," he said.

Trapped inside, he learned to cook and to care for his child, becoming a househusband in a society where men are supposed to be the breadwinners and women the homemakers.

Depression set in. "I had nothing to do. I felt that I was idle, and on top of hearing all the sad stories and bad news, the only thing to do was eat," he said.

Most of his time was spent in the living room, where the TV is. When he grew restless, he would go upstairs, then downstairs and then upstairs again. Anything to break the monotony. But each time he heard of another killing or attack, it convinced Abu Hassan that he was right to stay inside.

Sometimes he would hear shooting nearby and sit silently, barely breathing, until the danger passed. Several times, he tried to convince his parents that the family should leave. They refused to give up the family home, and Abu Hassan refused to go anywhere without them, so the family remained together in Dora.

It was a wretched life, lived behind drawn curtains and locked doors, with their weapons loaded and a lock and chain to keep the front gate secure.

"Sometimes I had a glance at the street either from behind the fence of the house or through a very small hole in the gate," he said. After glimpsing bombed-out homes and deserted streets, "the area seemed to me as if it were attacked by a chemical weapon."

To outsiders, it appeared that his house was occupied by only his mother and his wife.

Late last fall, he sensed a change. U.S. forces had been in Baghdad in increased numbers since January 2007. A movement known as the Awakening, which involved Iraqis volunteering to help protect their neighborhoods, was catching on.

"Instead of the news of the killings and violence, we began to hear that this Qaeda leader was killed or that one was detained or had left the area," Abu Hassan said.

The highway became safer, and the sounds of gunfire decreased. Abu Hassan felt the chains loosening.

He can't remember the day he decided it was safe to go outside. It was not a particular event that encouraged him so much as a growing sense that things were better.

One day, he washed the dust off his car and drove over the bridge. But then he hurried back to his house.

A few weeks later, though, after hearing of the deaths of some key insurgent leaders in the area, he quietly came out for good.

Now, he has returned to work. A few days ago, he felt confident enough to stand on the street and chat with neighbors. They welcomed him back, thinking he had been out of the country. He let them believe it.

In his neighborhood, shops have reopened and are full of men and women, holding on to their children's hands and browsing through colorful collections of clothes, fruits and vegetables. Iraqi police stand guard at dozens of checkpoints across Dora.

Some people worry that elements of Al Qaeda in Iraq remain in the area. Abu Hassan isn't one of them. He says they have lost their leaders or turned against the insurgency to earn money as guards working alongside U.S. and Iraqi forces.

His main concerns are losing the weight he gained, earning money to help the family recover the savings used during his year of inactivity, and learning to live again.

In Rwanda, Left to Die as Help Passes Them By

 
The Associated Press
June 8, 1994, Wednesday
Monastery Becomes Rwanda's Latest City Of Horror

By TINA SUSMAN, Associated Press Writer

KABGAYI, Rwanda _ There's a madman shouting nonsense in a corner. The bloated body of a government soldier, his eyes wide open in death, is sprawled in a nearby room.

In the middle of a courtyard, a man sits beside a cooking fire, surrounded by buzzing flies, corpses and others on the brink of death.

Six days ago, the rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front took control of Kabgayi, the tiny Central African country's largest monastery, where thousands of people had sought shelter from the war, but where hundreds instead met their deaths.

The city monastery has become a nightmare of corpses and several dozen starving victims left behind in the evacuation by the rebels and the Red Cross.

Some have lost their minds, probably driven mad after weeks in this death camp. Others, like Innocent Rudasingwa, are all too aware of their surroundings.

"I don't have any hope," the emaciated man said as he sat with four other people in a filthy room once used as a medical clinic.

They are still here because they could not walk to the vehicles that have come in the last week to evacuate survivors.

Rudasingwa was living happily with his wife and five children in Kigali, the capital about 23 miles to the north, when a machete sliced into his skull on April 8 during an attack by pro-government militiamen.

His wife was killed. His five children have disappeared. His wounds have left his right arm and leg paralyzed.

The university-educated teacher, who is fluent in English and French, ended up here after hospital workers decided it was too dangerous to keep patients in the Kigali hospital.

"At the beginning we received medical assistance, but by the end it dropped. That's why they decided to remove all the patients from here," he said. "Unfortunately, we were unable to get to the trucks."

It is unclear why the Red Cross has not come back for these people. Perhaps they are not aware of them; perhaps they are simply too overloaded with other victims at a Red Cross hospital at Nyanza, about 20 miles away.

The rebels have been evacuating people when they can find transportation, but their priority is winning the war.

"The situation is the same everywhere. It is pretty hard to fight and rescue," said rebel Lt. Tony Kulamio as he wandered through a maze of leaf-and-stick huts on the monastery grounds.

An estimated 200,000 people have died since the Rwandan civil war erupted again on April 6, the day after the deaths of the president and his Burundi counterpart, both Hutus, in a mysterious plane crash.

The government forces are largely from the majority Hutu tribe while the rebel RPF is made up mostly of minority Tutsis.

The vast majority of victims have been civilians killed in widespread massacres, mostly conducted by Hutu militiamen, often backed by soldiers.

Survivors say this area was a concentration camp controlled by government troops and militiamen who each night would choose victims for execution. Others were left without food or water.

Now the huts, tents and a chapel house hundreds of dead or seemingly dead. One girl appeared long dead and lay in her decaying mother's arms on the floor of the chapel, but suddenly she moved.

Rebels bent down and removed the girl from the tangle of corpses. Within two hours, another child and an old man had been pulled from the dead. They were loaded into a truck and driven to safety.

Rudasingwa was not among them. He stayed behind, the stench of a dead man in the next room drifting down the hall. Outside the madman screamed words no one understood and waved his arms wildly.

A few steps away, another man sat staring vacantly at the dead government soldier. When asked why he did not move, the man pushed aside his blanket and showed a bullet-shattered leg.

"We don't survive. We don't eat - it is apparent," Rudasingwa said.

Rebel spokesman Wilson Gumisiriza said these living-dead would be evacuated, but he didn't say when.

"I don't know why the Red Cross is not here. How do you explain this situation?" he said with a shrug. "So, this is how Rwanda is."

In Liberia, There's Room in the Zoo

The Associated Press
January 4, 1995, Wednesday
People Displaced By Civil War Find Home in Zoo, Wherever There's Space

By TINA SUSMAN, Associated Press Writer

MONROVIA, Liberia _ Josiah Kuoh has a stiff left arm, its muscles mangled and paralyzed when the hippo he used to feed clamped its jaws around the limb and wouldn't let go.

The hippo is long gone, a casualty of Liberia's civil war. Kuoh, however, remains in Monrovia's zoo, wandering among the cages with about 60 other people who now call it home.

Before Liberia's civil war began on Christmas Eve in 1989, this seaside city had about 400,000 people. Now the population is about 1.2 million, mainly people who came to escape fighting in the countryside and settled wherever there was space.

The war was supposed to be over with a Dec. 28 cease-fire accord. But fighting has continued outside Monrovia, and the capital's displaced are not going to leave until they're sure life is back to normal.

Only when animals return to the zoo, when a government returns to the wrecked administrative buildings, when shops reopen in the old mall will the people living in them move out.

"I don't like it, but we've got nowhere else to go," said 22-year-old Louise Jolo, who has lived since January with her mother and hundreds of other people in the old Department of Foreign Affairs building.

In another city, this seven-story oceanside building might be an enviable address. The rooms are spacious, with magnificent views of the Atlantic. There's a well outside, so water is never a problem. It's cool even on the baking equator, thanks to thick concrete walls that keep out the heat. The sea breeze flows down the long dark corridors through huge gaps where there used to be windows, or where shells slammed in during fighting.

When night comes, however, kerosene lanterns are the only light. Jolo stays in her room, on the bed with a teddy bear, to avoid falling down the crumbling stairway or being caught by thugs who occasionally roam the building.

The civil war began when forces loyal to rebel leader Charles Taylor invaded from Ivory Coast to overthrow tribalist dictator Samuel Doe. Doe subsequently was tortured to death by a breakaway faction.

What began as a popular rebellion ballooned into a tribal war that has left more than 150,000 of this West African nation's 2.6 million people dead. About half the population has been displaced by the fighting.

Kuoh has lived and worked at the old Monrovia Zoo for more than a decade, but he never thought it would house people. By day, children run free among the cages that once housed bears, eagles, snakes, apes and big cats.

In 1990, when fighting raged across the country and food was scarce, army soldiers started coming to the zoo and asking for animals to feed themselves. They were given a deer or a bird, said Margaret Williams, whose Swiss brother-in-law, Charles Steiner, opened the zoo 30 years ago.

"Then when things got really bad, they would just come in and shoot the animals through the cages," said Williams, who also lives on the zoo grounds. The soldiers shot and killed leopards, panthers and other animals.

"My brother-in-law, he took care of them like they were human beings," Williams said. "All his life he worked to build something, and now it's all lost."

Kuoh was attacked by the hippo in 1989 but continued tending the animal until it, too, became a war victim. Today, he still guides visitors through the zoo as if the animals were there, pointing out where the species used to be housed. "On Saturdays, we used to have people lined up to come here and see them. I wouldn't have believed this," he said.

The zoo founder, Steiner, is back in Bern, Switzerland with his Liberian wife. Williams says she's confident the zoo will one day reopen, bigger and better than before.

Even when that happens it will be impossible to forget the past brutality: Across the street from the zoo entrance is a sign marking a mass grave of hundreds of civilians killed during rebel attacks.

In Iraq, Hiding in Plain Sight

Los Angeles Times
May 23, 2008 Friday
Home Edition
COLUMN ONE;
The Iraqi who wasn't there;
Abu Hassan's fear for his life and his family rose with the sectarian killings in Baghdad. So he went into hiding -- without leaving home.

Tina Susman and Raheem Salman, Times Staff Writers

BAGHDAD _ Abu Hassan took deep breaths of joy as he crossed the double-decker bridge spanning the Tigris River. The water below may have stunk of sewage. The air may have been choked with traffic fumes. It didn't matter to Abu Hassan.

He was free after nearly a year hidden inside his house, the only place he had felt safe from the gunmen and killers who had taken over his neighborhood in south Baghdad.

"To breathe, to see people, to feel that I am still alive," he said recently, recalling his decision that day last winter to drive across the bridge leading from the Dora neighborhood to central Baghdad.

All he did was buy gas, turn around and go back into his house, but Abu Hassan, a Shiite Muslim living in a mainly Sunni Arab area, had taken his first tentative steps back into the world that had terrified him for so long.

This is one man's story of survival in the midst of the capital's deadly sectarian war, but it is also the story of how fear paralyzed a city by driving people underground or out of their homes.

The International Organization for Migration estimates that since February 2006, when the bombing of a Shiite mosque in Samarra unleashed massive Sunni-Shiite bloodshed, 1.5 million Iraqis have been displaced within the country, most of them Baghdad residents who fled their neighborhoods. There is no estimate of how many people locked themselves away and pretended not to exist, as Abu Hassan did.

For Abu Hassan, it was a year in which time had no meaning. He would not sleep until 3 or 4 a.m. He would eat meals and devour nuts, coffee, tea and soda all day while watching TV. He would try to read, but it was difficult to concentrate.

"I was thinking about what would happen after one hour, tonight, tomorrow," he said.

After the mosque bombing, Dora quickly became one of the capital's worst killing grounds. Sunni insurgents loyal to Al Qaeda in Iraq began moving in, targeting Christians and Shiites, who were minorities in the area. The once-thriving Dora market fell into ruin, and the streets became dumping grounds for bodies of people who refused gunmen's orders to leave their homes and businesses.

An influx of U.S. and Iraqi security forces in the last year, along with the growth of neighborhood security groups known as the Sons of Iraq, has changed Dora and brought the number of attacks down to about one or two a week, according to the U.S. military.

But the people of Dora are wary of pushing too far, too fast.

Abu Hassan, for example, went back into hiding for weeks after his drive over the bridge and finally emerged fully in December. He reluctantly began telling his story a few weeks ago, but is terrified that insurgents will come after him if they learn he was living in their midst.

So he refuses to give his full name, going only by a moniker that identifies him as the father of Hassan. He will not identify the Shiite uncle and cousin who were killed by insurgents last year when they refused gunmen's orders to close their shop.

He won't allow visitors into the home he shares with his parents and his wife and son. Nor will he come to where foreigners live. He won't let his house be photographed or permit a physical description of himself to be published, other than to say he is 32 and fat -- a result of his overeating during his self-imposed house arrest.

He fidgets and squirms as he speaks and glances around frequently, as if looking for a stalker. He chain-smokes, forcefully shoving each butt into the ashtray at a hotel cafe before lighting the next one. Still, he is impeccably dressed and unfailingly polite as he finally tells his story after canceling plans to meet several times.

Abu Hassan made the decision to hide the month his son was born: November 2006. Worried for his family's safety, he sought advice from a Lebanese friend who had survived his own country's civil war.

"You have the experience of 15 years of sectarian killing," he said to the friend. "What is the best to do?" The friend advised him to shut himself off from the violence.

That wasn't easy. Abu Hassan was a car salesman who commuted to another part of town. Insurgents favored his upscale neighborhood because of the comfortable houses, the highway that offered a quick escape route and the vast fields nearby that were ideal for stashing weapons and for hiding from security forces.

"Day by day, things got worse," Abu Hassan said. "The highway was witnessing killings, kidnappings and explosions. It was not possible even for the security forces to put checkpoints in some of its parts. The checkpoints there were always attacked."

The insurgents targeted men and usually left women and the elderly alone, so Abu Hassan went into hiding and his mother and wife, both teachers, went to work, did the shopping and updated him on the world outside: the killings, the bombings, the deterioration of the neighborhood and eventually the turnaround. His wife is a Sunni, which helped ensure her safety, as long as nobody knew her Shiite husband was hiding at home.

From November 2006 until December 2007, he remained inside except for the day he drove across the bridge and the rare times he ventured into his walled garden at night.

His father, a grocer, joined him in hiding after a friend at the market warned him that as a Shiite, he was sure to be killed. It had happened to several fellow shopkeepers. Abu Hassan rattled off the ones he remembered: a man selling food, a shoe salesman, a humble man who sold tea from a small wooden kiosk.

"All of them were killed for sectarian reasons," he said.

Trapped inside, he learned to cook and to care for his child, becoming a househusband in a society where men are supposed to be the breadwinners and women the homemakers.

Depression set in. "I had nothing to do. I felt that I was idle, and on top of hearing all the sad stories and bad news, the only thing to do was eat," he said.

Most of his time was spent in the living room, where the TV is. When he grew restless, he would go upstairs, then downstairs and then upstairs again. Anything to break the monotony. But each time he heard of another killing or attack, it convinced Abu Hassan that he was right to stay inside.

Sometimes he would hear shooting nearby and sit silently, barely breathing, until the danger passed. Several times, he tried to convince his parents that the family should leave. They refused to give up the family home, and Abu Hassan refused to go anywhere without them, so the family remained together in Dora.

It was a wretched life, lived behind drawn curtains and locked doors, with their weapons loaded and a lock and chain to keep the front gate secure.

"Sometimes I had a glance at the street either from behind the fence of the house or through a very small hole in the gate," he said. After glimpsing bombed-out homes and deserted streets, "the area seemed to me as if it were attacked by a chemical weapon."

To outsiders, it appeared that his house was occupied by only his mother and his wife.

Late last fall, he sensed a change. U.S. forces had been in Baghdad in increased numbers since January 2007. A movement known as the Awakening, which involved Iraqis volunteering to help protect their neighborhoods, was catching on.

"Instead of the news of the killings and violence, we began to hear that this Qaeda leader was killed or that one was detained or had left the area," Abu Hassan said.

The highway became safer, and the sounds of gunfire decreased. Abu Hassan felt the chains loosening.

He can't remember the day he decided it was safe to go outside. It was not a particular event that encouraged him so much as a growing sense that things were better.

One day, he washed the dust off his car and drove over the bridge. But then he hurried back to his house.

A few weeks later, though, after hearing of the deaths of some key insurgent leaders in the area, he quietly came out for good.

Now, he has returned to work. A few days ago, he felt confident enough to stand on the street and chat with neighbors. They welcomed him back, thinking he had been out of the country. He let them believe it.

In his neighborhood, shops have reopened and are full of men and women, holding on to their children's hands and browsing through colorful collections of clothes, fruits and vegetables. Iraqi police stand guard at dozens of checkpoints across Dora.

Some people worry that elements of Al Qaeda in Iraq remain in the area. Abu Hassan isn't one of them. He says they have lost their leaders or turned against the insurgency to earn money as guards working alongside U.S. and Iraqi forces.

His main concerns are losing the weight he gained, earning money to help the family recover the savings used during his year of inactivity, and learning to live again.

--

In Zaire, Waiting for the Flight That Never Comes

February 19, 1997, Wednesday

Zaire's refugees: a bleak existence of leaves, roots, and uncertainty

By TINA SUSMAN, Associated Press Writer

KALIMA, Zaire _ The silver DC-3 took a nose dive toward the grass airstrip, scattering people like specks of sand before soaring skyward again and looping around to land on the now-cleared runway.

About 25,000 people live along a desolate stretch of rocky, sandy terrain hugging the runway, which most hope one day will produce a plane to take them away or, at least, deliver enough food to last until their next stop.

Caught halfway between the rebel-held town of Shabunda, 60 miles to the east, and government-held Kindu to the west, Kalima's refugees are some of the most pitiful of the estimated 200,000 winding their way through eastern Zaire's dense forests.

They fear the rebels too much to go back but are blocked from going forward by the Zairian government, which is so fed up that it refuses even to use the term "refugee camp" to describe places like Kalima.

Instead, in official jargon, this is a "site."

It is a thorny, inhospitable patch of desert-like terrain, where most of the leaves and roots have been devoured by crowds who began trickling in shortly after Shabunda was overrun by Laurent Kabila's rebel army Feb. 5. Before Shabunda, they had fled civil strife in their native Rwanda and Burundi and had been refugees in Goma.

"We're angry because we're stuck here without anything. It's not normal - we must move to another place, another country," said Cyprien Itamgishaka, 30, who fled Burundi's civil strife for Zaire last year.

"Perhaps one country could take 10,000, another 10,000 and so on so that Zaire wouldn't have to bear all the burden," suggested a Rwandan refugee, Emmanuel Habimana, 32.

"They can go on with their conquest. I don't care," he said of the rebels. "But someone should arrange an international agreement for other countries to take us."

Word that Kabila and an envoy of Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko might meet in South Africa has brought hopes of a cease-fire in the five-month war, but it is unlikely to change things here anytime soon. Most refugees are Hutus from Rwanda and Burundi who fled conflict between majority Hutus and minority Tutsis.

Now they're afraid of reprisals if they return, particularly for the 1994 Hutu-orchestrated slaughter of a half-million Rwandan Tutsis.

The Zairian government doesn't want them and is bitter over the Goma situation, in which nearly 2 million refugees fled to the eastern Zaire town in 1994 and refused to budge. When Zaire tried to force them out, it faced international condemnation and was forced to stop.

Many Goma refugees fled home on their own after Kabila began the war. But, to the Zairian government's dismay, those who didn't moved further into the country.

"They don't want to recognize the camps, but the fact is, when you have 25,000 people you have to deal with it," said Ariane Quentier of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The organization tried unsuccessfully to persuade Zairian authorities to let the Kalima crowd move to a more livable space.

Unlike Tingi Tingi about 95 miles to the north, where more than 150,000 refugees have a well-run compound of sorts and receive regular aid deliveries, Kalima is too disorganized for major food distribution or clinics.

The unloading of just a few sacks of flour and some empty pots from the back of a plane brought cheers Wednesday from the haggard thousands along the runway.

The appearance of real food probably would cause a stampede. Weakened adults stagger along the gullies and slopes, carrying malnourished children and displaying them plaintively to visitors.

A hospital sits a few miles away in the town, but the government has refused general access to the refugees. On Wednesday, though, it said the most desperate cases could be accepted.

At the refugee site, meanwhile, efforts to set up a soup kitchen stalled when refugees hired to do the work called a strike Wednesday, saying they hadn't been paid.

Habimana, the Rwandan refugee, scoffed at the idea the kitchen ever would be built. The rebels, he said, probably would run the refugees out of Kalima anyway.

"Who's going to build a kitchen that will just be left after a few weeks?" he said.

Athens Olympics Pushes Some to the Fringes

Copyright 2004 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)

August 26, 2004 Thursday

PLIGHT OF THE ROMA;
Outcasts of Greece and the Games

BY TINA SUSMAN. STAFF CORRESPONDENT

ASPROPYRGOS, Greece - The rubble is everywhere: rusted car parts, a rickety baby carriage, a broken TV and all manner of trash. The ground is unpaved and strewn with rocks. The homes, patched together with stray chunks of wood, plastic and metal, resemble ill-fitted jigsaw puzzles.

Asked what she uses for a toilet, Joanna Aristopoulou motions toward the field. "Nature," she says.

That goes for the dozens of other Roma, or Gypsies, occupying this grimy industrial area outside Athens, which underwent a massive beautification effort to host the Olympics.

Aristopoulou and other Roma say they are victims of this effort and that the attention being focused on Greece should be turned to their plight. That's especially the case, they say, since many Roma settlements were dismantled before the Games, including one cleared to make way for a parking lot at the main Olympic complex.

The Roma say the government has reneged for years on vows to provide them better living standards.

"We are Greek citizens too. What is it for them to give adequate housing to the Roma?" said Aristopoulou, one of tens of thousands of Roma living in Greece, which has long been accused by human rights groups, including the government's own National Commission for Human Rights, of neglecting them. Those accusations took on new strength in the run-up to the Games from organizations such as Amnesty International, the European Union and the United Nations. Among other things, the government was chastised over the eviction that cleared land for the Olympic parking lot. That Roma settlement had existed nearly 50 years.

"The Games and all the infrastructure that's been done - the highways and this and that - that's all very good and very helpful. But for us to feel good about the Olympics, we need to be housed somewhere," said one of those displaced by the parking lot, Prokopis Nikolaou, 36.

Nikolaou and others who had lived in the shack settlement said they were promised rent subsidies so they could find apartments, and were told permanent housing eventually would be built for them. But the subsidies have been consistently late or not paid at all, Nikolaou said. Two years after the forced move, he, his wife and their three children share a cramped house with other relatives because, he says, the erratic subsidies made it impossible to secure an apartment.

In addition, he said his monthly subsidy, calculated according to family size, was never raised after his wife had their third child 11 months ago. "Basically, we feel we were cheated," he said.

The Greek government denies mistreating the Roma and says they, like other fringe groups, are simply feeling the bite of enhanced police enforcement during the Games. The interior ministry did not respond to e-mailed requests for specific comments, but in response to past criticisms it has described the Roma situation as "of great concern" to Greek authorities. It says it has spent millions of dollars moving Roma into prefabricated houses to replace their shacks and tents; to build permanent housing for others; and to offer them job training.

Determining how many Roma live in Greece is difficult. Estimates range from 120,000 to a half-million, and they are scattered and subject to different treatment, depending on municipality.

Commumities Wiped Out

A common complaint by rights groups concerns evictions by local officials determined to keep Roma out of sight and away from non-Roma, who derisively call them "gyps." Such evictions picked up speed after Athens was awarded the 2004 Olympics in 1997, as local officials saw a chance to bulldoze unsightly squatter settlements, the National Human Rights Commission said in 2001.

Those in Aspropyrgos, northwest of Athens, say they ended up in their current spot after their settlement next to a dump was razed by local officials. In Spata, south of the capital, another group was moved from its settlement behind a school to a seemingly preferable spot a few miles away, on a breezy hill with a view of the sea. But four years later, the promised electricity and water never materialized, and it's too far from town for children to walk to school, or for residents to go shopping or to a doctor on foot.

Land of broken promises

The Romas who were evicted to clear land for the parking lot two years ago are scattered across the city, since no settlement was established for them.

Critics say no matter what municipalities are guilty of, the final responsibility lies with the central government, which in 1996 and 2001 unveiled plans to, among other things, build new settlements for Romas, improve existing ones and make housing loans easier. In May, a report from the UN's Economic and Social Council said few of the promises had been kept and that "persistent discrimination" against Roma existed. It also said it was "gravely concerned" about demolition of Roma housing without adequate compensation or provisions of alternative housing.

Separate lives

The Romas' nomadic past, and the illegal squatter settlements they formed when they were drawn to cities in search of work, have prompted disdain among non-Roma. Many dismiss them as criminals who choose not to integrate with other Greeks. "The Roma are always in camps. They don't want to live in houses," said Theodoros Stefanides, a university student in Athens. "These people always complain, but it's their choice to live in tents. They're difficult people."

His companion, Daphne Dedopoulou, agreed: "If they want more respect from us, they could stop selling drugs."

Those attitudes rile Roma like Spiros Parianos. "Look at our hands! They are honest, hardworking!" he said indignantly, holding out his dry, calloused hands. "We are not illegal. We don't go to steal. We don't deal drugs."

Parianos makes a living selling scrap metal. Others sell wares at street markets but have been hampered by crackdowns on nonlicensed sellers.

Nikolaou admits he was selling trinkets and housewares without a permit. And there's no question some Roma are involved in questionable businesses. As one woman in Aspropyrgos lamented her poverty, her son drove up in a flashy red BMW she insisted was paid for through selling vegetables.

Economic Reality

Human rights groups say the majority of Roma, though, are law-abiding people forced by poverty and discrimination to live on the fringes of society. Nikolaou, for example, now cruises neighborhoods selling watermelons out of the back of a truck because the crackdown makes it impossible for him to sell at the flea market.

"We spent billions to make Athens much more beautiful," said Panayote Dimitras of Greek Helsinki Monitor, a rights group that has taken up the Romas' cause. "If only a tiny fraction of that was spent for those Roma who are in need, we would have model settlements that we could brag about."

Copyright 2004 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)

August 26, 2004 Thursday

PLIGHT OF THE ROMA;
Outcasts of Greece and the Games

BY TINA SUSMAN. STAFF CORRESPONDENT

ASPROPYRGOS, Greece - The rubble is everywhere: rusted car parts, a rickety baby carriage, a broken TV and all manner of trash. The ground is unpaved and strewn with rocks. The homes, patched together with stray chunks of wood, plastic and metal, resemble ill-fitted jigsaw puzzles.

Asked what she uses for a toilet, Joanna Aristopoulou motions toward the field. "Nature," she says.

That goes for the dozens of other Roma, or Gypsies, occupying this grimy industrial area outside Athens, which underwent a massive beautification effort to host the Olympics.

Aristopoulou and other Roma say they are victims of this effort and that the attention being focused on Greece should be turned to their plight. That's especially the case, they say, since many Roma settlements were dismantled before the Games, including one cleared to make way for a parking lot at the main Olympic complex.

The Roma say the government has reneged for years on vows to provide them better living standards.

"We are Greek citizens too. What is it for them to give adequate housing to the Roma?" said Aristopoulou, one of tens of thousands of Roma living in Greece, which has long been accused by human rights groups, including the government's own National Commission for Human Rights, of neglecting them. Those accusations took on new strength in the run-up to the Games from organizations such as Amnesty International, the European Union and the United Nations. Among other things, the government was chastised over the eviction that cleared land for the Olympic parking lot. That Roma settlement had existed nearly 50 years.

"The Games and all the infrastructure that's been done - the highways and this and that - that's all very good and very helpful. But for us to feel good about the Olympics, we need to be housed somewhere," said one of those displaced by the parking lot, Prokopis Nikolaou, 36.

Nikolaou and others who had lived in the shack settlement said they were promised rent subsidies so they could find apartments, and were told permanent housing eventually would be built for them. But the subsidies have been consistently late or not paid at all, Nikolaou said. Two years after the forced move, he, his wife and their three children share a cramped house with other relatives because, he says, the erratic subsidies made it impossible to secure an apartment.

In addition, he said his monthly subsidy, calculated according to family size, was never raised after his wife had their third child 11 months ago. "Basically, we feel we were cheated," he said.

The Greek government denies mistreating the Roma and says they, like other fringe groups, are simply feeling the bite of enhanced police enforcement during the Games. The interior ministry did not respond to e-mailed requests for specific comments, but in response to past criticisms it has described the Roma situation as "of great concern" to Greek authorities. It says it has spent millions of dollars moving Roma into prefabricated houses to replace their shacks and tents; to build permanent housing for others; and to offer them job training.

Determining how many Roma live in Greece is difficult. Estimates range from 120,000 to a half-million, and they are scattered and subject to different treatment, depending on municipality.

Commumities Wiped Out

A common complaint by rights groups concerns evictions by local officials determined to keep Roma out of sight and away from non-Roma, who derisively call them "gyps." Such evictions picked up speed after Athens was awarded the 2004 Olympics in 1997, as local officials saw a chance to bulldoze unsightly squatter settlements, the National Human Rights Commission said in 2001.

Those in Aspropyrgos, northwest of Athens, say they ended up in their current spot after their settlement next to a dump was razed by local officials. In Spata, south of the capital, another group was moved from its settlement behind a school to a seemingly preferable spot a few miles away, on a breezy hill with a view of the sea. But four years later, the promised electricity and water never materialized, and it's too far from town for children to walk to school, or for residents to go shopping or to a doctor on foot.

Land of broken promises

The Romas who were evicted to clear land for the parking lot two years ago are scattered across the city, since no settlement was established for them.

Critics say no matter what municipalities are guilty of, the final responsibility lies with the central government, which in 1996 and 2001 unveiled plans to, among other things, build new settlements for Romas, improve existing ones and make housing loans easier. In May, a report from the UN's Economic and Social Council said few of the promises had been kept and that "persistent discrimination" against Roma existed. It also said it was "gravely concerned" about demolition of Roma housing without adequate compensation or provisions of alternative housing.

Separate lives

The Romas' nomadic past, and the illegal squatter settlements they formed when they were drawn to cities in search of work, have prompted disdain among non-Roma. Many dismiss them as criminals who choose not to integrate with other Greeks. "The Roma are always in camps. They don't want to live in houses," said Theodoros Stefanides, a university student in Athens. "These people always complain, but it's their choice to live in tents. They're difficult people."

His companion, Daphne Dedopoulou, agreed: "If they want more respect from us, they could stop selling drugs."

Those attitudes rile Roma like Spiros Parianos. "Look at our hands! They are honest, hardworking!" he said indignantly, holding out his dry, calloused hands. "We are not illegal. We don't go to steal. We don't deal drugs."

Parianos makes a living selling scrap metal. Others sell wares at street markets but have been hampered by crackdowns on nonlicensed sellers.

Nikolaou admits he was selling trinkets and housewares without a permit. And there's no question some Roma are involved in questionable businesses. As one woman in Aspropyrgos lamented her poverty, her son drove up in a flashy red BMW she insisted was paid for through selling vegetables.

Economic Reality

Human rights groups say the majority of Roma, though, are law-abiding people forced by poverty and discrimination to live on the fringes of society. Nikolaou, for example, now cruises neighborhoods selling watermelons out of the back of a truck because the crackdown makes it impossible for him to sell at the flea market.

"We spent billions to make Athens much more beautiful," said Panayote Dimitras of Greek Helsinki Monitor, a rights group that has taken up the Romas' cause. "If only a tiny fraction of that was spent for those Roma who are in need, we would have model settlements that we could brag about."

Iraqis Debate Whether to Stay or Go

Los Angeles Times
March 10, 2009 Tuesday

COLUMN ONE;

Iraqis rethink American dream;
Many who work with U.S. agencies and media are newly eligible to emigrate. But the sour economy here gives them pause.

By Tina Susman

Baghdad _ Raheem's cellphone rang as we walked through a crowded market, stepping over piles of trash and weaving around slow-moving donkey carts.

He spoke to the caller in his usual low murmur, then hung up. It was a U.S. immigration official, he told me. His application for refugee status in America had been approved. The flight was nine days away. "What do you think?" he asked, as calmly as if inviting my opinion on a new shirt.

But Raheem, who speaks English with poetic fluency and carries himself with the dignity of an Ivy League lecturer, already knew he would not go.

In Iraq, he owns property and has a job, and his son has a promising career in computer technology. Bombs, of course, still go off and gunfire still crackles in the streets. Neighborhood gossip is of sectarian killings and kidnappings. But the epidemic of bloodshed seems a thing of the past.

The local news, meanwhile, reports on America's economic woes, of foreclosed homes being auctioned off for a pittance. Word filters back from Iraqis in the U.S. who are unable to find work, struggling to afford medical care, and devouring savings that once seemed everlasting.

"It used to be that going to America was a dream. No more," said Raheem, 56, a former teacher and experienced reporter who is one of the local cast of journalists, interpreters, drivers, guards, technicians and general fix-it men and women who have kept The Times running here since the war began.

The idea of going to the United States has long been a topic of discussion among Iraqis who have worked with Americans here in aid agencies, news organizations and the U.S. military. Their jobs make them susceptible to attacks by insurgents who have taken aim at U.S.-associated institutions and their most vulnerable employees: the Iraqis who come to work for them each day.

Now the economic aspect invariably creeps into the conversation. One rumor making the rounds is that things in the United States are so bad, new refugees could be sent to Guam.

"Life here has been difficult. We did not arrive at the perfect time," one former Times staffer wrote last month from his new home on the icy East Coast.

Raheem and I have had countless conversations on this topic since last summer, after the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act made it possible for Iraqis who worked for U.S.-based media, aid agencies and the U.S. government and its contractors to receive special consideration as refugees.

Among Iraqi media workers, the first applications under the act were filed in May. A U.S. Embassy official said the number of people applying isn't disclosed, only how many Iraqis have been resettled in the United States. So far 4,409 Iraqis, including those applying under the act, have been resettled this fiscal year, which began Oct. 1.

By the time most applicants had gone through the requisite Department of Homeland Security checks, interviews and medical exams, the U.S. stock market had begun to tank. Iraq's government, meanwhile, had begun making life here more attractive by giving pay raises to civil servants, many of whom juggle their state jobs with work for American news and nongovernmental organizations.

Even with unemployment in Iraq officially at 18% -- far higher than in America -- Iraqis are eligible for monthly food rations no matter what their income. In a society where bank loans and credit cards are virtually unheard of, most people own their homes outright. And many Iraqis are flush with cash after years of having little to spend money on.

As Iraqis' earnings grew, the violence around them continued a steady drip downward. Stores, restaurants, parks and even nightclubs opened, taking the edge off the bullet-scarred landscape and relieving the suffocating boredom of the last few years, when curfews, bloodshed and religious extremism turned this once-lively society hermetic. On a recent weekend, Baghdad's Zawra Park was packed with families, young couples and children, visiting the zoo, sitting on swing sets, spinning on amusement park rides.

What used to be a simple decision to stay or leave became far more difficult for many Iraqis, with families torn over the issue. One of our drivers, Ahmed, 44, an engineer by training, is determined to leave and expects to get the call within three months.

But his wife, after initially supporting the idea, has changed her mind. She will retire soon after 22 years as a teacher and wants to enjoy her comfortable pension in Iraq's newly stable environment, not struggle to make her way in a new country, he explained one day as we maneuvered through choking traffic.

Ahmed is resigned to starting his new life alone. "I want a new identity," he said.

A reporter, Usama, 34, is undecided. He fears being unable to support his wife and their two young children in the United States, but to leave them behind in hopes of one day bringing them over? "It's a difficult equation. I'm hesitating," he confessed recently, even though he has dreamed since childhood of going to America.

For Usama, awaiting the call is a much-needed stall. It gives him breathing space while he obsesses over the issue.

At least four staffers say they still want to leave, but at least three are on the fence about what to do when the call comes in. A year ago, that was unthinkable.

Most, but not all, applicants are accepted. Some have been turned down for reasons that never quite become clear, as was the case with Qusay, a Times driver who was so certain he would be leaving that he sold everything he owned. "My house is like a mosque," he said recently, referring to its bare floors and lack of furnishings.

When Qusay, 34, got word in December of his rejection, he was distraught. In the nearly two years we had worked together, he had talked of his yearning to leave Baghdad, where he feared for his wife and children in their militia-plagued neighborhood.

But after listening to others, he says he won't fight his rejection. Instead of lamenting his lack of furniture, he's planning to buy new things. He just bought a new car and cheerfully shows off its spiffy feature: an engine that starts up with the flick of a switch when he's outside the vehicle.

"I did the right thing by not going. Every day my wife tells me this," he said with confidence, gripping the steering wheel and eyeing the traffic around us as the worry beads hanging from the rear-view mirror clacked against the windshield. His wife just got a job, bringing in a second income. His neighborhood has been cleared of the masked gunmen who once ruled the roads. Finally, the family is content.

It is a good thing that Qusay seems comfortable with staying put. Rarely do would-be Iraqi refugees get a second chance. Those who opt to stay will have to live with their decision, just as those who take the leap try to live with theirs.

"I am trying my best here and will see what will happen," said the former staffer now living on the East Coast, who earns $10 an hour at a pharmacy. "To be honest . . . the option of returning is always open for me."

--

Afghan Refugees in the Cross-Fire

Copyright 2001 Newsday, Inc. 
Newsday (New York)

September 17, 2001 Monday

TERRORIST ATTACKS;
Afghan Refugees in the Crossfire;
Many fear consequences of reprisal

By Tina Susman; STAFF WRITER

Peshawar, Pakistan - It was supposed to be a weeklong trip when Sara Rauf Lewal crossed the Khyber Pass into Pakistan from Afghanistan in 1994, just enough time to let things settle down in her tense, war-wracked homeland. But seven days stretched into seven years, and seven years may stretch into infinity for refugees like Lewal, who have escaped a succession of wars only to find themselves caught on the cusp of yet another.

In the narrow, winding alleys and mud huts of the Nasir Bagh refugee camp, the talk is not about when people might go home, but if, because the United States is poised to attack Afghanistan's Taliban rulers to avenge last week's terrorist attacks on American soil.

"The situation is so bad now, so much worse, that I can't even say if I'll be alive tomorrow, much less if I'll ever make it back to Afghanistan," said Lewal, 40, who left behind everything when she left the Afghan capital, Kabul, with her husband and seven children so long ago. "I thought I was leaving for one week only. That's why I hardly brought anything."

There was the comfortable house with the garden, furniture and indoor plumbing; her thriving beauty parlor with its hand creams and jars of colorful makeup and nail polish; jewelry, and closets of clothes. A week after arriving in Peshawar, Lewal learned that the house and business had been destroyed. Since then, she and her family have lived with more than 150,000 other Afghan refugees at Nasir Bagh, about 25 miles from the Afghan border on the outskirts of Peshawar.

The compound they share with several other families is relatively luxurious, by refugee standards. The floors are dirt but covered with rugs that, though tattered, keep the ochre dust in check. There is virtually no furniture - not so much as a single chair or footstool - but there is a ceiling fan to stir the air and electricity to fuel it and to light up the bare bulb that dangles from the straw roof. A pond of open sewage the size of a backyard swimming pool festers a few feet from the front door, but Lewal and her family have their own bathroom facility: a corner in their courtyard with makeshift brick walls for privacy and buckets of water hauled in from the camp's communal tap.

For refugee camp residents, many of whom enjoyed middle-class lives in Afghanistan, the indignity of living in squalor is made worse by the belief that their plight is a consequence of foreign meddling in their beleaguered nation, meddling that seems likely to spark an American military bombardment if the Afghan regime refuses to hand over Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born chief suspect in the attacks, which are presumed to have killed thousands of people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

"We are slaves of many masters, and what these masters say, their puppets do," said Lewal's husband, Abdul Rauf Lewal, whose sentiments echoed across the vast camp here.

"We are angry with America because Afghans have nothing to do with these terrorist activities. Osama, he was imposed on us. He is not an Afghan," said Taimoor Shah, 37, who fled Kabul nine years ago when he was a soldier in the army of the communist government of the day. "NATO and others, they armed these guerrilla groups, trained them and started all of these things."

Pakistan, which has good relations with both Washington and Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement, planned to send a delegation to Kabul today to pressure officials to give up bin Laden and save everyone the agony of a massive military confrontation. The Taliban, meanwhile, has threatened war against any country that cooperates with the United States, an ominous message to Pakistan, which is being pressed by Washington to permit use of its ground and air space to launch an attack.

If such an attack takes place, Afghan refugees say innocent civilians who remain in their country will be caught in the crossfire, and refugees such as themselves will have less chance of ever going home.

Many refugees say they don't support the Taliban, whose extreme interpretation of Islamic rules bans women from working and limits education for girls, and whose policies have led the country into economic and political isolation. But the refugees also say the U.S. government should be sure it has the right suspect before it moves against bin Laden and his Taliban hosts.

"If America wants someone, it should act against the individual, not the entire Afghan nation," said Muhammad Kabir, 42, drawing nods of agreement as he blamed today's problems on the Soviet occupation of 1979 to 1989 and large-scale covert U.S. operations to end it. During the anti-Soviet war, which pitted an unpopular communist government against Muslim guerrillas, the United States welcomed the involvement of freelance Arab volunteers, such as bin Laden, and freely armed them with shoulder-borne Stinger missiles that rendered Soviet tanks useless in the arid mountains.

Soviet fighters withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, and the government they had backed was overthrown in 1994, leading to a power struggle among the Muslim guerrilla groups. With the capture of the capital, Kabul, two years later, the hard-line Taliban assumed control of most of Afghanistan.

"The Afghan people have nothing to do with the Taliban or [bin Laden]; they didn't come by our wish," Kabir said, his voice betraying anger as he described his past life - which included a two-story house, car and running water - as "gone with the wind."

The wars have produced a virtual nation of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, where the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates the population at nearly 3 million, including about 1.5 million living in camps such as Nasir Bagh. Tens of thousands more have in recent days been fleeing Afghanistan's major cities, in anticipation of U.S. bombardment. Most of them are expected to try to enter Pakistan, but they face reluctance by Pakistani officials who already are struggling to support the current refugee population and have agreed, at the urging of U.S. officials, to soon close its borders with Afghanistan.

The problem, said UNHCR spokesman Roy Herman, is grossly inadequate international aid to provide the support needed not only to care for current refugees, but new ones.

"The number [of new refugees] could certainly be in the hundreds of thousands," Herman said. "Where do you get these resources from? How do you get [the resources] where you need them?

"And all of this is happening in a situation where the international agencies that usually work in refugee camps are evacuating their staff."

International aid agencies have evacuated their foreign staffs from Afghanistan in the wake of Taliban warnings that it could not guarantee their security in the event of a U.S. attack, and nonessential staff and their dependents are being evacuated from Peshawar, a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, as well.

The refugees already here say things couldn't get much worse for them. Two of Lewal's children, 14 and 15, are forced to work to help bring in money for the family. Her beautician's business is barely surviving because the bulk of it depends upon young women getting wedding-day makeovers and hairstyles.

"This is the wedding season, but now, with everything that's happening, nobody is getting married, so there's no business," she said.

If only outside forces would let us be, her husband said.

"Afghanistan should be allowed to decide its own future, to solve its own problems," Abdul Rauf Lewal said. "When there is an end to foreign interference, then there will be a solution."

After Sept. 11

Copyright 2001 Newsday, Inc. 
Newsday (New York)

October 21, 2001 Sunday

THE WAR ON TERROR:

In Kashmir, Sights of War Seem Natural;
Pakistan, India's fight for control has been ongoing for 54 years

By Tina Susman; STAFF WRITER

Kakutta, Pakistan - The view of India is clear from Magsood Ahmed's tiny shop and adjoining house, and so is the sound.

On a warm and dozy afternoon, the whistle of gunfire streaking in from the red-hued hills a couple of miles away interrupts conversation. It sends a jittery giggle through a cluster of village girls, who scurry toward the shelter of a house.

After a quiet minute and no return fire, the giggles fade, the girls return to lounging outside in the shade and the adults resume their conversation as if a bullet streaking through the sky on a sunny Saturday was the most natural thing in the world.

In a sense, here in the hills of Kashmir, it is. "Of course we're worried, but this has been going on since we were kids," says Ahmed's younger brother, Mustafa Ayub. "We're pretty used to it by now."

Since Pakistan became a nation 54 years ago, it has been virtually at war with India over control of Kashmir. In 1947, Britain allowed its Indian colony to divide into independent, Muslim-dominated Pakistan and Hindu-dominated India. Between them, Kashmir was a separate principality with a mixed Muslim-Hindu population and a ruling maharaja unable to decide whether to be part of India or Pakistan.

War broke out and, after an Indian-Pakistani truce in 1949, Kashmir wound up divided along the cease-fire line, the so-called Line of Control.

Both sides want it all and have resorted to all-out warfare twice, most recently in 1972, to settle the matter. Between those larger battles have been endless skirmishes that send mortars, bullets and bombs flying back and forth and often landing in villages like Kakutta, which sits just beside the Line of Control.

Normally, such flare-ups are ignored except by the people - usually civilians - most affected. On Friday afternoon, for instance, Kakutta residents say shelling pounded the area for nearly two hours and killed two civilians in a nearby town.

Occasionally, the duels make news, as they did last week when intense fighting coincided with Secretary of State Colin Powell's visit to the region. It was a reminder of the tangled web the United States is having to pick through here as it tries to maintain support in the region for its campaign against the militant Islamic leader, Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban regime of Afghanistan that protects him.

While Pakistan's logistical and intelligence support is crucial to the U.S. campaign, India can't be jilted either, lest it decide to show its resentment by stepping up the Kashmiri conflict, say political analysts. That is putting the United States in the awkward position of trying to please both foes over an issue that has proved intractable for five decades.

"The point is, who is more important in this campaign: Pakistan or India? The Americans are performing a very delicate balancing act trying to keep the squabbling allies on board," said Rifaat Hussain, the chairman of the department of defense and strategic studies at Islamabad's Quaid-I-Azam University.

If the Kashmir conflict does not intensify in coming months, it may not be enough to derail the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan, Hussain said. The danger arises if Pakistan's Taliban-backed Kashmiri forces are provoked into a full-scale retaliation against India, he said. "Then the whole situation escalates into a direct confrontation, and then the United States will have two of its allies who are part of the coalition fighting it out among themselves."

A first-time visitor to Kakutta, which lies about 50 miles northeast of the capital, Islamabad - a five-hour drive on narrow and rocky mountain passes - could be surprised to hear that anything is amiss. In the wide, rocky riverbed separating Kakutta from Rawalakot, the closest city of any size, overloaded buses, their passengers squeezed tightly against the windows, creak slowly through the shallow water and toward the steep, tree-lined hills on the Kakutta side.

In the village itself, it's business as usual in the central market and at the shop Ahmed runs, which sits down the hill from the bazaar. At times, Ahmed and his neighbors are caught in the middle when Pakistani gunners in the hills behind the market trade fire with the Indians.

Nearly everyone seems to know of someone injured by shelling or gunfire.

Ayub says his 18-year-old niece died 1 1/2 years ago from a stray bullet. The tin roof of Ahmed's house is dotted with holes, the result of shrapnel falling during a skirmish some months back.

"Naturally, we're fed up, because we run the risk of being shelled, but what can we do?" asked Ahmed. Like virtually everyone here, he blames the Indians for the problem. He and others argue that India is simply jealous of the United States' new closeness with Pakistan and is trying to punish its neighbor for that.

"It's India that's wrong. They start a lot of trouble," said Gulham Fatima, who fears her seven children, most of whom are not yet teenagers, could be caught up in the violence. "We're really worried. When they go to school, we're worried. When they go fetch water, we're worried. We can't go anywhere."

India says it has been forced to defend itself against incursions by Muslim guerrillas from Pakistan. It blames them for such incidents as the suicide bomb attack on a legislative building in Indian-ruled Kashmir two weeks ago that killed 38 people.

And, India says, Pakistan's government and military support the guerrilla movements in Kashmir by training them and providing them with the covering artillery fire they need to sneak across the mountains into India.

Despite their bitterness toward India, however, virtually everyone interviewed here said that, if given the choice, they would not be part of Pakistan, either.

They would prefer to return to the autonomy of pre-independence days, which they say is the only means of silencing the guns that have tormented them for decades. "Kashmir is not Pakistan's or India's," Fatima said. "It is our own. If we're free from both, that would be brilliant."

As for the U.S. role, Kashmiris here tended to agree that if Washington wants Pakistan's unwavering support in the fight against terrorism, it should help fight what they say is terrorism coming from Indian-ruled Kashmir.

Otherwise, said 80-year-old Mehmoud Hussain, it will prove itself a hypocrite. "The Americans say they want to fight terrorism, but they only do it to Muslim terrorists. Why not to the Indian terrorists?" he yelled, shaking his walking stick toward the hills.

Copyright 2001 Newsday, Inc. 
Newsday (New York)

October 17, 2001 Wednesday

THE WAR ON TERROR;
Ousted King in Waiting;
Under skepticism, he looks to return as Afghan leader

By Tina Susman; STAFF CORRESPONDENT

Islamabad, Pakistan - The scent of onions and garlic is as thick as the densest fog as Gul Khan picks his way through the hawkers in Islamabad's main vegetable market, peddling strips of cloth from a bulging plastic sack. At 62, he's old enough to remember life in his native Afghanistan under former King Muhammad Zahir Shah, but there's no waxing nostalgic, no yearning for the days of the monarchy as Khan takes a break from the work that has sustained him for two decades.

There's only a sense of slightly bemused wonder that, after all these years, the man who was driven by a coup from his throne in 1973 is suddenly back on Afghanistan's checkered political map and being hailed as the best bet for bringing peace to the bombed-out, bullet-riddled, mine-ridden nation. It didn't take long for Zahir Shah's name to emerge after the U.S. bombardment of Afghanistan began two weeks ago, and he is already playing the role of leader-in-waiting as the United States and its allies anticipate the collapse of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban regime. He sent a delegation to Pakistan on Monday to meet with officials of Pakistan's government, once a Taliban ally but now a backer of the U.S. action, and has been visited at his Rome home by representatives of the United Nations, the U.S. Congress and the Northern Alliance guerrilla army fighting the Taliban.

For all the high-level diplomatic fuss, though, it's hard to find average Afghans, jaded by decades of abysmal governments, bubbling with enthusiasm at the idea of yet another government, even one led by a man who presided over four decades of peace.

"He was good in the sense that he didn't breed enmity in the country, but he did nothing for the development of Afghanistan in those years. So how can I expect him now to come and do anything good?" said Khan, his snow-white beard falling to his chest and a gray turban wound carefully around his head. "He was really doing nothing wrong - nor right."

That may be the biggest selling point for the exiled ex-king: his ability to seem relatively benign, even to his critics. In a country like Afghanistan, which has suffered a string of failed governments, warlords and civil wars since the 1970s, finding a potential leader who doesn't have a downright despicable legacy is a chore in itself, and at this stage, Zahir Shah, 86, seems the only candidate.

"At the end of the day, it's a question not so much of who's the best man for the job, but who's the least unacceptable man for the job," said Najam Sethi, a Pakistani journalist and editor of the Friday Times independent news magazine, citing two crucial credentials of Zahir Shah: his Pashtun ethnic background, the same as most Afghans, and the support - albeit grudging - from the Northern Alliance. Comprised of ethnic minorities, the Northern Alliance is looking to him to promote ethnic tolerance similar to that of his reign, which would give it a share of power in a post-Taliban government, political analysts said.

Equally important, Zahir Shah alone has clean hands among leaders of a country saturated by blood; hence he could ensure foreign financial support for a post-Taliban system, said Rasul Rais of Islamabad's Quaid-I-Azam University. "He is the only respectable Afghan left untouched by the events of the past decades, so why not try him?"

Zahir Shah's biggest support comes from those who thrived during the monarchy, the middle- and upper-class elite whose fortunes crashed in the decades of instability that followed his ouster. "He was good for the poor as well as the rich. There was employment for everyone," said Zain-ul-Abiddin, 50, who worked as a government engineer during the king's days. Now he drags a plastic jug through the vegetable market selling water to thirsty traders. "Nobody can unite the people the way he can. When the king left Afghanistan, people came to realize how beneficial he had been."

Those too young to have known the monarchy, who have seen only failed governments since Zahir Shah's, also tend to favor the king's return but for vague reasons or for no reason at all. "I like the king, but I don't know why," said one produce seller, who gave his age as 27 but did not give his name. "Zahir Shah is good because I've never heard anything bad about him," said another, Sarfaraz Khan, 30. Asked if the king's age could make it difficult for him to be a strong leader, he replied: "I don't know if his memory will work, but as long as he is alive, he can do the job."

Such is the mood among many Afghans, who seem willing to accept anyone, even a king they barely know, to replace what they've got now.

Already, though, problems may be brewing for Zahir Shah. The Northern Alliance, which had agreed with him on plans for an interim leadership to take over if the Taliban falls, began backing away yesterday as it claimed gains against Taliban forces. The Alliance had supported convening a traditional council quickly to plan a government. But it now says that council should not materialize for two or three years - "after the Taliban are completely defeated" - and that the ousted government of Burhanuddin Rabbani, driven out by the Taliban in 1996, should dominate any interim leadership.

That would clash with Zahir Shah's idea of an ethnically diverse selection of Afghans deciding how to run the country if the Taliban goes.

Zahir Shah must also contend with those who blame the ex-king himself for much of the country's current strife, who say he abandoned Afghanistan and its people by never returning after the 1973 palace coup.

"Who will assure us that he will come and not repeat his previous behavior?" said Saif Ullah, 53, who, like Khan, is skeptical of Shah's intentions after being cheated by so many bad leaders. "Everybody is acceptable with good intentions," he said, "but the problem is we don't know any longer who is good and who is not good, after 23 years of war."

Copyright 2001 Newsday, Inc. 
Newsday (New York)

September 20, 2001 Thursday

AMERICA'S ORDEAL;
Legendary Passageway A Bottleneck

By Tina Susman; STAFF CORRESPONDENT

Michni Post, Pakistan - "The crime rate here is zero! Would you believe that?" Muzaffar Wazir said as the car rounded a hairpin turn of the Khyber Pass.

It isn't hard to see why. A few feet ahead, uniformed men with faces ruddy from the wind and sun patrolled with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders, their eyes scrutinizing the cars and battered trucks that rumbled along the narrow highway toward the Afghan border.

The 26-mile-long Khyber Pass, which curls like a Slinky from Pakistan's Indus River valley up into the Suleiman Mountains, has for centuries been the stuff of legend, a place heavy with gun-runners and smugglers. This road also is one of the main economic lifelines of landlocked Afghanistan, carrying overloaded trucks of food and other goods for cities such as Kabul, the capital.

But as the United States confronts Afghanistan over the fate of Osama bin Laden, Pakistan has closed the border to keep out potential pro-Taliban saboteurs as well as masses of Afghans trying to flee a feared U.S. assault. For those who live here, and survive on the commerce passing through, the U.S.-Afghan confrontation seems to raise few passions other than a desire to see it ended so that business can get back to normal.

Access to the pass, never easy, is more restricted now. At the pass's highest point, 3,600-foot Michni Post, cars heading to Afghanistan are stopped, and only a handful are permitted to go farther toward the border crossing, a couple of miles on. No Afghans are permitted to pass except for a few, mainly traders, who seem to know the guards well enough.

The road from Peshawar, the Pakistani city at the bottom of the pass, climbs past a smattering of market towns, brick military forts from the days of British colonial rule and peeling mosques. Cemeteries, their headstones fashioned of jagged rocks dragged from nearby river beds, resemble sets of badly broken teeth against the sky.

As the road leaves Peshawar, at the sprawling Kharkhano Bazaar, a large sign declares: "Entry of foreigners is prohibited beyond this point." That's because the Pakistani border region remains, by Western standards, a lawless zone. Foreigners wishing to pass must negotiate a bureaucratic labyrinth in Peshawar for the necessary permit.

Like the British before them, Pakistani rulers have never managed to enforce the laws of central government on the ethnic Pashtun tribes who inhabit the borderland. Here, the tribes and their laws rule in a wary coalition with Pakistan's border force, the Khyber Rifles paramilitary guard.

Wazir, who works as an official guide to the few foreigners permitted to visit the pass, says there is no crime in the tribal homelands because there are no police. "Police are corrupt everywhere . ... This is a universal truth," he said.

"We live by our traditions," said Wazir. Tribal law is interpreted and enforced, not by judges, but by "jirgas," or councils of elders.

As punishment for a theft, for example, a jirga might impose a fine - or order the convict's hand cut off. "The general desire is not punishment," he said. "They just want to extend the peace and tranquility of the area."

The tribal territories are not, by reputation, more tranquil than the rest of this region. Blood vendettas between clans are routine, and men openly carry AK-47 assault rifles.

As startling as the guns and the open smuggling seem to a Western visitor, little of it seems odd to people living along a route with a front-row seat to thousands of years of wars and invasions. Here, gleaming Shell gas stations share space with ancient mosques and low-slung mud hovels.

Perhaps the strangest thing to hit a foreigner here today is the apparent lack of animosity toward Westerners, given the anger of so many Pakistanis toward the United States over what they say is its unfair aggressiveness toward Afghanistan's Islamic government.

The only sign of anger is a fresh graffito reading "Go Back America" painted in white on a low, brick wall by the road. It cannot be missed by drivers but was being ignored by the turbaned men, the ragged traders pulling donkey carts, and others out walking after an afternoon downpour.

In the crowded markets and at the Michni Post, where the Khyber Rifles guards peer down the mountains at the border post in the distance, there is little sign of anger at anyone, just the slightly bored attitude of people who've seen plenty of wars before and consider this crisis a mild hiccup amid life's routines.

"It's not a new thing. Since 1979 we've seen bombs, firing, so we're used to it," said Gul Agha, a trader who walked over the rocky hills to Michni Post recently not to survey the border, but to survey the foreign journalists surveying the border.

"There's no other entertainment, so I come here, because there's some activity," Agha said. "Foreigners - they're crazy."

"I'm not worried. This is normal for us," said Agha's friend Gul Roze. He said the showdown between the United States and Afghanistan shouldn't necessarily affect Pakistanis such as himself. "Maybe it's the Afghans' problem. Maybe it's the U.S. problem. It's not our problem. We're just concerned for our own interests."

Right now, those interests include getting traffic back into the Khyber Pass. The international crisis that is focused on this region has made business very difficult for the traders here, who deal in anything from grapes to guns.

For that reason, perhaps, the pass' residents seem far removed from the passionate anti-U.S. rallies that have been held by fundamentalist Islamic groups down in Peshawar. While Pakistanis at the rallies have shouted their readiness to join a holy war against the United States, people like Roze and Agha say they want everyone to keep a cool head and, most important, to abide by the strict traditions that govern the Pashtun people living here and in Afghanistan.

That includes lavish hospitality, including sheltering one's enemy or even a wanted criminal if he seeks help.

"If there is some solid proof against Osama bin Laden which is acceptable to the world community, we would have no objection" to Afghanistan handing him to the United States, Roze said. Even he admitted, though, that this could clash with the Pashtun culture of hospitality and finally concluded there was no simple solution. "We would probably choose the Pashtun [code], but we like justice, also," he said. The Khyber Pass The Khyber Pass is a 26-mile-long passage. It connects the northern frontier of Pakistan with Afghanistan. The pass is only about one mile at its widest point and a mere 50 feet at its narrowest. Contingents of Pakistan's Khyber Rifles, the Pakistani paramilitary force, have been deployed across the hills of the desolate frontier crossing to monitor the border.

Copyright 2001 Newsday, Inc. 
Newsday (New York)

September 17, 2001 Monday

TERRORIST ATTACKS;
Afghan Refugees in the Crossfire;
Many fear consequences of reprisal

By Tina Susman; STAFF WRITER

Peshawar, Pakistan - It was supposed to be a weeklong trip when Sara Rauf Lewal crossed the Khyber Pass into Pakistan from Afghanistan in 1994, just enough time to let things settle down in her tense, war-wracked homeland. But seven days stretched into seven years, and seven years may stretch into infinity for refugees like Lewal, who have escaped a succession of wars only to find themselves caught on the cusp of yet another.

In the narrow, winding alleys and mud huts of the Nasir Bagh refugee camp, the talk is not about when people might go home, but if, because the United States is poised to attack Afghanistan's Taliban rulers to avenge last week's terrorist attacks on American soil.

"The situation is so bad now, so much worse, that I can't even say if I'll be alive tomorrow, much less if I'll ever make it back to Afghanistan," said Lewal, 40, who left behind everything when she left the Afghan capital, Kabul, with her husband and seven children so long ago. "I thought I was leaving for one week only. That's why I hardly brought anything."

There was the comfortable house with the garden, furniture and indoor plumbing; her thriving beauty parlor with its hand creams and jars of colorful makeup and nail polish; jewelry, and closets of clothes. A week after arriving in Peshawar, Lewal learned that the house and business had been destroyed. Since then, she and her family have lived with more than 150,000 other Afghan refugees at Nasir Bagh, about 25 miles from the Afghan border on the outskirts of Peshawar.

The compound they share with several other families is relatively luxurious, by refugee standards. The floors are dirt but covered with rugs that, though tattered, keep the ochre dust in check. There is virtually no furniture - not so much as a single chair or footstool - but there is a ceiling fan to stir the air and electricity to fuel it and to light up the bare bulb that dangles from the straw roof. A pond of open sewage the size of a backyard swimming pool festers a few feet from the front door, but Lewal and her family have their own bathroom facility: a corner in their courtyard with makeshift brick walls for privacy and buckets of water hauled in from the camp's communal tap.

For refugee camp residents, many of whom enjoyed middle-class lives in Afghanistan, the indignity of living in squalor is made worse by the belief that their plight is a consequence of foreign meddling in their beleaguered nation, meddling that seems likely to spark an American military bombardment if the Afghan regime refuses to hand over Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born chief suspect in the attacks, which are presumed to have killed thousands of people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

"We are slaves of many masters, and what these masters say, their puppets do," said Lewal's husband, Abdul Rauf Lewal, whose sentiments echoed across the vast camp here.

"We are angry with America because Afghans have nothing to do with these terrorist activities. Osama, he was imposed on us. He is not an Afghan," said Taimoor Shah, 37, who fled Kabul nine years ago when he was a soldier in the army of the communist government of the day. "NATO and others, they armed these guerrilla groups, trained them and started all of these things."

Pakistan, which has good relations with both Washington and Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement, planned to send a delegation to Kabul today to pressure officials to give up bin Laden and save everyone the agony of a massive military confrontation. The Taliban, meanwhile, has threatened war against any country that cooperates with the United States, an ominous message to Pakistan, which is being pressed by Washington to permit use of its ground and air space to launch an attack.

If such an attack takes place, Afghan refugees say innocent civilians who remain in their country will be caught in the crossfire, and refugees such as themselves will have less chance of ever going home.

Many refugees say they don't support the Taliban, whose extreme interpretation of Islamic rules bans women from working and limits education for girls, and whose policies have led the country into economic and political isolation. But the refugees also say the U.S. government should be sure it has the right suspect before it moves against bin Laden and his Taliban hosts.

"If America wants someone, it should act against the individual, not the entire Afghan nation," said Muhammad Kabir, 42, drawing nods of agreement as he blamed today's problems on the Soviet occupation of 1979 to 1989 and large-scale covert U.S. operations to end it. During the anti-Soviet war, which pitted an unpopular communist government against Muslim guerrillas, the United States welcomed the involvement of freelance Arab volunteers, such as bin Laden, and freely armed them with shoulder-borne Stinger missiles that rendered Soviet tanks useless in the arid mountains.

Soviet fighters withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, and the government they had backed was overthrown in 1994, leading to a power struggle among the Muslim guerrilla groups. With the capture of the capital, Kabul, two years later, the hard-line Taliban assumed control of most of Afghanistan.

"The Afghan people have nothing to do with the Taliban or [bin Laden]; they didn't come by our wish," Kabir said, his voice betraying anger as he described his past life - which included a two-story house, car and running water - as "gone with the wind."

The wars have produced a virtual nation of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, where the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates the population at nearly 3 million, including about 1.5 million living in camps such as Nasir Bagh. Tens of thousands more have in recent days been fleeing Afghanistan's major cities, in anticipation of U.S. bombardment. Most of them are expected to try to enter Pakistan, but they face reluctance by Pakistani officials who already are struggling to support the current refugee population and have agreed, at the urging of U.S. officials, to soon close its borders with Afghanistan.

The problem, said UNHCR spokesman Roy Herman, is grossly inadequate international aid to provide the support needed not only to care for current refugees, but new ones.

"The number [of new refugees] could certainly be in the hundreds of thousands," Herman said. "Where do you get these resources from? How do you get [the resources] where you need them?

"And all of this is happening in a situation where the international agencies that usually work in refugee camps are evacuating their staff."

International aid agencies have evacuated their foreign staffs from Afghanistan in the wake of Taliban warnings that it could not guarantee their security in the event of a U.S. attack, and nonessential staff and their dependents are being evacuated from Peshawar, a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, as well.

The refugees already here say things couldn't get much worse for them. Two of Lewal's children, 14 and 15, are forced to work to help bring in money for the family. Her beautician's business is barely surviving because the bulk of it depends upon young women getting wedding-day makeovers and hairstyles.

"This is the wedding season, but now, with everything that's happening, nobody is getting married, so there's no business," she said.

If only outside forces would let us be, her husband said.

"Afghanistan should be allowed to decide its own future, to solve its own problems," Abdul Rauf Lewal said. "When there is an end to foreign interference, then there will be a solution."