George Bush’s secret war that goes unreported

WASHINGTON: When security agents took away her husband in the middle of the night they did not tell Ellah Ulusam that Washington had just opened a new front in its “war against terror”. They said he would be back the next day. Arif Ulusam vanished along with four other Muslim men, all arrested at home, handcuffed and bundled into a car for a bizarre odyssey which has not yet ended.

This is a part of George Bush’s war which does not make it on to television news, for it is waged on a front so remote few know it exists. In less eventful times what happened would be considered extraordinary. As it is, their story has been barely reported.

On June 22 Malawi security agents seized five men in Limbe, outside Malawi’s commercial capital Blantyre, and spirited them out of the country on suspicion of belonging to Al Qaeda, earning praise from the US ambassador.

Relatives were distraught. “Taking Arif away was a big loss to me. I was stranded. I didn’t know what was going on,” says Ellah, 27, cradling her daughter Kardelen, not yet three. “Kardelen misses her father so much, she puts on his shoes, kisses his shirts.”

Following the script from Afghanistan and other countries where terror suspects have been snatched, it seemed these were more Muslims destined for orange jumpsuits, their guilt or innocence to be decided at a future date by a US military tribunal. Except a funny thing happened on the way to Guantanamo — they were released.

Some details remain murky but enough is known to illuminate dark corners of Washington’s “anti-terror” tactics: Without telling their own embassy, US intelligence agents appear to have bullied the Malawi government into a swoop which triggered Muslim riots. The abductions were illegal and also, it seems, a blunder.

Malawi is a small landlocked country in southern Africa. Extremely poor, it was nonetheless peaceful, stable and a fledgling democracy. A fifth of its 10 million people are Muslim but no one pointed the finger when Al Qaeda attacked in Tanzania and Kenya. That changed in the early hours of June 22. Dozens of security agents arrested five suspects and carted away their files, books, mobile phones, photographs, floppy discs and computers in black bin-liners.

The men lived and worked in Limbe but were foreigners: Arif Ulusam, owner of Istanbul, a fast food restaurant, is Turkish; Ibrahim Itabaci, headmaster of the Bedir international school, is also Turkish; Mahmud Sardar Issa, coordinator for a charity called the Zakaat Fund Trust, is Sudanese; Khalifa Abdi Hassan, a scholar at the Muslim Association of Malawi, is Kenyan; Fahad Ral Bahli, director of the Malawi branch of Registered Trustees of the Prince Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz Special Committee on Relief, is Saudi Arabian.

“They said Arif would be released the next day,” said Mrs Ulusam. “But when we went to the police station he wasn’t there and nobody could tell us anything.” All organs of the Malawi state refused to say why or where the men were taken.

Their relatives hired a team of lawyers led by Shabir Latif, who practised at the bar in the UK. “Malawi has the best constitution south of the Sahara and guarantees basic rights which were denied my clients,” he said. A high court judge issued an injunction barring deportation, ordering the authorities to charge the men or release them on bail.

It made no difference. The five were spirited abroad. “Who can I produce in court now? Their ghosts?” Fahad Assani, Malawi’s director of public prosecutions, asked the court in exasperation. “These people are out of reach for us. It’s the Americans who know where they are.”

Amnesty International noted the irony of the men being transferred on the day the State Department released a report about US efforts to promote human rights worldwide. Colin Powell also recently lectured African leaders on respecting the rule of law. “I’ve never been as depressed on a case as this one,” said Latif. “No evidence was ever produced.”

The closest the US came to admitting custody was a statement from its ambassador, Roger Meece, praising Malawi as a partner in the fight against terrorism. It was said the men were accused of channelling money to Al Qaeda and had been on the CIA’s “watch list” since the 1998 bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Nothing more was heard until July 24 when lawyers heard that Fahad Ral Bahli had surfaced in Riyadh and the other four in Sudan, all free men. Hub-Eddin Abbakar, a colleague of the Sudanese suspect, said they had been handed over to their respective embassies in Khartoum after the CIA decided they were innocent.

To end up in a country on Washington’s terror list is only slightly more bizarre than reports that the Air Malawi plane chartered by the US stopped off in Zimbabwe on the way to a third country, possibly Djibouti or Uganda, where the men were questioned for a month.

US officials declined interview requests, but one western diplomat said the State Department had been kept in the dark by the CIA and that the ambassador’s praise for Malawi was an attempt to save face.

Malawi’s Muslims are furious, said Altaf Gahi, president of Blantyre’s Muslim Jamaat, and some are likely to become radicalized. The resort town of Mangochi erupted in rioting which wrecked Christian churches and the offices of the US aid agency Save the Children, and left several people wounded. “It was like doomsday to us. I ran away with my family, the mob could have killed us,” said Meleka Thom Phiri, pastor of the Assemblies of God church.

Three theories try to explain the fiasco. Malawi officials distrusted foreigners who mobilized Muslims, even for good works, and persuaded the US to intervene. “The US intelligence is too well equipped to make such a mistake. Somebody must have cooked the evidence for them,” said Hub-Eddin Abbakar.

Others say that the CIA knew the men were innocent but wanted to disrupt Malawi’s Muslim organizations, with skills and money coming from Arab countries, before it risked being infiltrated by terrorists. The same principle of pre-emption used to justify attacking Iraq, but on a micro-scale. “The work these guys were doing won’t resume,” predicted one Muslim businessman.

The third theory is of a cock-up. The day before the arrests, the Sudanese man and both Turks were questioned about stolen cars by men who said they were from Interpol. Ibrahim Itabaci had recently bought a second-hand car, according to Ellah Ulusam, which the detectives suspected of having been shipped from South Africa. Some of the Malawi officials investigating the cars were spotted among the agents who arrested the five men.

An impoverished country. Muslim men with money and means. Stolen vehicles. Al Qaeda active in the region. From the CIA’s viewpoint it could have added up to something sinister. It seems the agency was wrong. But for Malawi, now a land of kidnappings, riots and religious tension, that is exactly how things have added up.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.

A young poet eulogized

ABRAR Nadeem, the young editor of Aryung, a monthly devoted to the publication of news about literature and literary events, keeps arranging functions to project some newly published books. The latest, held recently in a local hotel, was the launching of a poetic collection of Ali Akbar Mansoor titled, Teri Awaz Chali Aati Heh. The function was presided over by the Baba-lover, Ashfaq Ahmed, while the proceedings were conducted by the petite Qindeel. In fact, she started off by making an observation. No doubt time keeps a changing, she said, but feelings and emotions always remained static. Referring to the poet of the evening, she said his poetry was generally based on love and he expressed his feelings in a straightforward and lucid manner.

Prof Shafiq Ahmed Khan who spoke on the occasion said Ali Akbar Mansoor wrote excellent prose as well but poetry was his first love. Moreover, despite having read most of the other poets there was no evidence that his poetry was influenced by others.

Among those who spoke that evening about the poet and his creative work were Ataul Haq Qasmi, Baqi Ahmedpuri, Zahid Masud and Shahzad Ahmed. Almost all of them felt that some psychological aspects were reflected in his poetry. Mostly concentrating on the ghazal in its purest form, his verses did not appear stale even when read for the second or the third time. Shahzad Ahmed who had already seen two books written by the poet about Muslim psychologists reiterated his observation that psychology played a prominent role in the poetry of Ali Akbar Mansoor.

In his presidential remarks, Ashfaq Ahmed said that in no way could Ali Akbar Mansoor be called a poet of pathos as his verses gave glimpses of cheer and hope. While going through his poetry one felt that the poet had not depended on hearsay or banked on the experiences of others but had personally passed through all that he expressed in his poetry. Ashfaq Ahmed was particularly appreciative of the spontaneity in his expression.

HUMOUR in Urdu literature is rather scarce. The reason probably is that we do not know how to laugh at our own selves. It is surprising, therefore, that I have recently seen a book Jhoot Boley Kava Katey by Sibte Akhtar who knows how to laugh at himself and in the process makes the reader go into convulsions with laughter. Living in the United States for quite some years, he has created humour through stories of everyday life in a foreign country. I’ll give an example here.

It is a story about the difficulty a Pakistani lady faces while conversing with an American. This is how it goes: My wife was travelling in a bus with her small daughter. An old lady sitting next to her asked her how many kids did she have. “I have two kids but only one kidney,” replied his wife pointing to the daughter. The old lady was astounded. “Only one kidney,” she said in surprise, “don’t you have any problem?”

“Problem? What problem? No problem. Big sister three kidney. Little sister, no kidney.”

The old lady was almost scared. “Are you all right?” she asked sitting a little distance away from her.

“Yes, I are all right.”

“Strange, very strange, “said the old lady. “But don’t worry, my brother is a very good surgeon. I’ll talk to him, he’ll look after everything.”

And his wife was confused. What, after all, she thought, would the surgeon do with so many girls?

Sibte Akhtar seems to be a well read person as well. He quotes extensively, and appropriately, from books of prose and poetry.

I REALLY do not know how those dealing with figures all the time manage to indulge in something lighter and go on to write poetry. Talking of millions and trillions they suddenly come down to counting fading beats of a heart and calculating the miseries of someone in love with a cruel girl. They touch two extremes, don’t they? From Jamiluddin Aali and Rasul Ahmed Kaleemi down to Zaman Kunjahi, they are all bankers. In between is Shahid Wasti whose latest collection of verse, Tamazat Kum Nahin Hoti, is before me.

A veteran in the field of poetry, Shahid Wasti’s first collection, Rutton Ke Darmian, came up in 1985 followed by a second edition in 1988. Then came Zar-i-Sukhan in 1989 and Samandar Mein Sitarey in 1992. He finally produced a book carrying all his poetry, Kulliyat, as it is called, and gave it the title Aye Jazba-i-Dil. Now a Kulliyat is supposed to be the final publication of a poet; by publishing that he seems to be saying: expect no more from me. But now Shahid Wasti has given his readers something more to concentrate upon. His Tamazat Kum Nahin Hoti shows how good he is at the ghazal, the queen of all genres of Urdu poetry, as the late Prof Gilani Kamran regarded it. He creates new angles of behaviour in his verse and makes one feel that he is at fault:

Dil hi kafi heh tujhey razon key rakhney key liye

Aankh jaisi shey ko roshandan karna chor de

Har kisi ka zarf is qabil nahi hota aziz

Nekion ka har taraf eilan karna chor de

The collection, published by Mavara Books is replete with excellent verses of ghazal. However, the poet has thought it fit to include the poems he had written to mourn the death of many poets. Although I appreciate the spirit in which he has composed those poems, their inclusion in this collection goes to reduce the impact of his ghazals which are outstanding in every respect. — ASHFAQUE NAQVI