WASHINGTON: Were there ever other international manhunts such as the United States is currently staging for Osama bin Laden? Well, yes. As a matter of fact, at least three come to mind — all roughly a century ago as America was flexing its newfound muscles on the world stage. All bear curious parallells to the present search.
The US sent the Navy after Sharif Ahmed-er-Raisuli, a Moroccan known as the last of the Barbary pirates, and leaned on his host country to force him to free American hostages. The US sent Marines after Philippine rebel Emilio Aguinaldo, and tricked him into captivity after breaking his codes. And the US sent the Army into Mexico after border raider Pancho Villa. The US never caught him, despite an 11-month search incorporating both the last use of mounted cavalry and the first use of air power and tanks in a US military campaign.
All three were denounced as terrorists at the time, though historians since have viewed their actions in a far more ambiguous light. Aguinaldo, for example, has come to be recognized as the true father of Philippine independence. The son of a part-Indian mother and a Chinese vegetable peddler who had been mayor of Cavite on the island of Luzon, he organized armed resistance in 1896 against what was then an oppressive Spanish colonial government in Manila. The Spanish bought him off the next year, sending him into exile.
In 1898, he was returned to the Philippines with the help of the United States, a month after the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Just as the United States would later fund Afghan guerrillas against the Soviet Union, it unleashed Aguinaldo to incite Filipino resistance against Spain, convincing him that the United States wanted only to secure liberation and democracy for the islands.
In May 1904, a wealthy Greek American expatriate named Ion Perdicaris was kidnapped from his summer villa above Tangier. He and his stepson were snatched from their vine-covered terrace by a band of armed Arabs who bound them, threw them onto horses and escaped toward the Atlas Mountains. Leading them was a handsome, black-bearded Moor, who mounted Perdicaris’s personal black stallion and thundered to the awe-struck household staff before galloping off: “I am the Raisuli!”
The American consul frantically cabled Washington for help. The only hope for Perdicaris, he knew, was to pressure the sultan into granting Raisuli’s demands. But that was political gunpowder at home, where news of the kidnapping prompted jingoistic outrage.
The French, anxious not to provoke its new colonial subjects with an overt show of force, arranged a $20,000 loan for the sultan and quietly pressured him to accede to all of Raisuli’s demands. Raisuli, Perdicaris said, had been not ruthless but charming and hospitable, furnishing his captives with their own tents, mattresses and servants and hosting elaborate dinners marked by his own highly intelligent and enlightening conversation.
Perhaps the greatest pre-Osama manhunt by the United States was that launched in 1916 for the Mexican bandit-turned-revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa. Villa led 1,000 of his Villista raiders across the border to sack Columbus, New Mexico, about 35 miles west of El Paso. In the two-hour battle, 18 Americans were killed. President Woodrow Wilson promptly ordered a search led by Gen John “Black Jack” Pershing. Pershing’s rules of engagement made it impossible to find Villa, who in any case was a master of the local terrain —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.