But nothing is impossible, of course. Especially if, as Bremer argues, the Iraqi people are beginning to use this freedom that they have never known, and can get used to it, in a climate in which basic order is guaranteed. Today this order can only come from the coalition forces, or — and this would be a better option — from an international peace force sponsored by the United Nations.
As I’m leaving Ambassador Bremer’s office, Lieutenant Colonel Juan Delgado and colonel Javier Sierra turn up. They breathe a sigh of relief. They have spent the entire morning looking for us in the labyrinth of enclosures, barriers, control points and patrols in the former domains of Saddam Hussein.
‘We are alive,’ we reassure them, ‘but we’re dying of thirst. Give us any cold drink, please, even one of those sweet Coca-Colas’.
The following morning, during the long journey through the desert from Baghdad to Amman, from where I’ll fly back to Europe, I ask myself yet again — I have done so every day in Iraq — if I was right or wrong to oppose the war that the United States decided unilaterally, without the support of the United Nations, to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The truth is that the two reasons offered by Bush and Blair to justify armed intervention — the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the link between the Iraqi government and the Al Qaeda terrorists — have not been proven and, at this moment, seem more improbable. Formally, then, the reasons I had to oppose the war were valid.
But what if the argument to intervene had been, clearly and explicitly, to put an end to an execrable and genocidal tyranny which had caused innumerable deaths and kept a whole nation in obscurantism and barbarity, and to restore their sovereignty? Three months ago, I’m not so sure, but now, with what I have seen and heard in this short stay, I would have supported the intervention, without hesitation. Without the intervention, Saddam Hussein might have fallen, but from a coup organised within his own clique, which would have prolonged the tyranny indefinitely, with other despots taking his place. And the fate of the overwhelming majority of Iraqis would remain the same for an indefinite time, a life of shame and backwardness. That isn’t a pessimistic view — just look around the whole of the Middle East — but a strictly realistic one. All the suffering that the armed intervention has inflicted on the Iraqi people is small compared to the horror they suffered under Saddam Hussein. Now, for the first time in its long history, they have the chance to break the vicious circle of dictatorship after dictatorship that they have lived under and — like Germany and Japan after the war — begin a new phase, embracing the culture of freedom, the only thing that can ward off any resurrection of the past. For this to become a reality depends not just on the Iraqis, although theirs, of course, is the main responsibility. It depends above all now on the cooperation and the material and political support of the democratic countries of the entire world, beginning with the European Union.
25 June–6 July 2003
A Story about Rats
When President Fujimori fled Peru and the dictatorship that he headed for ten years collapsed like a deck of cards, the new people in charge, who had been elected by Congress to ensure a clean electoral process, found that the Government Palace had been completely stripped by its former occupants (they had taken away even the ashtrays and the sheets) and had been horribly decorated with huachafo touches (huachafería is the Peruvian variant of vulgar taste).
They also found that the former House of Pizarro was a rats’ nest. The company hired to cleanse the palace of rats captured and counted before burning them — they assured me that these were round figures — some 6,200 rodents which had been lodging in the basements, the nooks, the shelves and the recesses of the building that for four-and-a-half centuries has been an emblem of the history of Peru.
I see these palace rats bequeathed by the dictatorship to a democracy that is now rising from the ashes, in the midst of great difficulties, as an allegory for what is happening in Peru. In many respects the changes are great and exciting. The country has recovered its liberty, its freedom of speech, and criticism is now wide-ranging and often quite fierce, parties and political leaders debate and contest positions on all sides, and the fight against the corruption of the infamous decade has not stopped. Quite the reverse — for the first time in the history of Peru we find a considerable number of military men, businessmen, media owners, traffickers of influence and privilege, behind bars for robbery and other crimes committed under the protection of the authoritarian regime, and the Judiciary, which is being purged, is going about its business quite independently and firmly. It is the case that a good number of those accused of fraud, corruption and violations have fled, within the country or abroad, before the law could catch up with them. But, even so, for once it seems that there will be no impunity — no cleaning of the slate and starting again — for a large number of people who, over ten years, committed serious crimes against human rights and democracy, and pillaged the state, amassing vast fortunes.
This encouraging outlook is somewhat overshadowed by the deep economic crisis which has impoverished the country, caused very high unemployment and a fall in the standard of living, and has hit, with particular brutality, the most disadvantaged sectors. For that reason, social demands are very high, which doubtless caused President Toledo to make exaggerated promises in his electoral campaign which can never be fulfilled. All this has caused a state of unrest and social conflict, which makes agreement difficult.
To a large extent the economic crisis is a direct consequence of the systematic and widespread plunder that the gang headed by Fujimori and Montesinos perpetrated over ten years, by use of force and coercion. To give you an idea: of the almost ten billion dollars that came into the state’s coffers over this period as a result of privatisations, which were usually only carried through to transfer public monopolies over to private monopolies or to benefit groups that were complicit with, or acted as straw men for, the regime’s inner circle, not a single cent remains. Taking off certain concrete debt repayments and payments to cover the fiscal deficit, it is the case that most of this enormous sum mysteriously disappeared without trace. That is, it became lost in the labyrinth of fiscal havens and secret bank accounts of the Fujimori mafia who have been evicted from power but have left the country in a comatose economic state.
The economic power of this Fujimori mafia is almost intact because very little money has been recuperated or frozen in the foreign bank accounts of the numerous guilty parties. And the recent experience of countries that have liberated themselves from kleptomaniac dictatorial regimes and tried to recoup what has been stolen shows us that, unfortunately, we should not hold out too much hope of getting back the money stolen by the henchmen (and some hench-women) of the dictatorship.