Journalist's Journal: Drinking tea with terrorists
By Peter Greste Posted Sep 30 2009
Let me begin with a politically incorrect confession: I like the Taliban.
And Somalia’s Islamic Courts Union. And the FARC in Colombia. I also happen to have a soft spot for the National Congress for the Defense of the People in the DR Congo (they make very good cheese, indeed).
Let me hasten to add that I don’t necessarily agree with all their politics or sympathize with their causes, but if there’s one thing that almost 15 years of reporting on rebels has taught me, it’s that a lot of them are really rather nice guys.
Everyone loves a good Western. Cowboys and Indians. Goodies vs. baddies. Cops and robbers. But too often as journalists, we tend to fall into the trap of confirming the rhetoric that our politicians use to carve up the world into black and white.
George W. Bush’s pronouncements after 9/11—that the world is either with the U.S. or against it—helped blot out so many shades of gray in the West’s understanding of these insurgencies that we all began to think in terms of friends and enemies. In a lot of reporting of conflict and rebellion, there has been a tendency to discover what we already believe.
For me, the problem stretched back to 1995, when I first encountered the Taliban. Back then, they were what the movement’s name suggested—a movement of Islamic students, born in the refugee camps, that housed millions of isolated and embittered Afghans who had fled to Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Poor, angry and determined to re-assert control over the country that the warlords had ravaged, they reached for the only form of law and order that they knew: Sharia law, enforced down the barrel of an AK-47.
At the time, I was a freelance correspondent in Kabul, covering Afghanistan for both the BBC and Reuters (among others). The Taliban had fought their way north from Kandahar, returning a degree of stability to the countryside and establishing a reputation for the ruthless and brutal suppression of women, the abolition of frivolities like music and kites, and a hatred of “infidels.”
As a confirmed infidel myself, I was nervous about my first meeting with their frontline commander, Mullah Mashr (pronounced through gritted teeth). Through my translator, we had made some early contact with the Taliban’s senior commanders back in Kandahar. They had assured us that everything would be “fine” if we popped into their newly established forward command post in Maidan Shah to the southwest of Kabul. But as we crossed the government’s front lines and approached the surly-looking Pashtun with the black turban fingering the trigger on his PK machine-gun at the Taliban checkpoint, my bowels began to do a little jig.
Even Hajji, my usually unflappable driver, seemed anxious as the Taliban pressed their noses and guns against the window, demanding to see some identification. But the moment we presented our press IDs, their grim, dusty faces split into wide grins and a burst of excited chatter.
We were welcomed into the Taliban’s austere forward headquarters—the government’s long-abandoned local offices, where we met the legendary Mashr. Instead of the tirade of anti-West, anti-Christian bigotry I’d been expecting, the Taliban commander offered us tea and lunch and a lively, intelligent discussion of the movement’s philosophies. And that was it: a debate, not a polemic.
In its early days, the Taliban was a genuinely conflicted movement, locked in a vigorous internal debate between the moderates who saw Sharia law as an interim, necessary stage in the process of defeating the warlords and the hard-line fundamentalists who believed that the only solution was to drive the country back to the days of the prophet.
Over the following year, I had countless discussions over endless cups of tea about the relative merits of Islam and Christianity, the theological basis for their movement and the international response to it all. They were always friendly, tolerant debates, usually ending with a huge guffaw, a slap on the back and an invitation to convert.
There is no doubt that since then the Taliban have morphed into a group of drug-running radical extremists, but I am also convinced that the obsession of many reporters with the darker corners of Sharia law fuelled the West’s rather hysterical response. Isolated and shunned by donors and diplomats, the radicals had all the ammunition they needed to win that internal debate and drive the movement into the arms of Al-Qaeda.
I’m not for a moment suggesting that it is all the media’s fault. But too few reporters went to see and talk to the Taliban, and even fewer tried to get a nuanced understanding of what they were all about.
The same is true of the FARC—the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. As one of the world’s longest-established Marxist rebel movements, they had a much more deeply embedded ideological framework. And nobody is disputing the fact that they financed their operations with cocaine. But labeling the FARC as “commie drug-runners” doesn’t help anyone understand the core of the problem.
Back in 2002, the Colombian government became fed up with the FARC and scrapped its “Safe Haven”—a Switzerland-sized chunk of territory in the middle of the country where the army had agreed to leave the rebels alone in exchange for peace talks.
After the FARC hijacked a plane and forced it to land on a stretch of highway inside the safe haven, the then-president Andres Pastrana sent the troops in to the main town of San Vicente del Caguan and re-claimed control over the entire territory. To prove it, they flew in a contingent of journalists on Blackhawk helicopters, skimming low and fast over the treetops.
The town looked stable enough and firmly in the hands of the troops who maintained a heavy presence. But I and another BBC colleague wanted to test the claim.
In a hired car, we drove out of town to see how far we could get—in retrospect, a rather stupid move, given the FARC’s reputation for kidnapping. First, we passed the combat zone—a stretch of territory around the town that had clearly been the scene of some recent fighting. Burned-out cars, empty shell casings, some bloody bandages; all the detritus of fresh battles.
Then, there were the FARC camps: abandoned collections of huts, mess halls and parade grounds daubed with Marxist slogans.
But barely 15 kilometers from the edge of town, we found a man with Kalashnikov lounging against a gate and picking his teeth with a splinter of wood.
“Can you tell us who’s in control here?” we cautiously inquired.
“FARC,” came the casual response.
“And can we talk to your boss?”
He nodded in the direction of a farmhouse a few hundred yards away and scratched his belly.
Again, we spent several fruitful hours over a meal of lamb stew, engaged in a discussion about the FARC, cocaine trafficking and kidnapping.
The local commander and his colleagues had clearly been through endless lectures on Marxism, but the logic was clear and well thought out: without root-and-branch land reform, the peasants would always remain marginalized and oppressed. Using cocaine to finance their rebellion was perfectly legitimate, particularly if it exploited a weakness in Latin America’s biggest post-colonial power.
Regardless of whether you agree with the rhetoric, the fact is that the FARC still enjoy enormous support amongst those they claim to protect. Back in San Vicente del Caguan, we found plenty of locals who, after a quick glance over their shoulders, were willing to praise the FARC for the discipline, order and efficiency with which they ran the town.
Understanding that gets you much closer to a resolution than simply dismissing the rebels as a bunch of well-organized criminals.
The now-defunct CNDP in eastern Congo was slightly harder to bump into. Its commander, Laurent Nkunda, is a lanky charismatic Tutsi, branded as a war criminal by the Congolese government. The Rwandans have him in detention (under “house arrest”), but at the time we went to see him early last year, he was trying to refashion himself as a political leader.
Making contact with the CNDP was a more complicated affair than either the Taliban or FARC. Several NGOs who operated across the region had contact with each of the rebel movements out of necessity. Through them, we managed to get word to Nkunda’s “spies” operating in the government-controlled regional capital of Goma. Eventually, after several frustrating days, we got hold of a phone number. Our contact agreed to make the arrangements.
After a hushed meeting in a café with an intermediary, we received a set of directions and an assurance that “the chairman” was willing and available to receive us.
Laurent Nkunda met us at his family estate—a dairy farm high in the hills above Goma that looks more like bucolic England than the heart of Africa. There, once more over a meal of fresh milk, homemade cheese and yogurt we tried to understand Nkunda’s logic.
The challenge with the Eastern Congo is its complexity. The CNDP was the most powerful military force in the region until it was folded into the Congolese army earlier this year under an agreement between Kinshasa, Rwanda and a one of Nkunda’s own deputies.
The fact that it could vanish as a military force virtually overnight speaks volumes about the layers of interests and political forces that continue to confound almost every “expert” that I’ve ever spoken to about the Congo. As one analyst told me, “anyone who claims to know what’s going on here really hasn’t got a clue.”
But for a while the chairman made some sense. His claim to be protecting the region’s Tutsis against the remnants of the Interahamwe who’d been responsible for the Rwandan genocide holds water. The Congolese government has signally failed to deal with the Hutu extremists who fled over the border at the end of the brief war.
That’s not to suggest that Nkunda is innocent of the charges of war crimes—he too has a lot of blood on his hands, and his troops have been guilty of rape, murder and recruiting child soldiers. But until the authorities understand and deal with the logic that underpins his rebellion, the conflict is bound to simmer on.
By all this, I don’t mean to imply that a pen, a camera and a sympathetic ear are all that’s needed to deal with rebel movements. It is often extremely dangerous, as several journalists who’ve tried to reach the Islamists in Somalia can attest (at the time of writing, two journalists—an Australian and a Canadian—were still being held hostage, more than eight months after being kidnapped in Mogadishu.)
My producer, Kate Peyton, was also gunned down after we arrived in Somalia in February 2005 to cover a range of stories including the emergence of the Islamic Courts Union. We still don’t know who killed her or why, but the incident underscores the very grave risks we all take in covering these kinds of stories.
But Kate and the two reporters still being held captive all understood the risks and still chose to take them. Because someone has to be willing to do the tough and at times perilous work of getting inside these groups if we’re ever going to resolve the problems that spawned them.