Touchstones

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  In the hottest morning of my life, when we were already half an hour late for the interview, Morgana decided, boldly and inopportunely, to teach the US army a lesson in good manners and started to shout at the platoon sergeant that she would not put up with abuse, with people raising their voices, or with this complete lack of cooperation from uncouth army men, to the extent that I thought that, apart from not seeing Bremer, it was quite likely that my bones would soon be resting in one of the dungeons of the despot’s palace. At that moment, providentially, a lieutenant appeared in his slippers, who saw reason. He understood the whole thing and asked us to follow him. That is how we reached the antechamber of the ambassador. Fifteen minutes later a friendly colonel appeared, one of the proconsul’s deputies, who asked us if we were here for the interview that Ambassador Bremer was to give to a Nobel Prize winner. Had the splendid Miguel Moro Aguilar, the head of the Spanish Embassy who had arranged the interview for me, invented this credential so that Bremer could not say no? When I explained to the disappointed colonel that there was no Nobel Prize winner around, and that the interview was to be with a mere novelist from Peru, he muttered in a rather demoralised attempt at humour: ‘If you tell the ambassador about all this confusion, he’ll fire me.’

  An hour after the appointed time, here we are with the man whom the terrorists – who have already killed twenty-seven US soldiers since 9 April, and wounded a further 177 – tried to kill yesterday at the National Museum, an attack that, of course, the security forces had detected and dealt with in time. He tells me that he spent his honeymoon in Peru in 1965 and that, thanks to a rail strike, he and his wife were lucky enough to visit Machu Picchu on their own, without the normal hordes of tourists.

  What is going to happen now in Iraq? In the short term, an Iraqi Council of Government is to be set up, made up of twenty-five people, representatives of all the political, religious and ethnic tendencies, that will have executive powers, nominate ministers and appoint commissions of engineers and experts to get the public institutions back working. The Council will have a role in preparing the Budget, establishing a market economy and privatising the public sector. Ambassador Bremer says that the market economy and political democracy will turn this country, that Saddam Hussein ruined with his frenetic arms expenditure and his state socialism, into a prosperous nation. ‘If Lee Kwan Yoo managed to do it in Singapore, a country with no resources other than its people, imagine what Iraq can achieve with its vast riches. And I’m not just thinking of oil, but also of the land, which in the central region is even more fertile than the French Midi.’

  A couple of weeks after my visit, the Council of Government was established, its twenty-five members reflecting a proportional representation of the political and social make-up of the country: thirteen Shiites, five Kurds, five Sunnis, one Turkmen and a Christian. Among them, three women and a communist. In Bremer’s first statements, this Council was just to act as an ‘assessor’, that is, to have a decorative function, but it seems that due to the insistence of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN special envoy, the ambassador agreed to give it executive powers. When I ask him about this, he replies: ‘I work very well with Vieira de Mello.’

  According to his plan, this Council of Government will see the beginning of many different initiatives, with increasing popular participation in all areas, which will help foster democracy in a practical way. At the same time, an assembly or constituent commission, made up of respected and capable people, will establish a Constitution, ‘guaranteeing freedom, legality and the rights of women’, that the Iraqi people will need to ratify through a plebiscite. Then Iraq will celebrate the first free elections in its history, and he, along with his six hundred staff in this palace and the 140,000 US soldiers, will leave.

  Bremer is emphatic that this will happen and that the terrorists that are ambushing and killing US soldiers on a daily basis will not weaken the resolve of the United States to carry this democratising process through to the end. Will US public opinion continue to support this, despite the very high economic cost and the cost in human lives? Without the slightest doubt. He receives bi-party delegations here on a daily basis, and despite the public disputes over the elections which have increased recently in the US, Democrats and Republicans agree that this must be carried out successfully, whatever the cost.

  Who are the terrorists? Various groups that operate in a dispersed manner, without any central control. Common criminals that Saddam Hussein released from prison. Remnants of the dictator’s armed forces, officers of the Republican Guard, Saddam’s fedayin, torturers and other members of the political police (the Mukhabarat) who, for obvious reasons, are anxious that chaos should spread. International militants from Al Qaeda coming in from abroad as well as fighters sent by the most fanatical sectors of the Iran government that fears, with good reason, a free and democratic Iraq on its borders. These forces will be defeated, methodically and with determination, through the collaboration of the Iraqi people themselves, once the police and the local militias, who are already being trained by the coalition forces, begin to operate. The capture or death of Saddam Hussein (there is a twenty-five-million-dollar reward out for him) will free many Iraqis from the terror they still feel at the possibility that one day the tyrant will return to power and seek vengeance for having had his statues toppled.

  I have heard it said many times, by Iraqis and foreigners, that Paul Bremer is not in his element here, that Iraq, the Arab world, the Middle East, are exotic topics for him. That is not my impression. Quite the reverse – he seems very much at ease in the murky waters of the differences, enmities and affinities between the innumerable Iraqi factions, communities, ethnic groups and religions – the Shi’ites and Sunnis, the Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Armenians, Christians, etc. – and makes subtle observations about the difficulties in making this disparate mosaic of interests coexist. ‘It will be difficult, but it will happen, it will happen,’ he repeats on several occasions. For him the determining factor will be not so much the institutions that are set up and the electoral commissions, but rather the everyday things, the discovery that Iraqis are making of what freedom means in this country which, despite the insecurity, the lack of water and electricity and the rubbish, has, since 9 April, been open to some fifty newspapers and has seen the establishment of seventy political parties. ‘All of this might appear somewhat anarchic. But what is happening is a real seismic shock, the direct and daily experience of freedom, of civic participation, at all levels of social life. Once they have understood what this means, the Iraqis will never again have it all snatched away from them. In many towns and neighbourhoods, real municipal bodies are already functioning through consensus, the residents are participating in, and funding, these initiatives with a freedom of action that this country has never known before.’

  When I tell him that I have not heard a single Iraqi lament the fall of Saddam Hussein or even the bombings that brought an end to his regime, but that, by contrast, everyone that I have spoken to is upset, humiliated and offended at the passivity of the US forces in the face of the looting, robbery and arson that has destroyed Baghdad and ruined hundreds of thousands of its citizens, he reminds me that this happened ‘when I wasn’t here, when I was leading a quiet life in the private sphere’. But it is true: ‘Not to have stopped the looting was the biggest mistake that we made, and it is going to cost us billions of dollars to repair this damage.’ The United States will be unstinting in providing resources to reconstruct services and restore the infrastructure, so that the country can take off and be at the forefront of political and economic modernisation in the Middle East. He speaks with the conviction of a missionary, and I am sure that he believes what he is telling me.

  Can this dream become a reality? Only, I think, if the United States or the United Nations take on the very high cost, in human losses, and in the outlay of considerable resources, of a long occupation. It is an illusion to think that the acts of sabotage, attacks and ambushes by different groups
of the resistance, in a country where Ambassador Bremer estimates that there are about five million weapons in the hands of the civilian population, will be quickly crushed, even after the death or capture of Saddam Hussein. What is most likely is that for a long period of time, they will increase, the victims will multiply and the damage and sabotage to the infrastructure will be great, so that economic recovery and creation of employment, a pressing issue for seventy per cent of the population who are unemployed, will go slowly or will come to a halt. Furthermore, the adoption of democracy will not be a rapid process or one without difficulties in a country where the religious question presents complex problems for any real freedom and equality between the sexes. I’m not just talking about fanatical extremists, who are doubtless a minority. Even among ordinary and progressive Muslims and also the Christians in Iraq, when it comes to talking about women’s issues, freedom of expression or the secular state, I have heard such strong prejudice and resistance that it will take a great deal of time and patience to overcome it. The animosity and the friction between the different religious, political and ethnic communities is currently very raw and perhaps inflamed now that they can be expressed openly and not be suffocated by a repressive authority. So it will also be difficult to establish a common consensus on which to build a democracy in this mosaic that is Iraq.

  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.

  How was it possible that a regime of this nature, controlled by shameless, undisguised villains who not only committed innumerable abuses every day, but also were recorded by Vladimiro Montesinos in hundreds and perhaps thousands of videos, which document, day after day, the extraordinary scope of the corruption, could be, throughout most of these ten years of dishonour, a popular regime? Because, to the shame of Peruvians, it was popular, right up to the last two years, perhaps less, of its insolent existence. The reply to this question is: thanks to the intelligent and unscrupulous manipulation of the media, especially the television channels accessible to all viewers, that the dictatorship placed at its service, by buying off the owners.

  The way in which Montesinos, the handy evil genius of the dictatorship’s intelligence service, proceeded was both subtle and brutal. He blackmailed some media organisations through the tax office. In return for silence, servility and complicity, he could withdraw the sword of Damocles of heavy taxation that could threaten the survival of a company. Those who did not comply had to pay their debts, which increased at the whim of the regime; in other cases, the operation was cruder and more direct: the media owners sold for hard cash their editorials, their headlines and their news stories. They introduced lies, spread rumours or kept silent about certain issues in order to bolster the regime’s campaign of propaganda, and they vilified and discredited critics of the regime in invective campaigns that Montesinos thought up, administered and orchestrated. This demagogic orchestration of public opinion through the main media outlets was the main factor in the popularity of a regime that lived off and in lies.