To the Secretary
Page 18
The embassy, sketching a biographic profile of Westerwelle in September 2009 following the FDP’s good showing in the election, found his remarks to be “short on substance, suggesting that Westerwelle’s command of complex foreign and security policy issues still requires deepening if he is to successfully represent German interests on the world stage.”
He harbors resentment that he has not been taken more seriously by the Washington political establishment . . . By his own admission, Westerwelle has never seriously harbored a fascination for international affairs.
There is a contrast between Westerwelle’s increased public support and successful leadership of the FDP versus the continued skepticism, often bordering on contempt, shown by much of the German foreign policy elite toward him.
The embassy continued with a series of damning assessments. “One foreign policy analyst told poloff [political officer], ‘he lacks the gravitas and is seen as too opportunistic to be trusted as foreign minister.’ Several Ministry of Foreign Affairs desk officers said they were not persuaded that Westerwelle ‘had the foreign and security policy expertise necessary.’ . . . There was a consensus among desk officers, driven perhaps by political bias, that Westerwelle was arrogant and too fixated on maintaining his cult of personality.”
The embassy seemed to reach for invidious comparisons. “Like Dan Quayle in 1992, Westerwelle wants to compare himself to his mentor, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, but in the eyes of the foreign policy community, he is no Genscher.”
The biggest problem seemed to be his personality—it is clear the embassy found him hard to like. “Westerwelle found it hard to conceal his resentment toward Washington based on his feeling that neither its top leadership nor the embassy in Berlin courted him during his time in opposition . . . He has little professional experience of the U.S. since he never made extensive efforts to introduce himself to the Washington policy community. Unfortunately our attempts to reach out to Westerwelle were often rebuffed with the excuse that he would only meet with the Ambassador. Only after extensive embassy negotiations with Westerwelle’s staff were former CDA [chargé d’affaires] and poloff able to secure a meeting.” 39
Less than a week later, on September 22, 2009, the embassy’s postelection analysis insisted that results did not signal change but fretted that Westerwelle’s “unpredictability” would require what it euphemistically termed “focused diplomatic engagement.”
As it turned out, the embassy had a far more intimate means of understanding the worldview of Westerwelle. It had a source within the FDP, a “young, up-and-coming party loyalist,” who offered the embassy documents on many occasions. The source, revealed as Helmut Metzner, “was excited with his role as FDP negotiations notetaker; he seemed happy to share his observations and insights and read directly from his notes and provided copies of documents from his binder.” The embassy was extraordinarily lucky to have found Metzner. While cultivating party insiders is the bread and butter of diplomatic work, this level of engagement with a source was unusual, as was Metzner’s willingness to serve, for all intents and purposes, as a mole. Unfortunately, for Metzner, it was not destined to last.
Westerwelle struggled to balance his role as foreign minister with his role as party leader. By February 2010, the embassy was reporting Metzner’s prediction that Westerwelle would leave diplomacy to the drawing rooms while using straight talk in the world of domestic politics. Straight talk could prove controversial, evinced by Westerwelle’s infamous gaffe that “promising people prosperity without work would encourage Germans to indulge in late-Roman decadence” and that working people “are increasingly becoming the idiots of the nation.” 40
Despite the embassy’s dubious views, Westerwelle had a long run as foreign minister, from 2009 to 2013. In an interesting footnote, the WikiLeaks cables claimed a political victim: Metzner was dismissed from his job as Westerwelle’s chief of staff after admitting he was the source of U.S. insights into confidential negotiations on the formation of the new government.
PLASTIC PEOPLE OF THE UNIVERSE AND OTHER PERNICIOUS ARTISTIC INFLUENCES
Even the most democratic governments have an uneasy relationship with artists and intelligentsia. They go too far, they say too much, they push from the comfortable center of an issue out to the furthest extremes. They make people think—and they also make them nervous. Diplomats seek out writers, playwrights, filmmakers, and musicians and value them for the nuances they can add to an issue. Engaging with artists is one aspect of cultural diplomacy, a catchall term that is often associated with soft power, the idea of espousing foreign policy goals in a less direct and less confrontational way. Cultural programming can be as simple as a traveling exhibit of American quilts, but the savviest diplomats see cultural programming as a two-way street. Local artists serve as a window into the subtleties of the society in which they live and work. Like the figures from other nongovernmental agencies, members of the artistic community provide an alternative view often at odds with conventional wisdom.
Sometimes the controversy they create is as silly as David Cerny’s sculpture Entropa, which served as the Czech Republic’s artistic contribution to its 2009 presidency of the European Union, a rotating honor shared by each member state for six months. The embassy reported that the sculpture, a map of Europe, served as an irritant for its irreverent (either funny or rude, depending on taste) stereotypical depictions of member states. Some were harmless and predictable—Denmark was built of Legos, Sweden was an Ikea box; but others, such as Bulgaria’s depiction as a toilet, were insulting. The sculpture caused the Czech government, already notorious as one of the most skeptical members of the EU, significant embarrassment and was a prelude to other disasters in its presidency term.
Sometimes the conflict between intellectuals and the state is more serious and offers insights into the thinking of the societies from which they spring. Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, is probably Turkey’s best-known novelist for works such as Snow, My Name Is Red, The Museum of Innocence, and many others.
In February 2005, in an act that he said was deliberately calculated to test the limits of free speech in Turkey, he stated, “Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here, and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to mention that. So I do.” He reinforced these thoughts in numerous interviews with world media. “What happened to the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 was a major thing that was hidden from the Turkish nation; it was a taboo. But we have to be able to talk about the past.” 41
Pamuk was subsequently charged under Turkey’s infamous Article 301, a 2005 law, amended in 2008, which made it a crime to insult Turkishness or the Turkish nation. The debate Pamuk ignited featured rallies at which his books were burned. He was also the target of assassination attempts and spent considerable time outside the country teaching at Columbia University and Bard College.
Pamuk was not the only intellectual to test the waters of free speech. Turkish-Armenian journalist and human rights activist Hrant Dink was assassinated in 2007. The seventeen-year-old perpetrator, once apprehended, openly admitted to the act and expressed nationalistic pride for it, reportedly saying during his interrogation, “I don’t regret it. I would do it again.” 42
The embassy in Ankara was alarmed by the upsurge in nationalism, writing that it was seeing a lynch-mob atmosphere. “Having gone unchecked, it appears that nationalism is exceeding the bounds of political expediency. In the wake of the Hrant Dink murder, most Turks were stunned by video clips released February 2 that show police proudly taking photos with Dink’s murderer before a Turkish flag. The photos fueled rumors of police involvement in the shooting . . .” 43
Pamuk continued his campaign for free speech, telling Russian magazine Timeout Moscow that freedom of expression did not exist in Turkey. He complained that the secular vision of the modern founder of the Turkish state, Mustafa Atatürk, and the politically influential Turkish military’s understanding of secularism were completely different.44
The Turkish parliament finally amended the infamous Article 301 after an extended debate that highlighted the deputies’ divided sentiments. Speaking for many of his parliamentary colleagues, Bekir Bozdag said the law had stained Turkey’s image. “Noting the irony of Turkish Nobel laureate author Orhan Pamuk showing the world the beauty of Turkey only to be prosecuted under Article 301, Bozdag said onlookers threw eggs and tomatoes at Pamuk as he entered the courthouse to defend himself against the charge of insulting Turkishness.” 45
The embassy saw Pamuk’s case as a bellwether for democracy and came to a pessimistic conclusion. “The fundamental problem lies in the un-reformed mentality of GOT [government of Turkey]) officials, starting with Prime Minister Erdogan, who have yet to fully accept freedom of speech in its broadest form as a core value.” Embassy officers said Turkish officials reassured them several times that Pamuk would never be imprisoned, a fact they found more troubling, since it implied officials saw the case as a troublesome one-off, rather than as a test of societal values. They worried that intellectuals without Pamuk’s high profile would still be endangered. “A Turkish free speech activist noted numerous speech-related lawsuits Erdogan brought against cartoonists who have lampooned him, as well as writers and demonstrators whose speech he considered personally insulting as evidence that the GOT leadership had not embraced the western concept of free expression.” 46
Turkish discomfort with freedom of expression, as evidenced by the Pamuk case, was sometimes characterized as the reason Europeans were leery of granting Turkey full membership in the European Union, but within the EU, countries that were undeniably Western faced similar problems, personified by writers, filmmakers, and journalists who asked uncomfortable questions that resonated far beyond their own societies.
The Danish cartoon controversy, which surfaced in September 2005 when a paper published a dozen cartoons caricaturing the Prophet Mohammed, was one aspect of this problem, and nearby Netherlands faced several crises as it worked to define the difference between free speech and hate speech. In November 2004, filmmaker Theo Van Gogh had been murdered by an enraged Muslim because of his film Submission, which dealt with violence against women in Islamic societies. The Netherlands has one of the highest Muslim populations of any European country—close to one million, comprising nearly 5 percent of its seventeen million people. Van Gogh’s murder led to an explosion of reprisals and fueled debate that followed on the heels of the earlier 2002 assassination of Pim Fortuyn, a member of parliament who had run on an anti-Islam platform.47
Geert Wilders, another high-profile anti-Islamic member of the Dutch parliament, mounted a film attack on the Qur’an called Fitna (an Arabic title meaning disagreement or division among people), which aired in March 2008. The embassy advised Washington to view him as more of a hatemonger than a free speech fighter.
Golden-pompadoured, maverick parliamentarian Geert Wilders’ anti-Islam, nationalist Freedom Party remains a thorn in the coalition’s side, capitalizing on the social stresses resulting from the failure to fully integrate almost a million Dutch Muslims, mostly of Moroccan or Turkish descent. In existence only since 2006, the Freedom Party, tightly controlled by Wilders, has grown to be the Netherlands second largest, and fastest growing, party . . . Wilders is no friend of the U.S.: he opposes Dutch military involvement in Afghanistan; he believes development assistance is money wasted; he opposes NATO missions outside “allied” territory; he is against most EU initiatives; and, most troubling, he foments fear and hatred of immigrants.48
The embassy wrote that release of his film only emboldened him. He campaigned by calling Islam a “fascist religion” and asked voters whether there were “too many Moroccans” in the Netherlands.49
On the tenth anniversary of Theo Van Gogh’s murder, it seemed his killing was still a third rail for the Dutch. Prominent cultural figures preferred to stay silent, “either because they feared any comments would contribute to further divisions; that comments would be exploited by right wing politicians; or that even the slightest criticism of Van Gogh would be seen as an apology for his killer.” Van Gogh’s friends claimed “tolerance had become a cover for cowardice,” 50 all of which demonstrate that such a killing harms a whole society, and that the wounds take a long time to heal.
Film has been a powerful way to test political dialogue in countries without Western freedoms. The creative community in autocratic Singapore tested these waters when film censors reversed a ban on Singapore Rebel, a film about opposition candidate Chee Soon Juan, but restricted it to adults only. The embassy reported that another film, Zahari’s 17 Years, about a former political prisoner, remained banned as a “threat to the public interest.” The film featured an interview with Said Zahari, a former journalist arrested as a communist conspirator and detained without trial from 1963 to 1979. The censors refused to classify a polemical film entitled One Nation Under Lee (now viewable on YouTube) because it incorporated clips from the banned Zahari film. Yet another film, Francis Seow: The Interview (also on YouTube), features footage of the former solicitor-general “who was detained and allegedly subject to harsh interrogation in the late 1980s after he was accused of taking money from the U.S. government to lead political opposition to the People’s Action Party. (Singapore also expelled an American diplomat, Hank Hendrickson, in that episode.)” 51 One reason for the easing up may be the authorities’ realization that the films are readily available on the Internet.
In some cases, embassy efforts to support artistic works have led to trouble, as was the case with a political film in Nigeria that was at the center of clashes between Muslim traditions and state authorities. The embassy reported that film producer Hamisu Lamido, known as Iyan-Tama, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to fifteen months in prison and a 300,000 naira ($2034) fine for violating censorship laws by releasing the film Tsintsiya, a Hausa adaptation of West Side Story, without first having it approved by the state censor board. The embassy had a prominent role in the film, ironically having sponsored production of Tsintsiya to encourage interfaith dialogue. The case went back and forth through the court system, and Iyan-Tama was granted bail with bond of 500,000 naira ($3390) and released after spending more than sixty days in detention.52
Sometimes artists and activists take breathtaking risks. In Azerbaijan, a group of dissidents staged a press conference in which a donkey held forth surrounded by a group of sycophants and furiously writing journalists. As the YouTube video went viral, Azeri president Ilham Aliyev failed to see the humor and threw the offenders—by now known as the donkey bloggers—in jail. Aliyev’s country occupies a strategic position, and his NATO overtures, tailored suits, and flawless English make him an attractive political partner. But he also removed presidential term limits, stifled opposition, and wrangled with U.S.-sponsored Radio Liberty when it dared to mock his plan to build the world’s tallest flagpole in the Baku port.53 It took concerted international work, including pressure from President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, to secure the donkey bloggers’ release.
Artistic license is also a challenge in Saudi Arabia. An officer from the U.S. consulate in Jeddah raved about the play Head Over Heels, performed before a mixed-gender audience in February 2009. What made it extraordinary, the cable explained, was that it was written—and performed—by a woman and dealt with sensitive themes.
“Maisah Sobaihi’s performance included a skit in which a Saudi couple remain married but separate after the husband secretly takes a second wife without wife number one’s knowledge or approval. Sobaihi raises the issue of ‘misrah’ marriages, discreet ‘marriages of convenience’ in which the man bears no financial obligation to the woman. The fact that a female playwright was able to perform a play with frank dialogue seeking to highlight the challenges and injustices Saudi women face is no mean feat in Saudi Arabia. And perhaps as important, Ms. Sobaihi was able to stage a work in which she freely drops references to sex and women’s lingerie before a mixed gender audience.”
Elsewhere, it was music that provided the inspiration that helped topple hated regimes. At the time of the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution in 1989, the U.S. embassy had been so lulled into complacency by the seeming eternal presence of communism that few staffers had much contact with dissident Václav Havel. No one was more surprised than former ambassador Shirley Temple Black when Havel, by then propelled to the role of Czech president, said he longed to meet Frank Zappa. Zappa’s band, the Mothers of Invention, and their album Absolutely Free had been the inspiration for the Czech band Plastic People of the Universe, which had provided the sound track for the Czech dissident community.
Havel, who gained international fame writing absurdist plays that poked fun not only at communism but bureaucracy and pomposity, was a uniquely cultural figure. Forging a close relationship with him and his confidants required a deep appreciation of the influence of the Czech artistic community. Havel set himself the task of making government—symbolized in the enormous Prague Castle—less frightening and more humane. The castle, once the home of the hated Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi ruler of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, had been subsequently inhabited by a series of equally frightening communist leaders. Havel set about exorcising the bad karma. He had the castle lit up by set designer Jan Svoboda and then costumed (there is no other word for it) the castle guard using the same artist who worked on Milo Forman’s film Amadeus (an Oscar-winning film about Mozart with key scenes filmed in Prague). Havel replaced dusty portraits with modern art and used a scooter to get from one meeting to the next in the building’s endless marble corridors. It was perhaps inevitable that the president would invite his musical hero Frank Zappa to Prague and then appoint him an ambassador of trade and culture. Zappa stayed for a time, enjoyed his rock star status, and moved on.