This was too much for exasperated Secretary of State James Baker, who rerouted his plane from Moscow for a stop in Prague, reportedly to rebuke Havel. “You can either do business with the United States or you can do business with Frank Zappa,” he warned.55 Havel must have been dismayed that the American response was as humorless as that of the communists, who never had much use for Zappa either.
Soon enough, Havel’s government faced real crises with the break-up of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and the Merry Prankster days faded of their own accord as the Czech Republic assumed a more traditional role as a state in the heart of Europe, albeit one in which Havel’s zany whimsy would linger, along with his wistful motto: “May truth and love triumph over lies and hatred.”
AMERICAN VALUES VS. AMERICAN INTERESTS: DO PERSONALITIES TRUMP POLICIES?
This cast of characters offers a small sampling of descriptions from diplomats of the people they encountered across the globe. Were this chapter a full inventory, the scoundrels would far outnumber the saints, and the scoundrels were usually the ones in power. Their poor records on democracy, human rights, and freedom of speech forced American policymakers to choose between American interests and American values.
This ongoing dilemma in foreign policy is not new. The list of unsavory characters the United States historically supported—the Pinochets, Somozas, and Duvaliers—is long. The biographic reporting cables detailing excesses and abuses pose the question: Where to draw the line between American interests and American values? The cables provide plenty of evidence that the United States continued to deal with unsavory characters; there is grim reading about the Mubaraks, Bouteflikas, and others. Embassies dutifully reported on how the dictators behaved toward their own people. Almost invariably, Washington’s view was that in spite of problems, American interests were best served by continuing to deal with them.
Whether that was the right decision certainly varies by country. But it is hard to find an example in which embassy reporting on dictators became the foundation for a policy review. Also troubling is the lack of debate. The embassies gave Washington far more information than what was available in the media, but relationships continued—sometimes for decades—with dubious leaders. The cables show that at least sometimes, political pressure works. Aliyev released the donkey bloggers; Richard Boucher ultimately got Tadjibayeva released.
Even more disconcerting are the stories of the saints. While it is important to celebrate the courage of these women, it is appalling that they endured hideous conditions. A photo op with the secretary of state seems a small reward for their pain. Even more disconcerting are the nominations of all the women who endured equal hardships but were not selected for the award.
The focus on the plight of women in Islamic countries stands at odds with many public pronouncements in which U.S. officials pay deep respect to Islamic culture but remain reticent on the status of women. Most disturbing of all is that this well-intentioned award process encourages the notion of women as victims. It reinforces existing impressions instead of changing the debate. An idealist might look forward to the day the Women of Courage Award is phased out—because there is no need of it.
The Havel-Zappa story points to a persistent underappreciation for the role of cultural diplomacy. Chronically underfunded and misunderstood, cultural diplomacy is about far more than sending American performers to remote capitals. Truly effective cultural diplomacy engages a country’s intellectuals and artists on a continual basis. This is hard work, requiring not only language skills but a fluency with the world of culture. Many public diplomacy officers have the skills to do this, but without a strong mandate from an ambassador who sees the connections and makes culture a part of the mission, it is often the first program to languish in the face of budget and personnel cuts. If Washington evinces no curiosity about a country’s cultural thinking, cultural reporting will fall by the wayside.
The cables also show the risks of drawing too many conclusions from personalities. It is human nature for Americans to assess leaders solely by their attitude toward the United States. The embassy’s dismissiveness of Guido Westerwelle was a good example of this. The message to Washington, reinforced with phrases such as “lightweight,” “lacks gravitas,” and “wild card,” was: here’s a man who doesn’t matter and one who often disagrees with us. The embassy accurately predicted the spectacular decline of his political party after the 2013 election, in which it failed to cross the 5 percent threshold, the minimum percentage of the vote required for a political party to enter parliament. But Westerwelle was still young, had impressive media skills, and, with nearly four years as foreign minister, should not have been counted out. Had he not been sidelined by leukemia, he might well have gone on to a second act. People who disagree with the administration in Washington often are not inconsequential.
One might want to think of foreign policy as an intellectual process grounded in history, founded on principle, and carefully calculated. But there is an inescapable personal aspect to diplomacy. And in some cases, the personal trumps all.
Chapter 6
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WILD ANIMALS:
Noble Causes and Jungle Diplomacy
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Recently, a rare endangered Siberian crane was spotted along the banks of the Irrawaddy River. The large bird dancing on the riverbank began to attract large numbers of gazers. Eventually they included the military, who proceeded to shoot the rare bird.
—U.S. Embassy Rangoon
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THE OFFICER AT THE U.S. CONSULATE IN GUANGZHOU was troubled by a British report on Independent Television Network about people buying tiger meat and drinking tiger “wine” at two Chinese wildlife preserves near Guilin (about 500 kilometers from Guangzhou, in southern China), one of which housed thirteen hundred rare tigers. He decided to make an unofficial visit. Reporting officers sometimes visit public places on their own as a means of avoiding the trappings of protocol and to get a better sense of what an average person would experience.
It was worse than he thought. On arrival, he stumbled onto a circus theater where tigers were made to perform while their human handlers whipped and struck the big cats with metal poles. Tiger cubs in a nursery eagerly greeted visitors bringing treats. The lack of fear made the animals unfit for release into the wild. The souvenir store did indeed offer tiger wine (enriched with tiger bone), ranging in price from $10 to $117, and locals assured him it was possible to purchase tiger skins with advance notice.
The officer painted a grim picture of the wildlife preserves, which seemed geared toward sleazy entertainment, with dirt tracks for camel and horse racing. The theater hawked performances by bears, including a mock marriage with cubs acting as the bride and groom. Some of the two hundred bears on the premises had small patches of hair shaved off their torsos, an indication of surgical removal of valued bear bile, an ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine, as is tiger wine and tiger bone. The bile was available in the gift shop, where it sold for about $52 for 500 milliliters. The officer concluded that the so-called wildlife preserves were heavily dependent on sales of animal products produced in-house that affected the well-being of the animals they were supposed to protect.” 1
The officer belongs to a new generation of diplomats who ditch the black-tie world of receptions and limos to pull on hiking boots, hop into four-wheel drive vehicles, and head for remote regions. They tell tales of species teetering on the edge of extinction, threatened by poachers, big game hunters, and venal officials. These cables aren’t front-page foreign policy news and they won’t necessarily build careers, but they suggest an important generational shift. No one wrote about wildlife in George Kennan’s time. There are no questions on the Foreign Service exam about wildlife, and none of the profession’s core competencies, as defined by the State Department, mention a love for rare species. Few officers bring any special expertise to the topic of wildlife managem
ent, but their determination to document the plight of wildlife suggests a deep affinity for animals and an understanding of how they fit into the larger environment. These millennial diplomats, raised on Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel, reflect a very Western sense of animals’ place in the world. They care.
The volume of their reporting is astounding: WikiLeaks contains several thousand cables on wildlife, hunting, poaching, illicit trade, endangered habitat, and on specific species such as lions, apes, elephants, rhinos, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, and whales. To monitor this Noah’s Ark, the State Department’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs (OES) posts fifty officers to a dozen regional environmental hubs covering multiple countries and issues, aided by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of volunteer embassy officers keen to supplement their regular duties for something off the beaten path.2
Since the world’s most exotic animals live in some of the world’s most corrupt states, there are some disconcerting developed/developing world disconnects. Diplomats found stories so bizarre as to defy belief. They wrote about rhinos caught in the crossfire of Maoist insurgents in Nepal; rare cranes shot by Burmese military for no good reason; and start-up zoos in Thailand where cafeterias offered dishes made from the species of animals on view. They recorded Saudi fatwas against family dogs and countries shipping off scores of large animals in exchange for favorable United Nations votes.
Not all the news was so disheartening. A trip to one of Russia’s farthest corners described efforts to save the Amur leopard. A diplomatic observer at a Guangzhou park watched yuppie Chinese and their dogs, commanded in English, sporting matching outfits.
In an earlier age, if a diplomatic officer bothered to report on wildlife at all, he would have visited the relevant ministries—environment, forestry, interior—met with a few national parks officials, and called it a day. Today’s officers also stumbled onto the evolving role of international NGOs dedicated to wildlife. In some cases, these well-heeled Western-oriented groups acted in lieu of (or in spite of) national governments, contributing enormous financial resources and making decisions about wildlife without the involvement of the country’s political stakeholders. The biggest of these groups dwarf the resources of a small country. For example, the Nature Conservancy had assets of roughly $6 billion, which exceeded the GDPs of countries such as Mali, Burundi, or Niger at the time the cables were written. Top-tier NGOs rely on scores of international lawyers, scientists, environmentalists, and other highly trained staff to spend their funds efficiently, something that cannot always be said of the countries in which they work. They also lobby their home governments to raise wildlife issues at the international level and count on a steady stream of donors who share their commitment.
American diplomats saw reporting on animal welfare in all forms as part of their diplomatic mission. They began with the premise that the way a country treats its animals—in the wild, in zoos, or in private homes, is a fair barometer of its civil society. At their most optimistic, they chronicled steps nations took to recognize the importance of animals and the need to protect them. At their most pessimistic, they observed wildlife losing out to lack of money and competing human-animal interests while corrupt officials hustled endangered animals toward ever-more inevitable extinction.
“PROTECTED” WILDLIFE
Wild animals are big business. The U.S. government estimates that the illicit global trade in poached animals and their hides, tusks, and bones is worth $10 to $20 billion a year, ranking third after arms and drug trafficking.3 A leopard skin can fetch $20,000; a kilogram of rhino horn goes for more than $65,000. The effort to stop this illegal trade is one of the most challenging areas of diplomacy.
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) often serves as the policy point of departure for embassy reporting on wildlife. The United States proposed the idea for what became CITES in 1973 and hosted a conference that led to the creation of what is now a 178-member organization.4 A rare example of modest international organizational success, CITES has achieved a measure of cross-border cooperation to ensure that international trade in wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival. Conservationists would counter that protection of wild animals and plants has a long way to go and charge that CITES has a legacy of mixed messages and an overwillingness to grant exceptions to its rules.
CITES’ function is simple: to list and categorize some thirty thousand species on three lists, called appendices, according to their level of endangerment. The member states meet once every two to three years, against a backdrop of furious negotiations, to uplist, downlist, or even delist species to more or less restrictive appendices.
The WikiLeaks cables demonstrate mounting discord within CITES over wildlife policies in the developed and developing worlds. In general (but not always) wealthy countries work to get animals moved onto the most stringent Appendix 1; developing countries, often where the animals actually live, work to get them off Appendix 1. While this international diplomacy plays out at the meetings, the reality for CITES-protected animals illustrates the clash between officials who see wildlife as a revenue resource and those who see it as an endangered treasure. Consider the 2010 efforts of ministers from Zambia and Tanzania to secure Washington’s support for legalizing the sale of elephant products (meaning ivory) in advance of an upcoming CITES meeting.
Catherine Namugala, Zambian Minister of Tourism, Environment, and Natural Resources, was in no mood for sentimentality. “We have too many elephants!” she complained to the U.S. ambassador. “They endanger Zambians and prevent children from going to school.” She insisted that Zambia should have the right to permit “the legal, regulated killing of elephants,” which she saw, at best, as a national resource that could promote development.
The embassy was unpersuaded, commenting that Zambia’s track record on wildlife conservation was “not stellar . . . only a single rhinoceros remains in the country.” Officers noted reports of then-president Rupiah Banda and his entourage on hunting trips in the countryside feasting on Cape buffalo and rare klipspringer antelope, which they also presented as gifts to local chieftains.5
Erasmus Tarimo, director of the Wildlife Division of the Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute, tried a different tactic, comparing the ivory ban to failed U.S. Prohibition laws. He said the ban only increased the international price of ivory without deterring poaching, and that Tanzania was helpless against poachers because of its huge land mass, limited resources, and the limitless demand from the Asian market, not to mention international traders who corrupted Tanzanian officials. He told the U.S. ambassador that downlisting the elephant would allow Tanzania to sell its ivory stockpile while ensuring that all of the estimated $20 million in proceeds would be earmarked for antipoaching activities and benefit local communities caught up in human-elephant competition for land. Elephants need an enormous amount of land for grazing and range over a wide area. Agrarian communities that lie in elephant migratory paths can see their crops wiped out by elephant herds.
The embassy questioned whether Tanzania would really devote the entire $20 million to antipoaching efforts, especially during an election year, and doubted Tanzania would agree to third-party custodianship of proceeds from ivory sales.6
Despite their lobbying, both Zambia and Tanzania lost their bid to downlist elephants and ivory at the CITES meeting in Doha in March 2010. But the battle was far from over.
HUNTERS AND GATHERERS
In the world of diplomatic reporting, as well as wildlife conservation, not all animals are created equal. Large mammals get far more publicity than their more obscure or less appealing relatives. The popular animals confront conservationists and diplomats with moral dilemmas: Will a controlled sale of ivory reduce the slaughter of elephants? Is it ethical to auction off big game hunting licenses to increase a country’s budget for wildlife management? Should we allow the killing of a few animals in order to save a lot more?
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p; Diplomats are sensitive to the age-old economic truth that banned products fetch high prices. By the mid 2000s, rising prosperity in Asia helped bid up sought-after wild animal products such as ivory to levels that would keep the rural families who sell them afloat for years. Yet poachers are not always rural families. There is mounting evidence that international organized crime has found a foothold in poaching and is deploying sophisticated weaponry including AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and helicopters, effectively militarizing large swathes of Africa.7 Complicating the picture even further are wealthy big game hunters collecting trophies of what they call Africa’s Big Five (elephant, lion, Cape buffalo, leopard, and rhino), who will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege—attractive revenue few African countries can overlook.
Wildlife preservation costs money. The poorest African countries are outmatched by the Western NGOs who focus their conservation efforts on them. Diplomatic cables chronicle a drama that pits animal-loving citizens of the developed world against the people who actually live with them, where hunting so-called bush meat may be a way of getting scarce protein, protecting precious crops from trampling herds, or saving villages that lie on a herd’s migratory path. Inadequacy and lack of will from national governments to protect their resources further stokes the conflict.
Case in Point: Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe is beset by overabundance and scarcity. It is home to one hundred thousand elephants on land meant to support fewer than half that number, and a population of rhinos whose numbers have dwindled to fewer than three hundred. The so-called elephant overabundance creates opportunities and problems in terms of culling, poaching, and income-generating hunting safaris, while the severe rhino scarcity illustrates the basic law of supply and demand. As sought-after rhino horns become ever scarcer, the rising price makes the risk of obtaining one more attractive to poachers, who sell them to Asian markets where they are valued in traditional medicine.
To the Secretary Page 19