Avuncular American

Sanitize the Lagos Airport Experience

Five years ago I spent several months in Nigeria, organizing seminars and workshops.  Mostly in the capital Abuja, but requiring a couple of stays in Lagos, the commercial capital and one of Africa's most sprawling and chaotic cities.

The 2009 Christmas Day close call above Detroit, involving a Nigerian passenger whose journey started at Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, reminded me of my own experiences there.  Usually I wasn't worried about the people on board my plane - it was the situation on the ground that was the problem.

Years before, I had worked with an internationally experienced engineer who was sent by my employer to a project in Chad, across the Nigerian border.  Except that he never made it further than Lagos airport.  So harassed by customs, immigration, or security officials for "dash" or bribes, he simply gave up and took the next flight back to Europe.

So I was ready for the worst when it was finally my turn to experience Lagos.  In fact, I had little to worry about; we came under the auspices of the American Consulate, with the additional security that afforded.  But we wanted more, as many of our seminar participants were to transit Lagos en route to Abuja.  We hired a private firm, headed by a talented Nigerian businessman who split his time between London and Lagos.  His firm's goal was to "sanitize the Lagos airport experience" for international travelers.

Why?  Well, as Lekan Oguntoyinbo explains in today's Washington Post

Two decades ago Murtala Muhammed International began earning a reputation as a home to criminals who sometimes attacked planes as they taxied down runways. Robbers roamed the terminals and parking lot looking for prey. To be sure, Nigeria has made improvements. In the airports, non-passengers' entry to terminals is restricted and runways are more closely monitored. But lax security still raises concerns. Airport personnel still sometimes extort passengers. And many elites and their guests are escorted to planes without being required to pass through metal detectors.

"Sanitizing" meant protecting foreign travelers from the importuning officials, but also involved hiring uniformed, armed police escorts for those transiting the international terminal to the domestic terminal, via the exposed public roads outside the airport perimeter.  It's still a free-for-all out there.

In the intervening five years, it would appear that the situation inside the airport had improved, though we will undoubtedly learn more about when and where our would-be suicide bomber slipped on his incendiary underpants.  In Lagos?  Or was it in Amsterdam?  Maybe in the Delta airplane's toilet? [UPDATE 1/1/2010: It appears that he began his flight in Accra.  Ghana's capital city has one of Africa's calmest, best-organized airports, as it happens.]

Barely a month ago, the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) announced that the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) had confirmed Lagos airport's compliance with ICAO security standards.

But if arriving passengers can have their Lagos experience "sanitized" for the price of an airport fixer, the danger, as Lekan Oguntoyinbo writes, is that departing members of the Nigerian elite are spared the indignities of the metal detector - for a price.

Image: Independence postage stamp from the Nigerian Philatelic Service.

Lessons In Gate-Crashing

While we let the US Secret Service and the White House Protocol office sort out the matter of Mr. and Mrs. Salahi, I'd like to reminisce about gate crashers and related species of uninvited guests I have known.  You get your share of them in a quarter century of diplomatic dinners and receptions.

There was the businessman, not unknown to me, who wasn't exactly a gate-crasher, but who insisted on determining the menu for a lunch for a visiting Washington worthy.  We (the cook and me) were very accommodating, but then the picky capitalist was a no show.  We ate his damn portion.

A minister of economy, who had been almost strip-searched (a possible exaggeration) in a provincial Midwest US airport which didn't know what a minister was ("oh, we get them all the time - Minister of the Reformed Church of Jesus Resurrected, Minister of the Temple of God the Redeemer - we strip them all"), anyway this minister was particularly sensitive at the hands of American-employed security guards.  After an incident in his own country where he was refused entry to a US Embassy Fourth of July reception, I made sure that I met him at the gate personally.

Picassiette, Paltrow, or the Great Pretenders?

You can never be too careful when it comes to filtering guests for the POTUS and FLOTUS, however, as last week's incident shows.  Were the guards at the front gate so bedazzled by the lady's red-and-gold sari that they just waved her and her husband through?  Hardly.  I suspect that somewhere along the line they got themselves an invitation card, perhaps under false pretenses - I guess the investigation will show.  I just hope that some White House functionary didn't confuse Mrs. Salahi for Gwyneth Paltrow and override the security guard.  But wait: the actress wasn't on the list, either.

There is a cottage industry in places like Paris, where French TV recently featured a pique-assiette, a guy who acts convincingly and dresses presentably, and who makes it his business to learn of cocktail parties (preferably those that serve lots of yummy dishes), and crashes them for a "living."  While I was always used to seeing "the usual suspects" who died for invitations to parties in the diplomatic world, Monsieur Pique-Assiette really took the cake, so to speak.

I do remember an inveterate party-goer in Alexandria, Egypt.  Perhaps party-goer is inaccurate; I'll just say that if you were driving to the Greek Consulate for the first time and had approximate directions, as soon as you saw this guy - a sort of homeless parking attendant, who would make sure your car wasn't vandalized while you went in for your ouzo - well, you knew you had reached your destination.  We were convinced that he was a mukhabarat (an Egyptian security service spook who kept his eyes on the dips).

Speaking of mukhabarat, my favorite story was not my own, but that of a senior British diplomat with long Middle East experience, who told me of his days in pre- or early-Saddam Iraq, when the government was already composed of military men with little appreciation for diplomatic niceties.  The British Embassy would send out invitations to individual Iraqis - ministers, generals, notables, the usual suspects - and then wait for the evening of the dinner party.  Where no one except the expats showed up.

This went on for some time, until some rising star of HM foreign service got this brain wave: what if we sent the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs blank invitations?  He had hit on something: 10 seats at the table = 10 Iraqi functionaries in them.  Just fill in the guest list after they show up and everyone is happy.

The key to protocolary success in 1960s Baghdad, however, is not something we want to emulate in the Washington of President Obama.  No uninvited guests, please.  There are already enough of the category of angry non-invited luminaries to make every slot count.

Kafka, Or the Half-Life of Black Lists

Brussels was the venue for a very important human rights conference this past week, but it took place in an academic setting, out of the spotlight but hopefully not entirely unnoticed.

ULB’s October 20 conference, “Terrorism Lists, Executive Powers, and Human Rights,” organized by the European Centre for Constitutional & Human Rights” (ECCHR), aimed very high. It gathered internationally-known jurists from academia and the human rights community, but also “practitioners” from both sides of the bar.

The day-long program started with a debate, Gilles de Kerchove, the EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator versus Mark Muller QC, Chair of the prestigious UK-based Bar Human Rights Committee (BHRC). De Kerchove garnered general admiration for his willingness to appear before a generally critical audience, before which speaker after speaker denounced the politicization of justice represented by the widespread creation, post 9/11, of no-fly lists. Muller stressed the disproportionate impact on open exile groups, whose freedom of expression has been hard hit by the blacklisting by EU member states, often simply copying each other’s lists, or worse, taking verbatim “toxic” lists coming out of the crusading Bush White House.

Kafka in Canada

“Kafkaesque” was used more than once to describe travesties, not of justice, but of what de Kerchove called “administrative procedure.” Those two chilling words have condemned people to much more than getting bumped from flights. In the case of Sudanese-Canadian Abousfian Adelrazik, it resulted in exile, torture, and brushes with death, before concerted legal, civil disobedience, press, and ultimately domestic political pressure shamed the Canadian government into granting a passport to one of its own citizens. “A black man, in a black site, on a black list,” is how Professor Amir Attaran of the University of Ottawa described Abdelrazik, who only escaped death because his case went beyond the courts. He had fallen into the black hole of the black list: “too innocent to charge, too guilty to fly.”

Such a gathering of legal brainpower would not be so rash as to condone terrorism, indeed one speaker denounced terrorism as one of the worst crimes against human rights. But the “craven arbitrariness,” as Attaran called blacklisting, risks subverting separation of powers and the rule of law, through extending and generalizing states of emergency.

“Proscription regimes,” as they are referred to in legal circles - black lists or no-fly lists if you will - give inordinate power to intelligence agencies, and have led to mistakes, misinformation, and deliberate disinformation changing (and ending) lives of sometimes innocent people. Blacklisted people wind up living a sort of non-life, deprived of means of earning a living, or even conducting basic economic activities (ever try to live without money?). Remember, we are sometimes talking about people whose only crime was to oppose dictators in their home countries, often quite peacefully. And once on Country A’s blacklist, it is extremely difficult - even when “cleared” - to be removed from those of Countries B through Z.

How Terrorism Ends (hint: not through war)

One of the most potent arguments opposing the wholesale, and sometimes unquestioning, inclusion of individuals and movements on blacklists came from Oliver Wils, the Director of Berlin-based NGO Berghof Peace Support, active in conflict resolution. Wils cited (as did the US Congress) a 2008 RAND Corporation study How Terrorist Groups End:

The evidence since 1968 indicates that most groups have not ended due to military pressure but because (1) they joined the political process or (2) local police and intelligence agencies arrested or killed key members and that few groups achieved victory within this timeframe.

The ending of most terrorist groups requires a range of policy instruments, such as careful police and intelligence work, military force, political negotiations, and economic sanctions. Yet policymakers need to understand where to prioritize their efforts with limited resources and attention.

The RAND study, noted Wils, shows that only 7% of terrorist groups that operated in the last four decades were put out of action by military force.

The Obama Administration wants to apply “smart power” solutions to problems exacerbated by the Bush Administration’s kinetic “War on Terror.” This week’s conference on the dangers of blacklists highlighted a number of key issues which should be of interest to smart American negotiators, and to European policy makers. With increasing focus on diplomatic solutions, will the Obama Administration pause before acceding to some dictator’s demand to put a legitimate opposition movement - even a liberation movement - on a black list? How many “peace processes” have come to a screeching halt, because one of the parties - The Outs - are declared “terrorists” by The Ins?

This post first appeared in Blogactiv.eu.

Spies On the Prowl: Romeos and Rapists

Two stories, related only in that they involve spies, sex, and women as victims.

The first story is of the alleged rape of Algerian women by a CIA operations officer, Andrew Warren, who was the station chief in Algiers until removed after accusations that he had raped Algerian women after drugging them.  Yesterday, the Washington Post carried an extensive article about the scandal, which has the potential to cause problems in US-Algerian relations.  The excellent English-language blog on North African affairs, "The Moor Next Door," provides insights on the Algerian reaction.

In the process of explaining spy tradecraft, WaPo's Joby Warrick and Jeffrey Smith tell us that

As CIA case officers attempt to recruit a foreign spy, they often offer personal inducements, ranging from cash to medical care. In some cases, a potential recruit may be taken to a strip club or even to a prostitute if it is deemed critical to cementing the relationship, longtime officers say.

Now, we've always known that women have been used as enticements in all manner of circumstances, and it probably comes as no surprise that Puritan America is not beyond practicing the "honeytrap" approach in its spy operations.  The allegations against Warren go way beyond this, however, and would put him in the same category as John Worboys, the London taxi serial rapist who drugged his victims.

But how about when men are used to entrap women?  I recommend listening to BBC World Service radio's "Assignment" program, here on podcast, on the East German Stasi's use of "Romeo Spies," specially selected male specimens who lured unsuspecting West German women to spy for the East during the Cold War.  The program profiles the case of Gabriele Kliem, who was recruited by the Stasi for her access to US secrets as an employee of the American Embassy in Bonn, and who lost everything as a result.  The program points out that while some 30 western women were prosecuted in similar cases, ex-Stasi agents have been largely able to get away scot-free.

There is no link, as I say, between the Algerian and East German cases.  But the juxtapostion this week of the two stories this week is fascinating.