Kidnapped oil rig worker in Nigeria

Kidnapped McKinney Man Gets an Up-Close Look Into Nigeria's Oily Heart of Darkness

By Chris Vogel

published: July 09, 2009

• Allison V. Smith

  

• Courtesy of Larry Plake

  

  Plake (seated far right) talks to A Russian reporter who stumbled upon the hostages while writing a story about the Niger Delta region.

• Courtesy of Larry Plake

  

  Members of the Niger-Delta Freedom Fighters held Plake hostage at their camp for three weeks.

• Courtesy of Larry Plake

  

  These guards working aboard Plake’s oil barge were wounded defending the ship against attackers. The other guards, Plake says, ditched their weapons and hid in the bottom of the boat.

• Courtesy of Larry Plake

  

• Allison V. Smith

  

  Larry Plake and his wife, Collette, are still trying to work through his recovery after he was taken hostage two years ago.

• Courtesy of Larry Plake

  

  Bullets tore holes in the side of the oil barge and Plake’s bedroom door, while gunmen took him hostage in the control tower.

• Courtesy of Larry Plake

  

  Bullets tore holes in the side of the oil barge and Plake’s bedroom door, while gunmen took him hostage in the control tower.

Subject(s):

Oil, Nigeria, kidnapping

Larry Plake was just outside the control tower on his way to bed aboard the Cheyenne, an oil barge anchored six miles off the coast of Nigeria, when he heard the shots. A veteran rig worker for Houston-based oil and gas contractor Global Industries, Plake, a Texan through and through, had just finished his evening shift and was in a bad mood after dining on a subpar version of African-style barbecued spareribs. At first, the "pop pop pop" sounded like someone lighting a blowtorch. But the deafening sound of bullets ricocheting off steel and bursting through the metal sides of the ship was unmistakable. They were under attack. Plake never fit the stereotype of an offshore oilman. At 37, he was slight, with wiry arms and a head of prematurely gray hair. He'd worked offshore much of his adult life and was one of the few men aboard who'd earned a pair of college degrees along the way. But he was a hard-working, cocky son of a bitch with a young face and a dry sense of humor—all of which made him popular and a natural leader with the crew.
Plake entered the control room to find barge foreman Kevin Faller and fellow crewmembers Mike Roussel and Chris Gay crouched below the windows. They seemed paralyzed, so Plake grabbed the CB radio and began calling for help. He had memorized the security protocol checklist and began going through the steps.
"We're taking hits," he radioed a nearby support vessel, there to help Plake and the crew build pipelines for Chevron. "Cut and run! Cut and run!"
Plake couldn't see a thing outside the tower. No one had seen the three speedboats approach in the night or the armed men climb aboard. He could barely make out the sound of footsteps heading toward him over the blare of machine-gun fire and explosions throughout the barge. Plake wanted to send out a flare, but was afraid he'd be shot if he opened a window.
Step two, thought Plake, as he radioed out to the armed security boat. Just as someone answered, a crowd of Nigerians with assault rifles kicked down the door and rushed into the control room.
The gunmen, dressed in red, white and black masks and camouflage pants, with chains of ammo draped across their bare chests, surrounded the four Americans. Someone jammed the point of a gun into the back of Plake's head, forcing his face into the floor. One of the men cracked Faller across the cheek with his fist.
"Stay down, stay down," Plake heard a man say in a deep voice. "We want your captain. Where is your captain?"
Refusing to give anyone up, Plake told the men that the captain should be waiting on the ship's deck. They shoved him and the others down a series of ladders and stairs toward the lifeboats as bullets whizzed by. No other crewmembers were in sight.
Of the Cheyenne's 11 armed guards, three had initially fought back but were wounded. The others, crewmembers later told Plake, tossed their guns overboard, tore off their security uniforms and scrambled to the belly of the ship to join the roughly 240 other crewmembers on board who had barricaded themselves inside their rooms. Only Plake, Roussel, Faller and Gay remained topside.
Minutes ticked by, and the gunmen were getting edgy. "Where is the captain?" they demanded over and over.
"Where is that damned security boat?" thought Plake.
Stalling for time, Plake insisted the captain should be there any moment. They waited as some of the attackers scavenged the ship for whatever they could snatch: cigarettes, ammo and binoculars. Plake didn't know that the security ship was anchored a mile and a half away and wouldn't get there for nearly another two hours.
"We can't find the captain," said a thick voice. "We're taking you."
They pushed the Americans toward the stern and then shoved them off the barge down into their speedboats. Plake and Faller were in one boat, Roussel and Gay in another. The speedboats peeled away from the barge, circling it while the kidnappers pumped more ammo into its sides. Then they raced after the ship that Plake had been able to warn over the radio.
Plake prayed that the guards aboard the support vessel wouldn't open fire on them. The chase, however, didn't last long, and Plake felt a moment of relief when the kidnappers stopped shooting and steered back toward shore.
The boats skimmed along the ocean's surface toward the mouth of a river heading inland. Fifteen Nigerians were piled onto three 18-foot-long fiberglass speedboats with V-shaped hulls. Giant twin 275-horsepower engines hung off the back of each boat.
"Maybe I should jump," thought Plake. But he couldn't bring himself to abandon his companions. Instead, he sat silently, wondering where they were going and what was going to happen once they got there.
The boats wound along the oil-slicked waterways deep into the jungle. The jostling vibration of the motors roaring at top speed through narrow creeks nearly drowned out all other sounds. Plake could barely hear the man holding a flashlight in the bow who barked directions to the driver.
One of the men offered Plake a pack of the stolen cigarettes. Another cleaned his rifle, tossing empty shells into a bucket of diesel. Occasionally they would stop so the driver could replace an empty gas tank. Sometimes the boats broke down, and they'd float in silence as the men made repairs. Then it was full-throttle again until one of the drivers would inevitably ram into a log or run aground, nearly tossing everyone from the boat.
Just before dawn, the boats pulled up to a makeshift dock along the riverbank. For the first time, Plake could hear the sounds of the jungle, all the birds, lizards and insects surrounding him. Then Plake heard drumming. "It's just like a King Kong movie," he thought, as he watched villagers dancing, shouting and shooting their guns in the air.
They marched Plake and the others at gunpoint up a path into the camp. A medicine man splashed water on their faces, a blessing, they were told, allowing them to enter. The kidnappers forced their captives onto a hand-carved wooden bench and began interrogating them. "Name? Rank? Why are you in Nigeria taking all of the jobs?"
From the moment he was captured on May 7, 2007, Plake both hoped and feared that his kidnappers were members of a well-known insurgency group called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND. For years, MEND had been kidnapping foreigners who worked for oil companies to use as leverage against Nigeria's corrupt government officials, who reputedly have been hoarding the billions of dollars the country makes from selling its crude instead of investing the profits in roads, schools or clean drinking water for its people. MEND was known as a ruthless, professional outfit, but most of its hostages eventually made it out alive.
As the interrogation continued, it became clear that Plake's kidnappers did not belong to MEND. These men said they belonged to the Niger-Delta Freedom Fighters, led by a rebel named Egbema One. They didn't necessarily want to make a political statement. They wanted money—more than $1 million per hostage.
Convinced that his company would never pay such a steep price, Plake closed his eyes and breathed deeply, thinking, "This is where I'm probably going to die."

----

Oil's been pumping through Plake's veins since the day he was born.
He grew up in Baytown, home to the largest refinery in the country, owned by ExxonMobil. His grandfather was an offshore legend, and his father rolled up his sleeves on some of the toughest jobs in the business in the North Sea. So it was pretty much expected that after Plake graduated from Ross S. Sterling High School, he would enter the family trade.
He worked offshore from ages 19 to 25, in seas all around the globe, off the coasts of India, South America and Malaysia. He worked for four years in Nigeria. One day in 1995, his back went out, and he had to come ashore.
By that point Plake had married 19-year-old Collette, whom he'd met in a local bar one night while he was home on leave. Collette, who the following year would give birth to their first daughter, Alyssa, was relieved to see her husband sidelined with a bad back. She missed him terribly on those long three-month stints and, much like a policeman's wife, lived in constant fear of that phone call at 3 in the morning.
Unlike many offshore oilmen who get itchy and long for the sea every time they touch land, Plake was OK with finding a new life. He had always been good with all things mechanical, earning him the nickname "MacGyver" among his friends, and enrolled in Baytown's Lee College, where he earned a degree in electronics. Plake next went to a specialty trade school in Watertown, Massachusetts, called the Ritop School for Mobile Electronics, where he learned to wire radios in exotic cars like Ferraris and Bentleys. With all his training, it didn't take Plake long to get a job in Deer Park, Texas, and start a new chapter.
But it wasn't easy. After 9/11, the economy seized up, and no one was spending money on luxury car radios. Plake bounced around for a while, eventually taking a job in Addison. But when the company hired too many radio installers, there wasn't enough work to go around, and Plake's paycheck once again nosedived. To support his family, which now included a second daughter, Jadyn, he delivered pizzas for Domino's, working for tips.
Late in 2006, the idea of again going offshore took hold of Plake. He was one week away from having his new home in McKinney put up for auction because he couldn't pay the mortgage, was working two jobs, never saw his wife and kids, and still couldn't make ends meet. He needed money, and fast.
"He came home one day," Collette says, "and said to me, 'Honey, I have no choice; I don't want to go back, but I have to.' He was crying for the first time in years."
(While giving interviews for this story, Plake and his wife were careful never to mention the name of the company he worked for, as per a legal agreement. The Houston Press, the Observer's sister paper, confirmed through news accounts and public records that Plake was working for Global Industries, which was doing contract work for Chevron. Global Industries did not return phone calls seeking comment.)
When Plake set off in March 2007 for the Cheyenne, both he and Collette went in with open eyes; they knew about the many assaults and kidnappings in the region where Plake was headed. For decades, as they understood it, corrupt Nigerian government officials had been pocketing more than their share of the country's oil revenues instead of investing them in developing the nation and helping their people.
According to University of Houston associate professor of history Kairn Klieman, who teaches classes about Africa including "Africa and the Oil Industry," the Nigerian government took control of the country's oil revenues following a civil war in the late 1960s. The government then purposefully left the Niger Delta region massively underdeveloped—no roads, electricity, clean water or jobs—hoping this would stave off any further attempts at revolution. Instead, people living there have suffered terribly, and vigilantism has become a way of life.
"Because the government was so greedy for oil revenues," Klieman says, "they let the oil companies work without following any kind of environmental regulations. So the land, the water, the air is all devastated, and the people there can't even live in the normal, old-fashioned way, which was to grow food. It's not even possible to live in the 19th-century model there anymore."
Nigeria ranks as the 121st most corrupt country in the world and is ranked No. 22 in Africa, according to the Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International, a global corruption watchdog group. The country's score of 2.7 out of 10 in 2008 was an improvement over its score of 2.2 in 2007, the year Plake was taken hostage. By comparison, Somalia, which has made headlines this year for acts of piracy off its shores, was ranked as the 180th most corrupt country in the world in 2008 and came in at No. 47 in Africa.
According to Oyibos Online, a Web site that tracks security incidents in Nigeria, 62 foreigners have been kidnapped so far this year. In 2008, 81 were taken. In 2007, the year Plake was captured, 172 people were abducted. That's not to mention the hundreds of maritime assaults, hijackings and pipeline bombings over the same time span.
"You've heard of 'blood diamonds'?" Plake says. "In Nigeria they call it 'blood oil' because of all the deaths and kidnappings over it. They'll steal and kill their own brother because they're such a depressed people. Life is cheap."
Tribes and insurgency groups take hostages who work for the very oil companies that the government relies on to extract and move the country's vast reserves. Their stated political goal is to stop the country's ability to export oil and thus end the corruption, as well as to pressure the government to develop the region.
But nothing is ever so cut-and-dried. Motivations range from obtaining basic necessities to pure greed. Much of the environmental devastation is the result of insurgents blowing up pipelines to make their point and then attacking crews sent in to repair the damage. Many times the men will "bunker," or tap into, a pipeline to steal the oil—which they sell on the black market to pay for weapons and provisions—leaving a busted pipe spitting oil into the ground.
A central problem, Klieman says, is that the oil companies simply factor the cost of ransoms and hostage-rescue missions into the price of doing business, making the insurgents' efforts effectively moot.
Moot, that is, to everyone except the men who are taken hostage and their families.

----

Exhausted and in shock after being kidnapped and interrogated for most of the day, Plake, Roussel, Faller and Gay were searched and stripped of their wallets, watches, necklaces and cell phones. One of the militants demanded Plake give up his wedding ring, but Plake refused, insisting that his wife had put it on his finger and he'd be damned if it was coming off while he was still alive. Another villager stepped forward, telling Plake he could keep it because Plake was a Christian. By some miracle, they didn't find Plake's pocketknife, which he hid in his shoe.
That first night, the men were locked in a crudely fashioned thatched-roof hut with screen windows and walls made out of pegboard. Inside there was a table, a bench and a fan connected to a small generator stashed in the corner. A naked light bulb swinging from the ceiling burned brightly all night.
When the men were finally alone, panic set in. They knew the Nigerian military was afraid of venturing this deep into the jungle and that they might as well be trapped on an island. A thousand thoughts raced through Plake's mind, always ending with, "I think we're pretty much fucked."
Plake slept less than an hour that first night, next to Faller on one of two thin foam mattresses in the room.
The next day, on Tuesday, May 8, Plake woke up at 5 a.m. to beating drums and gunfire—a ritual that would continue throughout their captivity. A man unlocked the door and led the hostages to the side of the building, where each was given a plastic lawn chair to sit in all day. This became the daily routine.
That night, in McKinney, Collette was feeling anxious as she rushed through the front door of her suburban home. She had just picked up her daughters from gymnastics and had to get them fed, but all she could think about was that her husband was going to be mad at her. They had a standing appointment every night to talk on Skype, an Internet telephone service, and she was late. She tried to get online, but the connection wasn't working, so Collette walked upstairs to her bedroom to cool off. The phone rang.
Thinking it must be her husband, she headed back downstairs to pick up the main phone in the kitchen, but the answering machine beat her to it.
"I never caught their name," Collette says. "He just said, 'This is so-and-so from Larry's company,' and my heart sank because I knew."
Collette picked up the phone and listened as the man told her that Plake's barge had been attacked. No one knew if he'd been kidnapped, only that he was missing.
"I got so angry right there on the phone," Collette says. "I blamed them and said, 'You better find him and get him back! So help me God, if he dies over there, I'll own your company!'"
When she hung up, she turned and saw her two daughters staring at her. They had heard every word.
"Is Daddy dead?" asked 5-year-old Jadyn.
"No, baby," Collette answered, hugging them tight. "Right now the bad men with guns have Daddy. But we're going to get him back."
Collette is a no-nonsense woman with a sharp voice that could split a diamond. Furious at what had happened, she called everyone she knew—family, neighbors—telling them the news. Yet she was just as angry at herself for letting Plake go. Down deep she knew this would happen. It had only been a matter of time. She and Plake had been talking on Skype for weeks about how an increasing number of hostages were being taken. There had been several recent kidnappings in the same area where Plake was captured.
Collette did not sleep that night. Her sister drove up from Baytown and arrived around 4 a.m.
Amazingly enough, Plake called the house that afternoon, saying he was alive and in the middle of nowhere. He sounded frantic, but said he'd call again and then hung up. Collette felt relieved, but knew the hard part was still to come. She had to get him home.
That night, agents from the FBI showed up at her door. They tapped her phone, put a tracking device on it in case Plake called again and told her that if he did call, to let the FBI know before she told anyone else.
Collette says that when Global Industries found out about the FBI's request, they got upset. She says a company representative told her that if Plake or his captors contacted her again, she should call Global Industries first and the FBI after that. Collette says company officials told her that they didn't want anyone to interfere with their rescue efforts.
"I felt so stressed-out and conflicted," Collette says. "But the FBI explained to me that my husband was now a U.S. hostage because of the company, and there went my loyalty. Every time Larry called, I'd call the FBI first."
Global Industries officials also discouraged Collette from talking to the other three crewmembers' wives, threatened to cut off her home phone line if they thought she was trying to negotiate with the militants and forbade her to talk to the media, Collette says. The only news item she saw was on a CNN ticker that said four Americans had been taken off the Nigerian coast.
All of the additional pressure helped push Collette into a deep depression. Her mother and sister cared for the kids while Collette spent day and night in her living room. She didn't eat, losing 20 pounds. Plake would occasionally call, but as the days rolled by it felt like no one was making any progress. On Mother's Day, she received a bouquet of flowers from Plake that he had ordered online the day before he was kidnapped.

----

From the moment they arose each morning, Plake's kidnappers, wearing nothing but boxer shorts, started drinking, smoking dope, shooting their guns straight up in the air and arguing. They kept their marijuana in 50-pound rice sacks and would put what they didn't smoke into jars of moonshine made out of palm tree sap to ferment. Invariably drunk by noon, they'd gulp down this potent mix until they passed out at night, but not before a couple of the militants would typically get into a fight and go after each other with machetes or clubs.
In the humid afternoons, while Plake sat bored in his chair, many of his captors would play cards or huddle around a small television and watch the same five Rambo and Jean-Claude Van Damme films over and over.
Then it dawned on Plake, This isn't enjoyment for them, it's training. They think it's real. The men asked Plake how many people had died in the movies. He had to explain that it was just Hollywood.
There was bottled water to drink, but not much in the way of food. One morning the villagers tossed a chicken in a pot of water and boiled it all day. When it came time to eat, the meat was so rubbery and overcooked that Plake couldn't pull it off the bone. Another time they dug a trench and slaughtered a sickly goat. There was a cache of potted meat and canned tuna fish, which became Plake's meal, mixed with a sweet blend of rice and corn served daily at 4 p.m. After several weeks, Plake convinced his captives to push dinnertime back so that he could avoid the hordes of flies that would swarm around his plate, preferring to eat amid the mosquitoes that came out at night.
Before bed, Plake stripped off his filthy jeans down to his boxers to stay cool. His fair-skinned body, peppered with swollen red bug bites, became a testament to jungle living.
Some of the villagers bathed in the polluted river; Plake did not. He had a spider bite on his left ankle that was oozing pus and he wasn't about to dip it in the same water that the entire village used as a toilet. Instead, he just rubbed soap under his arms and apologized for his stench. Nor would Plake shave with the razors used by the militants for fear of getting AIDS. At one point, his white moustache flopped down over his bottom lip.
At night, the Americans would stay up late plotting their escape, hatching scenario after scenario. One had Plake taking out a guard with his pocketknife while the other men grabbed his gun. "But what then?" Plake thought. "What if we do take the camp over? We've got to motor out. But what if we run into them on the river? We don't know where to go anyway. Plus they have lookouts along the creek in crow's nests with machine guns. We'd be sitting ducks."
Plake started giving his kidnappers nicknames such as "Mike the Administrator," "Ben the Weapons Expert" and "Bubba the Explosives Guy." Many of them told Plake they dreamed of one day going to the United States to be criminals there. They wanted to rob banks and get rich, and they all seemed to admire Osama bin Laden. When Plake told them that the al-Qaida leader had killed innocent people during 9/11, they didn't seem to care. They felt he was a hero for standing up against America.
Over time, Plake got to know "Sonny the Cook," who was in charge of making sure the hostages had food, bottled water and cigarettes. Sonny told Plake that all he really wanted was to open a restaurant in the United States. Plake began to sympathize with his captors. While taking hostages wasn't the way to go about it, he understood why they were fighting their government for basic rights. All this oil money was pouring into the country, yet their government treated them like animals.
The leader of the Niger-Delta Freedom Fighters was called Egbema One. He told Plake he was a prince and had once worked offshore as a ballast control engineer. He wanted to use the hostages as political leverage, but it soon became clear to Plake that Egbema One was in the minority. Everyone else just wanted cash. And when Egbema One left the camp to get supplies, tensions would rise. The militants would force Plake to use a prepaid cell phone with a bamboo-and-wire antenna to phone Global Industries, his wife or Nigerian politicians, demanding the ransom.
"Tell them to send the money now!" the militants shouted in Plake's face. "We're gonna kill you tomorrow if we don't get the money!"
The men cracked the side of their rifles against the back of Plake's neck and threatened him constantly. One of the larger men repeatedly said he was going to cut off Plake's pinky finger and send it to Plake's employer to prove he wasn't playing around. Then he'd laugh in Plake's face. The bomb-maker told Plake he'd never get out alive, and that he'd made a special explosive for Plake if it ever looked like the Texan was going to be released.
The kidnappers set up a bench about 50 yards into the jungle, hidden from the camp. Every time they heard a noise, be it a voice, a boat or the snap of a twig, they'd grab the hostages and hurriedly beat them like horses toward the clearing, where they'd wait until whatever it was had passed. After just a few times, the men learned to race over to the spot themselves whenever they heard something, day or night. The kidnappers told Plake that if anyone tried to rescue them, they'd execute the hostages before returning to defend the village. This happened as many as 10 times a day.

----

Hostage negotiations seemed to be going nowhere.
One of the phone numbers Plake had to contact Global Industries had been disconnected. When he dialed the company's main switchboard, Plake says, a company operator couldn't hear him, cursed at Plake and refused to patch him through. The kidnappers had Plake call the president of Nigeria, but his secretary would have nothing to do with them. The prepaid phone credits would always run out in the middle of conversations. The militants, just for the hell of it, once set off a bomb behind Plake while he was on the phone, knocking down the bamboo antenna. Disgusted, Plake stormed back toward his plastic chair, knocking over a table of automatic rifles.
"This is like working with children," Plake thought.
At home in McKinney, Collette was just as frustrated.
"I got so that I was losing my mind because it kept dragging on and on," she says. "I kept thinking, 'I can't bear to wake up another day and sit in my house all day long'...I felt so helpless. It was like I was a hostage in my own prison camp."
As the days slogged on, Plake suffered mood swings. There were moments of peacefulness, when Plake would sit in his plastic chair twisting his wedding ring around his finger for hours at a time, picturing taking his wife and daughters bowling. He took comfort knowing he had a will, and they would be taken care of if he died. The hostages relied heavily on each other. When Plake lost it, they'd calm him down. When one of the others cried, prompting the militants to laugh, Plake would stand up and say, "Just because he's crying doesn't mean he's not a man."
There were also days when Plake felt resigned and became aggressive. If the kidnappers didn't kill him, he thought, then someone or something else would. He was sick of the abuse and the false threats to blow him up or slice off his finger.
"There's no way I'm spending six months here," he told his captors. "You'll have to kill me."
He clutched his knife like a security blanket. He knew he'd never get out alive, but thought, "God, give me a sign to let me know it's go time. I'll send a few of these guys to hell before they send me to heaven."
But he never got the chance. "Gunboat Sunday" intervened.
During the weeks of negotiations, members of MEND had discovered that the Niger-Delta Freedom Fighters had kidnapped the Americans and were demanding a huge ransom. This rubbed them the wrong way. MEND believed hostages were to be used to achieve political leverage against the corrupt government, not for individual gain. They decided to teach this small band of extortionists a lesson.
On Sunday, May 27, 2007, MEND staged a rescue mission. As MEND's boats neared the shore, Plake's kidnappers started whooping, shrieking and firing their guns. Someone grabbed the hostages and pushed them toward the river, telling them they were being placed in the middle of the battle. That way, the man said, bullets from MEND would kill them and their deaths would not be the kidnappers' fault.
As Plake ducked and tried to crawl out of the way, the MEND boats retreated. They saw what was happening with the hostages and never fired a shot, disappearing as abruptly as they had arrived.
Plake and the other three hostages ran back to their room and locked the door. A moment later, a muscular, 6-foot-tall man named Jean-Paul kicked it down and pointed a gun at them. Plake thought he was dead for sure, but suddenly a group of villagers tackled Jean-Paul and wrestled the weapon away from him. With MEND closing down on the camp, the hostages were now more of a liability than ever. Many villagers, like Jean-Paul, simply wanted to get rid of them to save their own hides.
After the commotion died down, the insurgents let the hostages use the phone. Plake called his parents and then Collette to say his final goodbyes.
"There are some things going down over here, and it doesn't look good," he calmly told his wife, who was crying on the other end. "The chances of me coming home are pretty slim. Take good care of the kids. I've always loved you."
The next morning, members of MEND and tribal elders from a nearby village visited the camp and met with Egbema One all day. At one point, Sonny said to Plake in pidgin English, "Maybe you go home today. They talking serious." Plake refused to believe it. He didn't trust anyone. But that evening, the hostages were told to pack up; they were heading out.
Egbema One escorted the hostages by boat to the nearby village. There, Plake saw a sack of money change hands. Egbema One then took Plake's wrist and placed it in the hand of an elderly man named Good Luck, who walked with a cane and wore flowing white clothes.
"You belong to me now," Good Luck said. "You'll be leaving soon."
Leaving Egbema One and the Freedom Fighters behind, the hostages and members of MEND piled into another boat and began motoring toward the MEND camp. Plake wasn't convinced he'd be set free, but was hoping the new camp would at least be a little better. They snaked along the river for more than six hours. Occasionally the driver would tell Plake not to smoke because there was so much oil in the water. The members of MEND ridiculed the Freedom Fighters, calling them "little boys" and "dogs."
Finally, the boat pulled up to the MEND village. Just as when he first arrived at the Freedom Fighters' camp 21 days earlier, medicine men splashed water on Plake, blessing him as he entered. He was marched into a concrete building with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s stacked against the wall and told that a helicopter would get him in the morning. It was like entering a military barracks after spending weeks at a Boy Scout camp.
Plake didn't sleep much that night. The morning came and went. No chopper. "Maybe at noon," a MEND soldier said. Still no helicopter. Plake just figured this was yet another lie and he was screwed. Then, at about 6 p.m. Plake and the other hostages were loaded onto a boat.
They cruised along the water in silence. The canal was getting wider and wider, spanning more than 100 feet across. In the middle of the river, the driver suddenly cut the engine. Plake looked around, thinking: "This is it. They're going to kill us now and dump the bodies."
Plake watched as the driver's hand slowly disappeared into his coat pocket. Plake reached for his knife. Then he saw the man's hand emerge; he was holding a cell phone.
"We've got them," the man said into the speaker.
Before he knew it, Plake was stepping out of the boat and onto a dock near Warri, a major city in the Niger Delta, where a car whisked him off to the governor's house to meet up with Global executives and FBI agents who were waiting. From there, he flew to Lagos and then to London to see a tropical disease expert.
After 22 days, Plake, Faller, Roussel and Gay were finally free.

----

Collette had just returned home from a rare trip to McDonald's with the kids when the phone rang. It was someone from Global Industries.
"We've got him," said the voice.
The next day she was on a flight to London.
Because of convoluted English insurance laws, Plake and the other men were not allowed into the tropical disease center. Instead, they went to an urgent-care clinic. Other than the nasty spider bite, Plake checked out OK. Two of the other men had intestinal parasites and had to remain there a little longer that day. But not Plake; he was ready to go. For the past 48 hours, he'd been shuttled across two continents, poked and prodded by doctors, forced to do press interviews with the African media and listen to Global Industries officials tell him to keep quiet about everything that had happened. All he wanted to do was to see his wife.
Collette was sleeping when Plake finally made it back to the couple's London hotel room. His electronic key, though, had been accidentally knocked offline when Collette checked in earlier that day. He couldn't unlock the door. He started banging and hollering, but Collette didn't answer. Finally, Collette heard the knocking and ran to the door. When it swung open, she leapt into Plake's arms.
"You couldn't peel me off of him," she says.
That night, the four men and their wives celebrated, getting drunk at a nearby pub. They laughed and kidded each other about which movie stars would play them if their story ever made it to the big screen. Plake claimed fellow East Texan Matthew McConaughey. But the smiles wouldn't last long.
Back in McKinney, Plake was not readjusting well to normal life. For months he didn't want to talk about being kidnapped. He had nightmares. Sometimes he thought he'd heard footsteps and was ready to run over to the clearing in the jungle to hide. Other times he dreamed of being under attack on the barge, but this time he had a gun and fought back. He'd wake up lathered in sweat.
Plake saw a couple psychologists, but they didn't seem to help. He even checked himself into a mental hospital for a week. Time seemed to be the only cure. Plake had surgery on his spine in late 2008 to repair two discs that had been ruptured by repeated blows to the neck with rifles.
He now suffers migraines so bad that his vision is blurred and he throws up. He takes a long list of medications, including pills to fight depression, anxiety and pain.
Plake says he doesn't trust anyone anymore, no longer has a short-term memory and has developed a dangerously short fuse. He's caught himself yelling at his kids over dumb stuff such as eating an ice cream cone that he'd forgotten he himself had given them. He refuses to sit in plastic chairs and doesn't shave. It's taken him two years to start working again. He recently bought a property nearby that he's renovating and hoping to flip for a profit.
"Larry never regretted going back offshore," Collette says, "because he saved our home from being sold out from under us. But it's something he'll never get over. He just has to learn to live with it. It redefines who you are."
Plake still keeps up with Faller, Roussel and Gay. Scattered across Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, they couldn't get together for a second anniversary at the end of May. When they talk on the phone, they almost never mention what happened. They stick to what's going on now in their lives, their jobs and their kids. Plake says he's never going back offshore. Some of the others are considering it, he says, but no farther away than the Gulf of Mexico. The money is still as good as it's ever been.
For a long time, Plake would search the Internet every morning for news of Egbema One or MEND. Not anymore.
Earlier this year, Nigerian President Umaru Yar'Adua granted amnesty to a host of militants in the Niger Delta. According to Vanguard, a news publication covering the country, Egbema One was on the amnesty list. Yar'Adua has also reportedly directed his government to step up its efforts to rebuild and develop the region. But still, the violence only seems to increase. MEND has recently taken credit for a rash of pipeline bombings against Shell and Chevron, propelling Chevron to evacuate hundreds of employees from the area, according to The Christian Science Monitor. The group continues to wage attacks against the oil companies, claiming that amnesty is not enough to solve the long-standing problems.
The irony of it all is not lost on Plake.
"The group I had heard about and was most afraid of, MEND, were the ones who ended up rescuing us," he says. "I've been told it never happened before or ever since. I understand their plight more now and the reason why they do all this. I'm very appreciative because no one else was coming to get us. But the bottom line is that I got out. I'm here now, and I'm staying put."

Brizola queria revolução sangrenta no Brasil

MEMÓRIA 1964 - O dossiê do braço armado de Brizola

No fim de 1963, em meio à crescente radicalização do ambiente político do governo de João Goulart, Leonel Brizola era a liderança que unificara as esquerdas na Frente de Mobilização Popular. Entrincheirado na Rádio Mayrink Veiga, onde discursava todas as noites, ele pregava a criação dos Grupos de Onze Companheiros, compostos por cidadãos que marchariam unidos quando a esquerda tomasse o poder. A CBN teve acesso a documentos daquela época – que estavam em poder dos militares – que detalham como Brizola idealizou os Grupos de Onze: uma militância que pretendia utilizar mulheres e crianças como escudos civis; realizar ataques a centrais telefônicas, de rádio e TV; e previa a execução de prisioneiros.

Grupos de Onze: o braço armado de Brizola
Por: Mariza Tavares
Edição de arte: Fernanda Osternack

"Este é o documento a que me referi. O Exército não sabe que este dossiê ainda existe, porque foi dada uma ordem para que fosse destruído." Este era o texto do curto bilhete que acompanhava o pacote que recebi pelo correio, enviado por uma ouvinte fiel da CBN. Dentro, um calhamaço de 64 páginas já amareladas, no qual chamava atenção o carimbo no alto, em letras garrafais: SECRETO. A ditadura militar brasileira incinerou regularmente documentos sigilosos. Este dossiê estava em poder de um militar que preferiu desobedecer à ordem e decidiu guardar os papéis em casa. 
Datado de 30 de setembro de 1964 e assinado pelo general-de-brigada Itiberê Gouvêa do Amaral, o documento ostenta a classificação A-1, que até hoje é utilizada pela área militar e que significa que é de total confiança. A classificação varia de A a F para a confiabilidade da fonte; e de 1 a 6 para a confiabilidade do conteúdo.
No tom formal e meticuloso típico dos relatórios dos serviços de inteligência, o texto de abertura, a circular de número 79-E2/64, anunciava que havia sido identificada a criação de diversas células dos chamados "Grupo de onze companheiros" no interior do Paraná e de Santa Catarina.
"Os grupos constituíam a célula de um grande contingente, no qual seriam arregimentados homens das mais variadas categorias e profissões para servirem de instrumento a um pseudolíder, Leonel Brizola, em sua política de subversão do regime e implantação de um Governo de tendências antidemocráticas", explicava o documento.
Os militares já haviam deposto o presidente João Goulart e tomado o poder naquele ano; e a circular festejava a ação ao afirmar, categoricamente, que, "com o advento da revolução de 31 de março, foi cortado o processo ainda na fase inicial". No entanto, o documento assinalava: "Há indícios de que, no futuro, possa ser novamente equacionada a reestruturação dos grupos." Leonel Brizola já se encontrava no exílio no Uruguai desde maio daquele ano, mas a circular assinalava que havia informes de contatos entre "antigos elementos" que integravam esses grupos. Daí a necessidade de mobilização de oficiais para mapear qualquer atividade suspeita.

Jorge Ferreira: "Houve quem se inscrevesse apenas porque gostava de Brizola. Teve gente que pôs até o nome de filhos pequenos nas fichas de inscrição."

Os chamados Grupos de Onze Companheiros – simplificadamente, Grupos de Onze ou Gr-11 – e também conhecidos como Comandos Nacionalistas foram concebidos por Brizola no fim de 1963. Tomando por base a formação de um time de futebol, imagem de fácil assimilação e apelo popular, Brizola pregava a organização de pequenas células – cada uma composta de onze cidadãos, em todo o território nacional – que poderiam ser mobilizadas sob seu comando.
Jorge Ferreira, professor-titular de História da UFF (Universidade Federal Fluminense), doutor em História Social pela USP (Universidade de São Paulo) e autor do livro "O imaginário trabalhista", explica que um dos poucos documentos disponíveis sobre o Grupo de Onze é o modelo de ata de adesão. "Há poucos estudos sobre este movimento e praticamente não há documentação a respeito. As atas, com os dados dos participantes, eram enviadas para a Rádio Mayrink Veiga e depois ficaram em poder da repressão. Como os Grupos de Onze foram criados no fim de 1963, o clima de radicalização já se generalizara. A imprensa também supervalorizava sua capacidade de ação, mas a verdade é que houve quem se inscrevesse apenas porque gostava de Brizola e nunca teve participação efetiva. No Sul, muitos achavam que iam ganhar terra, sementes. Teve gente que pôs até o nome de filhos pequenos nas fichas de inscrição."
O dossiê a que a CBN teve acesso disseca o manual de ação desses militantes e foi criado quando Brizola, eleito deputado federal pelo PTB (Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro) com 300 mil votos – até então, o mais votado da antiga Guanabara – ocupou quase que diariamente o microfone da Rádio Mayrink Veiga entre 1962 e 1963. A tradicional emissora do antigo Distrito Federal, existente desde 1926, funcionava como palanque para Brizola, que ali destilava inflamados discursos pela aprovação das reformas de base – pilar do governo João Goulart e que compreendiam da reforma fiscal à agrária, com a desapropriação de terras de grandes proprietários rurais. E garantia que elas seriam aprovadas, "na lei ou na marra". A Mayrink Veiga estava tão identificada com o projeto político brizolista que uma cópia do documento assinado pelos integrantes de cada recém-criado Gr-11 deveria ser enviada para a emissora. A militância da Mayrink Veiga provocou uma reação dos empresários de comunicação Roberto Marinho (Rádio Globo), Manoel Francisco Nascimento Brito (Rádio Jornal do Brasil) e João Calmon (Rádio Tupi): a criação da Rede da Democracia, uma cadeia radiofônica para combater a política do presidente Jango. Também selou sua sorte: a emissora foi fechada pelo presidente militar Castelo Branco um ano depois da queda de João Goulart.
O documento é composto de anexos que detalham o modus operandi dos Grupos de Onze. O primeiro deles tem cinco páginas dedicadas aos "companheiros nacionalistas", numa espécie de cartilha para a promoção e organização de um comando nacionalista. Na abertura, uma afirmação categórica de vitória:  "A ideia de organização do povo em Comandos Nacionalistas (CN) ou em Grupos de Onze (Gr-11) está amplamente vitoriosa. Milhões e milhões de patriotas integram os Comandos Nacionalistas formados em todo o território pátrio: a palavra de ordem, organizados venceremos, penetrou na consciência de todos os nacionalistas brasileiros."
Para organizar um Gr-11, a primeira providência era a leitura e o estudo das instruções, "quantas vezes forem necessárias até uma segura compreensão dos fins e objetivos da organização." A etapa seguinte era "procurar os companheiros com os quais têm convivência e ligações de confiança". Vizinhos ou colegas de trabalho eram os mais indicados, e sempre em grupos reduzidos, de três ou quatro pessoas. Diante de receptividade para a ideia de organizar um Gr-11, "tal decisão significará um verdadeiro pacto de solidariedade e confiança entre os companheiros."
O objetivo era reunir 11 pessoas, mas as instruções reconhecem que arregimentar este contingente poderia ser um pouco difícil e estabelece que, com sete integrantes, a célula de militantes poderia começar a atuar.  Ao alcançar este quorum mínimo, o grupo é fundado oficialmente e, depois da leitura do manual e do "exame da situação política e da crise econômica e social que estamos atravessando", é escolhido o dirigente do Gr-11; seu assistente – e eventual substituto – e o secretário-tesoureiro. "Tomadas estas decisões", prosseguem as instruções, "proceder à leitura solene, com todos os onze companheiros de pé, do texto da ata e da carta-testamento do presidente Getúlio Vargas." Os integrantes devem assinar seus nomes logo abaixo da assinatura de Vargas e do seguinte texto: "O presidente Vargas sacrificou sua vida por nós. Nosso sacrifício não conhecerá limites para que o nosso povo, de que ele foi escravo, conquiste definitivamente sua libertação econômica e social." Entenda-se que a "libertação" passava por reforma agrária e fim da espoliação internacional.
A primeira reunião formal do grupo tinha objetivo bem burocrático: montar a estrutura do Gr-11. As funções estão bem detalhadas e cada integrante tem um papel específico (esta é a transcrição da descrição das tarefas):
Líder, dirigente ou comandante: representa, orienta e coordena as atividades do grupo, de acordo com as instruções partidárias e os objetivos da organização. Está previsto que seu mandato será a duração de um ano;
Assistente: prestar colaboração direta ao dirigente ou comandante do grupo, substituindo-o em seus impedimentos;
Secretário-tesoureiro: responsável pela gestão dos recursos financeiros e guarda de papéis e documentos (líder, assistente e secretário-tesoureiro formam a comissão executiva do Gr-11);
Comunicações: dois integrantes ficam encarregados das comunicações, que englobam a troca de informações entre os elementos do Gr-11, inclusive no caso de ser preciso avisar aos companheiros sobre a necessidade de esconderijo ou fuga;
Rádio-escuta: acompanhamento pelo rádio dos acontecimentos nacionais e locais;
Transporte: coordenação das possibilidades de transportes para os membros do grupo no caso de atos e concentrações públicas;
Propaganda: responsável por faixas, boletins, pichamentos, notícias para a imprensa;
Mobilização popular: contatos e ligações com o ambiente local, visando a formar um círculo de relações e colaboração em torno do grupo, principalmente para garantir o comparecimento em comícios ou outros atos públicos;
Informações: atribuição de fazer contatos e o levantamento de informações sobre a situação política e social, além de outros problemas que interessem o grupo. Também fica responsável pela organização partidária local;
Assistência médico-social: o companheiro deve ser, se possível, médico, enfermeiro ou assistente social, "ou no mínimo com alguma noção ou treinamento para prestar assistência ou orientação a todas as pessoas necessitadas no ambiente onde atuar o Comando Nacionalista (por exemplo, aplicar injeção, conseguir medicamentos, curativos de emergência)".
A proposta era criar sucessivos grupos de 11 integrantes até atingir 11 células com estas características, quando, como relata o documento, "seus onze líderes formarão um Gr-11-2, isto é, um grupo de onze de 2º. nível, reunindo um total de 121 companheiros."
Esta seria a matriz de multiplicação dos comandos nacionalistas: os 11 líderes escolheriam, entre si, um comandante de segundo nível, cuja responsabilidade seria a coordenação dos onze grupos; e os outros dez companheiros deste Gr-11-2 dariam apoio ao novo chefe. Mas nada de parar por aí, porque cada nova célula deveria perseguir sua clonagem ao infinito: "se num município, numa cidade, área ou bairro, se organizarem onze grupos de onze, portanto um Gr-11-2 e depois onze grupos de 2º. nível, teremos um total de 1.331 companheiros na organização, os quais serão orientados e dirigidos por um Gr-11-3, ou seja, um grupo de onze de 3º. nível, integrado pelos onze líderes dos grupos de 2º. nível."
As "recomendações gerais" sugerem que os Gr-11 deveriam ser integrados inicialmente por companheiros de "maior capacidade de direção e liderança". Os demais grupos seriam compostos por militantes de capacidade "aproximada ou igual". O documento frisa que o movimento recebe, de braços abertos, gente de todas as procedências: "No mesmo Gr-11 poderão estar um trabalhador da mais modesta atividade, ao lado de um médico; um trabalhador ou técnico especializado, um estudante, um agricultor, um intelectual, um motorista, ao lado de um camponês, um militar."
O contato com a liderança nacional era de responsabilidade de um delegado de ligação (DL); enquanto não chegavam novas instruções, cabia ao Gr-11 realizar reuniões para estreitar os laços entre seus militantes e analisar a conjuntura, além de buscar adesões em sua área de atuação. "Os companheiros devem estimular, particularmente, a formação de Gr-11 entre a mocidade e estudantes. É da maior significação esse ponto das presentes instruções. A nossa causa depende fundamentalmente do apoio e da integração dos jovens e das classes trabalhadoras."
Embora não fizesse restrições a analfabetos, a arquitetura dos Gr-11 praticamente ignorava uma militância integral das mulheres: "As companheiras integrantes do Movimento Feminino ou simpatizantes devem formar seus próprios Gr-11. Oportunamente serão enviadas instruções especiais sobre a estrutura desses grupos de companheiras."
O chamado Anexo C é composto de documentos de Leonel Brizola com o sugestivo título de "Subsídios para a Organização dos Comandos de Libertação Nacional".  Tem oito seções, todas subdivididas num minucioso roteiro para a militância. E começa pelo nome a ser dado ao grupo. No capítulo "Denominação", há cinco sugestões, por ordem preferencial: Comandos de Libertação Nacional (Colina); Comando Revolucionário de Libertação Nacional (Corlin); Comando Revolucionário dos Onze (Cron); Comando de Libertação Brasileira (Colb); e Comando dos Onze Revolucionários (Core).
O capítulo seguinte é o da "Justificativa": "A palavra revolucionária, como é sabido, exerce poderosa atração nas pessoas entre 17 e 25 anos – fator que servirá à etapa de arregimentação". O documento aposta na força de atração do termo: "A sigla onde aparece a ideia de revolução pode, com maiores possibilidades, ser difundida com certo mistério e mística de clandestinidade, complementada por instruções secretas, senhas, códigos, símbolos etc...", diz o texto que exibe rudimentos de técnica de marketing e motivação.

Vitor Borges:  "Os militares queriam saber como pretendíamos envenenar o reservatório de água e perguntavam onde estavam os sacos de veneno."

O gaúcho Vitor Borges de Melo, natural de Alegrete, cidade que fica a cerca de 500 quilômetros de Porto Alegre, é um bom exemplo de arregimentação de jovens que queriam um pouco de ação. "Eu e meus companheiros éramos simpatizantes de Brizola desde a Cadeia da Legalidade, em 1961. Eu já tinha me apresentado como voluntário nesta época. Depois passei a acompanhar os discursos na Rádio Mayrink Veiga e decidi entrar para o Grupo de Onze. Todos usavam nomes de guerra e o meu era Tavares." Aos 63 anos, embora seja citado como ex-integrante do Gr-11, Vitor na verdade só se lembra de ter participado de uma reunião. Mesmo assim ficou preso, incomunicável, por 31 dias. "Os militares queriam saber como pretendíamos envenenar o reservatório de água de Alegrete e perguntavam onde estavam os sacos de veneno. Não sei de onde tiraram isso, como é que faríamos uma coisa dessas?", lembra Vitor, hoje aposentado, filiado ao PTB e beneficiado, pela Lei da Anistia, com uma indenização de R$ 12 mil. Provavelmente, por só ter ido a uma reunião, Vitor não foi "iniciado" em todas as propostas de ação do movimento.
No dossiê, a delimitação de áreas de ação é meticulosa e pretende cobrir todo o território nacional. Do contingente inicial de 11 membros, a proposta é multiplicá-los de forma que um distrito  tenha 11 unidades de 11 membros, contabilizando 121 almas. A província terá 22 distritos, ou 2.662 membros; e a região será composta por 11 ou mais províncias, com 29.282 membros. O documento divide o país em sete regiões, mas exclui a Região Norte, provavelmente por problemas de logística:
1ª. Região: Guanabara, Rio de Janeiro e Espírito Santo;
2ª. Região: Bahia e Sergipe;
3ª. Região: Minas Gerais;
4ª. Região: São Paulo e Paraná;
5ª. Região: Santa Catarina e Rio Grande do Sul;
6ª. Região: Pernambuco, Alagoas, Paraíba e Rio Grande do Norte;
7ª. Região: Ceará, Piauí, Maranhão e Fernando de Noronha.
A estrutura administrativa nacional também previa um organograma que contava com um comandante supremo (CS); dois inspetores regionais (IN); e oito conselheiros regionais (CR), uma elite de burocratas encarregados de escolher, nomear ou destituir as camadas inferiores de militantes. Mas, abaixo deles, também havia espaço para muita gente se acomodar. O desenho da burocracia interna do poder é rico em categorias e deixaria qualquer analista de RH impressionado com o número de cargos. Sob a estrutura nacional, há estruturas administrativas regionais, provinciais e distritais, com direito a chefias, secretarias-executivas, assessorias e monitorias. Ao todo, são listados 32 cargos de alguma relevância – uma longa carreira que se descortinava para os aspirantes à militância.
Especialmente suculento é o capítulo sobre instruções gerais aos companheiros que quisessem organizar um Gr-11. Uma das principais preocupações diz respeito à seleção de indivíduos: "Procure conhecer bem as ideias políticas de cada uma das pessoas que você pretende convidar", ensina a cartilha, batendo na tecla da prudência: "Convide a pessoa para uma conversa reservada. Peça sigilo sobre o assunto. Procure certificar-se de que ela manteve sigilo. Mande alguém, seu conhecido, testá-la nesse pormenor."
A paranóia pela segurança se estende aos deveres dos dirigentes. Entre os dez itens listados, cinco dizem respeito ao controle da informação e dos membros do grupo: "manter severa vigilância em sua jurisdição para evitar infiltrações de inimigos entre os seus comandados"; "alternar, sempre, os locais de reuniões de seu grupo, fazendo as convocações sempre em código ou através de senhas"; "manter sob rigoroso controle os arquivos secretos e os dados sigilosos sobre a organização e seus membros"; "não discutir assuntos referentes aos planos dos Comandos de Libertação Nacional exceto com as pessoas autorizadas"; "procurar organizar em sua jurisdição um esquema de rápida mobilização popular para enfrentar golpistas, reacionários e grupos antipovo."
O código de segurança detalha os cuidados a serem adotados e a ordem é clara: desconfiar o tempo todo. Por isso o telefone fica banido na transmissão de mensagens. O militante também deve anotar tudo o que ouvir sobre a organização, especialmente quando partir de um "reacionário": "até as piadas têm sua importância. Não as despreze."

Os comandantes são instruídos a buscar subordinados para os Grupos de Onze que sejam "os autênticos e verdadeiros revolucionários, os destemerosos da própria morte."

Os comandantes regionais, devido à sua importância na estrutura do movimento, recebem instruções secretas que só devem ser compartilhadas com os companheiros do Grupo de Onze "com as devidas cautelas e ressalvas". O filé mignon da pregação revolucionária brizolista se encontra no Anexo D, cuja abertura tem o pomposo título "Preâmbulo Ultra-secreto" e determina que "só os fortes e intemeratos podem intentar a salvação do Brasil das garras do capitalismo internacional e de seus aliados internos. Quem for fraco ainda terá tempo de recuar ante a responsabilidade que terá que assumir com o conhecimento pleno destas instruções."
Os comandantes são instruídos a buscar subordinados para os Grupos de Onze que sejam "os autênticos e verdadeiros revolucionários, os destemerosos da própria morte, os que colocam a Pátria e nossos ideais acima de tudo e de todos." E a recomendação seguinte é evitar arregimentar parentes ou amigos íntimos.
Findo o preâmbulo, as instruções secretas têm dez seções. A primeira, sobre os objetivos, volta a pregar a importância do Gr-11 como a "vanguarda avançada" do movimento e compara esta célula à Guarda Vermelha da Revolução Socialista de 1917. Por ser revolucionária, ela não precisa prestar contas dos seus atos: "Não nos poderemos deter à procura de justificativas acadêmicas para atos que possam vir a ser considerados, pela reação e pelos companheiros sentimentalistas, agressivos demais ou até mesmo injustificados." Sem sombra de dúvida, os fins justificam os meios.
O quesito seguinte, que tem o título genérico de "Observações", descreve o que seria uma espécie de estado de espírito permanente dos participantes: "Os Grupos dos Onze Companheiros, como vanguardeiros da libertação nacional, terão que se preparar devidamente (...) devendo considerar-se, desde já, em REVOLUÇÃO PERMANENTE e OSTENSIVA." A revolução cubana vitoriosa de Fidel Castro é a principal referência: "A condição de militantes dos gloriosos Gr-11 traz consigo enormes responsabilidades e, por isso, embora para formação inicial de nossas unidades não seja condição sine qua o conhecimento da técnica propriamente militar, torna-se absolutamente necessário o da técnica de guerrilhas e a leitura, entre outras importantes publicações, do folheto cubano a respeito daquele mister."
No terceiro capítulo, sobre a ação preliminar, os companheiros são instados a tentar conseguir o quanto antes armamentos para o "Momento Supremo". E a lista contempla desde espingardas a pistolas e metralhadoras. Com um lembrete: "Não esquecer os preciosos coquetéis Molotov e outros tipos de bombas incendiárias, até mesmo estopa e panos embebidos em óleo ou gasolina." A instrução reconhece a escassez de armas no movimento, mas conta com aliados militares (segundo o documento, "que possuímos em toda as Forças Armadas") e garante ter o apoio da população rural. "Os camponeses virão destruindo e queimando as plantações, engenhos, celeiros e armazéns."
O descolamento entre propostas e realidade é flagrante, mas não diminui o grau de virulência da ação que, pelo menos em tese, seria desencadeada pelos Grupos de Onze. Juarez Santos Alves, de 61 anos, é contemporâneo e até hoje amigo de Vitor Borges de Melo. O pai, dono de farmácia, e o tio, militar, eram militantes do PCB (Partido Comunista Brasileiro) e foram sua inspiração. No entanto, no que diz respeito à sua passagem pelo Grupo de Onze, a monotonia imperava. "Considero mais um grupo poético, porque nunca demos um passo além das reuniões. Falava-se em tomar o quartel, mas como é que iríamos resistir se no máximo tínhamos armas pessoais ou de caça?", rememora Juarez, que depois ingressou na Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária. Preso e torturado, foi beneficiado com uma indenização de R$ 100 mil.

A cartilha de ação inclui escudos humanos, saques e incêndios de edifícios públicos e empresas particulares, além da difusão de notícias falsas.

Em centros urbanos, a tática adotada será assumidamente a de guerra suja, com a utilização de escudos civis, principalmente mulheres e crianças. "Nas cidades, os companheiros (...) incitarão a opinião pública com gritos e frases patrióticas, procurando levantar a bandeira das mais sentidas reivindicações populares, devendo, para a vitória desta tática, atrair o maior número de mulheres e crianças para a frente da massa popular." Agitação é a palavra de ordem, com direito a depredação de estabelecimentos comerciais, saques e incêndios de edifícios públicos e de empresas particulares. Também estão incluídos ataques a centrais telefônicas, emissoras de rádio e TV. O objetivo? "Com as autoridades policiais e militares totalmente desorientadas, estaremos, nesse momento, a um passo da tomada efetiva do Poder-Nação."
Sobre a tática geral da guerrilha nacional, tema do item quatro, a ênfase recai na guerra de informação. Depois de a autodenominada ação revolucionária ter provocado o caos, o passo seguinte seria cortar a comunicação entre as cidades e divulgar apenas o que interessasse ao movimento. "Difundindo-se notícias falsas, tendenciosas e inteiramente favoráveis aos nossos Gr-11 e aos nossos planos, com interceptação de comunicações telefônicas isolamento das cidades e de seus meios de comunicação." 
Em "O porquê da revolução nacional libertadora", a explicação de cartilha revolucionária: a exploração do capital monopolista estrangeiro, principalmente americano; e a estrutura agrária baseada na concentração latifundiária.  No capítulo sobre "o aliado comunista", não resta dúvida de que Brizola não via o Partido Comunista Brasileiro (PCB) com a menor simpatia. "Devemos ter sempre presente que o comunista é nosso principal aliado mas, embora alardeie o Partido Comunista ter forças para fazer a Revolução Libertadora, o PCB nada mais é que um movimento dividido em várias frentes internas em luta aberta entre si pelo poder absoluto e pela vitória de uma das facções em que se fragmentou." E continua, aumentando o tom da crítica: "São fracos e aburguesados esses camaradas chefiados pelos que veem, em Moscou, o único sol que poderá guiar o proletariado mundial à libertação internacional. Fogem à luta como fogem à realidade e não perderão nada se a situação nacional perdurar por muitos anos ainda."

"No caso de derrota do nosso movimento, os reféns deverão ser sumária e imediatamente fuzilados."

O trecho mais chocante das instruções secretas aos comandantes diz respeito à guarda e ao julgamento dos prisioneiros.  Para esta tarefa, a orientação é clara: "Deverão ser escolhidos companheiros de condições humildes mas, entretanto, de férreas e arraigadas condições de ódio aos poderosos e aos ricos". Além da prisão, está previsto o julgamento sumário de oponentes ao movimento, onde se incluem autoridades públicas, políticos e personalidades. "No caso de derrota do nosso movimento, o que é improvável, mas não impossível (...) e esta é uma informação para uso somente de alguns companheiros de absoluta e máxima confiança, os reféns deverão ser sumária e imediatamente fuzilados, a fim de que não denunciem seus aprisionadores e não lutem, posteriormente, para sua condenação e destruição."
Para o professor Jorge Ferreira, entre 1961 e 1964 houve uma profunda mudança nos interesses que alimentavam a correlação de forças entre militares, partidos políticos e sociedade. "Em agosto de 1961", diz ele, "quando Jânio Quadros renuncia, os militares deram um golpe que foi rechaçado pelo Congresso, pelos partidos e pelas entidades civis. Os grupos progressistas e legalistas venceram. A sociedade brasileira não queria romper com o processo democrático." O período parlamentarista manteve o equilíbrio, ainda que precário, entre essas correntes. Jango sabia que precisava de maioria no Congresso ou não governaria, mas o plebiscito que lhe devolveu o presidencialismo acabou dando outro rumo aos acontecimentos, como afirma Ferreira: "a Frente de Mobilização Popular, encabeçada por Brizola, havia unificado praticamente todas as esquerdas, englobando o Comando Geral dos Trabalhadores, Ligas Camponesas, UNE, Ação Popular, a esquerda do Partido Socialista Brasileiro, a esquerda mais radical do PCB, os movimentos de sargentos e marinheiros. E a exigência dessas esquerdas era o rompimento com o PSD (Partido Social Democrático), a convocação de Assembléia Nacional Constituinte e o questionamento das instituições liberais vigentes. É quando se estabelece o confronto." Desta vez, o estado de direito não venceu.

In Colombia, a mission for peace

In Colombia, a mission for peace

By Steve Salisbury
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 10, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20021210-85797464.htm

VILLA DE LA PAZ, Colombia - With prospects for peace in Colombia as remote as at any time during the nation's 38-year-old civil war, hope is being kept alive by a most unusual mediator - an American missionary who has known the Marxist rebels since they kidnapped him almost two decades ago.

Russell Martin Stendal, 47, a Protestant missionary from Minneapolis, had been working in Colombia as a rancher and operating a two-Cessna flying service for about eight years when he was taken captive by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in August 1983.

He was released five months later, making him more fortunate than some of the 120 Americans who have been kidnapped in Colombia, mostly by guerrillas. In 1999, FARC rebels kidnapped and killed three American activists who were building a school for an Indian tribe. The FARC later called the slayings a "misunderstanding."

Instead of fleeing Colombia, Mr. Stendal, his Colombian wife, Marina, and their four children continue to live in the country. They spend much of their time at a countryside home on the edge of the grounds of the defunct Lomalinda Translation Center, near Puerto Lleras in Meta province.

Despite a State Department warning that the FARC extorts from, kidnaps and kills U.S. citizens in Colombia, Mr. Stendal and his younger brother, "Chaddy," have acted as an informal "back channel" and sometimes as mediators in Meta among the FARC, the vigilante United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), local communities and the Colombian army. The brothers do this as part of their efforts to evangelize all the warring parties.

"Divine providence put us in the situations where we have had trajectories for many years with both sides that has led to the trust that there is now," Mr. Stendal said.

In 1964, the year the FARC was founded, the Stendal family moved from Minnesota to Colombia. Russell Stendal was 8. His father, Chad Stendal Sr., a civil engineer, was among the founders of the Lomalinda Translation Center of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) in Meta.

SIL was set up by Wycliffe Bible Translators to translate the New Testament into Colombia's Indian languages. According to Russell Stendal, the Lomalinda center grew to have nearly 100 households and 300 volunteers - mostly Americans.

But in the mid-1970s, SIL became the target of unsubstantiated rumors that it was a U.S. government entity, and in 1981, one of its members, Chester Bitterman, was kidnapped and killed by guerrillas of the now-disarmed and legalized April 19 Movement. Another American missionary was kidnapped by the FARC in the mid-1990s, and SIL's Lomalinda center closed about a year later, Russell Stendal said.

"It is astonishing we are all still alive," his father said. "Of the 23 closest personal friends of Chaddy, 20 were killed and three fled the country." Russell Stendal and his brother bought five small houses at Lomalinda, and there Russell Stendal started his first radio station in Colombia, Marfil Stereo at 88.8 FM. That was nearly four years ago.

Eighty percent of the station's broadcast content is secular, and 20 percent religious, Russell Stendal said. He later added Radio Alcaravan, 1530 AM , and a short-wave station, the Voice of Your Conscience at 6010 on the 49-meter band, which can be heard in the evening in North America and Europe. These two stations are primarily religious.

"Our programming isn't typical Christian programming. It is not trying to get people into our church and not into somebody else's church," Russell Stendal said.

"We are trying to bring people into a personal relationship with God, no matter to what group they belong," said his mother, Patricia Stendal.

"We produce programs that have solid values, and that deal with attitude and a change of heart, of being tolerant of other people's views and ideas," Russell Stendal said.

Mr. Stendal's broadcasting career grew out of his writing his first book, "Rescue the Captors," which he began while a captive of the FARC. The Stendal family said it paid $55,000 for Russell Stendal's freedom, down from the $500,000 ransom demand. The Stendals say they also "donated" a year later more than 80 percent of Chad Stendal Sr.'s 74,000-acre cattle ranch in Meta to landless Indians and peasants - an action that gained the family good will from the guerrillas.

Russell Stendal's story reached President Reagan, and he was invited to the White House. Mr. Reagan's director for domestic drug abuse policy met with him and opened doors for Mr. Stendal to make an anti-drug documentary and a two-year speaking tour of American high schools and colleges.

In the 1980s and early '90s, the late Rev. Rafael Garcia Herreros, a Colombian priest and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, enlisted Russell Stendal in joint Protestant-Catholic outreach efforts toward outlawed groups. Mr. Stendal tells of driving Father Garcia to secret meetings with the late Medellin cocaine cartel leader Pablo Escobar, where the priest persuaded Escobar to surrender.

Except for rustling Stendal cattle in the past two decades, the FARC and the AUC have not bothered the family, Russell Stendal said.

That's "because they see we are not political," said Chad Stendal Sr., who lives with his wife in Bogota. "And they also see that we physically help a lot of people, no matter who they are. We have helped a lot of wounded while they were dying."

Last month, Villa de la Paz, a community of about 600 people nearly 50 miles south of Lomalinda in an area dominated by the FARC, held a "Forum for Peace." Villager Hilberto Saenz says the Stendal brothers agreed to help organize it.

Residents complained of a deteriorating situation. Some accused the AUC and soldiers of collaborating in a campaign of killings against FARC sympathizers in nearby towns, and they feared it would reach Villa de la Paz.

"We cannot deny that there are guerrillas here," said the village treasurer, a 58-year-old man who asked not to be named. "But we are not guerrillas. So, we would like the government to allow the food, medicine and things necessary to live to enter town."

Some observers question the need for such a lightly inhabited area, where coca is heavily cultivated, to receive frequent, large deliveries of gasoline, which can be used to extract unrefined cocaine. One villager said the gasoline tankers also smuggle out the coca alkaloid in liquid form.

Villa de la Paz was founded in 1986 by peasants and coca growers, under the watch of the FARC - Colombia's largest guerrilla group, with an estimated 14,000 to 17,000 troops - and this has put its residents in the FARC-AUC-and-army cross fire.

In May, say villagers, laundress Luz Dari Caiceido was killed by government helicopter gunfire on the edge of Puerto Toledo, 18 miles south of Villa de la Paz.

Three guerrillas were said to be on the outskirts, but "bullets were hitting the town," said Edilma Marin, who was working at Puerto Toledo's communal pharmacy that day and says she saw Miss Caiceido's bullet-riddled body. Mrs. Marin said the victim was a destitute single mother who left five young children and a tar-paper shack.

Perhaps 5,000 people came to Villa de la Paz during the Nov. 23 peace forum, including truckloads of unarmed FARC guerrillas in civilian clothes. It was a hot, sunny day just north of the equator. About 400 people packed a tin-roofed village hall, and hundreds more filled the nearby streets. The smell of veal roasting on spits filled the air.

The hall's pink concrete walls were adorned with anti-government and anti-Plan Colombia banners. Speaker after speaker denounced abuses by the army and the vigilantes, but not by the guerrillas.

After one old man criticized the United States as the greatest human rights violator in history, a village leader close to the FARC took the microphone to reply. "The United States has two classes," he said, "the exploiters and the exploited. We have Americans with us here, and we honor them."

Russell Stendal, who was introduced as one of "the exploited," then took the mike.

"Someone told me, 'If our enemies are fearsome, then we are going to be more evil,'" he said. "Instead of being a contest of who can be the worst, why not see who can do the most good?"

His listeners applauded when Russell Stendal mentioned his belief that the FARC's 43rd Front, which controls the area, didn't have a policy of kidnapping during the past five years - unlike the FARC in general.

After the forum, people crowded around the American's red Chevy Suburban, where assistants passed out some of the 7,000 religious books and Bibles given away that day. Marxism is atheist, but many of the FARC's rank and file were raised as Catholics or Protestants.

Nacho, 27, an officer of the FARC's 43rd Front, received Russell Stendal and others just outside Villa de la Paz two hours after the peace forum. He sat with the visitors in plastic chairs under a thatched roof near a small wooden house. Trucks occasionally roared by, raising dust from an adjacent dirt road.

Accompanied by about 10 armed guerrillas in camouflage fatigues, Nacho said the idea of a regional peace forum was something to be considered. Three years of virtually fruitless national peace talks between the FARC and the previous Colombian president, Andres Pastrana, collapsed 10 months ago.

But Nacho, who said he is a 10-year FARC veteran, dismissed Russell Stendal's idea that each warring group give up 150 rifles to be melted into a peace monument. "We need the rifles," he replied, laughing.

His coppery face frowned in evident disagreement when Hamilton Castro, president of the private Pro-Colombia Foundation, said: "Sincerely, if the FARC commits terrorist acts, then it is terrorist. If the state commits terrorist acts, then it is terrorist."

Nacho responded that it is a time of war, and that the FARC has a right to act against its enemies, through means such as bombings and executions. "We are not terrorists," he said. "We are fighting for the people."

He said it would be hard to renew peace negotiations as long as the FARC was designated as "terrorist" and U.S. extradition orders were pending against its leaders.

Getting into the driver's seat of a green sport utility vehicle, Nacho smiled and shook hands, saying he enjoyed the visit. Mr. Stendal handed him a camouflage-covered Bible.

The next day, Russell Stendal's team left Villa de la Paz. At an army checkpoint en route to Puerto Lleras, a soldier snatched a small peace pennant affixed to Mr. Stendal's side mirror. When Mr. Stendal complained, a sergeant ordered the soldier to give it back.

Later, among the riverside ruins of Puerto Lleras, a soldier named Alex searched Mr. Stendal in a routine security check and recognized his ID card.

Alex pulled out a well-worn copy of Mr. Stendal's book - "The Beatitudes, God's Plan for Battle" - and asked him to autograph it.

A Sister’s experiences from 1980’s Salafi Movement

A Sister’s experiences from 1980’s Salafi Movement3 04 2007
A sister wrote this “prequel” and emailed it to me. Masha Allah, my original series on the 1990s Salafi movement made it to all corners of the globe and insha Allah will spark some much needed change. However, the sister basically gives a summary of her experiences with the beginnings of the movement in the 1980s:
This isn’t going to be very eloquent because truth to tell, I am saddened and sickened by the whole subject of salafism/wahabbism. I came across Brother Umar Lee’s blog a week or so ago and have been hanging out there ever since. Trying to find the logic in many comments, and when I can’t, trying to point it out. I should have learned from the past. In truth, it can’t be done.
I read Br. Umar’s discourse on “The Rise and Fall of the ‘Salafi Dawah’ in the US”. I think he was spot on in his assessments. Br. Umar began with the 1990’s, because he’s too young to know what US Islamic life was like back in the 80’s, pre-salafism as a defined group with a name. But there were groups of brothers exactly like many salafis today, who would help to create, and/or go on to embrace the movement and call it by the name by which it is known today.
This isn’t a pretty picture, but it is the truth. And in the nearly 25 years since I said my shahada, I am grief-stricken that not much has changed.
When I became acquainted with Islam, I was guided to one of the few masjids in town. It was, I guess you could say, the largest congregation and the most ethnically diverse. It was also located in the heart of the universities area, and attracted a variety of Muslims, both immigrant and indigenous, born Muslim and converted, Arab, Asian, African, European and “American”—in those days primarily “African” American.
The long and short of it is this: This particular masjid was usually only occupied at prayer time, except for a group of young American, convert men who always seemed to be there. Other members of the congregation were either students or employees, or both. Not this particular group. They were neither. I would come to know most of them as I studied Islam before I said my shahada. And sadly I would come to learn what a blight they were on the Islamic community. They were the source of most of the fitnah and destruction of brotherhood/sisterhood among us.
I would first like to say that when one has too much time on his hands, Shaytan uses him as a plaything. Under the guise of “Islamic education”, this group lounged around the masjid day in and day out. There wore the pre-salafia dress, favoring long white jalabiyahs and turbans instead of the “highwaters” and kufis preferred nowadays. They went by the name of the Islamic Propagation League. It was their mission to bring Islam to the masses in my city, and correct the aqeedah of those already Muslim. They went out of their way to catch those inquiring about Islam—or new shahadas—hoping to convert them to their own particular brand of Islam. I guess this was one reason for staying in the masjid all day. If anyone came or called asking about Islam, these brothers were usually the first to pounce on them. They provided “dawah” on Islam, emphasizing rejection of all things western as tools of the devil.
They placed great emphasis on how one was to dress, as western-style clothing was to be abandoned in favor of long robes for the men and full hijab, including niqaab, which they pushed as fard, for the women. There was precious little talk of tawheed, the pillars of Islam, etc. The emphasis was on outward appearances, even down to rejecting your birth name and choosing an Arabic one.
They were my second encounter with Muslims. My first was a man I had met at a party at the university, a Nigerian student who patiently answered all my questions about Islam once I discovered he was a Muslim. My only “knowledge” of Islam in those days what that Allah was an idol in the desert and women were oppressed. Alhamdulilah he set me straight, and guided me to the location of the masjid, and providing me with a number to someone eager to help me whom he described as “part Arab, part European”. But on my first visit I encountered the Islamic Propagation League, of which this Arab/European kid was a part, and very nearly left Islam before I embraced it.
I’m not sure what the token white guy’s qualifications were to have been known around the masjid as someone schooled enough to give dawah. I think he just seemed a bit more acceptable as he was white and a fluent English and Arabic speaker.
It came to be known that white converts—and there were many women especially—were a prized commodity to those slackers who lay in the masjid all day. They tried to snag us at all costs. Somehow they believed the addition of a white feather in their caps would give their group legitimacy—something it was sorely lacking. They often complained that the Arab brothers “stole the white women” away. I don’t know about that, but after listening to dawah lessons from both sides, with the exception of one lecture, I was much more impressed with the Arabs. Why? Because they concentrated on those concepts I mentioned above…tawheed, the five pillars, and cardinal beliefs. They weren’t about damning the West and telling me I needed to get myself into mandatory niqaab and start calling myself Aisha or something.
My first Islamic outfits were sewn by me, long, loose flowing robes and the veils included niqaab. I thought I was doing the right thing. It wasn’t until I met other members of the mosque that I learned niqaab was optional. I thought it was pretty and rather exotic-looking, but I was relieved because my family wasn’t having any part of my conversion to Islam, especially the clothes. So when I left the house on the way to the masjid, in jeans and a t-shirt, changing into Islamic clothing on the way, I was at least relieved to know that showing my face wasn’t a sin.
During my studies, I was also made privy to the kind of life-style these pre-salafis were leading. They were all, with the exception of one, married to black women and on the prowl for a second or third wife—preferably a white one. Their families lived on welfare because it was “haram to work for the kuffar”. The kuffar would not allow you to wear a turban and jalabayih to work, so you couldn’t work for them, as “Islamic” clothing for men was wajib. It was not haram however to take charity from the kuffar. So these families existed on full welfare, which back in those days—before Clinton’s welfare reform—was a bundle. You could very easily raise a family on cash allotments—which by the way increased with the birth of each new child, food stamps—again increased with each new birth, medical care, WIC and free housing or ridiculously low monthly payments via a section 8 housing allowance. Most of these brothers lived better than others who had jibs for a living. They weren’t getting all that help, and struggled to make ends meet.
It was suggested to me that I might like to become the wife of one of these fine brothers. I politely declined, not just because I was uninterested in living on welfare, but because I couldn’t get with the polygamy aspect, being that not only was it illegal, but I would have to lie and pretend I wasn’t married to my husband. This is how the welfare department in our city came to call the Muslim women on the welfare role “the Holy Whores” - because they were often dressed in all black and niqaab and having children (as far as the state was concerned) out of wedlock. The second and subsequent wives could not be legally married to their spouse, and the government didn’t give a damn about or recognize a so-called Islamic marriage. And so the “Holy Whores” were born and I wasn’t eager to join their ranks.
My polite refusal was met with scorn. I was refusing a life with a decent Muslim man just because I thought myself above welfare and being known as a “whore”. Well, truth to tell, I was. I think there’s no shame in that.
To make a long story short, I accepted Islam during a Friday evening halaqa for the brothers at the masjid. My pre-salafi acquaintances were also in attendance. As was my future husband—a moderate Arab. Once my future husband asked about marrying me, we were sort of doomed. The American slackers had lost another white woman to an Arab man—something that apparently happened all too often. I guess my marriage to him was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Because from then on, that group had it in for us.
My husband and I became very active in the masjid and in dawah. I was affiliating myself more with the Arab sector than I was the African-American group—mainly because I saw a better Islam and sensible work/study ethic from the Arabs. Because I was white, it often fell to me to meet other white women who were interested in Islam. I would share my own experiences with them while my husband shared the nuts and bolts of Islamic teachings.
I’m not going to get into the specifics of what happened to us - because that would jeopardize my anonymity - but we were put-down, taunted, accused of heinous things at every turn from a small band of these lazy devils masquerading as righteous Muslims. No matter that the greater Islamic community stood behind us—these pre-salafis were relentless. They would not let up on us in their quest to make our lives a living hell. After one particularly horrible incident, we decided to leave the city. We couldn’t take the pressure any longer.
But I kept in touch with many from my first community, including a few African-American sisters who knew this group, but were not a part of it. Upon hearing news from home, I was always so glad we had left. It was a constant string of gossip coming my way—this one had taken a third wife and divorced the other two. That one had caused a fight in the masjid between Arabs and blacks and the police had to be called. Another family had been set up in what would eventually morph into a rape charge against a very decent Muslim man and his family who had given shelter to a homeless ex-prostitute sent in as a decoy pretending to be interested in Islam. The list of atrocities committed by these pre-salafis was endless.
The funny thing is, in this town there was a totally African-American masjid, but the imam there would have none of their pre-salafi antics or dawah. He had forbidden them the opportunity to take up residence in his masjid. He was a decent, working class man who cared very well for his family. About 20 years later, upon his death, the masjid was taken over by salafis. What was once one of the oldest and most revered African-American masjids in the country is now a joke.
Over the years, even 20 years later—as self admitted followers of the salafi dawah, some members of the original group, were still making problems. Their wives still gossiping about people who had lived there ages ago, and trying to break up marriages and families of 20 years duration. Good deeds, if done by the persons still hated by the salafis, were turned into very near crimes against Islam. It continues to this day.
What happened to the original group? Basically they traded in their jalabiyahs and white turbans for highwaters and kufis. Their beards are down to waists, they reek of jasmine oil and henna, and their women dress like the beloved “black crows” of the Sunnah. But their hearts seem to be equally black. Most - if not all - have long since left that city, and formed or joined some infamous large salafi communities on the East Coast. Many got free trips to study Islam abroad and came back throwing around a few Arabic words in fus-hah and calling themselves “sheikhs”. Their second generation children are leaving the deen and are losing their own children to the dunya. They want no part of this extremist cult.
To this day you will find salafis gathered in person or on the internet, still discussing trivia to the point of insanity…Like the ruling regarding a particular sheikh who made a mistake in prayer, or the ruling on a particular community member who committed a sin. Hours and hours, days, weeks, months, volumes written on one single error—how to deal with it, discuss it, benefit from it, distance from it, ostracize the offender, etc, etc, etc.
Is this the Islam I envisioned when I took my shahada? No, and Alhamdulilah by the grace of Allah I never got sucked into it.
So the rise and fall of the salafi movement in the USA is a reality. It’s probably much worse actually then Brother Umar has indicated. There is a hadith of the Prophet (saw) that says…What starts on wrong is wrong. The beginning of the salafi movement in theUSA started with groups of men who were not willing to do their Islamic duties to Allah, themselves or their families, preferring instead to laze around the masjid in the name of “knowledge”. From my viewpoint, none of that has changed. The salafi dawah started on wrong, and will remain so. Unlike Islam—no sects, no labels, no bull—which will flourish and one day glorify hard-working, true believing Muslims, everywhere.

More Killing Please! - Palestinian Conflict and the American Civil War

SPENGLER
More killing, please!

"I think people are sick of [killing]," said President George W Bush of the Israeli-Palestinian war. The contrary may be true. People may want the killing to continue for quite some time, as the Palestinian radical organizations suggest. A recurring theme in the history of war is that most of the killing typically occurs long after rational calculation would call for the surrender of the losing side.

Think of the Japanese after Okinawa, the Germans after the Battle of the Bulge, or the final phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Thirty Years War, or the Hundred Years War. Across epochs and cultures, blood has flown in proportion inverse to the hope of victory. Perhaps what the Middle East requires in order to achieve a peace settlement is not less killing, but more.

Mut der Verzweiflung, as the Germans call it, courage borne of desperation, arises not from the delusion that victory is possible, but rather from the conviction that death is preferable to surrender. Wars of this sort end long after one side has been defeated, namely when enough of the diehards have been killed.

Don't blame the president's provincialism. This has nothing to do with Bushido, Nazi fanaticism or other exotic ideologies. The most compelling case of Mut der Verzweiflung can be found in Bush's own back yard, during the American Civil War of 1861-1865. The Southern cause was lost after Major General Ulysses S Grant took Vicksburg and General George G Meade repelled General Robert E Lee at Gettysburg in July 1863. With Union forces in control of the Mississippi River, the main artery of Southern commerce, and without the prospect of a breakout to the North, the Confederacy of slaveholding states faced inevitable strangulation by the vastly superior forces of the North.

Nonetheless, the South fought on for another 18 months. Between Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the two decisive battles of the war fought within the same week, 100,000 men had died, bringing the total number of deaths in major battles to more than a quarter of a million. Another 200,000 soldiers would die before Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox in April 1865. The chart below shows the cumulative number of Civil War casualties as the major battles of the war proceeded.



The chart is demarcated into sections labeled "Hope" (prior to Gettysburg and Vicksburg) and "No Hope". Geometers will recognize a so-called S-curve in which the pace of killing accelerates immediately after Gettysburg and Vickburg and remains steep through the Battle of Cold Harbor, before leveling off in the last months of the war. Not only did half the casualties occur after the war was lost by the South, but the speed at which casualties occurred sharply accelerated. The killing slowed after the South had bled nearly to death, with many regiments unable to field more than a handful of men.

In all, one-quarter of military age Southern manhood died in the field, by far the greatest sacrifice ever offered up by a modern nation in war. General W T Sherman, the scourge of the South, explained why this would occur in advance. There existed 300,000 fanatics in the South who knew nothing but hunting, drinking, gambling and dueling, a class who benefited from slavery and would rather die than work for a living. To end the war, Sherman stated on numerous occasions these 300,000 had to be killed. Evidently Sherman was right. For all the wasteful slaughter of the last 18 months of the war, Southern commander Lee barely could persuade his men to surrender in April 1865. The Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, called for guerilla war to continue, and Lee's staff wanted to keep fighting. Lee barely avoided a drawn-out irregular war.

What will happen now in the Middle East? At the outbreak of the war, Grant and Sherman were unknown. They rose to command because the nerve of their predecessors snapped at the edge of the abyss. The character of the war was too horrible for them to contemplate. Bush's nerve appears to have snapped, as I predicted ( Bush's nerve is going to snap, March 4), "The danger is that America will find itself fighting a sort of Chechnyan war on a global scale. President George W Bush cannot wrap his mind around this," I wrote then. "The blame lies at the doorstep of the neo-conservative war-hawks who persuaded the president that America should undertake a democratizing mission among a people who never once voted for their own leaders."

For that matter, Ariel Sharon's claim before last week's Likud party congress that Israel had achieved victory against terrorism was both accurate and misleading. Wars do not end when they are won, but when those who want to fight to the death find their wish has been granted. Sherman's 300,000 fanatics could not face the mediocre circumstances of a South without slaves and were willing to die for their way of life.

Three million Palestinians packed into a narrow strip of land one day may accept the modest fate of a small and impecunious people, but their young people do not seem ready to do so. We do not know how many ever will. The killing will continue for some time before we find out.

(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

Horror and humiliation and Chicago
By Spengler

What causes the Reverend Jeremiah Wright to imagine that "the government gives [young black men] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, [and] passes a three strikes law" to incarcerate them? It is the same kind of unbearable grief that still causes white Southerners to believe that their ancestors fought the Civil War for a noble cause? It is too humiliating to think that the miscreants had it coming.

An uncanny parallel links the fate of young African-Americans today and that of the young white men of the slave-holding South in 1865. Both cohorts have lost a terrifying proportion of their number to violence. One third of black Americans between the ages of 20 and 30 passed through the criminal justice system in 1995, according to the Sentencing Project, a prisoners' advocacy group. Nearly a third of military-age Southern men military age were killed or wounded during America's Civil War. [1]

It is a measure of the inherent good-heartedness of Americans that they evince a low threshold of horror. Three hundred thousand Confederate dead and millions of ruined African-American lives are too awful to contemplate. Some part of Senator Barack Obama's appeal derives from America's revulsion over the destruction of a generation of young black men; electing an African-American president would assuage part of the guilt.

From this great suffering arise two genres of American popular culture, the Gone With the Wind ilk of Civil War epic, and the "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" brand of gangsta tale. Both try to take the edge off the revulsion and placate the dishonored dead by turning them into folk-heroes. That is understandable, but also unfortunate, for America still has a great deal of killing left to do around the world, and might as well get used to it.

"Get Rich or Die Tryin'" would have been a good epitaph for the Confederate dead, who fought for land and slaves, not for "states' rights" or the sanctity of their soil. Slave-owners along with want-to-be slave-owners had it coming. The Union general William Tecumseh Sherman who said after he burned Atlanta, "I fear the world will jump to the wrong conclusion that because I am in Atlanta the work is done. Far from it. We must kill three hundred thousand, I have told you of so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them."

Given the sad history of racial oppression in the South for a century after the Civil War, the only thing to regret is that Sherman didn't finish the job. I stopped watching the film version of Gone With the Wind after Scarlett O'Hara saved her plantation from the tax-collector. I wanted her to pick cotton until her back broke.

It is appalling that the criminal justice system has devoured one out of three young African-Americans, to be sure, but the number must be too small, because the police will have failed to apprehend some who still commit crimes. I did not attempt to watch the film Get Rich or Die Tryin'. I want the police to incarcerate such people before they commit enough crimes to fill a screenplay.

Europeans are far more attuned to horror. They have had the opportunity to get used to it. Cannibalism was rampant in 17th-century Germany during the Thirty Years' War, and in the Ukraine during Joseph Stalin's 1931 starvation. Americans abandoned the horrors of the Old World. Terrible as the Civil War may have been, it spared civilians. Sherman burned his way from Atlanta to the sea in 1864, but the number of rapes and murders committed by his soldiers can be counted on one's fingers.

Nonetheless, there is no market for Hollywood epics about Sherman's March to the sea, arguably the most brilliant military campaign in the history of American arms, while the film industry still grinds out kitsch about the supposedly gallant losers. Perhaps one should feel sorry for the impoverished privates who bled for the Confederacy. Few had slaves, yet they fought stubbornly to preserve slavery, because they hoped that they, too, would obtain land and slaves as the victorious Confederacy became a hemispheric empire. I have expanded on this subject elsewhere (Happy birthday, Abe - pass the blood Asia Times Online, February 10, 2004).

The embittered fighters of the South sacrificed themselves in proportions unsurpassed in modern history, excepting the Serbs in World War I. But there was no honor, no gallantry, and no nobility in the blood-letting. They fought for empire and advancement, like Albrecht von Wallenstein's freebooters of the Thirty Years' War or Napoleon's ambitious Grande Armee. Sherman's belief that the war objective was not to occupy this or that piece of territory, but to kill 300,000 men, was almost exactly correct: the final total of Confederate dead was 289,000, just 11,000 short of Sherman's estimate. Perhaps the 11,000 men Sherman failed to kill were the founders of the Klu Klux Klan.

In fact, Sherman's superior, General Ulysses S Grant, did far more of the killing. Sherman burnt property and humiliated the South on their home soil. But a people that has given its all for a defeat that is too terrible to recall with clarity has nothing left but pride, and the wounded pride of the South has turned Sherman's memory into a curse.

Southerners thought of themselves as an oppressed people, the descendants of Scots-Irish immigrants driven out of their Celtic homelands by the English, flying the X-shaped cross of Scotland's patron saint in the Confederate battle flag, redolent of Scotland's "Lost Cause". The self-pity of the South pervades American popular culture, from Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, to The Band's bathetic song, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down". It is best known in the cover version by Joan Baez, an old civil rights campaigner. Such is the pull of identity politics.

With good reason, the descendants of Scots villagers expelled from the Highlands after the rebellion of 1746 may have thought themselves oppressed. Because they came from oppressed folk, their passion to better themselves burned all the more fiercely. When they set to build a slave empire, they could be stopped only by killing so many of them that insufficient numbers were left to form the ranks. The South fought on with redoubled ferocity after the twin Union victories of 1863, Vicksburg and Gettysburg, made Confederate victory improbable. Most Southern casualties, I reported in an earlier essay (More killing please!, Asia Times Online, June 13, 2003), occurred after Southern hopes had faded, and the South surrendered only after its manpower was too depleted to continue.

Sherman, who lived in the South and had many close Southern friends, understood that the ambitions of the South could be quelled only by a sea of blood. He is the decisive personality of the Civil War, yet there never has been a single cinematic treatment of the man. Twenty-one films, by contrast, portray Jesse James, the Confederate guerilla turned outlaw. He is the 50 Cent of the old South.

I do not mean to draw a moral equivalency between would-be slave-owners and the descendants of slaves, but the functional parallel is compelling. According to the Sentencing Project, "More than 60% of the people in prison are now racial and ethnic minorities. For black males in their twenties, one in every eight is in prison or jail on any given day. These trends have been intensified by the disproportionate impact of the 'war on drugs', in which three-fourths of all persons in prison for drug offenses are people of color."

A generation of African-Americans has been decimated. Murder is the leading cause of death among young African-American men; an American black has a 5% lifetime probably of becoming a murder victim (against a 0.7% probably for a white American).

Wright offers one sort of explanation: it is all due to a conspiracy by a racist government that wants to exterminate black people. The comedian and actor Bill Cosby now is touring America to offer a different explanation: the problems of African-Americans stem from a lack of individual responsibility, especially among men. In the May 2008 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Ta-Nehesi Coates reports on a Cosby event in Detroit, writing, "Cosby had come to Detroit aiming to grab the city's black men by their collars and shake them out of the torpor that has left so many of them - like so many of their peers across the country - undereducated, overincarcerated, and underrepresented in the ranks of active fathers."

Cosby speaks pure sanity to black Americans, but the circumstances are enough to make a man crazy - Wright, for example. Sanity is conveyed through humiliation. If young black men are killed in the commission of petty crimes, Cosby told a civil rights conference in 2004, it is their own fault:

Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! And then we all run out and are outraged, "The cops shouldn't have shot him." What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?

It is horrific to die young, and humiliating to die for the wrong reason. Living with the humiliation is the beginning of recovery. But Wright and his congregation cannot bear the horror and humiliation any more than the average white Southerner, who after a few Bourbons will tell you, "The South shall rise again!"

Americans need a higher threshold for horror. Tragedies sometimes must play themselves out, and the losers must be allowed to lose. Whole peoples can go bad, and sometimes it is necessary to prevent them from doing evil by winnowing their ranks. It is just as perverse to excuse Wright's paranoid outbursts as it is to perpetuate the self-consoling myth of the gallant slave-holding South. America will be on the right track when it celebrates Sherman instead of 50 Cent.

Note
1. Nearly four-fifths of Southern white men served in the Confederate Army, and of these, half were wounded and a quarter were killed