From the Archives: 2013 Nobel Peace Prize Recalls Chemical Weapons in Africa

Yesterday in Oslo it was announced that the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize will go to a group that monitors and discourages the use of chemical weapons in violation of international law.

As Alan Cowell reported in the New York Times,

Urging the destruction of an “entire category” of unconventional weapons, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its 2013 Peace Prize on Friday to a modest and little-known United Nations-backed organization that has drawn sudden attention with a mission to ensure that Syria’s stocks of chemical arms are eradicated.

The award, to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, surprised some Nobel watchers partly because of the unprecedented nature of its current task: overseeing the destruction of a previously secret chemical weapons program quickly amid a raging civil war.

The award brought to mind an article I wrote almost a quarter-century ago about chemical-weapons use by the Soviet Union and its Cuban ally in Africa. Published in the New York City Tribune on July 25, 1989, the piece appeared under the headline, "Nerve Gas Use Poisons U.S. Relationship with Soviets." The headline is somewhat inaccurate, as the article is about calcium cyanide gas, not nerve gas (a distinction brought out in the text).

One sentence stands out as though it could have been written in recent weeks about the situation in Syria:

While 400 or 500 poison gas casualties among tens of thousands of Angolans killed by conventional mean in the past few years seems militarily insignificant, it appears that the Soviets and their Cuban surrogates are using Africa as a laboratory for inhuman experiments.

So far as I know, this article about chemical weapons deployment in Angola in the 1980s has not previously been available on the Internet.

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Is the CIA covering up the use of chemical weapons by Soviet and Cuban forces in Angola? This question was raised recently when strong evidence came to light showing that calcium cyanide, a deadly poison with no known antidote, has been used by Cuban forces against Angolan civilians and supporters of UNITA, the anti-Marxist freedom fighters led by Dr. Jonas Savimbi.

Despite the physical evidence, which has been verified by teams of scientists in Austria, Belgium, Britain, and West Germany, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies refuse to acknowledge that the Soviets have a new chemical weapon nd that they are using it in Angola.

Prof. Aubin Heyndrickx, a distinguished toxicologist from the University of Ghent in Belgium, came to the United States recently to bring his findings regarding these chemical weapons to the attention of American policymakers. He said that U.S. officials are afraid to acknowledge the use of calcium cyanide in Angola for political reasons, because there is a “direct implication of Russia” in the evidence. The United States, he said, “is one of the most difficult countries in the world to accept realism.”

Prof. Heyndrickx describes calcium cyanide as unprecedently effective. It is, he says, faster at producing death than nerve gas. In doses too small to kill, it causes irreversible brain damage, skin burns and abrasions. The surviving victims, he said at a luncheon sponsored by the International Freedom Foundation in Washington, need our humanitarian assistance. They need new clothes, because often all the clothing in their villages has been contaminated by the poison. They need medical care. But most of all, they need recognition by Washington officials of their plight.

The overarching reason for official U.S. skepticism on this issue is the renewal of detente and good relations with Moscow under Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika, and the fear of damaging East-West relations. But the more immediate concern for American diplomats as well as others (from Cuba, Angola, and South Africa) is the success of the Angola-Namibia settlement agreement signed last December. This agreement, the result of eight years of hard negotiations under the leadership of Chester Crocker, former assistant secretary of state for African affairs, could be scuttled if news of chemical weapon use by Cuban forces became public.

In fact, Congress has mandated that if the president confirms that the Cubans are using chemical weapons in Angola, then the United States cannot provide money for the United Nations peacekeeping and transition forces in Namibia. The Bush Administration is hesitant to let Congress know – officially – that 400 to 500 Angolans are suffering the acute effects of calcium cyanide poisoning, not to mention the hundreds who have died since 1985, when the weapon was introduced to the Angolan conflict. As a result, despite the need for medical care in Western hospitals, the United States, Belgium, and the United Kingdom have denied entry visas to Angolans in great pain from cyanide gas poisoning. The authorities are afraid the victims' stories, once made public, will threaten fragile diplomatic efforts.

Still another reason why the intelligence community is afraid of this news coming to public attention is misplaced professional pride: the CIA and other agencies are embarrassed for not having discovered this new Soviet weapon. Moreover, because there is no known protective measure against this type of gas, nor any known antidote, its existence would throw NATO planning into a tizzy.

All the gas masks, all the poison gas pills, all the detection devices issued to NATO soldiers – all would be useless in the face of a Soviet calcium cyanide attack on the European front. Coincidentally, it has been demonstrated that in Afghanistan, Soviet troops have been testing new protective clothing and new types of gas masks. A captured gas mask is currently being examined by scientists in West Germany; no results of their investigation have yet been announced.

That is why this situation is worrisome. While 400 or 500 poison gas casualties among tens of thousands of Angolans killed by conventional mean in the past few years seems militarily insignificant, it appears that the Soviets and their Cuban surrogates are using Africa as a laboratory for inhuman experiments.

Like the Nazis and the communists who faced each other down during the Spanish Civil War, using the plains of Spain to test new weapons as a prelude to World War II, the Soviets and Cubans are testing this previously unknown poison on innocent Angolan civilians caught in the crossfire. Captured Angolan army officers have told Western intelligence agents that they themselves are not allowed to handle these weapons; only the Cubans use them under strict Soviet supervision.

Fortunately for the Angolan people, there has been no recorded use of these horrid weapons since April of this year. Still, that use came after the settlement agreement that is bringing an end to the 15-year-old conflict in the region and bringing independence to Namibia. It constitutes a violation of that agreement – not a minor violation, but a major breach of trust by one of the parties (Cuba) against the others (South Africa and the United States).

In light of the Soviets' use of poison gas against their own people in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi a few months ago, this situation should not go unnoticed. The Bush Administration should order a full-scale investigation.

Department of Defense scientists should go to Jamba in Angola, where an unexploded calcium cyanide bomb has been captured by UNITA soldiers and sits ready to be examined. The State Department should hurry along visa applications to allow gas victims to come to the United States for medical care.

President Bush should put pressure on our NATO allies to release the results of scientific studies that are currently being hidden from public view for political reasons, studies that demonstrate conclusively that new Soviet poison gas weapons have been used in Angola. The Soviets and Cubans should be called to account for this violation of human rights and the treaties that banned the use of such weapons more than 60 years ago.

Most of the world applauds the diplomacy that led to the Angola-Namibia settlement late last year. It would be foolish to jeopardize that agreement for trivial reasons. However, that risk is worth taking in order to expose to the world the Soviet Union's use of dangerous, new chemical weapons.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based policy analyst who writes frequently on African affairs.

No News Is New News: Revisiting the Somali Crisis of 1992-93

With the release on October 11 of the new Tom Hanks' movie, Captain Phillips, which is about the capture of an American cargo ship by Somali pirates; with the attack on the Westgate mall in Nairobi by Somali terrorists affiliated with al-Shabaab; and with this week's anniversary of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu (later chronicled in the book by Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down, and the 2002 Ridley Scott film of the same name), it seemed timely to revisit the Somali crisis of 1992-93 by looking at old video.

The video, in this case, is an episode of “On the Line,” which was produced by the Voice of America (VOA) for its Worldnet television network. The date was October 8, 1992. The occasion was the George H.W. Bush administration's lame-duck decision to send American troops to Somalia to protect the deliveries of humanitarian assistance, which had been obstructed by thugs and warlords.

On the Line: Crigler, Sincere, Untermeyer, Natsios

This troop deployment came to an insidious end just a year later, when the Clinton administration decided, after the debacle later portrayed in Black Hawk Down, that U.S. forces should be withdrawn from Somalia.

The guests on “On the Line” that day were Andrew Natsios, at the time director of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance within USAID and President Bush's special representative for humanitarian assistance in Somalia; Frank Crigler, the penultimate U.S. ambassador to Somalia (1987-90), who had retired from the Foreign Service earlier that year; and myself, then the director for African affairs at the International Freedom Foundation in Washington.

The host of the program was Chase Untermeyer, then director of the Voice of America and later U.S. Ambassador to Qatar.

Untermeyer asked me to explain the causes of the conflict in Somalia. My reply:

The causes are deep-seated, of course. The collapse of the government could have been a temporary power vacuum in which another government would come to power quickly. But in fact we see rival factions arising all over the place and the fact is that these factions are hostile to the humanitarian aid that's coming into the country and that is what is causing the technical problems in solving the disaster.

He asked Natsios, “Who is in charge in Somalia?” Natsios replied:

In terms of Somalis, no one is in charge of Somalia. In fact, I wish this were a civil war, at least we could negotiate with the two sides as we've done all over the world. In the Angolan civil war, the Mozambican civil war, the Sudan civil war, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, this is not like that. Even if the warlords agreed, they don't control half the militias. There are just bands of young thugs running around with guns who are high on the drug called khat, an amphetamine. They are uncontrollable and they don't answer to anybody.

Then Untermeyer said, “Mr. Sincere, is it correct to refer to Somalia as a country. Does it have any semblance of national order or rule at the moment?”

I answered:

I think that the best description for Somalia today was actually written by Thomas Hobbes 400 years ago, [in] Leviathan:  it's the state of nature, a war of all against all. It's something almost unprecedented in 20th century history. We're simply unused to a situation like this. And that is why it's so difficult for the United States, the other Western democracies, and the United Nations to get a handle on this and to actually help the situation.

Ambassador Crigler added to my response:

Let me comment on that, Chase, because I think this is a situation that's not going to remain unique. I don't believe it's unique even today. I think we're seeing something not unlike that in Yugoslavia, or what's left of Yugoslavia, and even, as we speak, in Georgia in the former Soviet Union – a situation in which the state of nature seems to be the only substitute for a repressive state structure.

(I find it interesting that both Georgia and the former Yugoslavia have settled into stability, with several former Yugoslav states joining NATO and the European Union. Somalia remains anarchic by comparison.)

Crigler continued:

The state structure in Somalia was really imposed from without, in any case, there was never really a nation-state as we know it in Somalia before, and that has collapsed since [President Mohammed] Siad-Barre's fall because that rigid structure is no longer there and simply crumbled of its own and there was nothing left to take the place of it. What has happened over the years under that rigid structure is that people have lost the talents for settling their ethnic differences by peaceful means. Traditionally, as Andrew [Natsios] was suggesting, the elders were able to moderate those differences. Those skills were lost during this period of repression and I'm afraid that's not a unique situation we're going to see in the world today.

Later, Andrew Natsios suggested that, if the rival Somali factions didn't resolve their own problems, the United States would withdraw its troops. (That prediction came true, if in tragic fashion.) Untermeyer asked me if I agreed that that is a good policy. I said:

I think it's the best policy. This is ultimately up to the Somali people to solve for themselves. Order cannot be imposed from outside. Humanitarian assistance cannot be provided if rival clans are actually shooting the humanitarian assisters. It's a tragic situation and it is ultimately up to the Somali people to get together and say, “We no longer want to have this war. We must live peacefully.” And it's not up to us to impose that on them. We can prod them, we can cajole them, but beyond that, there's not much we can do.

At that point, Untermeyer asked Ambassador Crigler about Somalia's strategic importance, and then posed the same question to me. My answer:

Well, certainly, from a geopolitical standpoint, Somalia always will have a strategic value to the United States and to any rivals the United States might have. But I think the point should be made that a comparison has often been made that the United States is paying more attention to Yugoslavia than to Somalia and the accusation has been leveled that this may be of racist origin but in fact the amount of aid that the United States has sent to Somalia has far outstripped what's been sent to Yugoslavia in the same period of time. I don't think the United States has fallen down on the job in this at all but the fact is that the hostility that we're facing in the region is blocking our ability to solve the problem.

Twenty-one years later, and we are still facing a region that is blocking our ability to solve the problem.

Here's the complete video of episode 24 of “On the Line,” just under 20 minutes, as recorded in the VOA studios on October 8, 1992:

Strange Fruit (Reprise)

I've been very popular with reporters today.

Hours before my telephone conversation with Los Angeles-based writer James Verini about the International Freedom Foundation (I am sure I disappointed him by not having known Jack Abramoff), I received a call from Chris Graham of the Augusta Free Press, who had come across a piece I wrote some years ago about hate-crimes legislation.

He was interested in my views on the topic given the vandalization of the UCC church in Middlebrook. I told him what I have always believed: hate crimes laws are unnecessary if local law enforcement officials are doing their jobs of investigating, prosecuting, and punishing crimes that are committed, regardless of motivation or the words expressed by criminals before or during their crimes. I also added my reservations about anti-bullying laws passed by the Virginia General Assembly earlier this year.

Watch for Chris's article in a forthcoming edition of the Augusta Free Press.

Lost in the Stars

This afternoon I received a telephone call from James Verini, a journalist working on a story for LA Weekly about a think-tank I worked for in the early 1990s, the International Freedom Foundation (IFF).

Since the IFF has been defunct for a decade now, it seemed odd that a reporter would be interested in it. The hook is that one of the IFF's founders was Jack Abramoff, the Washington lobbyist now in hot water for alleged fraudulent activities involving several clients, in particular some Indian tribes.

I told Mr. Verini that my time at IFF came after Abramoff's involvement in the organization and that, in fact, I had not met Abramoff (who may actually have remained on the IFF's board of directors but who had no role in its day-to-day activities).

My first contact with the IFF came in 1989, when I was asked to write a book under contract. That book was published in 1990 under the title Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise. Later, after working for almost a year in the public affairs office of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), I was asked to apply for the new position of Director of African Affairs at IFF. I jumped at the chance, since I really did not like working at CSIS because it was bureaucratic and unwieldy and my job there was not intellectually challenging, while IFF had a small staff (I think about 15 at the time) and I was promised a great deal of autonomy in my research.

I edited a newsletter called Sub-Saharan Monitor (not the publication now available on line) and later was promoted to Director of International Economic Affairs. When Mark Franz left IFF to work for the Bush 41 re-election campaign, I took his job as editor of the quarterly journal, terra nova. I really enjoyed editing terra nova: it was, as Robert Bork put it in another context, "an intellectual feast." I was able to interact with scholars from around the world, commission articles on interesting subjects, combine articles and book reviews so that they fit a common theme, and try to market the product to readers in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. It was a dream job for a writer/editor like myself, and one that I would love to replicate some day.

I explained that I had left IFF after the 1992 election when a number of staff, including myself, were laid off as fundraising faltered. Verini asked if this was because a Democratic administration was coming into office, but I told him that it was more because the end of the Cold War had caused funds to dry up for anti-Communist organizations like the International Freedom Foundation.

He asked if I was aware that the IFF had been funded by the South African government. (He characterized it as a "front" for the apartheid government.) I said no, that I only became aware of that fact when I googled IFF about six years ago and discovered that files had been uncovered during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's investigations. In fact, while I was at IFF, it seemed we were always scrambling for money, trying to find new and bigger funding sources. That was hardly the mark of an organization that was underwritten by a foreign government.

So far as I know, no one at the IFF at the time, including chairman Duncan Sellars or executive director Jeff Pandin, was aware of any underwriting by the South African government, the SADF, or South African intelligence services. The source of the money, such as it was, was hidden, and it is easy, in hindsight, to conclude that the money had been laundered quite successfully. Upon reflection, when I learned about the IFF's ultimate funding source a few years back, it occurred to me that the South African money must have been channeled through several European donors to IFF, who we all thought were primarily anti-communist in their motivation, none of whom had any apparent ties to South Africa or its government. (One, I remember, was described as an elderly Belgian businessman. And, no, I never learned his name.)

In his questions, Mr. Verini suggested that the International Freedom Foundation was a "pro-apartheid" organization. I told him this was a mischaracterization, that in fact the IFF was critical of the apartheid government, which we viewed as "ethnic socialism." (This view was best expressed, at the time, by George Mason University economist Walter E. Williams in his book, South Africa's War Against Capitalism, which I believe I reviewed in the predecessor to terra nova, International Freedom Review.) While the IFF was, in fact, opposed to the African National Congress, that was never equivalent to being in favor of apartheid.

I explained that we staff members -- researchers, writers, editors -- never had any pressure put on us to say anything in particular. Far from a propaganda front, the IFF provided us with free rein to pursue research topics. Naturally, those of us who worked for IFF shared a certain philosophy -- free-market oriented (in my case, libertarian) and anti-communist. No constraints were placed upon us in terms of what not to write about, and no direction was given about specific topics to pursue. There was no doubt, of course, that part of our job was to refute disinformation emanating from the ANC and pro-communist groups in southern Africa. Our overarching aim was to promote liberal democracy and free enterprise as an alternative to both communism and apartheid. This was typical of conservative and libertarian think tanks and advocacy groups in the closing years of the Cold War.

Verini asked what my views were on South African sanctions. I told him that I had testified before U.S. congressional committees during the 1980s, expressing my view that sanctions were an ineffective policy tool, and that I opposed the embargo against Cuba and sanctions against Libya for the same reason. (Believe me, such consistency was not common in the Reagan years. In fact, during my testimony at one hearing, Howard Wolpe, then-chairman of the House subcommittee on Africa, congratulated me for my consistency, albeit with a puzzled look on his face.) I also told Mr. Verini that my views have not changed, that I still believe sanctions are wrong-headed and ill-advised.

After our initial conversation, Verini called back to ask whether, during my time at the IFF, I had had any contact with the Bush administration. I told him nothing more than routine meetings with State Department officials, ambassadors, and the like, typical for anyone who works for a Washington think tank.

I did add this anecdote, however:

In the fall of 1992, I was working as the chief foreign policy advisor to Libertarian Party presidential candidate Andre Marrou and his running mate, my friend, Nancy Lord. My predecessor as editor of terra nova, Mark Franz, was working for the Bush re-election campaign. One day in September or October, Mark called me at work to ask me for some advice about how to frame a campaign issue. In the course of our conversation, I said to him, "You know, it's nice to have the luxury of knowing you're working for a presidential candidate who is going to lose." Mark responded ruefully: "I know exactly what you mean, Rick."