- When security agents took away her husband in the middle
of the night they did not tell Ellah Ulusam that Washington had just opened
a new front in its war against terror. They said he would be back the next
day. Arif Ulusam vanished along with four other Muslim men, all arrested
at home, handcuffed and bundled into a car for a bizarre odyssey which
has not yet ended.
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- This is a part of George Bush's war which does not make
it on to television news, for it is waged on a front so remote few know
it exists. In less eventful times what happened would be considered extraordinary.
As it is, their story has been barely reported.
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- On June 22 Malawi security agents seized five men in
Limbe, outside Malawi's commercial capital Blantyre, and spirited them
out of the country on suspicion of belonging to al-Qaida, earning praise
from the US ambassador.
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- Relatives were distraught. "Taking Arif away was
a big loss to me. I was stranded. I didn't know what was going on,"
says Ellah, 27, cradling her daughter Kardelen, not yet three. "Kardelen
misses her father so much, she puts on his shoes, kisses his shirts."
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- Following the script from Afghanistan and other countries
where terror suspects have been snatched, it seemed these were more Muslims
destined for orange jumpsuits, their guilt or innocence to be decided at
a future date by a US military tribunal. Except a funny thing happened
on the way to Guantanamo - they were released.
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- Some details remain murky but enough is known to illuminate
dark corners of Washington's anti-terror tactics: Without telling their
own embassy, US intelligence agents appear to have bullied the Malawi government
into a swoop which triggered Muslim riots. The abductions were illegal
and also, it seems, a blunder.
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- Malawi is a small land-locked country in southern Africa.
Extremely poor, it was nonetheless peaceful, stable and a fledgling democracy.
A fifth of its 10 million people are Muslim but no one pointed the finger
when al-Qaida attacked in Tanzania and Kenya.
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- That changed in the early hours of June 22. Dozens of
security agents arrested five suspects and carted away their files, books,
mobile phones, photographs, floppy discs and computers in black bin-liners.
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- The men lived and worked in Limbe but were foreigners:
Arif Ulusam, owner of Istanbul, a fast food restaurant, is Turkish; Ibrahim
Itabaci, headmaster of the Bedir international school, is also Turkish;
Mahmud Sardar Issa, coordinator for a charity called the Zakaat Fund Trust,
is Sudanese; Khalifa Abdi Hassan, a scholar at the Muslim Association of
Malawi, is Kenyan; Fahad Ral Bahli, director of the Malawi branch of Registered
Trustees of the Prince Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz Special Committee on Relief,
is Saudi Arabian.
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- "They said Arif would be released the next day,"
said Mrs Ulusam. "But when we went to the police station he wasn't
there and nobody could tell us anything." All organs of the Malawi
state refused to say why or where the men were taken.
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- Their relatives hired a team of lawyers led by Shabir
Latif, who practised at the bar in the UK. "Malawi has the best constitution
south of the Sahara and guarantees basic rights which were denied my clients,"
he said. A high court judge issued an injunction barring deportation, ordering
the authorities to charge the men or release them on bail.
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- It made no difference. The five were spirited abroad.
"Who can I produce in court now? Their ghosts?" Fahad Assani,
Malawi's director of public prosecutions, asked the court in exasperation.
"These people are out of reach for us. It's the Americans who know
where they are."
-
- Amnesty International noted the irony of the men being
transferred on the day the state department released a report about US
efforts to promote human rights worldwide. Colin Powell also recently lectured
African leaders on respecting the rule of law. "I've never been as
depressed on a case as this one," said Latif. "No evidence was
ever produced."
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- The closest the US came to admitting custody was a statement
from its ambassador, Roger Meece, praising Malawi as a partner in the fight
against terrorism. It was said the men were accused of channelling money
to al-Qaida and had been on the CIA's "watch list" since the
1998 bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
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- Nothing more was heard until July 24 when lawyers heard
that Fahad Ral Bahli had surfaced in Riyadh and the other four in Sudan,
all free men. Hub-Eddin Abbakar, a colleague of the Sudanese suspect, said
they had been handed over to their respective embassies in Khartoum after
the CIA decided they were innocent.
-
- To end up in a country on Washington's terror list is
only slightly more bizarre than reports that the Air Malawi plane chartered
by the US stopped off in Zimbabwe on the way to a third country, possibly
Djibouti or Uganda, where the men were questioned for a month.
-
- US officials declined interview requests, but one western
diplomat said the state department had been kept in the dark by the CIA
and that the ambassador's praise for Malawi was an attempt to save face.
-
- Malawi's Muslims are furious, said Altaf Gahi, president
of Blantyre's Muslim Jamaat, and some are likely to become radicalised.
The resort town of Mangochi erupted in rioting which wrecked Christian
churches and the offices of the US aid agency Save the Children, and left
several people wounded. "It was like doomsday to us. I ran away with
my family, the mob could have killed us," said Meleka Thom Phiri,
pastor of the Assemblies of God church.
-
- Three theories try to explain the fiasco. Malawi officials
distrusted foreigners who mobilised Muslims, even for good works, and persuaded
the US to intervene. "The US intelligence is too well equipped to
make such a mistake. Somebody must have cooked the evidence for them,"
said Hub-Eddin Abbakar.
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- Others say that the CIA knew the men were innocent but
wanted to disrupt Malawi's Muslim organisations, with skills and money
coming from Arab countries, before it risked being infiltrated by Islamist
terrorists. The same principle of pre-emption used to justify attacking
Iraq, but on a micro-scale. "The work these guys were doing won't
resume," predicted one Muslim businessman.
-
- The third theory is of a cock-up. The day before the
arrests, the Sudanese man and both Turks were questioned about stolen cars
by men who said they were from Interpol. Ibrahim Itabaci had recently bought
a second-hand car, according to Ellah Ulusam, which the detectives suspected
of having been shipped from South Africa. Some of the Malawi officials
investigating the cars were spotted among the agents who arrested the five
men.
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- An impoverished country. Muslim men with money and means.
Stolen vehicles. Al-Qaida active in the region. From the CIA's viewpoint
it could have added up to something sinister. It seems the agency was wrong.
But for Malawi, now a land of kidnappings, riots and religious tension,
that is exactly how things have added up.
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1026199,00.html
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