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TRAVEL:
To the Ends of the Earth
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Several tribes practice Donyi Polo, a religion worshipping the sun and the moon, whereas others practice animism. Missionaries have made few inroads here. Polygamy is permitted and practiced by some tribal elites. Two of the tribes exist in a master-slave relationship.
—U.S. Consulate Calcutta
January 18, 2005
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THE LAGOS OFFICER WAS HAVING A ROUGH TRIP. HE had set off to assess tourism prospects for seekers of Picathartes oreas, the gray-necked rockfowl that is one of Africa’s most prized birds, in the company of a Discovery Channel producer, the owners of a birding tour company, a naturalist, and a BBC correspondent who reported on the group’s odyssey through a small corner of southeastern Nigeria. The officer described a trek over barely passable clay track and rickety bridges with holes so large that the team had to carefully position wood planks so their vehicles would not tumble into the streams below. Things got worse when they reached the Okomu National Park access road, which was an obstacle course of disabled vehicles. Even the BBC’s 4x4 was stuck for hours.
“The lodge was a shock,” the officer wrote. “It looked derelict inside: shabby walls, peeling linoleum, black mold on the doors and ceiling, and furniture likely banned by some international convention. The potentially picturesque thatched hut built as a dining area needed some serious attention and cleaning (termite tubes climbed untended up wood surfaces to the roof).”
The bird-viewing canopy platforms offered great views, but the intrepid diplomat had to climb one hundred and thirty feet up the side of a tree to reach one, a physical feat for which, he wrote tongue in check, the post danger differential rate was inadequate.
Going home was no better. “The Benin/Lagos expressway was a complete showstopper. The divided highway is always a horror show . . . The constant problem of shakedowns by police at the country’s ubiquitous roadblocks is beyond annoying.” When the group finally returned to civilization, they stopped at a casino in Lagos. “We found a dozen waiters asleep on the kitchen floor and the croupiers asleep with their heads on the green baize.” 1
This is why people join the foreign service. They hope for the moment when they can truly feel far from home. Anyone who has ever sat on the Beltway, Interstate 95, or the Ventura Freeway might well fantasize about driving a 4x4 across Africa. The travails only serve to make the eventual arrival more meaningful. The officer who made this trip will dine out on this story for the rest of his life.
One of the least celebrated facts about the WikiLeaks cables are the tales of life beyond the capitals. Foreign service officers can easily fill their days with the routine matters of diplomacy, as witnessed by the reams of dutiful cables on démarches delivered, scene setters for VIP visitors, and congressionally mandated reporting. But for many officers, the same yearnings that led them into the foreign service also tempt them to leave the comforts and confines of the capital. They know that while globalization ensures they’ll find the same stores in Gainesville and Guatemala, another world awaits on the back roads.
It would be easy to dismiss the reporting officers as travel writer wannabes, but they bring something different than the Paul Therouxs and Rick Steveses of the world. They were already working in these countries before they set out, and after their trips into the hinterlands they returned to their embassy desks enriched. There was a policy point to these trips, ranging from human rights to religious freedom, refugees and migration, or environmental degradation. They had enviable access, through their government connections, to places that might be restricted or off limits to tourists. They also had access to people who matter—cultural, tribal, and religious leaders from chieftains to the pope.
Diplomats who travel and write home about it unwittingly illustrate one of the great divides between officers serving abroad and their colleagues in Washington. Their cables about rural realities can challenge assumptions about what matters most. Washington’s bias as a capital city inclines those working there to seek out interlocutors in power or those who might likely come to power. These are often Western-educated “people like us” who work in ministries, parliaments, universities, or newsrooms that resemble the Washington work environment. It’s easy to see them as the logical counterparts to any foreign policy conversation.
But Mao did not find his followers among the Mandarins. Diplomatic encounters with Turkmen truckers, Papuan separatists, and the garage bands of Tehran should widen Washington’s worldview. They seemed to have widened the views of the cable authors.
It takes good writing to demonstrate the many ways cultural traditions trump political ideology. It takes insight to explain why tribal clashes should merit the attention of the desk-bound officer in Foggy Bottom. And it takes an imaginative foreign service officer to connect two opposite poles and answer the “so what?” factor. The delightful aspects of the WikiLeaks cables are the descriptive passages written with curiosity, empathy, and wonder. While Washington politicians obsessed over Islam, one officer actually performed the Hajj and wrote movingly about each phase of his pilgrimage. Another explained that in Thailand, Islam’s greatest challenge may come not from the West but from the much older influence of traditional seers and mystics. And in Laos, a polite query about religious freedom turned into a rant from the elders on how Christianity had made their young people lose respect for the ancestors.
Those in the field held one unbeatable advantage over Washington—they had the time and the means to seek out remote locales that their colleagues could only read about. Their treks were purposeful and deliberate. Their cables made a contribution to the world’s understanding of inaccessible places and the people who live there. The great irony is that while Julian Assange and his team denounced the diplomats for duplicity, these cables attest to a dedicated group of individuals who undertook incredible journeys in search of understanding.
GETTING THERE IS HALF THE FUN
Airplanes cannot land everywhere. Highways become two-lane roads, dwindle to one lane, and then peter out. And where roads are poor, cars are not always the most useful vehicle. The diplomats used every means of transport from dugout canoes to snowmobiles. Occasionally, they walked.
Here’s an officer writing about a forgotten corner of southern China: “It is not easy to get to Xilin. The nearest commercial airports, in Nanning and Kunming, are both at least nine hours away by public transport. The nearest train station is still more than a couple of hours away. From there it takes a few more hours to get to Baise.”
And here’s a description of a January trip through Tajikistan: “The small rehabilitated airport in Garm operates only in summer, while camels are still used for transport in Jirgitol District.”
Kathmandu consular officers warned: “Road travel on Nepal’s circuitous, narrow highways is treacherous and grueling. Although we never covered more than 200 kilometers on any day, every day’s drive involved a minimum of six hours. Along the way, we witnessed the aftermath of 20 major head-on collisions, more often than not between buses and large carriage trucks.”
The consul general of Vladivostok wrote: “Krasniy Yar is an eleven hour drive from Vladivostok, the last four hours over a rough snow road (zimniki) cut through the woods . . . During this visit the temperature was minus 37 Celsius.”
And finally, an intrepid trio in Suriname wrote with jaw-dropping nonchalance: “Emboffs [embassy officers] traveled four days by dugout canoe down the Tapanahoni and Marowijne rivers.”
There is something to be said for slow travel. The abruptness of an airplane trip ill prepares travelers for the contrasts ahead. Four days by dugout canoe might be extreme, but the officers were probably more acute observers after their senses had a chance to acclimate to a different world.
The above excerpts are but a small sample of travel cables—sagas, really—that dwell at length on distance, time, and rural lives. The officers were perhaps unconsciously demonstrating that the feat of getting there can be an education in and of itself, even before meeting a single person. And then, when they did, the cables got even more interesting.
NOW THAT YOU’RE HERE . . .
Xilin, mentioned above, the westernmost county in the Guangzhou consular district, is a poor and rural part of southern China. Simple banking presented the visiting officers with their first challenge. Although there was one bank, there were no cash machines, and credit cards were not accepted. The officers presented a 50 renminbi note (worth U.S. $6.25 at the time), which was the first one the shopkeeper had ever seen. “In the end, we had no choice but to be short-changed . . . Even the small Mao bills, treated dismissively in China’s cities as disease-carrying, wallet-cluttering wastes of ink and paper, are important monetary units in Xilin.”
Culturally, the visitors found the place still ran like an old-school Communist stronghold. “The town awakens each day to the strains of the national anthem and other patriotic songs broadcast through loudspeakers.”
Sanitary conditions were appalling. “Even the small settlements astride the main, two-lane highway of the county were quite squalid. At one of these settlements, the restroom facilities at the local government center were described by EconPolAsst [economic-political assistant] as the worst he had seen in his life—no small feat for a Guangzhou native.”
But the most unsettling custom was revealed when the travelers checked into their hotel. “Prostitution did not seem to be a discreet trade in Xilin. In the first hotel where we stayed, for example, a condom was thoughtfully provided in each hotel room, discreetly stashed in the cylinder of a toilet paper roll, with no mention of extra charges for use.” 2
HALF A WORLD AWAY, officers from Embassy Paramaribo spent four days in a dugout canoe, determined to make contact with the Njuka Maroons (descendants of escaped slaves), who had not been visited by any embassy personnel for seven years. In pursuit of their goal, the officers happened upon a burgeoning illegal gold mining industry run by Brazilian and Chinese immigrants who had been exploiting a no-man’s-land with no Surinamese law enforcement or government presence.
Their itinerary into the interior reads like a geography quiz: they went to Dritabiki, Manlobi, Stoelmanseiland, and Loka Loka—all villages along the Tapanahoni and Marowijne rivers. The dugout canoe was one of many challenges.
As no suitable housing could be found in Manlobi, the second night’s destination and a village of about 1,000 individuals along the Tapanahoni river, Emboffs spent one night in a gold mining camp across the river from the village. The camp consisted of a bar, a restaurant, and a store which sold overpriced supplies. Some 20 Brazilians, 5-10 of whom likely were commercial sex workers, and a few Maroons lived on the site.3
The informal gold mining and the environmental degradation it caused were the major discoveries of their trip. The officers saw hundreds of tracts of land mined for gold deposits washed down by rainwater from the slopes above, along with fifteen floating suction dredges excavating for gold in the riverbeds. The machines were operated twenty-four hours a day by Brazilians who paid royalty fees to the closest Maroon village. The officers carefully documented the widespread selling and use of mercury in the mining areas (a dangerous but cheap means of extracting the gold). Their concerns about mercury damage to drinking water sources made their trip useful for environmental as well as sociological reasons.
South of Suriname, the Amazon and Andean regions offered equally enticing frontiers for embassy officers posted to Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. They evaluated economic development, prospects for ecotourism, environmental problems, and the status of indigenous people.
Bolivia is undeniably beautiful, with fossils in Sucre, salt flats in Potosí, and rain forest in Pando, but government support to develop tourism in these areas is very limited. “The people in the government now aren’t from Pando—they don’t know the rain forest and it’s hard to get them to care,” lamented one ecotourism expert to embassy visitors.
Despite the underdevelopment, the region attracts hordes of backpackers, and environmentalists shudder as more so-called eco-lodges spring up. The border town of Guayaramerín hosts a wildlife park that an officer described as “a glorified backyard zoo. Amazon birds, monkeys, capybaras and jaguars huddled in cramped cages while visitors snapped photos. . . . When asked where he obtained the animals, the owner responded, ‘you can buy anything in Bolivia if the price is right.’” 4
In a perverse example of how lack of infrastructure creates a kind of dark tourism, thousands of thrill-seeking mountain bikers flocked to “The Road of Death” to ride down the steep ten-foot-wide unpaved path that offers no guardrail between the biker and the two-thousand-foot drop below. “Not everyone gets the ‘I Survived Bolivia’s Death Road’ t-shirt handed out by tour companies at the end of the trip,” the officer wryly noted. “At least 13 bikers have died on the road in the past decade.” 5
Embassy reporters from Bogotá noted that Colombia was also struggling to build viable ecotourism, despite substantial help from a USAID-sponsored initiative, which provided small grants to indigenous communities. A chronicle of an ambassadorial visit to Amacayacu National Park noted that it was home not only to protected flora and fauna but to indigenous communities that lived in the park and helped care for vulnerable species. The cable spelled out the challenge in stark terms: the Amazonas department, one of thirty-two statelike political divisions, is Colombia’s largest but has only forty-eight thousand inhabitants, 53 percent of whom lived in a sixteen-kilometer strip along the Amazon. The area was woefully short of infrastructure, with only twenty-five miles of paved roads and few hotel rooms. The economy contributed less than .05 percent to Colombia’s GDP, and there was no comprehensive plan to attract high-income “boutique” tourists.6
A WORLD AWAY FROM the rivers and mountains of South America, but with the same spirit of exploration, embassy officers took to the backwaters of the post-Soviet world—contested villages in Georgia and forgotten rural spots in Central Asia. While Moscow and Saint Petersburg are as cosmopolitan as any part of Western Europe, the remote parts of the former Soviet Union provide landscapes littered with the rusting automotive hulks of Zhigulis, Trabants, and Wartburgs, all of which served as apt metaphors for the hasty abandonment of Soviet-era decay and the isolation of those left behind.
The troubles of ethnic Georgians in the breakaway region of Abkhazia are emblematic of the problems of people whose national identity may not change as fast as their borders. A year after the 2008 Russian invasion of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, embassy officers ventured into Gali, a border town within the UN security zone.
Emboffs observed decrepit housing, execrable roads, collapsing schools, insufficient health care facilities, horse drawn carts and insect-threatened hazelnut trees . . . The nuts are the primary source of income, with profits from the fall harvest needed to last the whole year.
The aspect of life in Gali most immediately and glaringly apparent to a visitor is the appalling state of the roads. The longest stretch the main road extends without massive road damage is perhaps a couple hundred yards . . . The roads in the villages, off the main road to Sukhumi, are even worse, with gaping holes every few yards. Although the UNHCR’s [UN High Commissioner for Refugees’s] four wheel drive SUV handled the rough spots well enough, the horse drawn carts and old Zhiguli sedans the locals use likely encounter major difficulties.7
Ethnic Georgians hinted at shakedowns when they crossed back and forth across the border and described the many ways their language, history, and culture were being erased. The officers described a dying village with depressing prospects, still occupied by Russian troops and Abkhaz forces, and one from which young people flee for better futures elsewhere.8
On the other side of the Urals, the Central Asian republics of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, with their borders like interlocking jigsaw pieces, offer a physical landscape as challenging as the political one. It is easy to understand why embassy officers might want to take to the roads and explore something less contentious than the halls of government.
Tajikistan offered an irresistible temptation to diplomats stuck in Dushanbe one January: a visit to the Rasht Valley to see rural life in winter. The locals begged them to wait until summer, warning of perilous road conditions in the mountains. Undaunted, the officers loaded their vehicle with meals ready-to-eat, sleeping bags, and bottled water, and headed off to Garm, six hours northeast from Dushanbe on the road to Kyrgyzstan.
EmbOffs enjoyed blazing snow-covered scenery as drivers slowly maneuvered through icy mountain roads at 25–30 kilometers per hour. Occasionally men from villages dressed in furry hats and beards came up to shovel dirt on the mountain paths to provide traction for passers-by. Vehicles small and large maneuvered between rockslides on the icy roads, carrying people and goods, such as new Chinese minivans, into the country.9
They also saw firsthand how harsh winters affect daily life. With only two to four hours of electricity a day from mid-October to mid-April, they made a very quick visit to School Number 1, where “shivering pupils bundled in coats dutifully wrote in their notebooks.”
Evidently the group survived to make another excursion eight months later—this time covering two thirds the length of the 1,344-kilometer Tajik-Afghan border, where they found more poverty-stricken villages and a rapidly developing western route for Chinese goods.
In the Tajik mountain village of Zing just downstream from the Darvaz border crossing, 165 families survive on remittance income from family members working in Russia, pensions, and family gardens. A shiny mausoleum marks the entrance to the pomegranate and apple tree–lined road. Residents often live over 90 years in this mountain town known for its honey sold in two-liter bottles. Across the river from Zing, Afghans transport goods via donkey along the mountain path to their houses the same shade of brown as the dirt. The Afghan side is within throwing distance of Tajikistan and EmbOffs watched as an agile Afghan boy clambered off the thin mountain path to retrieve sticks for firewood from further down the mountain.10
ANTHROPOLOGY 101: ANCIENT PEOPLES
Embassy officers were clearly fascinated by encounters with indigenous people, most of whom live in some of the globe’s remotest corners. Tribal peoples were challenged by creeping modernity, intergenerational divides, and contentious relations with national government officials, who were often of different ethnicities. Officers were alert to human rights abuses and evidence of political and economic marginalization, but their stories suggest a far more complex picture.
Where does India end and China begin? The answer to that riddle encompasses practices dating back to the British Raj: a long-unresolved border war and a fiercely xenophobic collection of tribes for whom modern nation states such as India and China are abstract concepts. A glance at a map of Arunachal Pradesh, India’s most isolated and least developed state, shows why the question might be relevant. Bhutan, Nepal, and Bangladesh nearly converge to leave Arunachal Pradesh’s connection to the Indian “mainland” hanging by a thread. With one million inhabitants, it is the least populated of all Indian states, home to twenty-six tribal groups, each with its own language and customs, and hundreds of subgroups.
“Arunachal is something of an anthropologist’s dream but a political and developmental nightmare,” wrote a U.S. consulate officer. Its northern border with China is a dotted line, symbolizing the uncertain feelings of the people (many of whom identify more with China than with India), as well as the cartographers. The border has been in dispute since India’s defeat in the 1962 Sino-Indian War. Deemed “sensitive” territory, even Indian citizens need special permission to visit. More than 80 percent of the land is covered in heavy forests, and parts of the state are still largely unexplored. With few highways, helicopters and footpaths are the main ways in and out.
The officer explained that indigenous communities are protected through a system of Inner Line Permits dating back to the days of British rule. No outsider can enter Arunachal Pradesh without an Inner Line or a Protected Area Permit. Neither can they buy land, start a business, or take up employment. Visiting consular staff were prohibited from taking photos with their Inner Line Permit. Yet, the officer noted, the people of Arunachal are unanimous about retaining the permit system. Without it they fear they would lose their lands to people from mainland India.
Villages are administered in consultation with headmen and the elected panchayat (local self-government leader). “Several tribes practice Donyi Polo, a religion worshipping the sun and the moon, whereas others practice animism. Missionaries have made few inroads here. Polygamy is permitted and practiced by some tribal elites. Two of the tribes exist in a master-slave relationship.”11
This is a place few Westerners ever reach.
In a smoky Mishmi longhouse, middle-aged tribal women with enormous plugs in their earlobes stared at the PO [principal officer] as he squatted by the fire and sipped rice beer under racks of charred wild cattle skulls. Asked through an interpreter what they found so interesting, they replied that they had seen “white” people on the cable television in their longhouse but that they had not believed, until just then, that such people existed in real life.12
The United States has an interest in the peaceful resolution to the long running Sino-India border dispute, and there may be prospects for U.S. investment in hydropower projects, forest-based industries, or adventure tourism. But with the xenophobic nature of the native Arunachalese and the government of India’s reluctance to upgrade infrastructure—especially if some or all of the land will eventually go to China—foreign investment remains a distant hope.
SOMETIMES THINGS AREN’T what they seem. In northernmost Thailand’s Mae Hong Son province there is a population of stateless people known as Padaung, a subgroup of the Karenni who fled their native lands in Burma in the 1990s; however, they lack refugee status, in part because they live in villages they created instead of official refugee camps. How they came to live in those villages is a story of crass commercial tourism. The Padaung are famous for their “long-necked” women. A custom of placing dozens of brass rings around the neck—which actually force the clavicle bone into a lower position to give the illusion of a longer neck—dates back centuries but had nearly disappeared in modern times.
Ambitious businessmen encouraged the refugee women to revive the tradition, live in Padaung villages, and pose for tourists who were bused in. Hundreds of Padaung saw it as a better alternative than refugee camps. They soon found themselves marketed as a “Thai Hill tribe” and mired in uncertain status. The Thai government refused to classify them as refugees and refused them the right to resettle in third countries, a problem the Chiang Mai consulate said was “endemic for refugees, migrant workers and ethnic minorities near the Thai-Burma border.”
The UNHCR representative charged that the women were being kept in a “human zoo,” and a human rights group said Thai authorities colluded with Burmese groups to traffic additional long-necked women into these Potemkin-style tourist villages. The Padaung languished in legal limbo, facing the hard choice of either refugee camps or tourist villages without a right to schooling, jobs, or a clear path to legal residency or citizenship.
In a few cases, Padaung women removed their rings as a means of rejecting the exploitation. But the reporting officers inserted a cautionary note, warning that the case of the Padaung is rife with ambiguities. “Despite signs of cultural exploitation, it is not clear what outcome the Padaung themselves want to see. Some have chosen a taste of freedom and economic opportunity in the tourist villages over an uncertain life inside a refugee camp.” The consulate report reflected on the frequent hostility between host countries and refugees. Thailand hosts one of the world’s largest stateless populations, who must contend with unfriendly and bureaucratic citizenship laws. “This dilemma has left thousands stranded in border camps while many more slip farther into Thailand to work illegally and risk exploitation.” 13
IN COUNTRIES WITH which the U.S. has no diplomatic relations, embassies from surrounding countries deploy border area watchers who chat with border crossers hoping to glean insight into a country from afar. Borders drawn on paper maps mean little to rural people for whom seasonal migration is a way of life. Embassy officers in Azerbaijan, a country that sits atop the northern border of Iran, interviewed two ethnic Kashgai people, a semi-nomadic Turkic minority of about 1.5 million with a history of antigovernment violence. About a third maintain a traditional migratory lifestyle that revolves around sheep and goat herding over a three-hundred-kilometer stretch of summer and winter grazing grounds between Isfahan and Shiraz, in central Iran. The seasonal trek takes three months each way with the help of camels and horses, although nowadays some herders use trucks to move livestock. The wool they produce is prized for its high quality and is woven by the Kashgai into carpets. They have no written language and no historical national ideology.
One Kashgai interviewee had a PhD in social anthropology; the other was a Tehran-based Kashgai carpet merchant. Both had been raised in traditional households, and they offered a fascinating picture of how a tribal minority is faring in Iran’s postrevolutionary era.
Known as the fiercely independent “Lords of the Mountains” (referring to the Zagros range), the Turkic-speaking Kashgai raided villages and were regarded with hostility and fear. Once one of the most violent minority groups in Iran, they engaged in armed resistance against central government efforts to force them into permanent settlements. After the fall of the shah, many returned to their migratory lifestyle. Although the anti-shah Kashgai leaders were initially embraced by Ayatollah Khomeini, they fell prey to the extremism of the revolution when they rejected Islamic rule and enforced settlement. As a result, many of their leaders were hanged by the Revolutionary Guard in 1982.
After the severe repression of the 1980s, Iran’s more relaxed policies have encouraged a peaceful political coexistence. Although not Persian, the Kashgai share the Shia faith—up to a point. The Kashgai men told officers that the mostly Persian mullahs are tolerated but not followed. Kashgai women work outside and do not wear the chador (full covering) except when visiting towns. The PhD left the officers with an indelible image of how this ancient people are coming to terms with modernity while, at least for now, maintaining a separate identity. He said that young herders use the Internet and social media, follow the NBA, and listen to rap music. “Economics is achieving what force could not achieve,” observed the PhD.14
In a media environment in which almost all the news on Iran concerned its nuclear program, this kind of reporting should have been invaluable to Washington. It puts individual faces to the collective label “Iranian,” reminds policymakers that Iranian society is diverse, and highlights a domestic narrative that has little to do with Western perceptions.
Turkmenistan abounds with something that would seldom catch a diplomat’s attention—truck stops. More than forty thousand Iranian truckers travel to or through Turkmenistan each year, the majority passing through the Farap crossing on the Uzbek border. The embassy officer painted a vivid picture: “As night falls, dozens of drivers congregate at cafes and parking lots, or on the side of the road on either side of the wobbly pontoon that connects the banks of the Amu Darya River and closes to truck traffic at 7 p.m.”
American diplomats made a habit of frequenting truck stops to converse with drivers and gauge the political atmosphere inside Iran, a country they cannot visit. The officers wrote about the lively conversations and colorful characters they encountered in the cafes. One rig operator said all his children had emigrated to the United States, Canada, and Europe. “Why does America have a problem with Iran? We’re good people—Americans are good people. There are no problems between us.”
Ethnic Turkmen were eager to complain about how Iran’s Shia majority discriminates against them in a society dominated by ethnic Persians. Turkmen children are forbidden to speak or study their language in school. “Turkmen sometimes marry Persians,” one trucker said. “But we never allow them to marry our daughters.”
The officers saw the Farap border as an entrée into a sector of Iran’s population unseen by policymakers.
None had ever applied for a U.S. visa or had much contact with Americans, although several older members of the group fondly recalled the days when their country was “full of Americans.” Everyone we encountered was friendly, hospitable, and appeared comfortable talking openly, in contrast to the truck stop in Berzengi, near Ashgabat, where Turkmen police have a visible presence.15
Eight months later, visiting diplomats were stunned to hear how copies of President Obama’s Cairo speech had caused a brawl. This much-anticipated speech addressed the Muslim world to generally good reviews. Distributing copies of speeches translated into local languages is a basic part of embassy work. Much of it happens electronically on embassy Web pages, but hard copies are often distributed as well, so American officers had left behind copies of the speech, translated into Farsi, at the truck stop cafe. The friendly proprietor promised to hand them out to anyone interested.
Not long afterward, eight to ten Iranians were eating dinner at the cafe, and she decided to offer them copies of the speech. One driver read the speech and made enthusiastic comments about Obama. A second trucker disagreed, and a heated argument ensued. Several friends joined in on both sides, and before long fists were flying in a full-scale brawl.
The officers noted two divergent views on offer at the truck stop. In general, older drivers were more favorably disposed toward the United States and willing to talk. Younger drivers were more reticent and those who did talk were negative about the United States. The officers apologized to the cafe owner, worried that enlisting her help in sharing the speech had caused trouble. But she seemed to enjoy her role as amateur diplomat, responding happily, “Come back after the 14th, after the President’s [Berdimuhamedov’s] visit. There will be lots of Iranians here again!” 16
ANOTHER ANCIENT PEOPLE for whom modern states mean little are the tribal people of Papua New Guinea.
Indonesians often say that although Papua is a seven hour flight from Jakarta the province is really 2,000 years away. Papua’s several hundred indigenous cultures—each with its own language—are alien and exotic to most Indonesians. Many communities in the Papuan highlands lived with ancient technology until a few decades ago. Long-running tribal wars, usually conducted with spears and arrows, are common in the central highlands. For most Jakarta officials Papua remains mysterious, a dark place filled with tribal conflicts, separatist sympathizers and chronic governance problems.17
The separatism is rooted in a sense of inequality. Relations between some 1.5 million indigenous Papuans and migrants from other parts of Indonesia are troubled. The economic disparity between the two groups—migrants are more prosperous—stokes resentment. Papuans lag in health care and education. Malnutrition is common, and malaria and tuberculosis are widespread. The HIV/AIDS infection rate is far above the national average.
But Papua is attractive to international mining companies, some of whom have had a presence for decades. A case in point is Freeport-McMoRan, whose troubles in Papua illustrate how American support for businesses overseas can sometimes trump other foreign policy efforts such as human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.
Freeport-McMoRan has been in Indonesia for forty years, and its copper and gold mining operations there represent 45 percent of the company’s income, which also makes it the largest taxpayer in Indonesia. That long history extended through the Suharto era of 1967–1998, when it took political savvy (and payment to local troops for protection) to stay afloat in a country run by one of the most corrupt dictatorships in Asia. To be fair, Freeport also embraced corporate social responsibility—building roads, schools, and hospitals to benefit Indonesians.18
But corruption was only one of many problems. The seat of government is in Jakarta, but the gold is in Papua, and, as the embassy explained, Papua can be violent. In addition to separatists, there is an active union movement and determining which groups are behind which actions can be difficult. In 2009 unknown assailants carried out more than a dozen attacks near Freeport-McMoRan’s mines, killing several. There have been long-running clashes between Indonesian security firms and Papuan insurgents, and in December 2009, Papuan separatist leader Kelly Kwalik was killed in a shootout. The embassy report stated that he was widely believed to have been involved in a series of shootings targeting Freeport, including an attack that killed two Americans.19
This violence was a backdrop to yet another problem—Freeport’s need for security. The embassy dutifully chronicled the turbulence,20 and a Forbes magazine article painted it in even starker terms. In addition to using Indonesian troops for protection, Freeport also spent $28 million in 2010 on its own security force. It was sufficiently alarmed to bring in Triple Canopy, a private U.S. security firm staffed by former U.S. Special Forces.21
The cables described a disturbing situation in which the Indonesian government used its own troops to protect a foreign mining interest, which in turn supplemented this with its own security forces. Human rights organizations said Indonesian security forces abused Papuans and pilfered the mining operations, some of which were environmentally ruinous. Freeport added to the tension by hiring technicians from outside Papua (who sometimes had better skills), leaving separatists, union activists, and environmentalists frustrated.
The rights of native Papuans gained little traction in this narrative, nor did the separatists who hoped to win back Papua for native Papuans. While any expropriation of Freeport would be a red flag for the U.S. government, many of the union demands seemed modest—a living wage, better working conditions, and more say in the exploitation of Papua’s resources.
This is an old, old story that’s played out many times elsewhere—Exxon, United Fruit, and W.R. Grace in Latin America, for example. While it is unthinkable that the U.S. government would ever abandon its advocacy of U.S. industries abroad, the embassy cables implicitly pose questions: How many times must we repeat the past? Is there another way to support U.S. businesses while also advancing Indonesian transparency, upholding the rights of indigenous Papuans, and protecting the environment? This remains Indonesia’s problem to solve, but when the center of the conflict is a forty-year relationship with a U.S. company that is also its largest taxpayer, there ought to be room for the United States to use its good offices.
ANTHROPOLOGY 201: MODERN PEOPLES
Embassy encounters with people from modern societies whose lives are nonetheless restricted for political, religious, or cultural reasons offer some of the most interesting reading. Social issues in Saudi Arabia and Iran caught the eye of observant officers who strayed from the usual political themes to portray groups ranging from wealthy Hejazis from western Saudi Arabia to Iranian punk rock musicians.
TURNING TO SAUDI ARABIA, Americans are often baffled by Saudi tolerance for such a restrictive society. People imagine menacing imams and lurking religious police. Trying to understand why anyone would prefer to live in such a world grips American diplomats, too. The consul general, the lead officer in Jeddah, offered a thoughtful analysis of this question with a stunning opening line:
There is no subject dearer to the hearts of even moderately well-off Hejazis (inhabitants of the Western Province) than leaving Saudi Arabia. The most stilted gathering can be brightened up at once by steering the conversation to a fondly anticipated (or remembered) stint outside the Kingdom.
The writer described social gatherings with people whom she said
bear an interesting secret . . . While outwardly seeming perfectly normal, even a slight acquaintance with them reveals that they are not at all what they seem.
There is a topic absolutely guaranteed to fill the most recalcitrant conversational lull: leaving Saudi Arabia . . . Smiles then light up faces. Voices vibrate more. Even the posture straightens. Men and women begin to talk enthusiastically of the trip they just took, the trip they are looking forward to taking, or their favorite trip of all time about which they are happy to reminisce.
One man (interestingly the majority of these daydreamers are men) mentioned casually that at heart he was a Spaniard “somewhere from Andalucia.” Another vouchsafed that Paris was his true home. A third shared that he never felt as well as in England, “Saudi Arabia’s historic twin” (a surprise, possibly, to the British).
The officer was amazed at precise details offered regarding airlines, car rental, hotels, and sights, “as if disgorged from a photographic memory. The slightest incident is recalled with pleasure.” The downside, inevitably, is a discussion of the return to Saudi Arabia, and the accompanying sadness. “That indeed is the predominant sentiment of the Hejazi returnee: impending doom as individual freedom (what in the West is considered ‘normal’ life) is to be surrendered to the stifling strictures of Wahhabi Islam . . . No amount of money or status can buy them freedom.”
She went on to pose the question—if the Wahhabi lifestyle is so awful, why not change it? The answers were sobering.
This could spell revolution! . . . The overthrow of the monarchy! . . . If there weren’t the possibility of escape, maybe we would be forced to do something but since we can periodically leave, we don’t have to . . . That’s what trips to the West are for.22
She concluded with the poignant observation that the greatest frustration among younger Hejazis is never having even been asked what kind of country they want; presumably a less restrictive form of Islamic monarchy.
This cable is dynamite, and it is easy to see why it got the “secret” classification. The diplomat is telling Washington that wealthy, educated, and well-traveled Saudis are essentially disavowing their own society. They find it oppressive, and they have more reason to know than most, since they can compare their country with those they visit.
The officer’s frustration with them is equally revealing. Why don’t they change their own society? Because they fear the conservatism of the masses and the risk that small modernization gains painstakingly achieved would be lost. The officer was unpersuaded that these elite were in a position to know the views of the masses. Nonetheless, it is clearly easier to dream of one’s next sojourn in Paris than to man the barricades in Jeddah.
AS A FITTING CODA to these examples of the strange ways in which modern lives and repressive regimes can clash, consider the story of the Iranian garage band Yellow Dogs. In 2009 its members made their way to Istanbul to apply for visas to perform a concert tour in the United States. The consular officers were fascinated by the picture they painted of the underground music scene in Tehran, and their visa interview soon turned into a reporting cable on the lives of Iranian youths. The consulate wrote that the musicians “reinforced the impression that Iranian society spans a far broader and more complex spectrum than many outside observers realize.” 23
The musicians described a scene where “drugs are cheap and easy to find, creative expression is at its most free, and participants are among Iran’s most tech-savvy citizens.” Some of the group’s political predictions did not come to pass, but their images of Iran’s youth culture seemed dead on, with their descriptions of hours spent playing video games, watching online TV, and blogging. “They told us with bemusement that they regularly play ‘Guitar Hero’ online and beat players from the U.S. or Europe. When they tell their online competitors they are from Iran, the other players express shock that Iranians are allowed to use the Internet—and that they are so good at video games.”
The Yellow Dogs got their visas and performed on concert tours, were interviewed on CNN and featured in Rolling Stone’s Middle Eastern edition, and were highlighted in No One Knows About Persian Cats, a film about the Iranian rock music scene. The exposure led to a coveted invitation to play at South by Southwest, and it seemed the group was poised to break out. They never went back to Iran and began a new life in Brooklyn. They applied for and were granted political asylum in the United States.
In one of the cruelest ironies imaginable, two members of the group, along with another Iranian musician, were slain on November 11, 2013, by a fellow Iranian musician who then committed suicide. Articles on the group quoted the embassy cable from WikiLeaks, stressing how the band opened America’s eyes to a younger generation of Iranians. “I wish all this attention was just for a new release of an album,” said surviving member and lead singer Siavash Karampour. “It took us three bodies to become famous.” 24
THE MANY FACES OF GOD
Embassy reporting about religion suggests that Washington ought to consider the world’s faiths more frequently than in the once-a-year International Religious Freedom Report. While politicians talked endlessly about Islamic fundamentalism, officers took a wider view, writing cables describing a variety of belief systems and how they influence local life. Religion and local politics commingle, suggesting that faith and foreign policy are logical, if not always comfortable, bedfellows. They reported on the influence of religions as familiar as Catholicism and as exotic as animism, showing that religion and foreign policy intersect in ways that policymakers might not have contemplated.
Like most other countries, the United States recognizes the Holy See and sends a small contingent of diplomats to its embassy in Vatican City. These officers analyze the enormous reach of Catholicism and its global influence. Some of their cables made the Vatican sound like a hip place, noting Pope Benedict XVI’s first foray on YouTube and explaining how the Vatican went green, becoming the first carbon-neutral country in the world.25 Benedict took an intellectual approach to climate change, linking it to issues from disarmament to the protection of human life to the rights of environmental refugees forced to migrate by the degradation of their natural surroundings.
The cables also described a church that struggled to cope with relentless sex abuse scandals, the first of which broke in the United States in 2002, several years before the issue surfaced in Europe. In Ireland, the abuse revelations of the Ryan Report in May 2009 and the Murphy Report of November 2009 marked an era which officers assessed as one of increasing secularization. “Once ensconced in the Irish Constitution, the Irish Catholic Church reached the height of its prestige and power with the 1979 state visit of Pope John Paul II but it has been falling ever since. At the same time, the Murphy Report reflects Irish shame over the collaboration of Ireland’s state bodies, including its schools, courts, and police in the appalling abuses and cover-up that occurred for decades.” 26
U.S. diplomats in the Holy See also wrote about the complexity of managing modern church-state relations. Ecumenism was an important platform for the pope, and the Vatican busied itself mounting interfaith dialogues with Muslims and Jews, among others. The thicket of historical and contemporary complications to this approach were on display in a May 2009 visit to Israel. Pope Benedict XVI spoke at—but not in—the Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem, to avoid seeing an unflattering depiction of Pope Pius XII, who is accused of doing too little to help Jews during the Holocaust. The trip was almost derailed before it got underway, when the pope decided to reinstate a breakaway Catholic group that included Holocaust denier Bishop Richard Williamson. Six months after his Israel visit, Benedict decreed Pius as “venerable” (along with the immensely more popular John Paul II). This act—a first step in a series that lead to elevation to sainthood—reactivated Jewish ire.
Although the pope may be the only religious leader with such a lengthy rule of his own country, the cables also shed light on patriarchs, rabbis, imams, and other religious leaders. Many dealt with the struggles of so-called minority religions, especially native U.S. groups such as Seventh-day Adventists, Scientologists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons. Explaining the practices of those religions and encouraging other countries to accept their presence was a major challenge for U.S. diplomats.
Germans (among other European nations) have steadfastly refused to grant Scientologists permanent resident visas. Reporting on refusals to two American Scientologists who had hoped to train local church staff, a U.S. officer wrote that the Germans felt the applicants were unable to demonstrate that their cost of living would be met by the Church of Scientology during their one-year stay in Germany and cited the applicants’ inability to provide any evidence of health insurance. In other contexts, these objections might have been overcome, but the German official also categorized the Church of Scientology’s activities as posing “a threat to Germany’s constitutional order” and wondered why the U.S. government was interested in a “residence permit denial case.” 27
In Russia, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Evangelical Lutherans struggled to find legal meeting places in a state that excelled at creating a maze of bureaucratic obstacles to worship.28 Meeting places were also a problem in Shanghai, where the consulate reported that a ruling authorizing expatriate Mormons to meet legally came with strings attached—the rent for the authorized space was one of the highest per head in Asia. In addition, a member of Shanghai’s religious affairs board was required to attend and observe services every week—versus once a year under a previous arrangement. And Chinese Mormons could no longer meet in the same location as the expatriate members.29
Elsewhere, reporting on religion took on a decidedly non-Western feel. In the Kédougou region of southern Senegal, a political officer visited the Bedik village of Ewol where residents have long resisted both Islam and Christianity in favor of a form of animism. The Bedik escaped from Mali in the twelfth century after the king of Guinea tried to convert them to Islam.
According to local legend . . . 18 young men were singled out to be sacrificed to the traditional spirit they worship. However, the devil spirit spared the young men and instead sent a swarm of bees which attacked the invading armies, killed the Guinean king, and spared them from slavery. In the center of Ewol stands a massive baobab tree where the villagers hold their annual sacrifices. The tree is also where, in the past, leading elders were buried and where it is believed that their spirits still reside.30
Animism also plays a role in Laos, along with ancestor worship, and an embassy officer and a visiting State Department officer found that the farther they traveled from the capital, the further they left the concept of religious freedom behind. In the remote province of Oudomxay, their search for the province’s political leaders wound through the multilingual territories of fourteen different ethnic groups. Along the way, they developed an appreciation of the infrastructure and communications challenges the Lao government faces in its northern provinces.
Even in such a faraway region, the officers found evidence that proselytizers had gone before them. They heard villagers complain about tourists distributing Bibles without permission and missionaries coercing ethnic minorities to convert by promising favors. “A con-artist extorted money from poor Buddhists in exchange for promises of salvation after death.” They found Seventh-day Adventists and a Calvinist sect forced to conduct religious services in the forest.
In one village, people were eager to gripe about Christianity. “Village elders complained that often cases of conflict arose when families planned important animal sacrifice ceremonies or funerals, and the Christian family members—often younger members—refused to take part. This was an insult to the family and the ancestors.” 31
In neighboring Thailand, astrology, not animism, influences people in high places. The leadership of the Council for National Security visited the famed Chiang Mai astrologer Varin Buaviratlert to protect against ill fortune and pay respect. The officers wrote that “attraction to mediums and mystics cuts across all segments of Thai society, including Muslims.” The embassy noted the leaders last visited the astrologer in early November to ward off bad luck that might have stemmed from their September 19, 2006, coup.
Belief in astrology and mysticism is well within the mainstream of Thai culture, which blends astrology and a rich mixture of Buddhism, Hinduism, animism, and elements of the occult into everyday life and decision making. However, the devotion to Varin’s wisdom and the cost of flying government leaders up to Chiang Mai in C-130 military planes has raised eyebrows even among normally superstitious Thais.32
In neighboring Burma, the ruling generals favor numerology.
Western rationality is not always apparent in regime decision-making. Than Shwe (a senior general in the junta) reportedly relies on favored soothsayers. We hear one such seer advised moving the capital to the interior because Rangoon would be subject to street disturbances and a horrific storm. Numerology also factors in. Witness the overnight shift to a currency divisible by nines in 1987 and the release of 9,002 prisoners last September, reportedly to ensure an auspicious 2009. Such decision methods may sound strange to us, but they are everyday elements in the lives of many Burmese.33
Sometimes the best insights arrive by way of observation. One diplomat went to Mecca to perform the Hajj, an annual pilgrimage that attracts two to three million Muslim worshippers. He wrote that the Saudis’ efforts to accommodate the pilgrims, including construction of new bridges and a light rail system, along with the easygoing attitude of crowd controllers and compliant pilgrims, suggested a reflective state of mind punctuated by moments of excitement and joy. The officer-pilgrim described how Saudis dealt with an unusual torrential rainstorm and how public health officials anticipated and dealt with the H1N1 (swine flu) virus.
Part of the religious ritual involves wearing white pilgrimage garments known as ihrams and circling seven times around the Ka’aba, the square granite building at the center of Islam’s most sacred mosque, Al-Masjid al-Haram. The officer described the scene:
Pilgrims poured into the mosque at a seemingly endless pace, all jockeying for a position as close to the Ka’aba as physically possible. Accordingly the ground and lower levels remained jam-packed both days with many pilgrims on those levels recounting later that they felt as if the sheer force of the crowd moved them around the Ka’aba, with their feet hardly touching the ground. Pilgrims on the two upper floors benefitted from more space and the picturesque view below of tens of thousands of worshippers clothed in white moving counterclockwise around the Ka’aba like a slow-moving hurricane.
The second day of the Hajj, considered the most important, is known as the day of Arafat, on which pilgrims head towards the Plain of Arafat, near Mount Arafat where the Prophet Muhammad delivered his final sermon. Here worshippers spend the day in tents praying, reading the Qur’an and reflecting on their lives. Towards the end of the afternoon most pilgrims exited their tents and faced in the direction of the Ka’aba to begin offering supplications until sunset. Believing that all prayers on Arafat are answered, pilgrims pray especially earnestly at this point in the Hajj, many weeping and shaking with emotion while directing silent petitions to the Almighty.
The Hajj lasts five days, with most pilgrims spending three of the nights in the tent city of Mina, which the officer likened to a large refugee camp, with thousands of tents arranged next to one another.
Camping areas are divided along nationality lines with delegations from each country occupying groups of adjoining tents. Other tent groupings are reserved for organizations such as the Organization of the Islamic Conference . . . Most tents are fitted simply with rugs for sleeping and a small restroom area (toilets and showers). Higher budget delegations, including royal and ministerial parties, tend to have larger, more luxurious tents equipped with small beds and upgraded restrooms. Poorer pilgrims sleep on the streets in any area they can mark out for themselves.
The officer also described the “stoning the devil” ritual, after which pilgrims change out of their ihram and put on regular clothing, which provides the most striking reminder of the international range of the participants. “As pilgrims made their way to stone the devil at Jamarat on subsequent days, many national delegations traveled in large groups, wearing matching garb and carrying their national flags in a spectacle reminiscent of the parade of nations at the opening ceremony of the Olympics.” 34
This compelling description of an event most Americans never witness firsthand is an invaluable effort to bridge a cultural gap, demystify a significant religious act, and provide detail on how the Saudis manage to deal peacefully with enormous international crowds. As part of the voluminous embassy reporting on religion, it offers participatory observation as another means of gathering information and practicing diplomacy.
WHY POWERLESS PEOPLE SHOULD MATTER
The Department of State should not be confused with the National Geographic Society. It is hard to make the case that people living traditional or rural lives are first-line stakeholders in foreign policy. The cables describe a reality in which people far from capital cities are often marginalized, politically and economically. The writing clearly establishes that tribal cultures are stressed by modernization and generational conflict. Indigenous people are on the front lines of globalization’s downside—environmental degradation, rampant tourism, and migration, all of which have reached the remotest corners of the planet.
But cables also have to answer the “so what?” question. While earlier generations of American diplomats might not have bothered to venture into the backwaters, today’s diplomats do so because they see it as an imperative, and because they see a clear connection between remote people and places and U.S. foreign policy. They have reconsidered who should be on the all-important embassy contact lists. They will always need to meet counterparts at foreign ministries and parliaments, but they are increasingly finding value in meetings with Turkmen truckers, Iranian rock bands, and tribal elders. The back country of Suriname should not have to wait seven years for the next visit.
Culture matters. The officers reporting on their trips and encounters are gently making the case that “people like us” are not the only agents of influence. Seeing the world through the lens of nineteenth-century nation-states is but one vision. Cables from country after country describe people who identify themselves according to their ethnicity, religion, or geography. They will make common cause with like-minded people in ways that sometimes negate the construct of nation-states. On occasion, the view from the village may matter more than the view from the corridors of power. Ignoring that view will leave the United States at risk.