03/23/07 – Bill Kelsey – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
I'm joined by my friend Bill Kelsey, who's a libertarian activist here in Austin and flies relief missions for an international non-governmental organization.
And he's just recently come back from adventures all around the world and has got to leave again in a couple of days.
Welcome, Bill.
Well, thank you.
Great to be back home.
Since we last spoke, you've had some adventures all over the world.
Africa, Asia?
Well, just Africa, Asia.
I've been in Afghanistan on two trips and also been in Sudan, Chad, Uganda, and Congo.
Uganda's where I'm based, but I have a supervisory role, so that takes me to several other countries.
Now, I know you primarily focus on disaster relief, whether man-made or natural disasters.
Are these all war zones like Afghanistan or other problems that you're helping to solve?
Well, the company I work for is open to working on any problem in the way of relief and development.
Usually, it's post-war.
We do have natural disasters that we've helped out in, in the way of earthquakes in Afghanistan and the tsunami in Indonesia.
We had a presence there.
But right now, pretty much all of our work is in war zones, with one exception.
There's a lot of post-war work that we've done in Mozambique.
Okay.
And now, I guess the most pressing issue for you to address is the war in Sudan.
And it's routinely called the genocide, which is the trigger word for America must intervene.
And I'd like a firsthand explanation of what you see going on there, Bill.
Okay.
Well, there are two main things to talk about in the way of Sudan.
One is that there was a war in South Sudan that went on for 30 years, and there's a peace agreement.
It's fragile, but it is happening, and that is good news.
And I fly into South Sudan with some regularity.
I do see soldiers from the SPLA.
That's the Southern Sudan People's Liberation Army, and I see functionaries from the Sudan government.
Sometimes in the uniforms of these formerly opposing sides, I'll see them at the same base or at the same airport.
Now, sometimes I'm at an airport where it's entirely SPLA control.
Other times, I notice that there are soldiers with a patch on that says integrated battalion where they've brought people from opposing forces and put them in one unit.
And people are putting that place together.
There's lots of money being poured in to build highways, to set up the telecommunications system.
So that's good news in South Sudan.
That integration of the separate forces into single units, that's working out, huh?
Well, it remains to be seen.
I mean, there are clashes and there are little things that go on.
Usually, it's disgruntled soldiers from one side or the other who haven't gotten their paychecks.
And you'll hear that there's a shootout every so often.
And there are minor splinters here and there that cause trouble, including spillovers from the civil war in Uganda.
But generally, I wanted to mention that because we do tend to focus in the news on the disasters and the terrible things that are happening.
But there are several places in Africa where people are not shooting each other or where there used to be a war and it has stopped and people are putting things back together again.
I spoke with John Mueller, the professor at Ohio State University, who wrote the book Overblown about the war on terrorism, and he talked about how right now the United Nations is out of peacekeepers.
There's so many ceasefires that have been made lately that peace is breaking out all over the place, as you say, despite the more attention-grabbing headlines.
Right.
I don't want to divert from people being aware of the various wars and tragic events going on in the world.
But I also don't want them to be discouraged and think that we're always going to hell in the handbasket because there are places where peace is breaking out.
Northern Uganda is another one where we used to have to fly doctors without borders between various cities in the north because this really terrible army called the Lord's Resistance Army kidnapped children, committed terrorist acts.
No one quite knew what they wanted or what their program was.
But there has been a ceasefire.
The ceasefire expired and there's a shootout every now and then, but by and large, the steam has gone out of the war and Doctors Without Borders travels by road between these various towns in northern Uganda that we used to have to fly them between.
So that, again, is good news.
Absolutely.
Now, the war in southern Sudan that you spoke of is an entirely separate animal from the war going on in the west in the Darfur region.
Is that correct?
Right.
The only way that they would link is that they are distant from Khartoum and they are non-quote-unquote Arab people that have been involved in rebellion.
I'd like to say that one of the things I noticed first off was that about the time that the southern Sudanese got their agreement, which really was a victory, they got a certain number of guaranteed seats in the National Assembly in Khartoum.
They got a few cabinet-level positions and where they didn't get a cabinet-level position, they got the number two position in these various cabinets.
And they got a vice presidential position in the Khartoum government.
And they got to control the territory in the south, including the garrison towns that the Sudan government army withdrew from.
So they got a pretty good deal.
We'll see how much of it gets implemented.
Now, coincidentally, right at the time when this deal was being worked out and signed a few years ago is when we started hearing about the Darfur rebellion.
So I do think it's more than coincidence that it started just at the point that the southerners got a good deal after having their war for 30 years.
People talk about Arab versus non-Arab in this Darfur fight.
I prefer to describe it in terms of nomadic versus sedentary.
These are, yes, they are Arabs, and the word Arab can be used to denote somebody who's a nomad in the Middle East.
That's how it's been used in certain times in history.
It can also be used to discuss somebody who speaks Arabic.
It can also be used to discuss somebody who has an Arab, or perceives that they have an Arab ancestor.
And all three are true in the case of the Janjaweed.
They are nomadic, they do speak Arabic, and they do claim an Arab ancestor.
And the Janjaweed are the militias, to what degree are they government backed?
They're the ones who are committing the murders going on there.
Well, you never know to what degree their government backed or to what degree they're rogue.
Janjaweed means the ghosts of the horses.
There was a TV show, I Dream of Jeannie.
Well, this is the same word.
Janjaweed, the jinns who ride horses, or the ghost riders if you want.
And they're the shock troops.
They would represent the tribes that have had friction.
Look, you've got villages that grow tomatoes, and somebody goes to great trouble to get a tomato patch growing out in the desert, and then along comes somebody from another tribe with a camel that starts eating the tomatoes.
You know, the tomato grower's going to get angry with the camel, and whoever owns the camels, and they're going to get angry back.
That's what I see as the deep, deep root of it.
The rest are all excuses and layers and commentary.
And so the central government, such as it is in Khartoum, is backing these Janjaweed militias against the nomads, against the farmers.
That appears to have been the original intent, whether they have complete control over the Janjaweed now.
I don't know.
Now, I do believe that the people from the various rebel groups in Darfur, there are three ethnic groups.
There's the four, the Masalit and the Zagawa.
And incidentally, there are some sedentary Arabs who are on the side of the rebels as well.
These people launched an attack.
This was before we heard about it.
They did launch a rebellion against the Sudan government, and they did blow up some airplanes.
They captured some generals.
They killed a bunch of people.
And the Sudanese government responded the way governments respond when governments get attacked by a rebel force, which is they went to the towns that the rebels lived in and attacked those towns and ran the people off.
And then we heard about it.
Then we began hearing that there are all these victims of genocide and people in refugee camps and Chad, who I've worked with.
And now how many years ago was this?
Well, the problem goes back to Cain and Abel, but the recent rebellion probably started four or five years ago, and then we started hearing about it three years ago.
Now, what kind of numbers are we talking about?
Hundreds of thousands of people killed, Bill?
Is that right?
Well, who knows?
These people weren't counted when they're alive.
Who knows how many when they're dead?
But what fascinates me and what I'm really trying hard to do is to figure out what's going on and separate the reality of what's happening in combat in the field from the propaganda and the words we use to describe it.
That's very important to me.
I'm studying our Bill of Rights and the third article talks about quartering soldiers in people's houses, that we actually have provisions in our constitution for soldiers.
In peacetime, it can only stay in somebody's house with the consent of the owner, in wartime, in a matter prescribed by law.
Soldiers have parents, they have families, they have wives, they have children, so they are going to be living to some extent with those families.
Rebel soldiers have families, they have towns, they have villages.
It's unlikely that they're going to sit out in the desert.
And what happens in combat is that the soldiers shoot, people shoot back at the soldiers, the civilians in the vicinity get killed.
There are variations on the theme, but what interests me in the way of language is how we distort what's really going on by the words that we use.
So for example, somebody talking about Fallujah, a very decent person talking about Fallujah will say, oh, those civilians that were killed in Fallujah, Iraq, the government, the Americans warned them to leave.
They were warned to leave, and if they got killed, it was their fault.
Now, in the case of the people fleeing villages in Darfur, I don't think we'd allow a Sudanese military person to say that, or we would tolerate it.
But I suspect that that's what they're saying.
We are giving them opportunities to leave.
We are not killing them.
If they get killed, it's because they didn't flee fast enough.
You could even say they're following the example we set in Fallujah.
And the same you hear good people say, well, in reference to the Israeli attack on South Lebanon, they'll say, well, you know, the Israelis, they don't want to kill any Lebanese, but these terrorists, they keep hiding among civilians.
So when you hear that, it usually tells you more about the sympathies of the speaker than what's really happening on the ground.
And what I tell people is look, whether it's the David Koresh people provoking the US government or appearing to provoke the US government, whether it's any small rebel force is going to attack a big government, whether you happen to sympathize with that rebel force, whether you happen to sympathize with the government, there's certain things that happen.
Civilians get killed, they get run out of their houses, the people fighting are running around, they do get stuck in civilian areas.
I don't think it's very common that people actually consciously use humans as shields.
I mean, do the recruiters that have a recruiting office in Dobi Mall, are they hiding behind civilians?
Does anybody say that that's a military base and they're hiding behind civilians?
No.
But if somebody were to perceive it as a military target, then a lot of civilians would get hurt.
And this happens in war.
So when you're sympathetic to the rebels, you say genocide when they get hurt.
When you're sympathetic to the government forces, you say, oh, that was because terrorists were hiding behind civilians.
I hope that doesn't sound too cynical, but that's the way I'm looking at some of these things.
Yeah, well, that sounds right to me.
And genocide is a word that applies to a very specific definition, which is at least a real attempt, if not a successful one, to wipe an ethnicity off the face of the earth, to kill all of them so that they are gone.
So here, you know, the United States is responsible directly and indirectly for the death of hundreds of thousands of Arabs in Iraq.
But that's not even beginning a path toward genocide, has nothing to do with genocide at all.
And for anyone to call that genocide, as you say, reveals more about the person doing the accusing or using that language than anything about the real situation.
And that's the accusation in Darfur.
And genocide is the trigger word.
That's the ultimate cost of spelling for it's time for America to send forces to intervene, as the guest I talked to earlier today said.
The left thinks that America ought to pull its troops out of Iraq and put them in Darfur in order to stop this genocide.
So I guess the first question, Bill, really break it down.
Is there an attempt of one side to wipe another ethnicity off the face of the earth in Darfur?
And in your personal experience from being in the Sudan and, you know, being involved firsthand and witnessing what's going on there, is there a role for American combat forces to keep the peace and protect innocent people in that land?
Well, you brought up two points for me to make.
One is that it is brutal.
And I've been with the refugees and I've seen women who've gone crazy from the things they've suffered.
And I've been in the refugee camps in eastern Chad that have come from Darfur.
So no question something horrible and brutal has happened.
The word genocide should not be thrown around casually.
And so, yes, there is brutality.
Now, also, I have been in Sudan where, in towns under government control, where people from these groups, the Masalit, Darfur and the Zagawa, are walking around.
There are communities of all these three groups in Khartoum itself.
They are not being rounded up and massacred.
It is a situation.
And they could argue that their life is not perfect in Khartoum.
Maybe they get arrested now and then, any of the activists.
Maybe they get discriminated against.
But they're not being round up and put in concentration camps and shot.
The places where this is happening is where there is combat either against people who are rebelling against the government or nomadic peoples who are taking the opportunity to steal the land of the people who have supplied rebels.
And I should also note that the Sudan government army will also have people in it who are from the various non-Arab groups in Sudan.
Quite often they have people from the same ethnic groups they're fighting, which is unfortunate.
So, anyway, that is not exactly genocide.
It is brutal.
It is terrible.
But let's stick to analysis rather than propaganda in this.
As far as what various liberals have seized onto this, I'm fascinated of all the reasons people give for going to war.
You know, I think the most dangerous one is when the altruists and people who have good motives come up with a reason to go to war because it sounds ugly to go to war for oil or to just gain territory and to get a president elected.
These are all vulgar reasons and nobody wants to admit that that might be a reason for war.
But the most dangerous one is when good people believe they are doing something good, when they feel that, oh, here we're saving lives by going to war in Sudan.
That is the oldest trick in the book, the notion that the U.S. Civil War was to fight slavery or that the Second World War was to rescue Jews from the concentration camps.
These are excuses made up afterwards.
And even Afghanistan, lots of very anti-war women, accepted the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan on the grounds that it was liberating women.
It's not the case, but that's what they thought.
And how's that working out?
Oh, Afghanistan, another continent now.
It's very surreal being in Kabul.
It kind of reminded me of what I would imagine for being in the last days in Havana of the Batista regime before Castro took over or maybe in Phnom Penh before, not a month before, but maybe two years before the Khmer Rouge actually took over.
What you have out, you got the Taliban, they're unsavory, they're not Boy Scouts, not people.
We have a lot in common with, and they are brutal.
I've carried their victims in airplanes, carried their corpses.
That's what you have out in the countryside.
And then in Kabul itself, you do have a foreign military occupation that resembles nothing so much as the Soviet invasion.
We have Americans in the foreign troops that are there.
I'll tell you, I spent a day at a Lithuanian base, of all things.
There are Lithuanian units there, and they had soldiers.
These are allies of the United States now.
Some of the older soldiers were there with the Soviet invasion.
And when I'm taxiing the airplane for takeoff in Kabul airport, quite often I'm delayed by my takeoff by lots of airplanes coming in or other airplanes taking off.
Overwhelming majority of them have Russian voices and former Soviet states' registration.
Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, you name it.
These people are flying the supplies in and out to the Americans.
And downtown, in our social milieu, we mix with Russians and Uzbekistanis and people from all over that area.
So it's the new domino theory, but this time we're the Reds, Bill.
Well, we'd like to think that we're very different from the Soviets, but as best I can tell, the parallels are there more than they're not within Kabul itself.
There were two cases where I was invited into an Afghan home.
And it could be coincidence because it's not a very big statistical sample, but in both cases, the man of the house was someone who had, in his youth, served in the pro-Soviet Afghan army that existed during the Soviet invasion.
And when the Soviets were occupying Kabul, I mean, there were a certain number of people who did prefer the Soviets, just as there are a certain number of people who prefer the foreign invasion now, or at least are making a living off of it.
These people apparently didn't see it much different to cooperate with the Soviets, as with the UN and the ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force, and the United States.
It's a complicated bureaucracy as to who controls what in Kabul.
And lots of countries are involved.
I mean, you have Macedonia, and while I was on the Lithuanian base, I actually came across some people from Iceland, some special forces.
And I said, well, I didn't know Iceland had an army.
And they said, well, Iceland doesn't, but we rounded up 50 strong guys and sent them to Norway for special forces training, and they rotate them through.
So at any one time, there are about 14 Icelandic civilian special forces in Afghanistan helping out.
Well, in the long term, you know, we read these articles about, well, this is Indian country, and we're going to tame it, and that kind of thing.
Like, this is the Wild West, that one day it's going to be all populated by Americans or something.
How tenuous is this occupation in Afghanistan, Bill?
It's hard to say.
I mean, it is backed up with a lot more sophisticated firepower than the Russians had, and the Taliban have not come up with the equivalent of a Stinger missile yet.
And if they have, the allied forces have countermeasures.
So I don't see the allied invasion collapsing quickly, nor do I see them winning over the Taliban.
I think they're both going to use up their resources for a long time.
And at a certain point, probably, I hope sooner than later, they're going to sit down, they'll negotiate a deal where neo-Taliban get to control the southern area of Afghanistan where they're predominant among the pahtuns, and they'll be given a few seats in parliament, and the allies will have a face-saving way to withdraw.
That's what I think will be the outcome.
But as far as defeating the Taliban as such, they've become the national patriotic symbol, like it or not.
And the allies represent, for all of the education they're bringing, for all of the schools they're building, for all of the fact that women have a little more freedom in areas where the foreigners aren't in control.
They're foreigners, they're going to leave at some point, and they are perceived as a foreign occupation.
So yeah, I believe that's what's going to happen, as the pahtuns will get dominant in one area of the country, and the allies will have to leave.
When I look at places like Afghanistan and various wars around the world, I try to discover things that are not being discussed in the press, or maybe get a little angle that hasn't been looked at before.
And as I've mentioned, I do believe that it's a very similar war to the war that was going on in the 80s, with the Soviet invasion, except that the United States has switched sides.
In the mid-80s, it was very difficult to argue against the form of intervention that involved funding the mujahideen.
Liberals, leftists, right-wing for sure, were all in agreement that the Soviet invasion was very bad, and to a lesser extent across the spectrum, people felt that, yes, money should be sent to the mujahideen, support should be done for the mujahideen.
And Reason magazine in particular was very much into combat pornography, as I call it, where they would send reporters over to Afghanistan, who would accompany the wonderful Afghan freedom fighters and walk into Afghanistan with them, watch them blow up a few Soviet tanks, or shoot at whatever was in the air.
And articles were written about it, and I've since learned, reading one book, Charlie Wilson's War, that it was a much huger secret operation than we are aware of, just the total amount of money and munitions that were sent into the mujahideen.
Now, what I'm noticing is that the Taliban are mainly, they're the same ethnic and cultural force.
They're based in Pakistan, and they work in southern Afghanistan.
If you were one of the people who wrote for Reason magazine or any number of other right-wing screeds, who felt that the mujahideen were, as Ronald Reagan put it, the equivalent of the founding fathers, if you believe that, if you still believe that, then it would be consistent for you to be supporting the Taliban now.
If, on the other hand, you find something unsavory about the Taliban, then it would be sporting to publicly repudiate what position you had in 1985, and say, I was wrong to support, I was wrong to believe that the mujahideen represented freedom fighters.
Maybe you still believe that they do.
If you believe that those mujahideen were freedom fighters back then, then the next logical consequence is you should be supporting the Taliban.
Well, I'll hold my breath while waiting for all the people to recant their previous stance, Bill.
Well, you know, it would be nice if they did.
I haven't read any articles.
I'd like to know what all the people who invested so much in the mujahideen back then, what are they saying, what are they feeling, how do they process this?
I'd welcome an article or two, true confessions or something.
Now, I know that you used to fly into Iraq on these relief missions.
Did your company decide that that wasn't a safe enough place to send you anymore?
Well, no, when I went to Baghdad, that was just to help to set up the program.
I helped fly in the first civilian humanitarian flight into Baghdad on May 1st when the mission was accomplished.
And at that time, I was just a relief fill-in pilot and I helped set up the operation and they got some more permanent pilots.
Yeah, they're still flying into Baghdad and spiral down into – I haven't been in there since the spring of 2003.
But Afghanistan, I've been to twice this last fall.
And in Afghanistan, you'd say that the situation is becoming more tenuous or progress being made, as George Bush likes to put it?
Well, no, they're just grinding each other down, hurting a lot of people and generating confusion and hatred.
Some people are becoming more pro-Taliban and others are making as much money as they can off of the allied presence.
Just to give you an idea how strange it is, in Kabul, it's officially a dry country and it's officially a country where even under what passes for the Karzai government, women have marginally more freedom than they do under the Taliban and about half the women you see in Kabul still wear burqas.
So you still have a conservative society, even with the Karzai government backed by the foreigners.
You don't walk into a shop downtown and try to buy alcohol.
Alcohol is banned.
Public restaurants where men and women mix, it's just not done.
However, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of establishments where you go and there'll be a gate with two guys with an AK-47 guarding it.
You show that you're approved to them that you're a foreigner and they let you in and inside you'll find a French cafe or a German beer garden or a Chinese brothel, every decadence you can imagine.
And this is going on in...
I mean, really, things would still be illegal in Austin, Texas.
I mean, right in the diplomatic quarter, in the high class area of Kabul, it's computed to be 80 Chinese brothels.
Well, we're spreading liberalism around the world.
Right, right, who knows.
And who knows what the status of the waitresses are in these guest houses, as they're called.
They come from China, they're imprisoned in these houses, and I believe they're owned by Afghans and managed by Turks and staffed by Chinese ladies.
Well, that's good, yeah, spreading our wonderful Western heritage to Injun country, where they need civilizing over there, I hear.
Let me ask you a tough question here.
I know that you're a libertarian and that you'll understand, but what if I just call you a poverty pimp and I just say that, listen, all you do is go around making these wars easier for people like George Bush and Dick Cheney because you help clean up the mess they make and you're making your living off it at the same time.
Oh, you really hit the nail and they have been called worse things than a poverty pimp, but you could be forgiven for suggesting that.
My main goal is to represent America well and to be a decent person and hopefully not commit any harm, hopefully be useful or at least harmless.
Yes, what you discussed is an ethical dilemma that people in the aid industry, if they're thinking people, sensitive people, we all have this question.
Are we being codependent?
Are we making it easier for the arsonist?
Maybe war will end when people experience how horrible it is, and as long as we're picking up the pieces and keeping people fed during the conflict, it becomes not so horrible and thus continues.
We never know.
What if there were humanitarian airlifts into the Confederacy during the American Civil War?
How much longer would that have gone on?
And food aid, yeah, you feed the starving people, that food does go to the soldiers.
There's no way to keep it out of the soldiers' hands.
And even if none of the aid food directly goes to the soldiers, then at least by donating it to the civilians, it frees up more local food for the soldiers.
So, yeah, it's definitely a dilemma, and I don't claim to be innocent on that regard.
I like to fly airplanes.
I like visiting these countries.
I like learning about what's going on, so I'm not Mother Teresa for sure, and I am concerned about the issues, but primarily I'm doing my best to learn about them.
Well, and as you say, I think I'd agree that it's important that these people meet Americans who aren't just dropping high explosives on their head but shooting food at them instead.
Yeah, that's what I try.
By the way, the reason I mentioned the bars and the discotheques and the brothels and so on in Kabul is just to show the contrast between what you have out in the countryside.
The closest parallel I can think of is Cambodia and the Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge people.
Though the Taliban are not as brutal as the Khmer Rouge, they are austere.
You don't have alcohol, or in public anyway.
It's very hidden, and they are very repressive, and then at the other, here in Kabul, you have the complete opposite extreme with very little moderation.
All right, well, any other adventures that you've been on that I should ask you about?
Well, you know, I go over to Congo, and that's ongoing civil war, and it's not one civil war.
You can't keep track of how many civil wars there are going on in any given day.
What are they fighting over?
Resources, or just old tribal factions, or what?
About everything.
Sometimes it's just out of habit.
A lot of the little fights that take place are powerful consortium.
Let's say you discover that there's coltan.
Coltan's what goes in your cell phone, okay?
And there's a little town named Wali Kali where they mine a lot of this coltan.
So whoever mines the coltan will work out a deal with whoever is powerful locally.
So two militias or two armies might have a fight with each other in order to control that mine and control the right to sell to whichever foreigner is flying the airplane and to land in Wali Kali and take out the coltan.
Same with numerous other minerals, timber, uranium, you name it.
What about Nigeria?
Do you ever go to Nigeria?
No, I don't have much to add about Nigeria at all, except what we read in the news about oil gets taken out, the people where the oil is drilled don't feel they're getting a fair share of it, so they shoot up the oil workers every so often or maybe just kidnap them.
Yeah, some of the reports I've read make me think that there's going to be international intervention there pretty soon, and not too long after that you're going to come back and tell me all about what's going on there because you'll have been there.
Well, I hope not.
I hope not.
I would prefer to be put out of business and fly for the fun of it.
All right, that's Bill Kelsey.
He's a local libertarian activist here in Austin, Texas, and flies relief missions, saving people's lives all over Asia and Africa.
Thanks for coming on my show again, Bill.
I really appreciate it.
All right.
It was a pleasure to be here, and I'll be heading back to Africa in about a week, and I'll stay in touch and maybe we'll catch up again in a few months.