The dapper, organized 33-year-old lives in Syria with his wife and parents. Back in Baghdad recently to check out the prospects for a return, he reflected on what the last five years had meant for the country’s depleted merchant class. “In the beginning, I was happy the Saddam regime was finished. He was a dictator,” says Jabbar, a Shiite Muslim. “He made war with Kuwait and Iran.” Jabbar recalls spending 17 days in his house in downtown Baghdad during the U.S. invasion, waiting for the shooting to stop before emerging to see the chaos that followed. Even then, he was hopeful. “I expected the looting would end,” he says. But the ransacking continued for months and one of his first shocks about the new reality of Iraq was hearing that a bank was looted while American troops looked on. “It was painful,” he says, noting that people’s well-placed savings were suddenly gone.
But by early 2004 he was willing to gamble on peace. He formed a construction company with three partners, winning a contract from U.S. troops for improvements to a large mosque. It was a venture that proved too risky. As the work neared completion, someone dropped off a threat at Jabbar’s house in a paper rolled around a bullet. It told him to stop the project, which he did. He now believes it may have been an inside job from someone involved with the contract, but at the time he felt he couldn’t take any chances and that he had nowhere to go for help. “There is no state. There is nothing I could do,” he says.
Meanwhile, the overall climate in Baghdad was deteriorating, especially for those with money. “We couldn’t move around Baghdad because we were afraid of getting kidnapped.” Indeed, a friend of the family, a man in his 60s, was yanked from the front of his car on the way to work. Thugs stuffed him in his own trunk and drove him away. The first call from the kidnappers demanded $100,000 for the man’s life. After a week, in the usual fashion of these agonizing negotiations, the price dropped to $30,000, which was paid to secure his release. Badly beaten, the man fled the country three days later.
Jabbar’s father took the family’s first step out, going to Damascus to take a look and returning to take Jabbar’s mother to join him. But Jabbar had reason to stay behind–he was engaged and wanted a local wedding. In June 2005, he was married in a small party at his house, the dangerous streets outside forcing the celebration to end early. His family and friends were there, but his parents were not. “What could I do? My feelings were mixed,” he says. Within days, he and his bride arranged the drive to Damascus and made the long, dangerous trip, praying for God’s protection. “Syria was beautiful. There was security. There was work, jobs. I felt like I was reborn at the time when I went to Syria,” he recalls with a sigh. While working-class Iraqis languish in Syria or fight to maintain their visa status, Jabbar and his father had the capital to start buying and selling apartments.
Meanwhile, the chaos back home only increased. He heard of lost friends in Baghdad. One was killed by an IED that blew up as he was washing the windows of his storefront. Another was blown up by a car bomb while he walked to work. Jabbar can quickly tick off America’s mistakes in Iraq. “They didn’t protect the borders, they allowed people to loot, like the Iraq Museum,” he says, recounting the conventional wisdom here. “They didn’t protect the Iraqi military bases to secure the weapons.”
Nonetheless, he still believes the U.S. invasion could provide new opportunities for Iraq. “It was good. I’m not just talking about myself. There are a lot of people who like the Americans,” he says. And unlike many Iraqis, he is in no hurry for the U.S. troops to leave. Success, in his view, will take what amounts to decades more commitment from Washington. “We hope the Americans do here what they did in Germany and Japan,” he says. “I hope they make [long-term] bases here.”
As for him, he is not yet ready to move his base back to Iraq. The streets might be safer, but bombings and kidnappings continue and the public services are still miserable. “There is no power, there is no life. There are no jobs,” he shrugs. And he can still make more money in Syria. “[In Iraq] you have to have relatives in the government to get contracts.” A year ago, he came back for a visit and saw the city in mayhem. This time, he has seen improvement and says maybe in a year he’ll return for good. In the meantime, he’s gone back to Damascus.
title: “A Life In Exile” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-15” author: “Brian Barbieri”
The Dalai Lama sits on a couch in front of his visitors. He tries to put them at ease by asking where they come from, and if any have traveled from Amdo, his own province. But the few stuttering replies show how overawed they remain. Then, he gives them what they have come for. ““Tibet has survived these past 40 years of Chinese occupation because of your strength and determination,’’ he says in his deep, resonant voice. ““I know you have come here with great difficulty, and you have suffered on your journey. But by coming here you have shown not only your own but Tibet’s determination. I give you my greetings, and my gratitude for what you have done.''
This is not the role to which he was born. The Dalai Lama would never have spoken and mixed with ordinary people in the Tibet from which he was driven by Chinese invaders in 1959. As he says in his autobiography, ““Freedom in Exile,’’ on the rare occasions he left his official residence, the 1,000-room Potala palace in Lhasa, he moved past them on a yellow silk palanquin, pulled by 20 army officers in green cloaks and red hats and surrounded by hundreds of men: monks and musicians, sword-wielding horsemen and ““porters carrying my songbirds in cages and my personal belongings all wrapped in yellow silk.’’ To make sure the people didn’t get too close, the whole entourage was surrounded by the monastic police. ““In their hands they carried long whips, which they would not hesitate to use,’’ he wrote.
““Exile has made me tougher,’’ the Dalai Lama told NEWSWEEK. It has also, according to his younger brother Tenzin Choegyal, ““enabled him to realize his full potential. In the Potala, he was secluded and isolated. If one good thing has come out of his having to leave, it was that he was exposed to his own people and the world. He was given the chance to see things as they really are.’’ From being the century’s most secluded leader, the Dalai Lama is now among the most traveled and best known. The bespectacled figure in maroon robes has become the focal point for the world’s anxiety about Chinese authoritarianism, and his schedule reflects it. He will be in the Czech Republic with his friend President Vaclav Havel one week, in Hollywood, Calif., with Richard Gere and Sharon Stone the next. Then perhaps on to Australia, where on his last visit he lectured leading businessmen on ““Ethics and the Bottom Line.''
Yet this is a man of two worlds. In one, he mixes with world leaders and goes to glittering fund-raisers with Hollywood stars. In the other world, of Tibetan Buddhism, he is a great sage and teacher, the 14th reincarnation of the first Dalai Lama, chosen as a small child. He consults state oracles who go into trances to predict the future of Tibet. In the tradition of a religion that venerates great teachers, he keeps the plastic-coated corpse of his beloved teacher Ling Rinpoche, who died in 1983, seated in a room in his palace.
At home or on the road, the Dalai Lama rises at about 4 in the morning, prays and meditates until about 6, has a shower and breakfasts on tsampa, the Tibetan roasted-barley porridge that is usually mixed with butter and honey. When traveling, he then begins a long day of meetings. One day in Melbourne, Australia, last year, he had 17 appointments, starting with a meeting with a rabbi at 7:50 a.m. and ending with an evening lecture to 20,000 people on ““Inner Peace, World Peace.’’ On most foreign trips he gives extended ““teachings’’ on Buddhist ethics and practice. Not everyone gets it. In California last year, he burst into tears when someone asked him, ““What is the quickest way to enlightenment?''
In newspaper and television interviews, he argues for Tibetan autonomy. Recognizing that full independence is impossible, he says he would accept Chinese control over international and defense policy–but Beijing hasn’t even replied. Recently, he has examined whether the ““one country, two systems’’ arrangement in Hong Kong might work for Tibet. Meanwhile, he seeks out Overseas Chinese communities, lobbying the people who will always be Tibet’s neighbors–““unless there is some gigantic geological change,’’ he says with a laugh.
At home, his routine is more ordered. He prays and meditates for hours at the beginning and end of each day, but will have time to get on his exercise bike for half an hour and watch the BBC-television evening news, brought in through a dish antenna given by an American friend. Then he may go into his workroom to repair broken watches and any clock in the ““palace’’ that has stopped. Mechanical things have always fascinated him.
The routine belies his erudition–and the risks he runs. He is a great master of all four major branches of Tibetan Buddhism. As such he has earned the hatred of a fundamentalist minor sect that believes he should participate only in the rituals of his own Yellow Hat sect. Indian police think this group may have murdered three of the Dalai Lama’s closest religious associates in a room just a hundred yards from his low-roofed home earlier this year; an attack so frenzied it left blood high on the walls. One of the most peaceable men in the world now lives behind high walls and iron gates, guarded by armed Indian soldiers.
Yet the Dalai Lama is supremely optimistic. ““I feel so healthy, I think I’m going to live to be 100,’’ he says. ““And if I do, then I’ll die in a free Tibet.’’ That sounds like wishful thinking. But, as he points out, the Soviet Union lasted less than 75 years, and its breakup freed a dozen countries. China’s totalitarian regime is 48 years old. If he’s right about the shelf life of communism, he could see the Potala again. His undaunted people will be waiting for him.
title: “A Life In Exile” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-15” author: “Jeffrey Pike”
Until he was arrested at the door of his modest Cape Town bungalow Friday night, this man had been one of the FBI’s most wanted-the last Symbionese Liberation Army fugitive at large, James Kilgore. But to his colleagues in Cape Town’s left-wing academic circles, Kilgore was “John Pape,” a stalwart in their ongoing struggle against the forces of global capitalism. At today’s arraignment, the balding activist, 55, acknowledged their applause with smiles, thumbs up, and, finally, a clenched-fist salute.
James Kilgore made a success of his 27-year exile. That’s both a measure of his own resourcefulness and of the politics of the post-liberation southern African societies where he thrived. One local daily this week called Kilgore “one of Cape Town’s leading intellectual lights.” “John is an important activist who made a huge contribution towards the worker’s struggle in South Africa,” Tony Ehrenreich, regional leader of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), said outside the courthouse. “The question of social justice was always uppermost in his mind.” That won’t sway California prosecutors, who last week accepted guilty pleas from four of Kilgore’s old American comrades. They will serve lengthy prison sentences. But in South African terms, COSATU’s endorsement carried weight. The trade federation and the South African Communist Party are partners with the African National Congress in government.
The full story of Kilgore’s life as a fugitive remains a mystery. He dropped from sight in 1975 and has been on the run since the following year, when a federal warrant charged him with possessing a pipe bomb. By then the Symbionese Liberation Army was notorious for kidnapping and brainwashing heiress Patty Hearst, killing a school superintendent and carrying out a botched bank robbery in which a customer was shot to death. The group’s top leaders died in a shootout with police in Los Angeles.
Authorities believe Kilgore fled first to Australia, then to Zimbabwe. That southern African nation, which underwent a political transformation following all-race elections in 1980, had become a magnet for social activists eager to live that change. As John Pape, Kilgore received a PhD. from Australia’s Deaken University while in Zimbabwe; his thesis dealt with class struggle and labor relations there. He also met his wife, African-American academic Teresa Barnes. The couple moved to Johannesburg five years ago. Kilgore was later hired as a director of the International Labour Information and Research Group, a research institute attached to the University of Cape Town, and his wife held another research position with the university.
Evidently confident in his alias, Kilgore began to campaign in public for his beliefs. In one letter to the weekly Mail and Guardian, he took the newspaper to task for “repeating tired free-market sales tracks.” He published an economics text for South African students, and a guide on globalization for union members. In his spare time, he volunteered as a tutor for COSATU. With a colleague, he embarked on a study of the South African government’s policy of trying to make fees cover the cost of providing water and electricity. The book-length critique, “Cost Recovery and the Crisis of Service Delivery in South Africa,” was published in August.
In the end, Kilgore decided that the game was up. Several months ago he began trying to negotiate his surrender through a U.S. lawyer, officials said; he had hoped to return to California at Thanksgiving. Authorities weren’t saying what gave him away. But some of his South African friends saw the arrest and likely extradition as a spiteful U.S. effort to deny him a more dignified surrender, preempting the negotiations. “It’s a betrayal,” said Vincent Kolbe, 69, a longtime political activist and an acquaintance Kilgore’s. “War-monger George Bush suddenly gets the credit for pulling in a terrorist.” Kilgore and his wife both are “beloved by democratic-minded people in this country,” Kolbe said. “He obviously lived with a cloud over his head, which may have made him an extra-likeable guy.” Since 1990, South Africans have grown accustomed to seeing past acts of political violence forgiven. The friends of “John Pape” want nothing less for their American comrade.
