Fariba Nawa – AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST

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  • Opposition claims capture of villages in northern Afghanistan

    By Fariba Nawa
    October 7, 2001
    Agence France Presse

    Islamabad — Opposition forces Sunday claimed to have made significant gains in their fight against the Taliban militia in the north and west of Afghanistan, as US forces stood ready across the border in Uzbekistan.

    Opposition spokesmen said hundreds of Taliban soldiers had surrendered and 13 villages had been captured in northern Samangan province, bordering Uzbekistan, and western Ghor province during heavy fighting overnight and Sunday.

    Spokesman Mohammad Habeel told the Afghan Islamic Press that the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, otherwise known as the United Front, had moved to within 1.5 kilometres (one mile) of Chaghcharan, the Ghor capital.

    Some 150 Taliban fighters joined opposition forces Saturday, he said, adding that Chaghcharan would fall “soon”. The city sits on a road linking the western provinces to the north and centre of the country.

    In Samangan, opposition spokesman Mohammad Ashraf Nadeem said the Taliban lost two villages after a failed counter-attack designed to divert pressure from the strategic northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

    He said that eight Taliban commanders and 100 Taliban fighters surrendered to the opposition Sunday morning. Taliban officials have not been available to comment.

    “They surrendered because they had heard that America would attack the Taliban tonight (Sunday) and they were afraid,” he told AFP by telephone from near the frontlines in northern Afghanistan.

    The opposition said Saturday they had advanced to within 50 kilometers (30 miles) of Mazar-i-Sharif and could capture the city within two days.

    Its fall would give US forces in Uzbekistan, including 1,000 crack mountain troops, a base in northern Afghanistan from which to launch their expected attacks.

    US military forces have been converging on Afghanistan’s borders in preparation for threatened retaliatory strikes over the Taliban’s refusal to hand over Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden — the main suspect in last month’s devastating attacks on New York and Washington. Taliban Education Minister Mullah Amir Muttaqi denied that opposition troops had scored territorial gains in Samangan and Ghor provinces.

    “These are wrong and concocted claims,” Muttaqi told Afghan Islamic Press.

    Nadeem said the militia, which seized Kabul in 1996 and now controls most of the country, had sent some 3,000 troops from Kunduz province to reinforce its attack in neighbouring Samangan, bordering Uzbekistan.

    The Taliban earlier Sunday said they had 8,000 fighters, including fresh reinforcements, deployed near the Uzbek border following the arrival of 1,000 crack US mountain troops in Uzbekistan.

    Officials in Uzbekistan said they had no information about the Taliban deployments but reported that the situation on the border was normal.

    Fighting in northern Afghanistan has intensified since the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, with opposition forces boosted by the prospect of US military strikes against the ruling Taliban militia.

    The anti-Taliban forces — a disparate group of ethnic minority groups which control isolated pockets of territory around the northern half of the country — have offered to cooperate with US forces and have been in touch with US military planners in recent days.

  • Afghan opposition commander calls for US prudence

    By Fariba Nawa
    October 4, 2001
    Agence France Presse

    Islamabad — Opposition commander Ismail Khan on Thursday warned the United States that elements of the Taliban should be involved in efforts to reconstruct Afghanistan despite growing signs of popular rebellion.

    Khan cautioned Washington against being blinded to the political and social realities of Afghanistan in its “hot pursuit” of Osama bin Laden, the man blamed for last month’s devastating terrorist attacks.

    “Americans must be more careful and attentive this time. Getting rid of Osama will not end terrorism. Toppling the Taliban and creating a representative government will,” the veteran commander and senior opposition leader told AFP via satellite phone from somewhere in western Afghanistan.

    The former governor of Herat province, bordering Iran, said his forces had made gains against the Taliban during heavy fighting in the western provinces of Badghis and Ghor over the past three weeks.

    He said people in the two provinces were already beginning to rebel against the radical Islamic militia, with hundreds of young men swelling the ranks of his small guerrilla army since the September 11 attacks in the United States. “The most important fact is that civilians in these two provinces are rising against the Taliban. They do not want to be under Taliban rule,” he said, adding that “Death to the Taliban” graffiti had begun appearing on walls in the city of Herat.

    “To win, we need more money, men and weapons. We’re willing to accept help from whoever has our best interest in mind,” Khan said.

    But he said he still saw a role for the Taliban in any future political setup, and expressed concern at US efforts to promote a new broad-based government under the auspices of exiled former king Mohammad Zahir Shah.

    “We’re for reconstruction, peace and freedom for all Afghans,” Khan said, but added: “We’re worried about what America will do.

    “We were thankful to the world for helping us win the war against the Soviets but instead of thanking us for winning the war, those allies forgot us,” he said, referring to US backing for the mujahedin guerrillas who fought the Red Army from 1979 to 1989.

    He said Taliban members who “are not criminals” should be included in discussions on the future of Afghanistan and how to end the civil wars that have blighted the country since the Soviet withdrawal.

    British Prime Minister Tony Blair said a change of regime in Afghanistan would be necessary if the Taliban did not end its support for “international terrorism.” “If they will not comply with this objective, we must bring about a change in that regime to ensure that Afghanistan’s link with international terrorism is broken,” Blair told parliament Thursday.

    Zahir Shah, who has lived in exile in Rome since being overthrown in 1973, has over the past week discussed with Afghan opposition leaders and senior US diplomats plans for a new, broad-based government to replace the Taliban.

    The Afghan opposition groups agreed on Monday to form a 120-member supreme council which could elect a head of state and transitional government.

    Richard Haass, the US State Department’s director of policy planning, is also set to meet Zahir Shah this week, but Washington insists it is not trying to impose its own will on the Afghan people.

    “We certainly support the idea of a broad-based government in Afghanistan,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.

    “We certainly believe that the Taliban has in many ways betrayed the interests of the Afghan people, but… the decision on what kind of government they want to have is for the Afghan people to decide.”

  • Hiding in Brooklyn

    Afghan American fears for safety
    By Fariba Nawa
    September 13, 2001
    Pacific News Service

    EDITOR’S NOTE: This commentary is the widest circulating piece Fariba Nawa wrote, running in dozens of newspapers and websites such as MSNBC and Boston Globe, and attracting broadcast media attention from BBC World News to NBC and CBS televsion news programs. She gave more than a dozen interviews to American and European news outlets in response.

    I’m hiding in my house in the heart of an Arab neighborhood in Brooklyn, four miles from the terror that struck Manhattan. As an Afghan American, I fear the retaliation in the aftermath of the tragedy. If this “act of war” is like Pearl Harbor, will Arabs and Afghans living in America become targets of hate as Japanese Americans did during World War II?

    From the roof of my brownstone home, I watched the billowing smoke darken the sky above the World Trade Center. I heard the sirens, the screams of victims falling to their death on television, and the rage that New Yorkers expressed afterwards. Americans are angry — rightly so — and want someone to blame and attack. But I shudder thinking of the innocent Muslims who could be the victims of this fury.

    On New York radio stations, callers shouted slurs against Afghans and Arabs, demanded they be killed and called for war against Afghanistan, whose rulers are suspected perpetrators of the attack. I turned off the radio and in a daze walked to the Promenade where people stood looking at the disaster across the East River. Some held any extra fabric over their mouths to block the fumes and stench of burning steel. A man appearing to be in his twenties said to a friend, “These damn Islamic people in this country should be under surveillance. They’re getting away with too much.”

    In bars where patrons crowded to watch TV, men and women clapped as President Bush swore to seek revenge.

    I paced back home with my two Muslim friends, locked the door and sat still in shock. I hoped no one on our street knew that Muslims live in the house. Ever since the Taliban seized my birthplace, Afghanistan and Afghans have become the butt of slurs, jokes and ridicule. But stereotyping and verbal attacks are not my fear anymore. The magnitude of this tragedy may provoke violence against Muslim and especially Afghan communities in this country. Few listen to the warnings by the media that Americans should not convict any group without proof.

    I think back to the Gulf War, when Americans unleashed their anger on Muslims. Then in high school, I was a dumbfounded teenager when we were called camel jockey and Maddas lover — Saddam Hussein’s first name spelled backwards. Now, I am more scared knowing how vicious the usually tolerant American can become in times of crises.

    Mayor Rudolph Giuliani deployed more police officers to Muslim neighborhoods, which makes me feel safer. But for how long? As the story unravels, Osama bin Laden is at the top of the suspect list and Americans’ call to bomb his residence Afghanistan gets louder. I quietly weep when I think of the fate of hapless Afghan civilians who will suffer the consequences if the accusations against bin Laden are true.

    I wonder if Americans know that the rage they are feeling today is what Palestinians and Muslims across the world feel everyday against the American government. Every time there has been an attack against Americans, the government focuses on retribution and prevention, but pays little attention to changing its policies such as indifference to the loss of Palestinian lives.

    There is no justification for Tuesday’s terrorist attacks, but increasing security at airports and catching the culprits are short-term band-aids that will probably not stop these disasters. Reconsidering American policies and creating a consistent and fair approach to deal with other nations is a long-term solution.

    As a hybrid of Afghanistan and the United States, I am angry not with a nationality or group, but with fanaticism and the injustice of hegemony. I hope that the American people will be more tolerant than their government toward Muslims, inside and outside America.

  • The blue-eyed grandmother of the Afghans still finds ways to help after 30 years

    By Fariba Nawa
    November 30, 2000
    Pacific News Service

    Peshawar, Pakistan — With her soft silver hair in a bun and round glasses magnifying her clear blue eyes, Nancy Hatch Dupree looks like the idealized image of an American grandmother. But don’t expect Dupree, 73, to offer fresh-baked cookies. She’s too busy being the Grandmother of Afghanistan, a title bestowed upon her by hundreds of Afghans.

    For the past 11 years, she has been living in Peshawar, Pakistan, two hours from the border of war-ravaged Afghanistan. A senior consultant to the non-governmental Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, Dupree is the expert on Afghan issues that Afghans themselves recommend to CNN and BBC.

    The widow of Louis Dupree, an archaeologist and scholar whose writings introduced Afghanistan to Americans in the 1950s, Dupree is seen by many Afghans as the one foreigner who knows and understands their misunderstood nation. Not everyone agreed with Louis Dupree, but it proved impossible to find anyone willing to criticize his widow.

    “She has spent most of her life serving Afghans,” said Nooria Saidi, an aid provider who has worked with Dupree for three years. “How can anyone criticize her?”

    In more than 250 works – including tour guides, articles and book chapters – Dupree has written on such topics as Afghan history, archaeology, women and libraries. In education-starved Afghanistan, she has helped set up 300 libraries across the country in mosques, schools and community centers. And in Peshawar, Dupree has established the world’s most comprehensive resource center on Afghanistan.

    Dupree travels to Afghanistan occasionally to oversee her cultural projects but treads lightly. She is aware that the Taliban ejected Mary MacMackin – an American who had worked in Afghanistan for 30 years – for hiring Afghan women in her organization.

    When they seized control of the country six years ago, the ruling militia banned Afghan women from getting a formal education or going to work.

    But Dupree is far from the Taliban’s ideal. She’s a no-nonsense, opinionated workaholic. She works from 6 a.m. to the evening hours, writing, holding meetings, answering phone inquiries and letters and giving interviews. In between phone calls and knocks on the door, Dupree talks of politics, not her personal life.

    She is succinct and sometimes sarcastic. Women’s rights in Afghanistan were “the flavor of the month” for the press, she said. Afghan and Western feminists, she feels, are harming Afghan women by campaigning against the Taliban. The feminists need to consider Afghan women in the context of their families, not just as individuals, and stop exaggerating abuses against them.

    As she talked, she walked around her office sifting through files, showing documents of her different projects.

    “Everybody around here gets out of my way when I’m on a tirade,” she said. “They grin knowing it won’t last.”

    But those who know Dupree say her flexibility and ability to understand Afghans’ needs are key to 37 years of warm relations.

    “She values something more important than politics – that’s culture,” said Afghan writer and journalist Saboor Siasang. “She’s an optimist who’s more Afghan than American. She’s a living a memory of Afghan history.”

    Dupree fell in love with Louis Dupree and Afghanistan simultaneously. She first arrived in the Afghan capital Kabul as the wife of an American diplomat. She met Louis Dupree, divorced her husband and married the Harvard-educated adventurer, and the two traveled freely through the rugged, landlocked country as he searched for archaeological sites and she gathered material for tour books.

    “He was audacious, exciting, on the go – it was an exhilarating experience to be near him,” Dupree said.

    In 1978 when the Soviet puppet regime took control of Afghanistan, Louis Dupree was arrested and accused of being a CIA agent. He was released but the couple supported those fighting against the Soviets throughout the war. Dupree denied that her husband might have been a spy. “People got suspicious because they couldn’t understand why you would spend 30 years in Afghanistan.”

    Louis Dupree died in North Carolina in 1989. Dupree says she has few attachments in life, but her husband and Afghanistan have been her two lasting passions. When her beloved died, Dupree said she felt aimless for a while. The only solace was returning to Peshawar and continuing their fight for peace through this organization, which her husband had established.

    Now after 22 years of war, Dupree is still hopeful that peace will come, even if not in her lifetime.

    Dupree scattered her husband’s ashes on Afghan soil at his request. That is where she wants to be buried as well.

  • Reaching women in Afghanistan

    The nearer you are, the more complicated it gets
    By Fariba Nawa
    July 6, 2000
    Pacific News Service

    EDITOR’S NOTE: Women in Afghanistan have no legal right to education or employment, and this has drawn outright condemnation from many individual women and women’s groups. Some of those who work directly with Afghan women, by negotiating their way through loopholes in the current system, fear these protests may make things worse. PNS commentator Fariba Nawa was a staff reporter for ANG Newspapers in California and is now based in Pakistan.

    Peshawar, Pakistan — Farida Azizi, an Afghan aid worker here, travels to train women to work in Afghanistan, where most work for women is outlawed.

    Azizi has learned how to deal with the Taliban, the hard-line militia controlling 90 percent of Afghanistan. She travels with her husband, wears the all-enveloping burqa and has permission from the government to be a health educator. The Taliban allowed Azizi and her organization, Norwegian Church Aid, to train 20 women as midwives with the condition that they must also study Islamic scriptures.

    Azizi is one of hundreds of aid workers, many based in Pakistan, who have been moving cautiously for change ever since Afghan women lost their legal right to education and employment six years ago. But they say their efforts are thwarted by campaigns conducted by exiled Afghan and other feminists Certainly, the idea of liberating Afghan women is big in the United States with Hollywood stars like Meryl Streep and Sidney Poitier gracing fundraisers for the cause. Photos of women shrouded in veils appear in American magazines with disapproving captions. But aid groups working in the field say all this may hurt as much as it helps. At issue is a conflict between a Western and a Middle Eastern approach to the Taliban problem.

    Western feminists conduct a straightforward, strong campaign against the Taliban, demanding to be heard, and in the process making things worse for the women they want to help, critics say.

    In contrast, those trying to work within the system exploit loopholes and play on the economy’s need for women workers — but also run the risk of change coming slowly and not always steadily.

    Those at the center of the conflict — the Afghan women — also are split. Educated city women loathe the Taliban and want their freedom back. Poor and village women whose lives have become safer since the Taliban seized control, support the hardliners’ ways.

    At the forefront of the U.S. campaign is Feminist Majority, a Washington D.C.-based organization that publicizes accounts of atrocities in Afghanistan. But aid workers say by taking individual cases and blowing them up as a national crisis, feminists discourage donor funds, making it difficult for non-governmental agencies to open home schools and create home work — activities the Taliban grudgingly allow in some Afghan provinces.

    “They are poisoning the general attitude in Europe and America, taking away funding,” said Nancy Dupree, the senior consultant at the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief in Peshawar.

    “We must all persevere in our efforts to find ways, using quiet dialogue, to take our steps forward. Too much aggressive haste can only jeopardize those we seek to help,” Dupree wrote in a letter to the feminists.

    She said she received no reply. Aid workers say the feminists ignore their protests. Jennifer Jackman of Feminist Majority dismissed the criticism as based on misconceptions about the organization’s campaign and denied that the group’s advocacy has depleted funding. She said Feminist Majority and other women’s groups have been pressuring the United States and United Nations to provide humanitarian assistance for women but also to continue their isolation of the Taliban as a government.

    “To remain silent would be to condemn women to unspeakable misery,” Jackman said. The debate includes Afghans and non-Afghans on both sides. Zieba Shorish, an Afghan woman and head of the Washington D.C.-based Women’s Alliance for Peace and Human Rights in Afghanistan, has assisted Feminist Majority with their campaign.

    “We the Afghan women do not have any power over the Feminist Majority and should be grateful that they have taken the ‘Afghan women problems’ and have made it their own,” Shorish said. “They are on our side and struggle against injustice to our Afghan sisters with us.”

    Aid providers say the more feminists push the Taliban, the stricter radicals become; providers say working with the Taliban helps women more.

    And the best way, they say, is to invoke Islam, the Taliban’s law. The religion essentially gives men and women equal rights, as aid workers are quick to remind the Taliban. “They’re uneducated village boys who sometimes listen when you teach them,” Azizi said.

    The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, one of the most established aid groups in the country, runs more than 100 girls’ schools in Afghan villages. Carol Le Duc, the organization’s gender coordinator, said they work with communities to solve problems with the Taliban. A British native, Le Duc is one of the most vocal opponents of the feminist approach. “The feminists,” she says, “are marginalizing women. They’re repeating historical mistakes and focusing on the political.”

    While women in Peshawar and Washington shoot at each other, inside Afghanistan the Taliban — religious students, who are by no means monolithic — are easing up.

    Initially women could not leave the house without a male kin, now they can. International pressure is part of the reason for the change, but the big reason has been need — for example, Taliban realized that firing all the women doctors would leave a void that men doctors could not fill.

    But there’s no consistency. One militia leader may allow a woman’s clinic to operate on one day but another official will shut it down the next.

    Mary Rahmany, a 20-year-old from Kabul in Pakistan for a wedding, said she preferred the communists in the 1980s to the Taliban. They were the lesser evil with women, she said. “I’ve been sitting home doing nothing for four years now when I could have finished high school, gone to college,” Rahmany said.

    According to Rahmany, the aid providers help people they know, not the people in need, and so their good relations with the Taliban benefit a selected few. She hopes the feminist approach will give women more freedom in time.

    “Afghan women don’t have the spirit to fight anymore. We sit all day listening to BBC hoping to hear that somebody out there is doing something so that we can live again,” Rahmany said, sighing.

    But it may be that women in villages, where aid organizations are most active, exert more power over their lives.

    Coco Gul lives in a village in Logar province and comes to Peshawar often. The mother of six children said the Taliban have not affected her life. She is illiterate but brings in an income. She sews and sells the clothes through a program that one of the grassroots groups has set up.

    “I like my life. Education is not for women anyway. It’s these Westerners and city women who ask for too much,” Coco Gul said.

  • Bombing suspect arrested

    ‘Sigh of relief’ after 18 months
    By Fariba Nawa
    October 6, 1999
    Fremont Argus/Oakland Tribune/ANG Newspapers

    Fremont — After an 18-month investigation that took local police and federal agents halfway across the country, authorities believe they have the Fremont bomber behind bars.

    Rodney Blach, 53, was arrested Tuesday morning near his San Diego home in connection with the six bombings that shocked Fremont residents in March 1998.

    “A lot of people in Fremont are breathing a sigh of relief,” Fremont police Capt. Ron Hunt said. “I think there’s a huge sense of relief and sense of accomplishment (for authorities).”

    Blach, who became the main focus of the investigation two weeks after the explosions, was taken into custody quietly as he walked from his house to a car about 9:10 a.m. He moved from his house from Fremont to San Diego several weeks after the bombings.

    About a dozen federal agents, San Diego police officers and Fremont detectives — wearing civilian clothes and police raid jackets — waited until Blach’s wife, Penny -Coppernoll-Blach, left for work before arresting the suspect, police said. Then authorities searched his San Diego house for the third time, Hunt said.

    Blach did not resist the arrest and was not armed, Hunt said.

    He was in San Diego county jail on a no-bail warrant Tuesday and was expected to be transported to Santa Rita county jail in Dublin today.

    Blach is facing state charges that could confine him to prison for life, according to a source at the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. Blach, a former crime lab evidence specialist, may be arraigned Thursday or Friday at the Fremont Hall of Justice, authorities said.

    He faces 11 felony counts, including premeditated attempted murder, explosion of destructive devices with attempt to commit murder and arson, police said.

    Beginning March 29, 1998, the series of bombings that week targeted Fremont Police Chief Craig Steckler, former Police Chief Bob Wasserman — now a city council member — and a Mission Hills neighborhood. No one was injured in the explosions, but two million-dollar houses were severely damaged. A 17-year-old girl sleeping in one of the homes was rescued by a neighbor.

    Fremont police — with the aid of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms — gathered a roomful of evidence in one of the most intensive investigations in Fremont’s history and presented it to the district attorney’s office.

    Officials in the district attorney’s office decided there was enough evidence against Blach to make a case. Fremont Superior Judge Donald Squires said he signed the arrest warrant for Blach last week.

    Hunt said it was a collection of evidence and not one piece in particular that led to the arrest. Most of the evidence is circumstantial, he said, but he refused to elaborate.

    “I think we have to recognize that we’ve been working pretty intensively on this investigation for 18 months and nobody’s stopped working on it,” the captain said. “We got to a point where we said we have enough to charge him. We’ve been putting loose ends together and are still doing so.”

    In the last 18 months, investigators followed leads from Fremont to San Diego to Tucson, Ariz., where Blach’s sister lives, to Chicago, where the suspect was an evidence specialist for the Chicago Police Department 20 years ago. Blach has been unemployed for the last 20 years. A federal grand jury was formed to look into the case but Blach is not facing any federal charges yet, Hunt said.

    Making an arrest took so long for the same reasons most bombing cases do, Hunt said: Much of the evidence is destroyed when the bomb goes off.

    The Fremont investigation included countless interviews, paperwork, trailing cash register receipts, and tracing bomb parts. Initially, 10 local investigators and 60 federal agents were working on the case.

    Police began trailing Blach after his name, along with several others, was given by tipsters, Hunt said.

    “We do know that Mr. Blach had expressed some antagonism against some persons in town, including the police chief and retired police chief,” he said.

    The FBI and local police kept a periodic surveillance on Blach, serving at least four search warrants on his former Fremont and San Diego homes. Hunt said Blach implicated himself in the bombings by talking a lot to police officers and reporters.

    But the police investigation is not over. Although Hunt said Blach is the sole suspect in the case, detectives continue to seek more evidence.

    The initial $87,000 reward for information leading to the bomber still is available. Any one who has information about the location of a storage locker where police believe the bombs were made should contact police, he said.

  • Bay Area Afghans divided over military strike

    By Fariba Nawa
    August 21, 1999
    Argus/ANG Newspapers

    Fremont — In a Centerville jewelry store, a group of Bay Area Afghans who call themselves United Guardians Defending Afghanistan stood Thursday in front of their picket signs voicing anger about U.S. military strikes in their homeland.

    President Clinton ordered military strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan on Thursday to destroy what the U.S. government considered terrorist facilities run by Saudi financier Osama bin Laden.

    The American government has found evidence linking the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa to bin Laden.

    The number of casualties was not reported as of Thursday evening.

    But in Fremont, where perhaps the largest exile Afghan community in the U.S. resides, people were concerned about civilian lives.

    “We believe if there’s one bad apple in a tree, don’t cut the whole tree. Don’t bomb and kill innocent people. Just take (bin Laden),” said Sakhi Faryabi, the Fremont group’s spokesman.

    The group, which claims to have at least 300 members, said Clinton’s action will only hurt innocent Afghans already marred by the civil war in their country.

    The politically charged Afghan band held a demonstration Tuesday in San Francisco to protest the advance of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Pakistani-supported Taliban took the last major city in Afghanistan last week. To many Afghans, the Taliban victory against the opposing northern factions means the militia has won the war.

    Faryabi’s group was concentrating on directing Americans attention to their paint splattered signs that read: “Pakistan Stop Bloodshed in Afghanistan.”

    But now it seemed the United States was focused on their homeland — for the wrong reasons. One of their leaders, Soraya Baha, a Fremont resident, said Clinton ordered the strike to divert attention form the Monica Lewinsky scandal and in the process is sacrificing Afghan lives.

    Other Afghans were more supportive of American actions.

    “Bin Laden is a bacteria in Afghanistan. He gives us a bad name. Clinton’s doing the right thing by wanting to get rid of him,” said Mohammad Omar Khamosh, owner of Pamir Market in Fremont. He heard a lot of opinions from Afghans buying groceries Thursday.

    Khamosh said community reaction seemed to approve of the strikes, but people are concerned that Afghans will be linked to terrorists.

    “Afghans are not involved. They don’t have a part in terrorism. They’re just being used by other countries for political purposes,” said Noman Mamak of Fremont. About 26,000 Afghans live in the Bay Area, according to the Afghan Center in Union City.

    Ghulam Hazrat Koshan, who lives in south Hayward and is president of the Afghanistan Cultural Society with membership statewide, said: “We don’t have any connection with Osama bin Laden, who is the trainer of terrorism.”

    “We are against terrorism — anytime, anywhere, even it it’s inside Afghanistan,” he said. Mohammad Nasiri of Fremont visited Kabul, Afghanistan, six months ago. He said he wants to hear and see the evidence against bin Laden before supporting the United States. “Our people have suffered enough,” Nasiri said.

  • Minorities see less prejudice, more sensitivity in workplace

    By Fariba Nawa
    August 1, 1999
    Argus/ANG Newspapers

    EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of four articles investigating diversity in local police departments.

    FREMONT POLICE officer J.C. Grant knows some of his colleagues tiptoe around the words black and African American when they talk about crimes in his presence.

    Grant, one of 14 African Americans among 300 employees in the Fremont Police Department, said his predominantly white co-workers go out of their way to be sensitive on issues of race around him. But he wishes they would just say what’s on their mind.

    Political correctness has made many local police personnel super polite about race and culture. But some minority employees say it doesn’t necessarily change people’s basic prejudices.

    Diversity and tolerance are now preached to the point that few dare to speak against it, police experts said. Those who do oppose affirmative action or multiculturalism may be reprimanded or passed up for promotion, one employee said.

    But few minorities in police departments complain about political correctness. It has served its purpose of suppressing discrimination — there have been fewer incidents of voiced prejudice in the last decade, employees said. But political correctness has done little to overcome ignorance.

    During a police diversity training class, one person asked Grant — who was a panelist — if African Americans were genetically gifted in sports. The department’s diversity program, Common Ground, has helped break through such stereotypes, some employees say.

    In the Fremont, Union City and Newark police departments, a number of minority employees said they had been discriminated against by colleagues once or twice in the beginning of their careers. But they reported the incidents to their superiors or dealt with it personally, and the problems did not resurface.

    Elliott Stephens, a supervisor at Fremont City Jail who is African American, said colleagues have twice directed racial slurs at him in his 20 years working for the department.

    Kourosh Nikoui, an Iranian American who was promoted from photographer to forensic analyst in Fremont during 11 years with the department, said he was amazed at the trust the department gave a foreigner. The entire crime lab is now under his control.

    But Nikoui doesn’t trust political correctness.

    I always feel that I have to be better than average, he said. I have to try harder to prove myself. You always have to deal with some sort of prejudice that exists. It may be underlying. Lt. Gus Arroyo, a Mexican American who has been with Fremont police for 19 years, said he counsels employees who may take a joke too far. Often, the words aren’t intended to be offensive but employees are cautioned not to make any jokes in regards to race.

    Cheryl Tassano, a Korean-American school resource officer, said her five years in the Union City department have been positive. She chose to work for Union City because it’s a fairly diverse department — one-third of 93 employees are nonwhite.

    Tassano said her co-workers have been so supportive that they’re pushing her too fast. The 32-year-old was encouraged to take the test to make sergeant recently but declined, saying she wasn’t ready yet.

    While tolerance for racial and ethnic differences is preached and generally practiced in local departments, it doesn’t carry over to the streets. Minority officers say they hear racist and sexist comments more frequently from the public, not surprisingly from people they arrest. White suspects don’t hesitate to call you n—, and blacks will say ‘white man’s boy,’ ‘Uncle Tom,’ the 41-year-old Grant said.

    The self-described cool, confident and quiet Grant brushes off the slurs.

    We deal with a lot of (people) who try to get under your skin, said. It comes with the job. I know who I am, what I am and it doesn’t bother me.

    Deborah Cabness, an African-American community service officer in Newark, said men have shunned her because of gender more than race.

    On occasion, I have met with males in the community who did not want to discuss their problems or even talk with a female officer, she said.

    Some minority employees say they are treated well in their departments, but they would be more comfortable if there were more minorities, and would like to see more hired.

    Local departments are making intensive efforts to hire minorities, but they are struggling to find qualified candidates, officials said.

    Some employees say there are a couple of reasons for this: Nonwhites see police as corrupt and those who have a more positive view seek more lucrative careers. More incentives might lure more minorities, some employees said.

    For the black inner-city community, cops are thought of as the enemies, Grant said. The 11-year police veteran grew up in a slum in East Chicago, Ind., and chose to be an officer to change that perception.

    But now, he said, rising costs and the need to take care of his family have him thinking of leaving police work.

    The computer industry. That’s where monetary gain seems to be, he said.

  • Diversity dilemma: police face a growing language barrier

    By Fariba Nawa
    July 31, 1999
    Argus/ANG Newspapers

    EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of four articles investigating diversity in local police departments.

    TERROR STRUCK a 50-year-old Korean man when narcotics officers kicked in the door of his Newark home, tackled him, put a gun to his head and handcuffed him.

    The officers, dressed in street clothes, said they had no choice when Bok Hwan Kim tried to flee from what they believed was a drug house. Kim later said he thought they were robbers.

    The problem?

    Kim didn’t speak English and didn’t know they were police officers. And the officers didn’t speak Korean, so he couldn’t tell them they had the wrong house.

    Officers soon discovered their mistake, but not before the language barrier led to a nearly tragic misunderstanding.

    Newark Police Chief Ken Jones apologized to the Kim family a week after the raid. Kim filed a $1 million lawsuit against the city and police claiming his civil rights were violated. The suit was settled out of court.

    That was in spring 1988, as the Southeast Asian, Indian and Afghan populations in Fremont, Union City and Newark were swelling, bringing with it communication problems for police departments unprepared to handle the influx of immigrants speaking such a diversity of lan guages.

    Eleven years later, the number of languages and dialects spoken in Fremont, Newark and Union City has doubled to about 104, said local school officials.

    The still-growing immigrant population has created obstacles for police in trying to cope with communities that have vastly different cultures and value systems, which often include an ingrained distrust of police.

    Language barriers often make basic fact gathering difficult.

    While the cities don’t compile statistics on immigration, Fremont police expect that by the year 2000 about half of the city’s 203,000 residents will be a mix of ethnicities and races other than white — including Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern and African-American.

    Police are trying to hire bilingual and minority workers, but say it is a major challenge. Minority police employees say cultural-based attitudes to ward police may be the reason.

    The majority of police employees speak only English and many immigrants do not speak English well.

    Officers responding to an emergency, perhaps a domestic dispute, get frustrated when they have to turn to an English-speaking child in the family to defuse an explosive situation.

    It can take up to two hours to get an interpreter to the scene, Fremont Sgt. Sandra Cortez said.

    Another Fremont police sergeant voiced his fears: “What if people … are talking to each other about killing me and I have no clue. I’m just standing around waiting for a translator.”

    A language barrier has not resulted in any killings in the area but police say the language barrier slows them down.

    Non-English speakers who are confronted by police can be frustrated, too.

    Last summer, in a felony traffic stop three Newark officers pointed their guns at Simeen Muntazir, 63, an Afghan native who speaks only Farsi. A petrified Muntazir, who has serious heart problems, ended up in the hospital, though she had done nothing wrong.

    She and her daughter-in-law, Sima, were going home after a funeral service when the officers mistook their blue Toyota van for a criminal’s vehicle. Police were looking for someone who had brandished a weapon earlier that night.

    Firearms drawn, the officers pulled the van over. The younger woman, who speaks some English, tried to explain to her mother-in-law what was happening. But Muntazir started to hy perventilate and had to be taken to the hospital.

    A year later, Muntazir recalled the incident, still uncomfortable with the memory: “I didn’t know what was going on. I panicked. I thought they were taking us to jail or going to shoot us. And I couldn’t tell them we hadn’t done any thing wrong. I don’t speak their language.”

    No data is kept for how many calls to police require interpreters but dispatchers heard on the police scanner will say “language barrier” several times a day, and then contact an interpreter.

    There are a few resources to deal with the barrier:

    -Phone companies, which provide interpreters for many dialects and languages.

    -A few bilingual police employees, who can serve as translators.

    -Fellow officers who know a few phrases in more common languages such as Spanish.

    -And a bank of bilingual volunteers available to Fremont officers.

    These options work in situations that don’t require immediate action. But police have almost no resources in urgent situations.

    Departments are trying to address the issue. Recruiting multilingual minorities has become a top goal.

    But because of a statewide shortage of applicants, police departments struggle just to hire qualified officers — without even considering their ability to speak foreign languages, recruiters say.

    Lt. Jan Gove, who heads the Fremont department’s diversity program, said they are doing their best to meet the needs of the different communities. Out of 300 Fremont police employees, 14 percent are bilingual. They speak about 12 languages, ranging from Japanese to the East Indian Punjabi dialect and American Sign Language, Gove said.

    Another problem is that there may be no financial incentive for police employees to become bilingual.

    The bilingual employees are not paid for translating in Fremont and Newark, but Fremont Officer Eric Frederic, a certified Spanish interpreter, wants to change that. He and another bilingual detective have asked the city to pay for interpretation services.

    Union City recently agreed to pay its bilingual employees.

    Frederic, who learned the language as a missionary in the Dominican Republic, said his language skills have helped him build a rapport with the Hispanic community. He used his skills in a model program to help reduce crime in Centerville. Other officers also request his services in follow-up investigations, and he prepares press releases in Spanish for the media.

    Police see the language barrier as a challenge, but not an insurmountable situation.

    Most immigrants speak some English and police are able to get the information they need most of the time, Fremont’s Gove said.

    “We’re pretty effective at what we’re doing. But there’s always room to improve,” she said.

    In Newark, where police have essentially the same resources as Fremont, Detective Rich Paloma said he feels hampered by the language barrier.

    As an investigator, the subtleties of expressions and tones are important to catch. The underlying meanings may be lost during the translation, he said.

    “With a translator, you don’t have as much control over the interview,” Paloma said.

    The detective said he thinks if his department offered classes in more languages, employees would take them.

    But Gove said it’s nearly impossible to offer classes in so many different languages. The East Indian and East Asian dialects are the biggest struggle because there are so many of them, she said.

    Community policing should play a key role in addressing the problem, said Matthew Petrocelli, a California State University, Hayward, criminal justice professor. He has studied police diversity issues.

    True community policing would involve teaching officers simple phrases in the primary languages of their neighborhood, Petrocelli said.

    “It would behoove departments to teach their officers some sort of basics,” he said. “The military has its own language institute. Why can’t the police?”

    Newark police officers have seen the benefit of language lessons.

    The department may offer Spanish classes through Ohlone College be cause of the high demand for Spanish interpreters, Capt. Cliff Nannini said.

    In Union City, where a large Filipino population has settled, Officer Mark Quindoy said using his native Tagalog makes it easier to relate, even though many Filipinos speak English.

    “Some people have a natural bond if you speak their language,” Quindoy said.

  • East Palo Alto man still hopes to find brother’s assailants

    By Fariba Nawa
    March 28, 1999
    Fremont Argus/Oakland Tribune/ANG Newspapers

    EDITOR’S NOTE: Unsolved Crimes is a monthly series that profiles cases which remain unsolved in Fremont, Union City and Newark. Police ask residents to call them if they have information about any of these crimes.

    Union City — Every day, as Joseph Holland walks past people on the street, he wonders if they are his brother’s killers.

    Holland, a resident of East Palo Alto, wants to know who shot to death 27-year-old Peter Holland in his Union City driveway — and he wants to know why. And so do the Union City police. The Holland family put up a $10,000 reward for information leading to the killers, but it has yet to be claimed.

    On Feb. 22, 1995, at about 11 p.m., Peter Holland — a convicted drug dealer who had served his time — returned to his stucco home after working out at the gym. His wife was waiting up for him while his two boys, then ages 3 and 7, were sleeping. The 250-pound amateur boxer didn’t get a chance to turn off his car before he was approached by his assailants.

    Witnesses to the Clover Street homicide said that two men, who had been lying in wait in a Honda Prelude, argued with Peter and then fired at least four shots, hitting him in the back and thighs. The gunmen drove away, laughing, with their headlights off.

    None of those witnesses could identify the killers, said Sgt. Bill Pena, and investigators have run out of leads. Except for the bullets and casings, police do not have any physical evidence to guide their search for the two men.

    And Peter Holland’s shady past leaves an unlimited number of suspects, Pena said. Investigators believe Peter Holland, who officially worked at his uncles’ metal polishing shop in San Carlos, may have been trafficking narcotics after serving his prison sentence. Pena said Peter Holland had dealt with organized drug cartels.

    “He was no street dealer,” the sergeant said.

    His older brother disagrees. He said Friday that Peter Holland was a small-time dealer, and that after serving his jail time, he was trying to improve his life. He was getting a B average in community college, and he was working full-time. He even moved out of East Palo where he grew up to get away from a troubled environment.

    But perhaps enemies form his past caught up with him, Holland said. He can’t point a finger at anybody, but he’s hoping somebody out there knows something.

    “The way they killed Peter, they have killed before and they will kill again.” Holland said he thinks if one of the men is arrested for another crime, the truth about his brother’s slaying will be revealed.

    “I’m hoping one will rat out the other.”

    And for anyone who has information regarding the case, he asks that they please come forward.

    BROTHER: MAN SAYS DEATH TORE FAMILY APART

    “They should look at my family and see what we’ve gone through. They ripped us apart. I think about (Peter) every single day.”

    Peter Holland was one of 10 siblings. He was a kind, caring person who bought ice cream for all the children on his block, Holland said. But he was also tough.

    “He would help you, but if you crossed him he would retaliate,” Holland said. Their parents gave them a moral upbringing and a lot of love, Holland said. But Peter Holland stumbled into the wrong crowd at age 22.

    Five years later, when his family thought he had escaped violence, Peter Holland’s life ended.

    Holland said he buried his parents and a sister, all of whom died of cancer and the wounds of their deaths have healed. But he is still waiting for closure on this brother’s death.