And then there is the bad news.
FOGGY BOTTOM BETRAYAL
'I Am an American'
The State Department sends in the Marines to consign a U.S. citizen to Saudi hell.
BY WILLIAM MCGURN
Thursday, July 11, 2002 12:01 a.m.
The words crackle over the phone line from Riyadh, in softly accented English. "I am an American woman," Amjad Radwan repeats. "My mother always tells me how free America is, and how much my grandmother, my aunts and uncles and cousins in America love me. But though I am American I cannot go see them."
If Miss Radwan appears at pains to stress her adult status, it's because the same U.S. government that trumpets its liberation of Afghan women suddenly begins shuffling its diplomatic feet when the subject turns to adult American women languishing in Saudi Arabia. In the last month alone, when asked publicly about Amjad Radwan and Alia and Aisha Gheshayan, at least three senior American officials--Secretary of State Colin Powell, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, and Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs William Burns--all muddied the issue by resorting to the State Department line that the fates of at least a dozen American women in Saudi Arabia are "custody" spats involving "children."
The reason is plain: Most Americans understand the detention of innocent U.S. citizens as an outrage. Indeed, in many ways these cases are a microcosm of the whole U.S.-Saudi relationship, where Uncle Sam sends troops to prop up their regime while they show contempt for America. And why not? In accepting that these are mere family squabbles subject to Saudi law rather than declaring them affronts to America, the State Department only encourages Saudi intransigence.
"You can't imagine what it's like to put your faith in your government and then, when you turn to it for help, to hear time and again that 'we have to respect Saudi law,'" says Miss Radwan's mother, Monica Stowers. "It's like finding out there's no God."
No one knows better than Amjad Radwan how desperate life can be for an American whose country has written her off. Born in 1983 in Houston to an American mother and Saudi father who had met at the University of Dallas, she was taken to Saudi Arabia as an infant, along with her older brother, Rasheed. When they arrived in Riyadh later that year, her mother was in for a nasty shock: Nizar Radwan had neglected to tell her (or the state of Texas, under whose laws he was married) that he already had a wife and family. It wouldn't be the first time a Saudi would demonstrate his scorn for American law.
When Miss Stowers said she wanted to return home, he did what too many other Saudi men have done: He grabbed the children. When she protested, an Islamic court awarded him custody because she was a Christian. Miss Stowers returned to America believing her government would help her--a big mistake. Over the next decade, apart from sporadic visits at a Saudi police station, Amjad would be almost entirely cut off from her mother.
Amjad's father raised her to believe she was the child of his first wife. But her brother Rasheed told her it was a lie, valiantly keeping the memory of their American mother alive. In 1990 Miss Stowers went back to Saudi Arabia, and Rasheed met her at the airport. Not long after, they made their move, picking Amjad up at school and fleeing to the American Embassy. There, she believed, she would find refuge.
That was her second big mistake.
In testimony submitted to the House Government Reform Committee, Miss Stowers says that Karla Reed, a State Department officer, coldly informed her that the American Embassy was "not a hotel." When Miss Stowers refused to leave and pleaded for help, two Marines were brought in. Miss Stowers says she held the American passports of her and her two U.S. children in front of her, never believing that an American Embassy would turn the American military on a helpless American mother and her children.
"You see that American flag over the embassy and you think, 'I'm safe now. This is civilization, and they'll do something to help me here.'" One of the Marines apologized to her. Amjad, who was then only seven years old, recalls being scooped up by "a big man" and then taken out of the office as her mom and brother followed. Another State Department officer had already called Miss Stowers's ex-husband.
Again Amjad was taken from her. Ultimately, Miss Stowers would be arrested and spend time in a Saudi prison.
Typically the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh hasn't been all that eager to hear from Miss Stowers. But when the embassy got wind of last month's congressional hearings on how State has botched these cases, the embassy's Charles Glatz called to find out what she was going to say. Mr. Glatz, she says, told her that Ms. Reed denies any recollection of calling in the Marines, though the Government Reform Committee does have an embassy write-up of the incident. According to the Marine Corps, this is definitely outside the parameters governing embassy Marine, who are there to protect national security and diplomats--not to do State's dirty work.
Since that day, Miss Radwan's life rivals anything in "1001 Arabian Nights." Sodomized by her half brother (Rasheed was also sodomized by the same half-brother, as well as by his uncle), she was married off by her father at age 12. But she ran away, eventually living with her mother as a quasi-fugitive in an abandoned Saudi school. Miss Radwan's Saudi husband divorced her, and today mother, daughter and brother live together in a legal but furtive existence, with Miss Radwan unable to leave and all three looking over their shoulders for whatever horror Saudi law might bring next.
Throughout all these travails, Miss Stowers has tried to maintain her faith in her homeland. An American flag, for example, hangs over her television set. Her father, Eddie Stowers, was a sailor who drove landing vehicles on D-Day and later endured kamikaze attacks as a Navy gunner in the Pacific--but whose reward from his country was never to meet his granddaughter before he died. Ditto for an uncle of Miss Radwan's who served in Vietnam. Alas, outside her dreams the closest Miss Radwan gets to America these days is a Riyadh Starbucks or Safeway.
This leads to some bitter ironies. Though Miss Radwan is forbidden to leave Saudi Arabia for America without written permission from her father, her Saudi relatives--uncles, aunts and cousins--have all been given visas by the State Department to visit America, which they apparently love to do. But she, the American citizen, can't.
"There is no future for me in Saudi Arabia," she tells me. "I can't go to school, I can't get a good job, and my father wants to marry me [off] to a man in his 40s."
Though State Department officials say they have raised this and other cases with Saudi officials right up to Crown Prince Abdullah, they make clear that they have done so only in the context of a custody dispute and not as what it really is: a thumb in America's eye. Calls to Secretary Powell and Assistant Secretary Burns were not returned, and Ari Fleischer says that while he concedes that Miss Radwan and the Gheshayan sisters are adults, "technically" he was right to label their cases custody disputes because these women were taken as children.
It is telling, moreover, that our diplomats always speak about "raising" these cases--never about resolving them, or demanding that these American hostages be given exit visas, or even letting us know what the response is from, say, Crown Prince Abdullah when they do "raise" the issue with him. Americans, the Saudis and State both appreciate, have a short attention span, and in a few months the press and Congress will forget all about Miss Radwan and the Gheshayan sisters.
And so Miss Radwan rots in Saudi-imposed exile, wondering what will befall her should something happen to her 46-year-old mother, who's already been treated for cancer. "America is my future," she says firmly.
There was a day when American embassies rose to the occasion, granting refuge to a Catholic cardinal in Budapest, two Pentecostal families in Moscow, a Chinese dissident in Beijing, etc. Isn't it time George W. Bush instructed our embassy in Riyadh to begin showing as much concern for American women and children?
Mr. McGurn is The Wall Street Journal's chief editorial writer. A related editorial appears here. |
