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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (39636)	4/15/2004 3:26:02 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793877

Ann "Fisks" Oliver Stone. Live. This is being reveled in all over the net. interrogation Oliver Stone's Twist Is the director's latest film soft on Castro? By Ann Louise Bardach Slate Last April, HBO planned to broadcast Comandante, a sympathetic documentary of Fidel Castro made by Oliver Stone. Around the same time, Castro rounded up some 75 dissidents and threw them in jail, and three men charged with hijacking were executed by the Cuban government following summary trials. The film, criticized by the press for its soft approach to Castro, was yanked by HBO and never aired on the network. Instead, HBO sent Stone back down to Havana for a second take. The result, Looking for Fidel, airs tonight, April 14, at 8 p.m. ET on HBO. Looking for Fidel takes a harder line toward Castro than Comandante did, yet even Stone concedes that it is primarily a platform for Castro to explain the thinking and motives behind his crackdown on dissidents the last two years. Last week, Ann Louise Bardach questioned Oliver Stone about both films, and about the 60 hours he spent with Fidel Castro, Cuba's ruler since 1959. ALB: Do you know that the Cubans are refusing visas to virtually all reporters and not allowing them back in the country? OS: You know, the advantage I have is to be a filmmaker. [Castro] seemed to love my movies. Apparently he liked my presence, and he trusted that I wouldn't edit him in a way that would be negative from the outset. But I did tell him, the second trip, that I would try to be tougher, not disrespectfully so. As you see, several times [in the film] he does get upset. ALB: I gather you rejected the idea of demonizing him. OS: Of course. My role here was not as a journalist. It really was as a director and filmmaker. In my job, I challenge actors. I provoke them. ALB: Let me ask you about the part [in the film] where Castro's in front of eight prisoners charged with attempting to hijack a plane [to Miami]. He says to them, "I want you all to speak frankly and freely." What do you make of that whole scene, where you have these prisoners who happened to be wearing perfectly starched, nice blue shirts? OS: Let me give you the background. He obviously set it up overnight. It was in that spirit that he said, "Ask whatever you want. I'm sitting here. I want to hear it too. I want to hear what they're thinking." He let me run the tribunal, so to speak. ALB: But Cuba's leader for life is sitting in front of these guys who are facing life in prison, and you're asking them, "Are you well treated in prison?" Did you think they could honestly answer that question? OS: If they were being horribly mistreated, then I don't know that they could be worse mistreated [afterward]. ALB: So in other words, you think they thought this was their best shot to air grievances? Rather than that if they did speak candidly, there'd be hell to pay when they got back to prison? OS: I must say, you're really picturing a Stalinist state. It doesn't feel that way. You can always find horrible prisons if you go to any country in Central America. ALB: Did you go to the prisons in Cuba? OS: No, I didn't. ALB: So you don't know if they're any different than, say, the prisons in Honduras then? OS: I think that those prisoners are being honest. ALB: What about when you ask them what they think is a fair sentence for their crimes, and one of them starts to talk about how he'd like to have 30 years in prison? OS: I was shocked at that. But Bush would have shot these people, is what Castro said. … I don't know what the parole system is. ALB: There is none unless Fidel Castro decides to give you clemency. ALB: They seemed very willing to bring up sound bites that Castro is partial to—that they wanted to leave Cuba only for economic reasons, not political ones, etc. OS: You're going to the theory that they were trying to get good time in front of the camera to get lighter sentences. ALB: I'm going even further than that. I'm suggesting that they had no choice but to appear there, and that in some ways it was a bit of a mini-show-trial, sort of "Look how well we treat our prisoners." OS: It does have that aura, absolutely. But I do maintain that if it were a Stalinist state … they certainly do a great job of concealing it. ALB: To me, one of the most interesting exchanges in the film is when you ask, "Why did you decide to shoot these three hijackers on the eighth day?" And he bristles and says, "I didn't shoot anyone, personally." You respond, "Well, OK, the state shot these three guys on the eighth day." He then says, "Of course, I take my share of responsibility." OS: He was a huge part of the state, and now, as he points out, he has less power. … There is a functioning congress. ALB: Do you really think that anything happens in Cuba without his approval? OS: I don't know. ALB: You don't know? OS: I've heard that the reform elements tried to move in after the Soviet Union's [collapse] … in '92 and '93, and Castro took the hard line on that. ALB: That's right. As far as I know, Comandante has the first footage of Fidel with his son Fidelito and grandson, aside from formal receptions, etc. How did they respond to each other? OS: I think Fidel said something to the effect that, at the end, he could have been a better father. ALB: Now, when you were talking to the prisoners who tried to hijack a plane, one told you he was a fisherman, and you said, "Why then didn't you take a boat?" Why did you ask that? OS: Well, it seemed to me that if they were familiar with boats, it seemed to be the best way. ALB: Did you know that in Cuba there are virtually no boats? The boats that are used for fishermen are tightly controlled. One of the more surreal aspects of Cuba, being the largest island in the Caribbean, is that there are no visible boats. OS: I see. ALB: How did you end up in a hospital with him getting an EKG? OS: I went with him to see a functioning hospital in the heart of the city. Spontaneously, he took his shirt off, and said, "Well, I need one. Give me one." The [EKG results] looked good. ALB: In other words, he's saying to you, "All these rumors about me dying and my poor health, let me dispel them once and for all"? OS: No, he didn't say that. ALB: But by doing this, in essence, he's saying that? OS: In essence. But I had not heard these rumors about him dying. In the first documentary he showed us his exercise regime in the office, pacing back and forth. He walks three miles in his office. ALB: Did it strike you as interesting that at one point in the scene with the prisoners, Castro turned to the prisoners' defense lawyers, who just happened to be there, and he says, "I urge you to do your best to reduce the sentences"? OS: I love that. I thought that was hilarious. Those guys just popped up. ALB: Is there a show-trial element here? OS: Yeah. I thought that was funny, I did—the prosecutor and Fidel admonishing them, to make sure they worked hard. There was that paternalism. I mean "father knows best," as opposed to totalitarianism. It's paternalism, that's what I meant. It's a Latin thing. ALB: So after 60 hours with Castro, what do you make of this man? OS: I'm totally awed by his ability to survive and maintain a strong moral presence … and we ignore him now at our peril if we start another war with Cuba. ALB: You say we ignore him at our peril. It seems to me that we're obsessed with him. OS: No, I think the focus is wrong. Fidel is not the revolution, believe me. Fidel is popular, whatever his enemies say. It's Zapata, remember that movie? He said, "A strong people don't need a strong leader." ALB: So you think that if he went off the scene the revolution would continue? OS: If Mr. Bush and his people have the illusion that they're going to walk into an Iraq-type situation, and people are going to throw up their arms and welcome us, [they are] dead wrong. These people are committed. Castro has become a spiritual leader. He will always be a Mao to those people. ALB: Did you ask him about his relationship with Juanita in Miami? OS: God, I don't remember. There were so many women. ALB: Juanita is his sister. OS: Juanita's his sister? ... He seemed to be a very straight-shooter, very kind of shy with women. ALB: I've called him the movie star dictator. Did you get that sense about him? OS: Totally. I think it would be a mistake to see him as a Ceausescu. I would compare him more to Reagan and Clinton. … They were both tall and had great shoulders, and so does Fidel. ALB: For the second film, you received permission to see the dissidents Osvaldo Paya, Vladimiro Roca, and Elizardo Sanchez. They spoke critically of the government. Obviously, that couldn't have happened unless permission for them to see you was granted, right? What do you make of Castro allowing that to happen? OS: I don't think he was happy with it. I don't think he wants to be in the same film with Paya. In his mind they are faux dissidents. ALB: He actually calls them faux dissidents? He called them the so-called dissidents? OS: Yeah, so-called, right. I was in Soviet Russia for a script in 1983, and I interviewed 20 dissidents in 12 cities. I really got an idea of dissidents that was much rougher than here. These people in Cuba were nothing compared to what I saw in Russia. ALB: Did you ever think to bring up why he doesn't hold a presidential election? OS: I did. He said something to the effect, "We have elections." ALB: Local representative elections. But what about a presidential election? OS: We didn't talk about it, especially in view of the fact that our own 2000 elections were a little bit discredited. ALB: In the first film, Comandante, he asked you, "Is it so bad to be a dictator?" Did you think you should have responded to that question? OS: I don't think that was the place to do it. … You know, dictator or tyrant, those words are used very easily. In the Greek political system, democracy didn't work out that well. There were what they called benevolent dictators back in those days. ALB: And you think he might be in that category? OS: Well, not benevolent to everybody, no. ALB: Can't it be said in fact that Castro is quite cynical—the master debater, master lawyer? OS: Well, nobody's perfect. Ann Louise Bardach, a commentator for National Public Radio's Marketplace, is the author of Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana and Cuba and Cuba: A Traveler's Literary Companion. Article URL: slate.msn.com

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (39636)	4/15/2004 4:02:36 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793877

The Wisdom of Quiet Diplomacy The American Thinker April 15th, 2004 Former President Clinton met with Yassar Arafat 15 times, more often than he met with any other foreign leader during his 8 years in office. Now, on the $250,000 an hour lecture circuit in synagogues across America, Clinton bemoans how Arafat stiffed him at the Camp David summit, and then again by starting the intifada. Critics of President George Bush have attacked him for failing to directly engage in the Middle East conflict, as Clinton did. Bush has not convened any summit between the warring parties, and has never met with Arafat. These critics of the Bush policy (such as Jimmy Carter) understand engagement to mean putting pressure on Israel to make the concessions necessary to get the Palestinians back to the table, and perhaps to stop killing Jews for a few weeks at a time. It is hard to fathom how the same people who regard Bush as a foreign policy ingénue, and a diplomatic nightmare, also expected him to work at a Camp David style summit for a few weeks, and accomplish something that Bill Clinton with all his charm, verbal agility, and powers of political persuasion, was unable to achieve in the year 2000 at Camp David. While the Iraq conflict and the heavily politicized 9/11 hearings have been dominating the mass media, the Bush administration and the Sharon government have been quietly discussing ways for Israel to take some substantive steps that might tamp down the level of violence, and improve the lives and security of both Palestinians and Israelis. At a press conference on Wednesday, after a meeting with Prime Minister Sharon, the President signaled that his administration was making a break with State Department policy on several final status issues that have been in force for half a century. These now-discarded policies had implicitly favored the Palestinian side on several very contentious disputes between the two sides. The current Sharon visit to Washington concerns the Prime Minister’s plan to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza, and to close down a few permanent settlements on the West Bank. Sharon will take this policy initiative to a referendum of his Likud Party in early May. The visit to Washington was clearly designed to try to win some support from the Bush Administration which might influence skeptics in the Likud Party to give Sharon’s program a chance. For many years, some pro-Israel advocates have maintained that Israel will be ready to make substantive concessions only when it feels it has a solid partner in the United States, rather than an “ally” that is really doing the Palestinians’ bidding and pressuring Israel to make concessions. The Clinton administration worked well with the Rabin government, and the Barak government. Barak, himself, decided on what to offer the Palestinians at Camp David and later at Taba. But when Likud leader Bibi Netanyahu was Prime Minister from 1996 to 1999, the Clinton administration basically tried to break his knees, demanding specific percentages of the West Bank to be turned over to the Palestinians, and treating him as an outsider. During the Clinton years, the Oslo process was supposed to have created the conditions for making peace. In retrospect, that did not happen. Today, there is no ongoing peace process, and no peace partner for Israel among the Palestinians. But despite this, Sharon and Bush are on the verge of achieving more for both Israel and the Palestinians than occurred during the fiction of the Oslo peace process. The hard-line Likud leader Ariel Sharon, the father of the settlement movement, has proposed dismantling all the settlements in Gaza, and five in the West Bank. <font size=4>The earth is moving, even if the press has been ignoring it. <font size=3> Uprooting the Jewish settlements in Gaza, and evacuating the 8,000 settlers, might help accomplish a few things. It would leave the Palestinians without Jewish targets in Gaza. It would also remove 1.3 million Palestinians from all the demographic nightmare scenarios relating to Jews becoming a minority within the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River sometime in the next ten years. Completion of the security fence and withdrawal from a few West Bank settlements, will further limit the area that Israel controls in the territories, and presumably is responsible for overseeing. Sharon has identified five blocks of settlements that he has stated will remain part of Israel. They include settlements around Jerusalem (including Maaleh Adunim), Gush Etzion, and Ariel, among others. All these settlement blocks will be within the new security fence that is being constructed. Many critics of Israel have failed to notice, or deliberately ignored, the fact that when Palestinians demand an end to Jewish settlements on the West Bank, they also demand that all the Jews leave all parts of East Jerusalem. This includes the old city, in which Jews have maintained a continuous presence for 2000 years, except for the 19 years of Jordanian rule between 1948 and 1967, when the Jordanians destroyed all the synagogues in the old city, and used the Mount of Olives gravesites for latrines. Sharon seems to agree with those analysts who believe that the failure of Camp David and the anger unleashed by the current intifada have eliminated the possibility of a final status settlement for years to come. The withdrawal from Gaza is not something required by the roadmap for peace, the plan that was agreed on by Sharon, Bush and the former Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen. Undermined by Arafat’s treachery, Abu Mazen resigned within months of his appointment, realizing he had been given no authority to negotiate for the Palestinians. The roadmap process has been dead in its tracks ever since. The roadmap’s initial phase called for Israel to dismantle illegal outposts -- in most cases nothing more than caravan encampments established by a few settlers on isolated hilltops. Some of this has been done, but the pressure Sharon might have felt to complete this gesture disappeared when Palestinian terror attacks continued, and the PA made no attempt to disarm the terror groups, as they were required to do as a corresponding step in the first phase of the roadmap. Bush’s comments at the press conference indicated that a final settlement between Israel and the Palestinians would have to take account of new demographic realities, including certain Jewish settlement activity, and that the 1949 (or pre-1967 lines) were not hard lines. This is consistent, of course, with what American negotiators anticipated when they helped draft UN resolution 242 in November 1967, knowing then that some border adjustments would occur. Perhaps even more important, Bush stated that Palestinian refugees should expect to be resettled in a Palestinian state, when that is established, and not in Israel. Egypt, the PA, and various European “allies” had pressured Bush in the last week to not give away too much (or anything) to Sharon in exchange for this proposed withdrawal from Gaza. But Bush resisted their entreaties. For a half century, the State Department has seemed to give some credence to UN resolution 181, which ostensibly provides some measure of support for the so called right of return of refugees from the 1948 war. At this point, 55 years after that resolution was adopted, perhaps only 200,000 of the 4 million or more who claim refugee status, are in fact living original refugees (the refugees from that war numbered perhaps 600,000, and two thirds of them have already died). The rest of the 4 million (more than 95%) are descendants of refugees who never have stepped foot in Israel. Only in the fantasy land of Middle East politics can these people be considered refugees with a right of “return” to some place they never left or entered. This conflict still exists, however, primarily because of the angry Palestinians living in miserable conditions in these refugee camps, 50 years after their families could have been resettled and been given the chance to move on with their lives. Give “credit” to the United Nations for helping create this situation and then allowing it to perpetuate. Most Palestinian refugees from the 1948-49 war left of their own volition, and were not driven out by the Zionists. This was not the case with the larger number of Jews who were expelled from Arab countries after the creation of Israel. Israel absorbed these refugees, and they are today functioning members of their society. This is also the case for all the other refugee populations from all the other wars of the last century. None of them are still in camps decades later. But it is not true for the Palestinians, who with the blessing of their Arab brothers, have either chosen to remain in these refugee camps, or been prohibited from leaving them (e.g. Lebanon), if they can not live in Israel. So Palestinians rattle old keys, and demand a right to return to homes that do not exist anymore, and which almost all of them have never visited. So I give credit to the President for acknowledging reality, and trying to nudge the Palestinians to move from their fantasy of how this conflict can be resolved, towards a real compromise with Israel. As long as the millions of so-called refugees can cling to a legal fiction that they will some day return to Israel, reclaim cities and homes, and drive the Zionists out, this conflict cannot end. It may not end soon in any case. But Sharon is trying to minimize the areas of conflict and the flashpoints between the two sides by a withdrawal from Gaza, and completion of the security fence. And Bush has helped, by putting America on record that the home for Palestinians will be a Palestinian state, and not Israel. This is not Clinton-style engagement, but it is genuine substance, and hopefully will bring Israel closer to peace and security. Richard Baehr americanthinker.com