When
you call this a strategy ~ it was certainly bizarre !!
The
American government brought his brutal six-year regime to an end in December
1989, with the invasion of Panama (code-named Operation Just Cause) but
capturing the man himself proved more difficult. It involved one of the
strangest operations in military history. Revealing an unexpected secret weapon
– a sense of humour – the military set aside their guns for Guns N' Roses. The
assault began on December 20. The Americans dropped more than 400 bombs in 13
hours, while the ruler fled across
Panama City in a Hyundai, dashing from one hopeless hide-out to another,
ducking into a school, a hospital and even a Dairy Queen fast food restaurant.
"It
was like a nightmare – like falling into a swimming pool and when you try to
reach for the safety of a wall or touch bottom, you suddenly realise that walls
and bottom had fallen away," he wrote in his memoir America's Prisoner.
"All I could see was an endless, limitless ocean and thousands of weapons
and men hoping to find me in their sights." He eventually found a place of
refuge in the closest thing the Vatican has to an embassy, the Apostolic
Nunciature of the Holy See. For days, he camped out in a sparsely furnished room,
reading the bible and considering his options. The Americans were stumped. They
certainly couldn’t draw him out by force – an assault on the Pope’s territory
was hardly an option. The government wrote to the Vatican, begging them to
refuse asylum, and describing the
drug-lord as common criminal rather than a political refugee. But the request
was scuppered by poor timing: it was Christmas, and the Holy See was swamped
with other seasonal requests.
Help
came in the unlikely form of glam rock. For Operation Nifty Package – the
extraction of the tyrant ruler as they
designated him – special operatives set up enormous speakers around the
building, blasting out the local US military radio station, SCN. To begin with, the station mostly played news
bulletins, interspersed with some music. "We told the audience not to use
the phone unless it was an emergency or official business," an official
report later explained, "so we would not tie up phone lines." On the request line, requests became quite imaginative... played
a lot of songs with the word 'jungle' in it”. Welcome to the Jungle, by hard
rockers Guns 'n Roses, was a particular favourite. The man, an opera-lover, was stuck listening to
Oingo-Boingo. He found his eardrums under attack from heavy metal acts like
Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and KISS, alongside cringeworthy pop-mongers such as
Rick Astley and New Kids on the Block. They only interrupted this onslaught of
rock and pop for one day: December 25, when the station instead played
back-to-back Christmas hits.
It was
“a peculiar attempt to unnerve the refugee through questionable art,” “Blasting rock
music was silly, childish, reproachable… but in some strange, postmodern way,
it worked.”After 10 days, with his ears ringing and a mob gathering outside the
gates, the Holy See's representative, Monsignor Jose Sebastian Laboa, told his
guest he had to leave. The man agreed. He wrote two letters, one to his wife
("I go now on an adventure", he told her) and one to the Pope,
thanking him for his hospitality. In full military uniform, he walked through
the Nunciature's front gates – and was immediately tackled to the ground by a
posse of US soldiers.
Manuel Antonio
Noriega, the brash former dictator of Panama and sometime ally of the United
States whose ties to drug trafficking led to his ouster in 1989 in what was
then the largest American military action since the Vietnam War, has died. He
was 83. President Juan Carlos Varela of
Panama announced Mr. Noriega’s death on Twitter early Tuesday morning.
The atmosphere
outside Gen Manuel Noriega’s battered, bullet-scarred comandancia, headquarters
of the Panamanian Defence Forces, one early morning in October 1989, bordered
on frenetic. Beyond the railings a woman sobbed with grief. Her husband, an
officer involved in the previous night’s failed coup attempt against Noriega,
was missing. It later transpired he and dozens of co-conspirators had been shot
out of hand. The headquarters was guarded by heavily armed, paramilitary thugs
from Noriega’s feared Dignity Battalions. A crowd of supporters cheered and
shouted insults about the US president, George HW Bush. Then, without warning,
Noriega, Panama’s feared dictator, spy chief and self-styled “maximum leader”,
appeared on the steps wearing combat fatigues, a red baseball cap and a broad
smile.
Noriega, who died
on Monday at the age of 83, was right to be nervous. The October coup attempt
marked a turning point in Washington’s attitude to a man whose rise to power it
had assisted, who became a valued CIA cold war asset and go-between in Central
America’s dirty wars, but who turned into a monster US spy bosses could no
longer control. Noriega had outlived his usefulness. Now he was an
embarrassment. So Bush made him America’s most wanted.
When Noriega subsequently
launched a vicious wave of repression, threatened American personnel guarding
the Panama Canal and declared a “state of war” with the US, Bush pounced.
Economic sanctions and quiet diplomacy had failed. Control over the
strategically and economically vital canal was threatened. And Noriega knew too
much. In December 1989, Bush ordered Gen Colin Powell, then chairman of the
joint chiefs of staff, to launch Operation Just Cause, sending 26,000 invasion
troops into Panama in a rehearsal of the Powell “doctrine of overwhelming
force” that was next employed two years later in the first Gulf war.
Mr. Noriega died
around 11 p.m. Monday at Santo Tomás Hospital in Panama City, a hospital
employee confirmed. An official cause of death was not immediately available. Mr. Noriega had been in intensive care since
March 7 after complications developed from surgery to remove what his lawyer
described as a benign brain tumor. His daughters told reporters at the hospital
in March that he had had a brain hemorrhage after the procedure. He had been
granted house arrest in January to prepare for the operation.
His medical
problems came on the heels of a legal odyssey that had begun with the invasion
and led to prison terms in the United States, France and finally Panama. While
imprisoned abroad he suffered strokes, hypertension and other ailments, his
lawyers said. After returning to Panama on Dec. 11, 2011, he began serving long
sentences for murder, embezzlement and corruption in connection with his rule
during the 1980s. It was an inglorious homecoming for a man who had been known
for brandishing a machete while making defiant nationalist speeches and living
a lavish, libertine life off drug-trade riches, complete with luxurious
mansions, cocaine-fueled parties and voluminous collections of antique guns. It
was a quirky life as well: He liked to display his teddy bears dressed as
paratroopers.
Mr. Noriega, who
became the de facto leader of the country by promoting himself to full general
of the armed forces in 1983, had a decades-long, head-spinning relationship
with the United States, shifting from cooperative ally and informant for
American drug and intelligence agencies to shady adversary, selling secrets to
political enemies of the United States in the Western Hemisphere and tipping
off drug cartels. Whose side he was on was often hard to tell. It was an
awkward embrace that befitted the history of American and Panamanian relations
since the United States built the Panama Canal early in the 20th century. The
United States continued to operate the canal — and govern a strip of territory
alongside it — for eight decades before turning it over to Panama on Dec. 31,
1999.
Just like many
other stories, a man nurtured by some, grew and turned his guns against the
same, only to be pummelled and dishonoured.
Sad, that’s history !
With regards – S.
Sampathkumar
30th May
2017.
PS : Being a
foreign story collated from many sources including NYtimes, Guardian, the Sun,
BBC and more.
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