Venezuelan Arabs Stung by U.S. Charges

<a href=asia.reuters.com>Reuters Tue April 22, 2003 11:58 AM ET By Pascal Fletcher

PORLAMAR, Venezuela (Reuters) - Half a world away from Iraq, Arab merchants in Venezuela's Caribbean island of Margarita swap gossip and finger prayer beads as they serve customers in this traditionally bustling free port.

Like Arab nations and communities around the globe, most of Margarita's well-established Muslim traders bitterly oppose the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, seeing it as an unlawful and unjustified attack against their race and religion.

But the Lebanese, Syrians and Palestinians who have made this tropical resort and duty-free zone their home for decades are even more angry about what they see as another American affront, this time leveled directly against them.

Allegations by a top U.S. military chief that Margarita is a base for radical Islamic groups posing a potential terrorist threat have angered both the 12,000-strong Arab community and the government of Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez.

"We have nothing to do with terrorism here. Pure business, that's what we do," Naim Awada, who emigrated from Lebanon 20 years ago, told Reuters in his clothing store in Porlamar.

All around him, shop names like Nabil Import, El Laden Mustafa and Flower of Palestine attest to the strong Arab presence on Margarita, an island of tourist hotels, arid hills and abundant beaches off Venezuela's eastern Caribbean coast.

Arab community leaders and Venezuela's government say the allegations by the Pentagon's top soldier for Latin America, Gen. James Hill, are really part of a wider campaign by foes of Chavez to try to discredit the populist president abroad.

They say Chavez' opponents, who have failed to topple him over the last year despite a short-lived coup and a crippling two-month anti-government strike, are seeking to paint him as a dangerous anti-U.S. maverick collaborating with terrorism.

The debate is more than just academic for Washington because Chavez, a former paratrooper and coup plotter elected in 1998, rules over the world's No. 5 oil exporter that is also one of the top suppliers of crude oil to the United States.

VISCERAL HATRED OF ISRAEL

In testimony to Congress in March, Gen. Hill, commander of the Miami-based Southern Command, said his country was concerned about what he called the "possible activities of radical Islamic groups on Margarita Island in Venezuela."

Probes into potential terrorism hot spots increased after the deadly Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the United States.

Hill said money laundering and arms and drugs trafficking in Margarita and in the tri-border region between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil were generating several millions of dollars a year in funds for militant Middle Eastern groups like Hizbollah and Hamas, considered "terrorist" organizations by Washington.

On the teeming boulevards of downtown Porlamar, Venezuelan Arabs do not hide their anger over the Iraq war, their visceral hatred of the governments of Israel and the United States or their sympathies for Hizbollah and Hamas.

"Of course, we back Hizbollah, but there is no terrorism here," said Ziad Faiad, 39, who came from Syria 14 years ago. "We don't back Saddam Hussein. We support the Iraqi people."

Many Margarita Muslims say they admire Hizbollah for its resistance to Israel in southern Lebanon and support Hamas as a legitimate defender of the rights of the Palestinian people.

"It is natural that people should identify with the religious leaders that they have," Abdallah Nassereddine, an Arab community leader and businessman, told Reuters.

"No Arab ever came to Margarita with a plan to act against the United States," added Nassereddine, who is president of Venezuelan-Arab Federation which represents most of the estimated 1 million Arab immigrants and their families.

He said the terrorism allegations had hurt the image of Venezuela's top vacation destination. Margarita's tourism is already in the doldrums because of the severe economic recession triggered by a year of domestic political turmoil.

On top of this, foreign exchange controls introduced in early February are squeezing the business of many Margarita Arab importers. "Sales are down 95 percent," Awada said.

EVIDENCE HARD TO FIND

Concrete evidence of the presence of Hizbollah and Hamas members in Margarita is hard to find.

The 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people and injured 200, raised international alarm about the presence of Islamic militants in Latin America.

Three years later Venezuelan security police detained three Lebanese-born Arabs in Margarita in a probe of a suspected cell of members of Iranian-backed Hizbollah. But the suspects were freed and results of the inquiry were never made public.

Fears of a Venezuelan terrorist connection surfaced again in February this year when a Venezuelan Muslim, Hasil Mohammed Rahaham-Alan was arrested at London's Gatwick airport with a hand grenade in his luggage. He was held under Britain's anti-terrorist laws.

Non-U.S. security experts give some credence to U.S. allegations about the presence of radical Muslim groups in Margarita. "It may serve as an R and R (rest and recreation) facility and is certainly used for finance raising," said one European expert in Caracas, who asked not to be named.

Ariel Kurtz, whose Tel Aviv-based security consultancy SIA has analyzed the threat of radical groups like Hizbollah and Hamas in Latin America, said the accusations of fund raising and money laundering among Margarita's Arabs seemed credible.

But experts are skeptical about media reports of terrorist training camps being based in the western half of Margarita.

Barely an hour's drive from the high-rise hotels and apartments of Porlamar, the scrub and cactus-covered western Macanao peninsula is largely inhabited by poor fishermen whose seaside shacks lack basic amenities. The words "we want water" daubed on walls are a testimony to the peninsula's neglect.

DOMESTIC POLITICS A FACTOR

Gen. Hill's comments, magnified by heightened world tensions over the war in Iraq, have been seized on by domestic foes of Chavez, who cite them as evidence of the president's alleged anti-U.S. intentions and tolerance of "terrorism."

Chavez, who staged a botched coup bid in 1992, angered Washington in 2000 by becoming the first foreign head of state to visit Saddam Hussein in Baghdad since the 1991 Gulf War.

His critics accuse him of using his friendship with Cuban President Fidel Castro to try to install Cuba-style communism in Venezuela, and of cooperating with leftist rebels fighting the U.S.-backed government of neighboring Colombia.

Chavez, who despite his vocal condemnation of the war in Iraq has kept on shipping oil to the United States, denies the allegations, dismissing them as a "diabolical media campaign."

Interior Minister Gen. Lucas Rincon called on Gen. Hill to back up his accusations about Margarita with proof.

"If this gentleman has this information, well, he should pass it on and we will investigate," Rincon told Reuters.

But he said Venezuelan inquiries, which have included a probe of bank accounts in search of suspicious transactions, had not produced any evidence of terrorists on Margarita.

"We do not support, nor have we ever supported, terrorist groups ... If we manage to detect a terrorist, then of course we will act," Rincon said, angrily cutting short an interview.

Pressed for details to back up Gen. Hill's public accusations, a spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command in Miami said he could not give any more information as this could compromise ongoing U.S. intelligence investigations