Hell Hath No Fury (42 page)

England reportedly expected a desk job in Iraq. Instead she found herself guarding hundreds of Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib jail. She was thrust into the center of a media storm when she was identified as one of the US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. In one shocking image, England was pictured pointing at the genitals of naked prisoners; in another she held a prone prisoner by a leash fastened around his neck; in a third she posed grinning and giving the thumbs-up sign with her boyfriend, Specialist Charles Graner, behind a pyramid of naked Iraqis.

In May 2004, before formal charges were brought against England, who was pregnant by Graner, she was transferred to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and assigned to light duties. After a mistrial, England was retried in September 2005 and convicted on one count of conspiracy, four counts of maltreating detainees, and one count of performing an indecent act. She was given a dishonorable discharge and received a three-year prison sentence. Graner, the alleged ringleader of the abuse at Abu Ghraib, was convicted separately and given a sentence of ten years.

England's mother, Terrie, defended her, protesting that her daughter was just doing “kid things, stupid pranks.” Terrie England was more accurate in her observation that her daughter was a scapegoat for failings higher up the army's chain of command and in the Department of Defense.

The revulsion felt by many at England's conduct stemmed partly from the fact that during the Iraq War the Pentagon was happy to portray women as potential victims of enemy violence and sexual assault (see
Lynch, Jessica,
Chapter 7) and reluctant to admit that they could also be active players in sordid games of power and cruelty. Nevertheless, it must be said that the Bush administration, requiring a scapegoat for its colossal strategic misjudgment in Iraq, attempted to use England and her colleagues to bear the moral burden for its war.

Reference: Janis Karpinski, Steven Strasser, and Bernadette Dunne,
One Woman's Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story,
2005.

GRESE, IRMA

German SS Auxiliary and War Criminal, b. 1923, d. 1945

Irma Grese lived an unremarkable life before World War II, when Nazi preferment gave her the power of life and death over the inmates of the concentration and death camps in which she served as a wardress
(Aufseherin).

Grese came from a farming family in Mecklenburg. She left school in 1938 and after a series of dead-end jobs was taken on as an apprentice nurse at the sinister SS sanatorium at Hohenlychen run by Dr. Karl Gebhardt, a distinguished surgeon and die-hard Nazi who in 1948 was executed as a war criminal. Grese did not qualify as a nurse, but Gebhardt found her a place in the training program for female warders at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The failed nurse was an archetypal adolescent “true believer,” mesmerized by the rituals and paraphernalia of the SS, the organization that employed her at Ravensbrück from the summer of 1942 and gave her an escape route from the tedium of her early life.

In March 1943, Grese was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau, in southern Poland, where she participated in the selection of inmates for the gas chamber. At Auschwitz she was promoted to the rank of
Oberaufseherin
(senior SS warder) and had a brief affair with the camp's senior doctor, Josef Mengele. Prompted, no doubt, by her failed attempt to become a nurse under the tutelage of Karl Gebhardt, Grese was also an active observer at the grotesque medical experiments undertaken at the camp hospital by Mengele and his assistants.

In breach of camp regulations, Grese had numerous homosexual liaisons with inmates, later consigning them to the gas chamber. Her immaculate uniforms were tailored by inmates who had in previous lives been seamstresses. In March 1945, after another period at Ravensbrück, Grese was transferred as labor-control officer to Bergen-Belsen, a camp on Lüneburg Heath near Hanover, whose senior SS officer, Josef Kramer, had previously been in charge at Auschwitz and was thought to have been another of Grese's lovers. Bergen-Belsen was a camp for invalids transferred from other parts of Germany; by the end of the war, the malevolent neglect by Kramer and his subordinates had ensured that it was hideously overcrowded and swept by waves of typhus and spotted fever. When Bergen-Belsen was overrun by the British on April 15, 1945, some thirteen thousand corpses lay strewn around the camp and the remaining inmates were barely alive. Far from fleeing the scene of her crimes when the British arrived, Grese remained on the site and physically attacked a senior British officer when he tried to enter a camp hut.

The survivors at Bergen-Belsen attested to Grese's brutality, her beatings and arbitrary shootings and the savaging of prisoners by her half-starved dogs. She habitually wore heavy boots and carried a silver-plated pistol. She beat many women to death, using a plaited cellophane whip, rubber truncheon, and “whipping stick.” In a chilling photograph taken by her captors, Grese glares at the camera, her handsome features twisted by a scowl of barely contained violence. Her homely sweater and skirt are disturbingly offset by black knee-length boots. The British military police nicknamed Grese “Jut Jaw.”

At her trial she showed not a flicker of remorse for the horrors for which she had been responsible, weeping uncontrollably only when her sister appeared as a character witness. Grese, camp commandant Josef Kramer, and eleven others were sentenced to death and were hanged on December 13, 1945, by the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint, who, apparently without irony, recalled that Grese “was as bonny a girl as one could ever wish to meet.” Grese's last word as she stood on the gallows, a white hood pulled over her head, was
“Schnell”
(quick).

Reference: Daniel Patrick Brown,
The Beautiful Beast: The Life and Crimes of SS Aufseherin Irma Grese,
1996.

KHALED, LEILA

Palestinian Terrorist Hijacker and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Fighter, b. 1944

In the 1970s, Khaled rivaled Che Guevara as a modish poster pinup. With her head scarf, a Kalashnikov slung over her shoulder, her black bob, and her burning eyes, she was the epitome of revolutionary chic, inspiring a character in the British TV science-fiction series
Doctor Who
and a love song, “Leila Khaled Said,” by the 1980s band the Teardrop Explodes.

She was born in Haifa, which was then part of the British mandate in Palestine. When in 1947 Palestine's Arab population rejected the United Nations' plan to partition Palestine, fighting broke out between Arabs and Jews, and in 1948 Khaled's family moved to Lebanon, leaving behind her father, who was a fighter with the fedayeen, the armed Palestinian militias.

At fifteen, Khaled joined the radical Arab nationalist movement, which had been founded in the late 1940s by George Habbash, a medical student at the American University of Beirut. In 1967, following the Six Day War, the Palestinian faction of this movement became the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

On August 29, 1969, Khaled was part of the team that hijacked TWA flight 840 as it flew from Rome to Athens, on the mistaken assumption that Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, was on board. The hijackers diverted the Boeing 707 to Damascus after flying over Haifa to allow Khaled to see her birthplace. The aircraft was blown up in Damascus, but none of the passengers was injured.

After the hijacking, Khaled underwent the first of several plastic surgery operations to change her appearance. On September 6, 1970, in the company of Nicaraguan Patrick Arguello, she attempted the hijack of El Al flight 219 from Amsterdam to New York, one of a series of simultaneous hijackings carried out by the PFLP. However, Israeli sky marshals on the flight killed Arguello after he shot one of the crew, and overpowered Khaled, who was carrying two hand grenades. The aircraft was diverted to London, where Khaled was taken into custody and a month later released as part of a prisoner exchange. Khaled had failed in her mission of September 6, but on that day the PFLP successfully hijacked a Swissair and a TWA jet, which were flown to Dawson's Field in Jordan, where along with a BOAC VC-10 hijacked on September 9, they were blown up three days later. A year later the PFLP abandoned hijacking, although terrorist groups that it spawned continued the tactic, notably in the Entebbe incident of 1976.

Khaled later admitted that she had found her incarceration in London sufficiently agreeable to prompt a correspondence with the two policewomen responsible for her there and a number of return visits to the United Kingdom to address supporters. Still a handsome woman in late middle age, Khaled has announced that she no longer considers hijacking a legitimate tactic, although she remains highly critical of the “peace process” aimed at improving relations between the Israelis and Palestinians. She is a member of the Palestinian National Council and appears regularly at the World Social Forum, a talking shop for members of the anti-globalization movement.

Reference: Leila Khaled,
My People Shall Live,
1973.

LAKWENA, ALICE

Ugandan Prophetess and Insurgent, 1956–2007

A self-proclaimed prophetess and spirit medium, Lakwena inspired a long-running and bloody insurgency in northern Uganda against the government forces of President Yoweri Museveni.

Born Alice Auma, she was an Acholi, the predominant ethnic group in northern Uganda, which formed the core of the Ugandan army. She was rumored to have worked as a prostitute, although some sources describe her as a fisherwoman. At some point she converted to Roman Catholicism. She was married twice but had no children.

The origins of the insurgency led by Lakwena date back to the overthrow by Museveni of the regime headed by General Tito Okello, a former sergeant and a member of the Acholi tribe. The downfall of Okello traumatized the Acholi, and their leaders formed the rebel Ugandan People's Democratic Party (UPDA) in an attempt to drive Museveni's forces from the north and regain their former status.

In 1985 Auma claimed that she had been possessed by the spirit of a dead Italian army officer called Lakwena, who ordered her to create a Holy Spirit Movement to liberate the world from sin and bring an end to the bloodshed in Uganda. She consulted witches about her mission, but they remained cautiously noncommittal. The animals in the Paraa National Park proved more communicative, and after forty days Lakwena, as she was now to be called, emerged to become one of the many spirit mediums prophesying and practicing healing near the town of Gulu.

As Uganda descended into chaos, Lakwena instructed Auma to redirect her work for the Holy Spirit Movement, which aimed to bring about the Second Coming of Christ and the inauguration of an earthly paradise. She gathered a group of followers and persuaded the UPDA leaders to place some of their troops under her control. In December 1986, acting under the command of His Holiness Lakwena, the Holy Spirit Movement achieved two unexpected victories over government forces. After a recruiting drive, the movement was able to put some ten thousand fighters into the field.

They fought as a regular army, although they relied more heavily on magic than on conventional hardware. Lakwena urged her followers to smear themselves with nut oil and ingest potions that would make them invulnerable to bullets. The formations of the Holy Spirit Movement had their own spiritual commissars who attended Lakwena when she was possessed by spirits, and who blessed stones that they claimed would explode like grenades. Units marched into battle in cross-shaped formations bawling hymns. After an engagement in July 1987, rebel survivors were reported to be wandering around in a trance, and the battlefield was littered with wire models of helicopters and grenades, slaughtered cats, live chameleons, and Bibles. Government troops also found an altar decked with flowers and a “trench dug to resemble a river.”

Magic proved no match for modern weaponry, and in subsequent engagements automatic weapons mowed down the hymn-chanting rebels. Nevertheless, they advanced to within one hundred miles of Kampala, the Ugandan capital, before they were cut to pieces by machine guns and artillery bombardment at Jinja in August 1987.

The Holy Spirit Movement splintered into a number of small groupings, many of which were little more than bandit gangs. Some regrouped to form the sinister and ultra-violent Lord's Resistance Army, which continues to operate in Uganda.

In the aftermath of the defeat of the Holy Spirit Movement, Lakwena was accused of being a witch, and deserted by her Italian spirit guide, she fled to a refugee camp in Kenya. From there, seated on a throne, she continued to command a few faithful followers and vowed to dedicate the rest of her life to finding a cure for AIDS, a fantasy she pursued until her death.

Reference: Heiki Behrend,
Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits: War in Northern Uganda, 1985–1997,
2000.

MBANDI, JINGA

Angolan Queen, b. ca. 1580, d. 1663

Described by the Dutch leader of her bodyguard as a “cunning virago,” Jinga Mbandi led her forces in an ultimately unsuccessful war against a European power with designs on her kingdom. In the twenty-first century, she remains a popular heroine in Angola and a symbol of national resistance and of Pan-Africanism, despite keeping “concubators” (male concubines) and rejecting Christianity in favor of cannibalism.

She was born in West Africa at a time when the two most powerful tribes in the region were the Kongo and Ndongo. In all probability, she was the daughter of the
ngola
(king) of the Ndongo, who in the mid-sixteenth century had welcomed Portuguese missionaries. However, it was not the promise of Christian converts but the financial rewards of the slave trade that led the Portuguese to found Loanda (present-day Luanda, capital of Angola) in 1575 and to install a governor.

We first encounter Jinga in the early 1620s, when she negotiated with the Portuguese on behalf of her brother, who had become the
ngola
but had been exiled to an offshore island by the governor. The
ngola
had become entangled in the murky politics of the slave trade, which in the early seventeenth century was booming. A Portuguese official boasted that the teeming population of the African interior would supply slaves “to the end of the world” to work in the Brazilian plantations and mines. Local chiefs became an integral part of the trade, raiding rival tribes for valuable human cargo. Naturally enough, the Africans wanted to control the trade on their own terms, but the Portuguese begged to differ. The
ngola
had become a casualty of this brutal jostling.