Some in U.S. Now Reliving Days of Dread

For years, images of Mirna Aceituno’s childhood in Guatemala smoldered in her memory. She remembers early morning executions at the cemetery. She recalls the way friends of her father kept disappearing. And she remembers returning from school to see a man with a gun to her mother’s head.

Those fears, freshly awakened since last week’s bloody chaos in the United States, have left her sleepless at night, crying every half hour.

“That lack of security that I felt when I was so little was such a constant thing that it became normal,” said Aceituno, 30, an account executive at a Pasadena public relations firm, whose father was a political activist. “You could feel it. The instability, the fear with the guerrillas.”

For most Americans, the fear that terrorist violence could erupt out of nowhere, with no obvious enemy and no certainty about the day after tomorrow, feels completely new. But for many immigrants to this country--from such places as Iran, Chile, Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia--who fled here to escape oppressive regimes, dictators and random brutality, such fears are achingly, terrifyingly familiar.

They find the memories they have tried to suppress or exorcise triggered anew by the attacks on their adopted country. Some smelled the smoke, heard the gunfire, felt the ground-shaking tremors of car bombs, as they watched the televised images of the hijacked planes crashing, the World Trade Center towers tumbling over and over.

These immigrants, in Southern California and around the country, value American liberties--some perhaps more intensely than U.S.-born Americans. But many say that Americans, for all their freedoms, goodwill and optimism, remain painfully ignorant of how they--and their foreign policy--are perceived by much of the world.

Immigrants and refugees, in a wide range of conversations, offered various opinions on what this country should do in response to the attacks. But, with just one exception, they all urged their adopted country to be cautious about rushing into war because they know firsthand that the one thing war creates is more innocent victims.

“Analyze me. Why am I not blowing up people?” asked Ansar Haroun, a Pakistan-born American, who is a Muslim, an armed forces reservist who fought in the Gulf War and a forensic psychiatrist in San Diego. “Because psychologically I have something to live for. If I lived in a refugee camp and I knew life would never get better, that the only thing I will see for years is bombing and missiles, that would drive me to terrorism. Open an English school in Afghanistan. Let them read the New York Times. Let them hear what [Thomas] Jefferson says. Let them eat bread. Then they will not be terrorists.”

As the government debates the extent of its response, Haroun is bothered that “90% of the ideas we have seen are from white American men. How many Muslims have you seen on television? Where is the other point of view?”

David Zenian, an Armenian journalist based in Washington, D.C., worked in Beirut in the 1970s. Last week’s attacks have shown him there is no forgetting terrorism. “I’m having flashbacks every two seconds,” said Zenian, who lives in Potomac, Md. He remembers the day a car bomb went off across the street from his daughter’s school in Beirut. “I ran from the office to her school and I can still see the people’s faces and their screams are back in my ears now. Anybody who has gone through this can relate. Oh, my God, can I relate.”

Since then, Zenian has never felt 100% safe. He still waits for the next train if he sees someone getting on the metro with a suitcase. “Human suffering is such that if it hits you once, it sits in there, someplace, and it doesn’t really go away.”

Ernest Chavez, professor and head of psychology at Colorado State University, says immigrants traumatized by terrorism in their native countries are likely to experience symptoms of amnesia, anger, insomnia, recurring nightmares, depression and anxiety, and fear of public places as a result of last week’s attacks, often to a deeper degree than their U.S- born counterparts.

“These issues are similar in all of us,” he said. “But people who have already suffered these traumatic events in their countries, that kind of terrorism or violence, are going to have emotions now that are going to reactivate the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Even if they worked it through very well in the past, it’s going to come back.”

Immigrants from war-torn countries have already rebuilt shattered lives in a way that New Yorkers will have to do in months and years to come, said Dr. Steven Kingsbury, associate professor of clinical psychiatry at USC.

As Americans, he said, “you’re feeling that you’re safe and in a routine and things are under control and all of a sudden something terrible happens. It’s like you fracture a bone. Even though it is repaired, it has some specific weaknesses and is susceptible to injury again.”

Student Was Raised on Tales of Escape

Thearith Cheng, 21, a Cambodian American junior at Cal State Long Beach, has struggled with identity. The blood of Cambodia and its killing fields flows in his veins, but after the attacks he feels wholly American.

Cheng’s family escaped Cambodia in 1982, seven years after the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, captured the capital city of Phnom Penh and instigated a reign of terror in which about 3 million people perished.

Cheng was raised on terrifying tales of escape, such as this one: “I was only a couple of months old and [my mother] was running in the jungle, getting out of Phnom Penh. She was tired. She didn’t have enough food in her body to help me. Luckily, I didn’t cry and we survived. The soldiers were chasing people as they escaped. They knew they were losing and they wanted to kill everyone so they wouldn’t tell of the cruelty that took place at Phnom Penh.”

Most of his family was killed. But Cheng said his mother learned resilience. He thinks America, too, will draw strength from what happened. “Within ourselves,” he said, “we have to prepare for the next war.”

Sonbol Abedian, a Santa Monica acupuncturist, came to this country 16 years ago. Her family still lives in Iran, in a state close to the Afghanistan border. She was in the Middle East during the Iran-Iraq war, when American planes flew low over the capital every night, firing missiles. Now she prays desperately for peace and focuses her energy on healing.

“All the people that are coming to America from other parts of the world,” she said, “they are looking for freedom. They would like to live more in peace. That’s why we are here.” Abedian believes Americans should go after terrorists, “but not in a war, attacking and killing a lot of innocent people along with them.”

Ariel Dorfman, a playwright, essayist and novelist, was forced to flee his adopted country of Chile after the bloody coup led by military leader Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

“For me, it’s like living it for a second time,” said Dorfman, who was born in Argentina, fled to New York with his family and ended up in Chile when Sen. Joseph McCarthy set his sights on Dorfman’s father. He said the attacks were particularly bizarre because Sept. 11 was the anniversary of the 1973 coup in Chile which brought Pinochet to power and resulted in thousands of Chileans being imprisoned, tortured and killed, and “was, of course, sponsored by the United States.”

But Dorfman, also a professor of literature and Latin American studies at Duke University, sees the attacks as a chance for countries to work together. “I hope Americans realize that this has not been unique to them. This has been done over and over and over, often with the connivance of the United States--which in no way justifies the loss of even one human life,” he said. “Just as fire rains down on our sky, it rains down on their sky. It’s a common sky.”

America Must Ask Why It Is Hated

Other immigrants said Americans must begin to ask why they are so hated. Nicaragua-born poet and novelist Gioconda Belli, who lives in Santa Monica, was “completely heartbroken” by the terrorist attack. But Belli said she thinks Americans need a better understanding of the U.S.’ impact on other people’s lives.

Belli came to the United States in 1990 after marrying a National Public Radio correspondent in Central America. She was a militant supporter of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, the guerrilla movement that spearheaded the 1979 overthrow of dictator Anastasio Somoza. The United States then sided covertly with the Contra rebels in a civil war that toppled the Sandinistas and plunged the country into economic crisis.

In her view, “There’s always been that impression that Americans who die are more important than other people who die. If 10 Nicaraguans die, it doesn’t make big news. It’s like other lives are not equally worthy.”

“People who feel grieved and feel slighted and start accumulating hate and hostility start to plot how they can harm this country, humble this country, make it feel what other people feel in other parts of the world. They try to bring the empire to its knees.”

An anthropology professor from the former Yugoslavia now teaching at Reed College in Portland, Ore., feels he is a veteran of these types of situations. (He did not feel he could speak freely if he gave his name.) In the last week there has been a swelling of xenophobic sentiment and a surge in violence and possible hate crimes against Muslims, including two fatal shootings.

He says he sympathizes especially with New Yorkers, because he knows they feel what he felt when his city was bombed. “I feel Belgrade is a living being, when it was bombed . . . part of my life was just gone.”

He knows the pain, the anger, the surge of nationalism and the almost animal impulse toward retaliation that follow an attack. But he cautioned against giving into these emotions. “The enormity of what happened to you tends to blot out everything else,” he said. “You don’t want to ask, ‘How have we contributed to this?’ ”

“If what attacked you is completely evil, it does not mean that you are good. The problem here is, the United States is a giant, which is so much bigger than anyone else in the world. When a small nation is bombed and enraged, there isn’t much they can do. When a big nation gets enraged, there is a lot it can do. It’s very dangerous.”

Some immigrants, who suffered in their countries of birth, say last week’s events triggered dark memories but inspired them to give back to their new country in a way they haven’t before. To recover, Americans should turn to each other, said psychiatrist Kingsbury. “They’re actively taking some steps to control their own and their country’s destiny as opposed to sitting back and being victimized,” he said.

Woman Brought Her Daughter to Freedom

Gabriella Juris, a Beverly Hills medical geneticist, says what once loomed large now feels trivial. She wants to do something. Juris was a teenager in 1968 when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia. Her anti-Communist father was captured and thrown into a mine. He suffered a nervous breakdown.

“We were always followed and I promised [my baby] she would never have to go through this again, that I would leave with her and bring her to the free world.” Last week, Juris found herself looking over her shoulder and staring into the sky for bombs.

“I’ve been trying to get the courage to deliver something back,” she said. “I owe my life and my daughter’s life to this country.” She closed her office for 1 1/2 days and hit her neighborhood coffee shops, reaching out to anyone who might benefit from her counsel. Giving to strangers, she says, erased her feelings of isolation and gave her a new purpose.

“If I have to die tomorrow, I want to feel very good about today,” she said. “The important thing is how many lives I improved and how much love I gave in one day.”