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[url]http://chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic04/NewsST121804.html[/url]
December 18, 2004
BOBBY FISCHER AND THE BOLSHEVIK UNDERSTANDING OF LAW
by Srdja Trifkovic
Bobby Fischer may stay out of Uncle Sam's reach after all. He is currently in Japanese detention on a U.S. arrest warrant for violating sanctions against Yugoslavia in 1992, for which he faces a $250,000 fine, ten years in prison, or both. His supporters are optimistic that the former world chess champion will be spared further tribulations, however, thanks to Iceland's unexpected offer of asylum. This is the latest twist in a bizarre saga that mixes international diplomacy, Balkan intrigue, Cold War memories, National Security State vindictiveness, and the vagaries of a genius bordering on madness.
The offer is the result of a campaign by a group of Icelanders who feel that Fischer put their isolated island nation on the map and deserves to be repaid for the favor. "When Fischer came here in 1972 to play chess with Soviet Boris Spassky, it was the biggest international event to take place in Iceland in the then 28-year history of the republic," says Hrafn Jokulsson, chairman of the chess club Hrokurinn ("The Rook"). In the following year President Richard Nixon and French President Georges Pompidou both visited Iceland, and Jokulsson says that the 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev Reykyavik summit would not have taken place had it not been for Fischer: "He put Iceland on the map, and we don't forget our friends."
Fischer was arrested at Tokyo's Narita airport on July 15 as he tried to leave for the Philippines. He was traveling on a passport that the State Department says had been invalidated a year ago (a contention disputed by Fischer and his supporters). The news echoed across the globe. "It was as if a forgotten film star, someone long assumed dead because they hadn't been seen on television in ages, had suddenly and quite unexpectedly materialized," noted Rene Chun in Salon.com. "It's the type of twisted American tragedy that? Billy Wilder would have savored."
On several occasions over the past five months Fischer appeared to be on the verge of extradition but each time the end-game was prolonged by a legal technicality. At the same time an international lobbying campaign for his release was gathering steam. It was spearheaded by Iceland's Chess Association, which pointed out that "not a single person involved in the 1992 Fischer-Spassky Match has been indicted or even criticized for their participation" or faced any reproach for their participationââ¬âexcept Fischer."
On December 15 the authorities in Reykyavik approved a residency permit for him. A Foreign Ministry official said the decision was "due to the special connection Bobby Fischer has to Iceland as being part of one of the major events" in its history. "We're in a happy mood," says John Bosnitch, head of the Committee to Free Bobby Fischer. If he has "a passport in hand and a country invitation, then we expect the Japanese government to release him, to drop this procedure against him and to allow him to go to Iceland." With characteristic reticence ("the possibility is not zero"), Japanese immigration bureau spokesman Shoichiro Okabe confirmed that Fischer might in the end leave for Iceland. But the decision by a tiny country to risk American displeasure for the sake of gratitude to an eccentric has-been appeared foolhardy to some "mainstream" commentators. "Extending the hand of friendship to a man viewed as a paranoid recluse with extreme views may seem a puzzling move," commented the BBC, adding that it "becomes even more inexplicable when to do so could earn you the disapproval of the US." The American ambassador in Iceland confirmed this possibility by declaring that since Fischer broke U.S. law the case belongs to the Justice Department.
Fischer's legal troubles started in 1992 when he emerged from two decades of seclusion. In the early years of Yugoslavia's violent disintegration a shady Serbian businessman and chess aficionado, Jezdimir Vasiljevic, had the strange notion of staging a replay of the Reykjavik match in the Montenegrin seaside resort of Sveti Stefan. As we reported last September, he persuaded Fischer to re-emerge for the occasion. Spassky, a French citizen by that time, was also willing, and the second match was duly staged.
It proved in many ways more odd than the first. The war in Bosnia (a mere hour's drive from the Montenegrin coast) was in full swing, and rump Yugoslavia was under U.N. sanctions. Yet Mr. Vasiljevic (known at that time as "Jezda the Boss" in his native country) went ahead and staged a world-class media spectacle in Montenegro's once-glamorous prime resort. He was throwing down a gauntlet for the "international community," and the whole spectacle smacked of inat, that proudly stubborn spite typical of many Serbs. Bobby Fischer just loved it. At a press conference upon arrival in Yugoslavia he pulled out an order from the U.S. Treasury Department, warning him that he would be violating sanctions if he went ahead with the match, and spat on it.
The match went ahead, and Fischer won again, with 10 wins, 5 losses, and 15 draws. That was the only time in the last 32 years that he has played chess in public. Ever since 1992 has been theoretically under the threat of up to ten years in prison, a fine, and the forfeiture of three million dollars in prize money if he ever comes to the United States. It is noteworthy that the French authorities did not regard Spassky's participation as a violation of the sanctions, however, and Fischer is the only person ever to have been criminally charged with violating sanctions against Yugoslavia on the basis of the presidential Executive Order. Another U.S. citizen, former ICN Chairman and CEO Milan Panic, went to Belgrade a month earlier to become the country's Prime Minister (under Milosevic's presidency, at that), but that was not deemed to be a transgression in Washington which duly granted him a license to assume his new post.
The affair was soon forgotten and as the years went by, it appeared that the United States would let the matter quietly rest. Serbian grandmaster Svetozar Gligoric, one of the few people who know Fischer and enjoy his trust, told me last summer that he was under the impression that "an arrangement" had been reached. Such impression was apparently confirmed by Fischer's ability to live for years more or less unhindered. Solvent again thanks to Vasiljevic's prize of $3 million, he divided his time between Europe and the Far East. His passport was renewed in 1997 by the U.S. embassy in Berne without a glitch. When he arrived in Tokyo last April, the Japanese immigration authorities did not get a "flag" as his passport was swiped through the computer. Furthermore, for years he has traveled unhindered to countries that maintain extradition treaties with the United States. Asked in a radio interview in 2002 if he feared arrest, Fischer laughed it off and said, "the U.S. hasn't got the guts to catch me." Following his arrest Fischer has repeatedly denounced the U.S. deportation order as politically motivated. He has also renounced his U.S. citizenship, but his desire to leave Japan is complicated by the fact that he lacks a valid passport of any country. Iceland will let him enter with a one-way travel document but Japanese officials have indicated that he could go to a third country only if the United States refuses to take him.
L'affaire Fischer may prove that being paranoid does not mean "they" are not out to get you. It started 61 years ago, when a boy, Robert James, was born out of wedlock to a Jewish-American woman whose communist sympathies took her to the Soviet Union on the eve of World War II. Two of the few people who knew Fischer well, Gligoric and another Serbian grandmasters, Ljubomir Ljubojevic, point out that he first attracted the authorities' attention even before his birth because his father was a prominent Hungarian atomic physicist, Pal Nemenyi, who was involved with the Manhattan Project. Nemenyi died soon thereafter, in 1952; "Bobby" never got to know him. The security implications of the affair were nevertheless obvious. A suspicion of links with the Soviet secret service surrounded the mother, and eventually the boy, for years to come.
His mother was hard working but poor. Young Bobby wore shoes patched with scraps of leather, and his sister Joan could not attend her nursing school graduation ceremony because the cap and gown rental was deemed a luxury the family budget could not absorb. At the age of six, Fischer learned to play chess and declared that he did not want to do anything else for the rest of his life. By 15, he was the youngest grandmaster in history, and, a year later, he quit school, calling it a waste of time. A classic Wunderkind with an IQ of 180, he had an astonishing memory that enabled him to recall every move of all his championship games.
Throughout his early decades Fischer remained very close to his mother, even though his political views were developing in the opposite direction. His anticommunism provided him with a double motive to try to deprive the Soviets of the world title they had held for decades: to prove that he was the best, and to deprive them of a propaganda weapon ("to teach them some humility," as he put it). His moment of glory finally came in 1972, when he won the famous Fischer-Spassky world-championship match in Reykjavik.
The event was filled with Cold War drama. Soviet officials accused the United States of trying to throw off Spassky by using secret electronic devices pointed at their player. Fischer's chair and the whole playing area were subjected to a thorough examination. All light fixtures were removed from the ceiling, but only two dead flies were found. A member of the Soviet delegation was finally rebuked for demanding that an autopsy be performed on the insects. Not to be outdone, Fischer had all fillings in his teeth replaced on the eve of the match, fearing the presence of Soviet implants that could be activated to distract him at crucial moments. On September 1, 1972, Fischer became world champion after Spassky conceded a match in which Fischer won 7 games, drew 11, and lost 3.
In April of the following year, the World Chess Federation (FIDE) demanded that Fischer accept Anatoly Karpov's challenge, which he refused, claiming that he needed more time to prepare for the match. FIDE insisted, and his title was taken away in what Gligoric calls a dishonest setup designed to remove a troublesome and increasingly unconventional genius from the chess throne. At this time, Fischer's latent eccentricities became more strongly pronounced. He felt hurt that President Nixon had not received him after the Spassky match and suspected that the odium of the officialdom was connected to his anti-establishmentarian and increasingly anti-Jewish views. He once asked Gligoric to visit him incognito in Los Angeles and spoke of his woes and fears. "As we were parting, he gave me a two-way radio of the kind used by seamen, which he used to communicate with the outside world," Gligoric remembers. "He spent the last $50 he had on him at that time on that gift."
Fischer's current problems may be linked to his reappearance in public in the immediate aftermath 9/11, when he verily gloated over the attacks in an interview to a Filipino radio station and to his increasingly strident anti-Semitic remarks. Such statements, damaging to Fischer's reputation and reprehensible as they are, are no worse than thousands of remarks heard in mosques and Islamic centers all over the United States every Friday. Fischer's original alleged sin, violating the U.N. sanctions, was not deemed a crime by France, also a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, and it would be strange indeed if the United States under George W. Bush were to prove more internationalist-minded today than France under François Mitterand a decade ago. Fischer may be unpleasant, spoiled, solipsistic hellion, his former second G.M. Evans said on CNN (July 19), but he is not a criminal. We should be fighting to help Bobby not for his sake but for our sake.
The State has grabbed a man who played chess. It is not charging him under the internal revenue code, but it is charging him under laws that in another time would have automatically been ruled unconstitutional because they transfer legislative authority to the presidentââ¬Â¦ [H]e remains the only person in the world charged with having violated an executive order re the embargo against Serbia. It is a political act by our government. There was once an idea that criminalityââ¬Â¦ was based on norms rather than the convenience of the State or the will of legislators who decide to declare a given act, which was perfectly legal on Monday, to be illegal on Tuesday, though it may become legal again next year on a Wednesday. This is a dialectical, Bolshevik understanding of law that denies the existence of norms.
We are all criminals if one defines this status as having broken some portion of the federal codex, Evans warns, and "not one of us would survive a search of the codex; not one of us would serve less than 20 years if a bureaucrat looked for something to nab us." If Fischer is nevertheless extradited and tried for the "crime" of playing chess in circumstances that did not suit the president of the United States, some commentators predict that he will be deemed mentally unstable and confined to an institution. The parallel between Fischer in 2004 and Ezra Pound in 1944 would then become obvious, and the underlying message to those deemed guilty of thought crimes would remain the same.