He’s at a loss over what to do about the bloody unrest in Tibet. He has called for an independent international investigation of the recent riots and military crackdown, knowing that Beijing will never agree. And he’s urged the Chinese leadership to exercise restraint and respect human rights. But the Dalai Lama also preaches nonviolence to his fellow Tibetans. “I lack the means to defuse the conflict,” says the world’s most famous asylum seeker, a man revered by people around the world — in Germany even more so than the pope.

“We would need a miracle for that,” says the Dalai Lama, 72, whose real name is Tenzin Gyatso. (His title means “Ocean of Wisdom.”) “But miracles are unrealistic.” The Dalai Lama has even broached the idea of stepping down as the political leader of Tibetans and returning to private life. Over and over he says: “I don’t understand the Chinese, I really don’t understand them. This sort of escalation cannot be in their best interest.”

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has called the Dalai Lama a “hypocrite” and holds him responsible for the recent violence in the streets of the Tibet’s capital, Lhasa. Other leading Chinese Communists have heaped derision on the Tibetan leader in exile, calling him everything from a “divider of the nation” to a “wolf in monks’ robes.”

His native Tibet has again moved into the international spotlight, but not in a way the apostle of nonviolence welcomes. China, which occupies Tibet, has declared a “people’s war” there and has largely cut off the region from the outside world. Tibetan Communist Party leader Zhang Qingli has called it a “fight for life and death.” After a period of silence about the incident, the Communist Party in Beijing announced that there were 16 dead on the streets of the Lhasa. But Tibetan exiles believe the death toll is closer to 100.

Since last weekend, tanks have rolled through the city’s streets, and soldiers have been stationed at all key points, sealing off the Jokhang Temple in downtown Lhasa and the nearby Sera, Drepung and Ganden monasteries. Distraught Tibetans who have managed to find a functioning telephone or Internet access report house-to-house searches, arrests, beatings and torture. The Chinese apparently set an ultimatum that expired on Monday evening. Those who were recognized as protesters by the government who failed to turn themselves in and denounce fellow protesters by the deadline — thereby accepting a supposedly “mild punishment” — faced “the full severity of the law,” as the Communist Party called it.

Eyewitnesses say that more than 1,000 people were arrested, with dozens of them paraded through Lhasa in open trucks, their heads bowed and their hands handcuffed behind their backs. More than 100 women and men had turned themselves in voluntarily, reported the region’s vice governor, who claimed: “Some were directly involved in looting and arson.” Qiangba Puncog, the region’s governor, offered an accountant’s assessment of the “serious crimes of the Dalai Lama clique,” saying that during the riots of the last few days 214 shops went up in flames, 56 cars were damaged, and 61 police officers were injured.

Nevertheless, the Chinese failed to quell the resistance. The clashes between rioters and security forces continued on the outskirts of Lhasa on Tuesday, and in the city residents placed toilet paper on the streets — a message calling on the Chinese to finally withdraw from Tibet.

But by midweek official TV broadcasts showed images of Chinese merchants clearing debris from their ruined shops, while others covered burned-out window openings with plastic tarps. The Communist Party leadership wanted to demonstrate that calm had returned to Lhasa. A reporter stood in front of a burned middle school to suggest that rioters had not even drawn the line at schools. And rumors, probably started by Communist Party officials, spread among the Chinese in Lhasa that the drinking water was contaminated. The Dalai Lama had ordered the water supply poisoned, a merchant told Norwegian tourists who were the last to leave the city, on Air China Flight 4111 to Beijing.

If Lhasa had become deathly quiet by midweek, though — because few residents dared leave their homes to challenge Chinese forces — protests spread like wildfire to other parts of the People’s Republic.

Demonstrators took to the streets in Sichuan, Gansu, Yunnan and Qinghai provinces, where there are more Tibetans than in the so-called Tibet Autonomous Region, an arbitrary entity created by Beijing. According to Tibetans in exile, 39 people died during protests in these areas by Wednesday. Many of the demonstrators were monks and devout Buddhists openly celebrating the Dalai Lama, defying the ban on displaying his likeness, and swearing eternal obedience to their revered god-king. But students also joined the demonstrators in several cities.

In Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, roads leading to Tibet were closed, and the town of Xiahe in the Ganan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture was also sealed off. Xiahe is home to the Buddhist Labrang Monastery, where, according to eyewitness reports, 400 monks took to the streets and, joined by several thousand sympathizers, swung the Tibetan flag and sang songs praising the Dalai Lama.

In Aba, in Sichuan province, demonstrators set fire to a market with Molotov cocktails, and several of them were allegedly shot by police. “>

In Gansu province — as photographs taken by two Canadian television reporters show — demonstrators on horseback stormed down from the mountains and congregated in front of the Bora Monastery near the city of Hezuo. Together with monks and demonstrators on mopeds, the Tibetans surrounded a government building, took down the Chinese flag, and hoisted the Tibetan flag in its place before police and soldiers regained control over the area after hours of street skirmishes.

A few blocks away, monks from the Bora Monastery even broke into and ransacked Chinese shops. They deliberately spared the shopkeepers but didn’t end their attacks until a lama interceded. Meanwhile, Communist Party leaders used government-controlled television to announce that they had the situation “everywhere completely under control.”

The region, a popular tourist destination, is now deserted. Instead of the usual backpackers, hotels now house government security forces. Residents seeking to leave the Aba Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in the direction of Chengdu must pass through road checkpoints, where Chinese soldiers wielding machine guns search cars and trunks with metal detectors. Meanwhile, military trucks filled with young soldiers — reinforcements — arrive from the opposite direction.

Even in Beijing, roughly 50 young academics from the Central University for Nationalities dared to challenge the authorities by staging a sit-in — and risking their freedom, or at the very least jeopardizing their careers. According to the state news agency Xinhua, professors convinced the protesters to return to their dormitories.

But the Chinese public was kept almost completely in the dark about most of the protests, as if a news blackout — including blockage of the domestic feeds for CNN and the BBC, a ban on international reporting, and the expulsion of Hong Kong journalists — could make the events go away.

And yet the news quickly circled the globe, mainly thanks to media-savvy young Tibetan politicians in exile. They spread their message throughout a worldwide network and triggered a massive outcry against Beijing. From Athens to Amsterdam, from Washington to Wellington, and from The Hague to Tokyo, demonstrators took to the streets to show solidarity for the repressed Tibetan minority. In Berlin, hundreds demonstrated in front of the embassy of the People’s Republic of China. The protests were especially strident in neighboring Nepal and India, where more than 80,000 Tibetan exiles live.

In Taiwan, where elections will be held on Sunday, events on the roof of the world have suddenly taken center stage. Beijing considers the island nation a renegade province and hopes that the Kuomintang Party (KMT), which is the Taiwanese party most closely aligned with the mainland Communist Party, will win the election — which would bring Taiwan closer to “reunification.” But now the widely favored presidential candidate, KMT’s Ma Ying-jeou, finds himself on the defensive. He has condemned what he calls “repression in Tibet,” and he’s considering a boycott of the Olympics, echoing the sentiments of some European politicians.

The events in Tibet and elsewhere have turned into a major public-relations disaster for China’s leaders. Suddenly the ugly face of Chinese communism is omnipresent again, as images of past injustices are conjured up. The 1989 massacre on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, when the party’s tanks mowed down peaceful demonstrators and up to 3,000 people were killed, has been on people’s minds; so has the violence in Lhasa in 1959, when more than 80,000 Tibetans died in the wake of a failed uprising that led to the Dalai Lama’s forced exile. It’s all happening as Beijing hoped to bask in the glow of the Olympics. This preeminent celebration of sports is more than just a prestigious event for China’s leadership. Beijing associates the Olympics with its return to the stage as a world power.

The countdown to this new era has been running for seven years. The 1.3 billion citizens of the most populous nation on earth have been well primed. Beijing wants to suggest it has joined the United States as a superpower — backed up by certain economic facts. China already has the largest foreign currency reserves of any nation, and it will likely be the world’s leading exporter in 2008. The West looks up to us again, Beijing implies to its own people, with its imposing new towers and new Olympic sports facilities.

Last Tuesday, at his annual press conference to conclude the Beijing meeting of the National People’s Congress, Premier Wen — already playing jovial host — insisted that the “smiles of 1.3 billion Chinese ” will be returned by the smiles of all of the peoples of the world. But his performance also revealed that this time Beijing can no longer ignore global outrage over its repressive policies in Tibet. Speaking on live TV, the premier seemed genuinely anxious to respond to reporters’ questions.

But then Wen proceeded to rattle off the party’s hackneyed phrases, insisting that the Dalai Lama’s claims that he seeks a peaceful dialogue, not independence for Tibet, are nothing but lies. On the other hand, he was also forced to address a French reporter’s request to allow the foreign press to travel to Tibet, promising that Beijing would “look into” the matter.

But why is China jeopardizing its reputation in the world in such a dramatic way? What is it about Tibet and the Dalai Lama that has triggered the Communist Party leadership’s extreme reaction? And how much of the escalation can be attributed to young, radical Tibetans who no longer support the Dalai Lama’s peaceful “middle way,” instead seeking confrontation with their Chinese occupiers?

Even more important, what exactly happened in Lhasa? And what is happening there now, while the global public is kept in the dark?

Beijing sees the unrest in Tibet as an attack on the country’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, and a large majority of Chinese share its views. Ninety-two percent of Chinese belong to the Han ethnic group, and from their perspective Beijing is merely defending China’s best interests in its dealings with Tibet.

If the People’s Republic were made up entirely of Han Chinese, of course, the government could have saved itself the trouble of blocking reports about the Tibetan riots on the Internet. The popular Internet portal Sina listed up to 470 Web sites with tens of thousands of comments from enraged Chinese. One user wrote that the government should “not relent in the struggle against terrorists,” while another insisted that Beijing should “protect the fatherland and fight the separatists.”

This outpouring of anger cannot be dismissed as a consequence of nationalist indoctrination, a strategy China’s communists hope will keep them in power in their new age of capitalism. The fight against rebellious minorities along the outer edges of the massive country, in strategically important regions blessed with mineral resources, also touches on a deeply rooted Chinese fear of national disintegration. They call it “iuan,” or chaos.

This is why no Chinese government can afford to yield to Western pressure to make concessions to Tibet, even if the Olympics are jeopardized. The Chinese government finds itself in a Catch-22 situation. One goal was to use the games to plaster over a host of growing internal conflicts, including social tensions and ethnic uprisings. But now the Olympics themselves may have contributed to the widening of natural fissures in China’s social fabric.

After it was awarded the games, Beijing proved receptive to criticism, but only of its foreign policy. It endured scathing condemnation by Hollywood stars like Mia Farrow of Beijing’s backing of the Sudanese government and its role in the genocide in Darfur (in a 2007 Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Farrow characterized the 2008 games as a “Genocide Olympics”). This outcry prompted the Communist Party rulers to consent to a U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur and even consider participating in it.

But all hopes for an improvement of human rights within China have been in vain. Despite protests by organizations like Human Rights Watch, dissidents like Yang Chulin (“We want human rights, not the Olympics”) and AIDS activist Hu Jia have been put on trial for “subversion.” Although Li Baodong, the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, is permitted to exercise self-criticism (“China still has a long way to go to promote and protect human rights”), the regime in Beijing already paints itself as a role model when it comes to human rights. Foreign Minister Yang Jieche insists: “The Chinese people enjoy the full extent of human rights and religious freedom.”

The Chinese Communist Party’s deep hatred of the Dalai Lama is rooted in his gentle but firm insistence, when speaking with politicians from around the world, that precisely the opposite is true. He accuses the Chinese government of waging “cultural genocide,” in the form of the deliberate mass settlement of his native Tibet with Han Chinese, a process that destroys Tibetan traditions. One reason Beijing has responded so vehemently to the attacks is that they are so difficult to deny.

Lhasa is a predominantly Chinese city today. As a result of Han Chinese settlement, promoted by tax subsidies, Tibetans are now a minority in their own capital. They make up only about one-third of its 400,000 residents. Bars and brothels have dramatically altered the character of this holy place, as have the soldiers patrolling its streets. The city’s tallest building, surrounded by colored plastic palm trees, houses the headquarters of the secret police. The most successful businesspeople are Chinese, who make no secret of their disdain for the “backward locals.”

Tibetans benefit the least from a rising standard of living, even though, from a material standpoint, they are better off than ever before. But they are spiritually starved, and the majority of Tibetans still cling to their spiritual and political father figure, perhaps even more so today. They know the 14th Dalai Lama has long been a democratically oriented reformer, and most Tibetans have at least enough contact with the government in exile in Dharamsala to know it has a freely elected Parliament. The Chinese Communist Party and its “People’s Liberation Army,” which in 1950 invaded Tibet — until then a de facto independent country — have yet to acquire a comparable level of respect among Tibetans.

The Tibetan people don’t enjoy true religious freedom. They are permitted to perform their Buddhist ceremonies in the private sphere, and a few monasteries have been restored to be inhabited by monks again. But the party has carefully severed Tibetans’ spiritual bond with their god-king. Anyone caught with a picture of the Dalai Lama is arrested and often tortured.

The Potala Palace, the traditional seat of the Dalai Lama, is being preserved, but merely as a tourist attraction, part of Beijing’s effort to reduce Tibet to a spiritual Disneyland. Late last week, when unarmed monks were intimidated during a peaceful demonstration and then arrested, the Tibetans finally vented their anger. It was this rage that probably contributed to violence against Chinese police officers and business owners — violence that Beijing’s governors met with even sharper repression. The official reaction, in turn, led to several monks attempting to commit suicide, setting off a spiral of unrest interrupted only by periods of calm that can be attributed, at best, to exhaustion.

The Dalai Lama opposes any form of violence. He reacted with extreme outrage, even bitterness, to Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s charge that he “and his clique” had instigated the bloody riots in Lhasa. Wen even claimed that he had “a lot of evidence” to support his accusations. “Hey, Mr. Prime Minister, come here and show them to me and the world,” the Nobel laureate called out a press conference on Tuesday.

In truth, the world’s most famous exile has always sought to accommodate the Chinese, beginning with Mao (he was long blinded by Mao’s ideological powers of persuasion), followed by Deng Xiaoping and his successors at the head of the Communist Party.

The 14th Dalai Lama gave up his fight for a sovereign independent nation long ago, and now he calls “only” for true cultural autonomy for his Tibet. In several rounds of talks, most recently in 2006, his negotiators sought to shape compromises with Beijing’s negotiating team, but failed completely.

The Dalai Lama pinned his hopes on the Communist Party’s current harmonization campaign and its increasingly tolerant treatment of all religions. “I am the last Tibetan leader with whom there can be a peaceful transition,” the god-king said last year. “And if I am to be an obstacle, I am prepared to withdraw from politics and continue my life as a simple monk.”

He left many questions unanswered: whether he should have a successor, whether a woman could become a Dalai Lama, and whether the traditional search for a new reincarnation should be replaced with a sort of conclave in which the new Dalai Lama is elected by abbots. “Perhaps there will even be two Dalai Lamas after me,” he said. “One serving at Beijing’s pleasure, and one recognized by the Tibetans according to spiritual tradition.”

The Communist Party, as an atheist force, has presumed to be responsible for reincarnations. In 1995 it appointed the Panchen Lama, the second-highest-ranking Tibetan religious leader, and abducted the boy designated by the Dalai Lama, along with his parents. The whereabouts of the family remain unknown to this day. Beijing’s Panchen Lama has obediently condemned the “crimes of the Dalai clique.”

The young Tibetan Buddhists of Dharamsala insist that the 14th Dalai Lama has put up with too much, far too much. Taking the nonviolent Mahatma Gandhi as his role model, as the Dalai Lama does, is all very well and good, they say, but the approach should also yield comparable results.

“Gandhi brought independence to India, and where are we today?” Kelsang Phuntsok, then-president of the Tibetan Youth Congress in Dharamsala asked provocatively in 2007. “The word ‘violence’ is not a taboo for me. At this point we are getting nowhere with the position taken by our revered leader. We are like the panda bears of international politics. Everyone cuddles us, but no one does anything serious on our behalf. We must take fate into our own hands.”

When a member of the Youth Congress starved himself to death during a protest a few years ago, the Dalai Lama denounced his act. But young Tibetans celebrated him as a “martyr.” It cannot be ruled out that some have thought of transforming their pacifist struggle into a resistance movement akin to the Palestinian struggle. But there is no concrete evidence whatsoever that last week’s unrest in Lhasa was part of a deliberate military provocation.

In their campaign surrounding the Beijing Olympics, until now, young Tibetans have opted for creative rather than violent campaigns. They’ve unfurled “Free Tibet” banners at the Great Wall, used all legal means at their disposal and even presented the IOC with a list of athletes ready to compete as part of their own Tibetan “national team.” They have launched rallies converging at the Chinese borders and staged PR-conscious demonstrations in front of embassies.

Now that the young Tibetans are trying to achieve a boycott of the Beijing games, they agree with the Dalai Lama’s view that the event should be used to draw attention to the cause of their oppressed people.

Unlike the 14th Dalai Lama, however, the Tibetan Youth Congress will continue to fight for full independence. Young Tibetans think their god-king is simply not of this world when they hear him say: “In Buddhism, we are constantly concerned with how we handle our negative forces and emotions. I also pray for the Chinese. They, of all people, need our sympathy.”

Dharamsala’s wild young Tibetans have a sixth sense for understanding provocations by the Chinese — when Tibet’s Communist Party chairman Zhang says, for example, that the party is the “father and mother of the Tibetan people,” and claims to know exactly “what is good for the children — the Central Committee is the true Buddha of Tibetans.” The Dalai Lama, when he hears this sort of rhetoric, says that he has “great understanding for the impatience of the young people,” and that he must admit that his “middle way” has registered few victories so far.

Yet the Dalai Lama sees no alternative to his approach, no matter how fiercely Beijing’s politicians demonize him. “As neighbors, we must live together,” he says, “side by side.”

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

This article has been provided by Der Spiegel through a special arrangement with Salon. For more from Europe’s most-read newsmagazine, visit Spiegel Online at http://www.spiegel.de/international or subscribe to the daily newsletter.

But anyone returning to the two neighborhoods these days will have difficulty recognizing the western sections of the Iraqi capital. Within half an hour after sundown, the streets are pitch-black in an area where there is no electricity, and where the only houses with lights are those with rattling, fume-belching generators in their front yards. In the old days, Baghdad’s streets came alive at night, but nowadays the day comes to an end by early evening. No one dares set foot outside, since taking a walk means gambling with one’s life. Shots can be heard every night, and every morning more people are dead.

Handwritten black mourning banners have been fluttering for days on Amal al-Shabi Street in Amiriya. The banners are there to commemorate Bakr Mohammed, who was shot in his grocery shop; Abu Ahmed, who was murdered while on his way to his auto repair shop; and goldsmith Sharif Abd al-Khalid, whose shop was blown up.

“In the name of God the All-Merciful,” begins the obituary for “Dr. Amal al-Mansuri, Martyr,” a pharmacist. According to the obituary, “she was murdered by the cowardly hands of filthy criminals. Condolence visits from November 25-28. We all come from God and we all return to God.”

Only six months after the U.S.-led invasion, the last shop in Amiriya that still sold beer was forced to close its doors. Selling alcohol is a mortal sin for the gangs of young Iraqis who now control the neighborhood. In the changed reality of life in Baghdad today, even male hairdressers who cut women’s hair risk losing their lives unless they abandon their profession.

The killers who forced their way into Sadia Abd al-Hussein’s hair salon weren’t looking for Western customers. Instead, they had their sights set on Hussein himself and his regular Iraqi customers. Three people were dead by the time the terrorists left his shop.

Many hairdressers have switched to the mobile phone business, but that too has become a dangerous profession. Mobile phones play music, and music is “haram” — forbidden under the religious rules the fundamentalist militias seek to impose.

One in four houses in Amiriya is now for sale, as western Baghdad’s once-mixed neighborhoods gradually become more segregated. Shiites are fleeing in droves from primarily Sunni neighborhoods like Jihad and Amiriya, while Sunnis are getting out of majority Shiite areas of the city as fast as they can. But none of Iraq’s religious groups can feel safe as the violence in the once-peaceful neighborhoods spins out of control. “Sunni gangsters shoot faster,” says English teacher Hussam Ali, a Shiite. “That’s the only difference.”

Three weeks ago, another section of the city saw angry protests against the Shiite-dominated government after U.S. troops discovered a secret interrogation bunker run by the Iraqi interior ministry. The soldiers freed about 170 emaciated Sunni torture victims, terrorism suspects the Iraqis had arrested weeks and months ago.

Despite the fact that the prisoners were fellow Muslims, no one in Amiriya expressed outrage over the discovery. “I didn’t hear a single complaint,” says retiree Muhannith Kassim, a former employee in Saddam’s oil ministry. Indeed, Kassim believes that the government does far too little against terrorists in his own neighborhood. “It’s not enough to torture these people in some bunker,” he says. “They should be strung up on the open street, the way Saddam used to do it. They should put the fear of death into these people.”

According to an American study just released, Iraq sees more than a hundred attacks a day — twice as many as last year. Forty-six major bomb attacks, each claiming several lives, were committed in September, making it the deadliest month since the beginning of the Iraq war. About 400 people died in November 2005, more than four times as many as in November 2004.

Criminal statistics in Iraq no longer distinguish between politically motivated killings and conventional murder — and no one even bothers to count the numbers of thefts, blackmailings, muggings and kidnappings. The abyss of violence seems bottomless, and the victims are almost always Iraqi citizens. “There are currently 48 Iraqi victims for each American death,” says Kamran Karadaghi, the chief of staff of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

Despite the buzz of commerce in some parts of the country, like the northern Kurdish region, Iraq today is anything but the model democratic state the Americans promised and the Iraqis had hoped for after the fall of Saddam.

Instead, today’s Iraq is the scene of daily horrors. Anyone who spends time standing in front of a police station or near a public institution, a hospital, for example, runs the constant risk of being killed by a suicide bomber. Most attacks are committed by Sunnis, and most acts of revenge by Shiites. The motive of revenge is a tremendous recruitment tool for all terrorist groups in the country — revenge for the destruction of a house, revenge for having to lie in the dust for hours in front of the occupiers, revenge for the death of a friend or relative.

The situation is so bad that some officials in Washington have found it necessary to pay for positive coverage by the Iraqi press. A Pentagon propaganda unit has reportedly made million-dollar contracts with American P.R. firms hired to place pro-American articles in Baghdad newspapers. The questionable approach toward press freedom even has many in the U.S. Department of Defense concerned.

According to Ayad Allawi, a former Iraqi prime minister and considered a leading candidate for the office again in the upcoming Dec. 15 election, there has not even been any progress when it comes to human rights. “They are doing the same things we saw in the Saddam days and even worse,” he complained about the new government authorities in a recent interview with Britain’s weekly Observer.

The kidnapping business is an especially dark facet of violence happening daily. Although abduction for ransom money began in Iraq in the first few days following the invasion, it was hardly noticed because the group most heavily affected was small and shrinking every day — wealthy Iraqis who had not managed to get out of the country in time.

One of them, textile merchant Yassin al-Rubai, 49, comes from the Jihad neighborhood. After much soul-searching, Rubai finally decided to sell his business and move with his family to Egypt. He had expected the drive to the Rafidain Bank in the Mansur neighborhood to be one of his last drives in Baghdad before selling his old BMW. But he was wrong.

A few hundred meters from his house, a red Toyota pulled in front of Rubai, blocking his way. Three men got out, calmly pulled him from his car and threw him into his trunk. “Empty your pockets,” said one of the men, holding a pistol to his head as he lay in the trunk. “You won’t be leaving here before you pay us a lot of money.” Rubai gave the men the $11,000 he had just withdrawn from the bank, and then they shut the trunk and began driving away in the BMW.

Rubai knew that his car’s trunk lock was broken and he was able to open the trunk and jump out. Despite breaking one of his legs and his shoulder, he barely noticed the pain and hobbled from the scene as quickly as he was able, likely saving his life in the process.

He now knows that the men had been spying on him for weeks. Ever since the attempted kidnapping, he has been living with relatives in Sadr City, a Shiite slum on the other side of Baghdad. His leg cast has been removed, but he has already had four surgeries to repair his shoulder. Rubai and his wife have taken their children out of school, fearful that they could be harmed en route. Rubai’s wife spends most of her day sitting apathetically at the kitchen table, sometimes weeping. But the family can no longer afford to flee to Egypt.

As the wealthiest Iraqis have left the country, ransom payments have come down but the number of kidnappings has not. “Ten to 15 kidnapping cases are reported to us each day in Baghdad alone,” says police colonel and Interior Ministry official Adnan al-Hajali. On some days that number is twice as high and Hajali doesn’t even venture to speculate over how many cases go unreported, adding that countrywide statistics are being compiled.

The Interior Ministry has established a department dedicated to tackling the kidnapping epidemic, but few believe it can solve the problem, especially now that its agents’ propensity for torture has been exposed. Even Iraqi police officers have little regard for the new department. “That would be the last place I would go if someone in my family had been kidnapped,” says one police officer. His comment reflects the widespread suspicion that Interior Ministry officials have their own fingers in the pot when it comes to the flourishing trade in human lives.

About half of the abduction cases Hajali lists took place in the relatively affluent western section of the city, especially in the Jihad and Amiriya neighborhoods. The typical victims are Iraqi employees of Western firms — interpreters and employees of the U.S. military, politicians, police officers and security officers. Even children have become targets, reflecting a general decline in moral thresholds.

Saad Jamil is 10 years old and was a pupil at the Ibn al-Heitham elementary school in Adhamiya. In early November, a group of masked men abducted him while he was waiting for a school bus and took him to a warehouse in the Sheikh Omar neighborhood, where they were also holding other children. When the kidnappers called his father, an engineer, and demanded a $100,000 ransom, he barely managed to stammer a sentence, one for which he is ashamed today: “Then kill the boy. I don’t have that much money.” His son was released in mid-November — for a tenth of the original ransom demand.

Over the millennia, violence has always played a major role in what is now Iraq. But kidnapping is a new and increasingly popular weapon, next to more pedestrian crimes, in the growing conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. Nowadays, whenever a prominent Sunni or Shiite disappears, retaliation increasingly comes in the form of another kidnapping. The hostages in these retaliatory abductions are not always exchanged, nor do they always survive.

Iraq’s booming abduction business only entered the global consciousness in April 2004, when a foreign hostage fell into the hands of terrorists for the first time. Whereas Iraqis are kidnapped almost exclusively for monetary gain, the kidnappings of foreigners are often tied to political demands, at least initially. But despite the hundreds of abductions of non-Iraqis to date, it remains difficult to discern any consistent patterns of behavior. Kidnappers are becoming as inscrutable as the terrorist milieu itself.

But almost all cases have one thing in common. Whether the kidnappers are gangs of thugs driven by money or supposedly politically motivated groups affiliated with Iraqi al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, none of them hesitate to kill, especially when their hostages are American or British.

As if to convey the message that they must be severely dealt with as punishment for their countries’ invasion of Iraq, American or British hostages are not only humiliated, but their deaths seem to be a foregone conclusion from the moment they are abducted. Especially when they fall into the hands of terrorists like Zarqawi. This only heightens the sense of horror Americans feel when they see images of terrified U.S. citizens captured by terrorists, citizens like 21-year-old U.S. soldier Matthew Keith Maupin. He was abducted on April 9, 2004, in an attack on his convoy and then paraded before the world as a helpless hostage on a video taken by his captors. Since then the fate of Pvt. Maupin is unknown, at least officially, although a poor-quality video released weeks after his abduction appears to show his execution.

The more professional video images of British hostage Kenneth Bigley, 62, are quite the opposite. They reveal a perfidious effort by the terrorists to dramatize the kidnapping and its aftermath. A group affiliated with Zarqawi kidnapped Bigley, an engineer, together with U.S. citizens Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong, in September 2004. In an apparent allusion to the al-Qaida detainees in the U.S. camp at Guantánamo Bay, the men, all involved in the Iraqi development effort, were forced to wear orange prisoners’ jumpsuits. The murder of Bigley, whose throat was slit on live video after he had been held for three weeks, remains one of the most gruesome acts recorded during the Iraqi conflict to date.

The relatives of German hostage Susanne Osthoff hope that her close personal ties with Iraq could save her life, but they may not have reason to be too optimistic. Polish hostage Teresa Borcz Khalifa, abducted in October 2004 by a group calling itself the Abu Bakr al-Siddiq Fundamentalist Brigades, probably owes her life to the fact that she had been living in Iraq for 30 years and was married to an Iraqi. After all, the Polish government refused to comply with the terrorists’ demands that it withdraw all Polish troops from Iraq. But the 59-year-old British citizen Margaret Hassan’s relatively strong ties to Iraq did not help her. Her kidnappers were not even impressed by the fact that Hassan, head of Baghdad operations of the British aid organization CARE International, was widely respected in the country for her work on behalf of Iraqis.

“Please help me. Please help me,” stammered Hassan in a video released by her captors. Hassan, who like Susanne Osthoff, was widely seen as a person who would prove resilient under pressure, wept and appealed to the government in London to withdraw British troops, but her efforts were in vain. She was shot on live video. British Prime Minister Tony Blair called the murder of the first female hostage in Iraq “abhorrent,” but he rejected the idea of giving in to the kidnappers’ demands, just as almost every other government affected by kidnappings has.

So far only one head of state, Philippine President Gloria Arroyo, has capitulated to kidnappers. When a group called the Khalid Ibn al-Walid brigade kidnapped Filipino truck driver Angelo de la Cruz, Arroyo came under intense domestic political pressures to meet the terrorists’ demands. She announced publicly in Manila that she would withdraw 51 Filipino soldiers and police officers from Iraq “a few days earlier” than planned. Her efforts paid off for de la Cruz, who was released.

But a government’s unwillingness to yield to kidnapper demands isn’t necessarily a death sentence for a hostage. For example, both France and Italy refused to give in to the terrorists and nevertheless managed to save the lives of hostages. After being held for 157 days, French reporter Florence Aubenas, 44, and her Iraqi driver Hussein Hanun were released unharmed, as was her Italian colleague Giuliana Sgrena, 57. In both cases, the respective governments used their intelligence connections and also did not hesitate to deal with shady middlemen.

The shocking death of Italian agent Nicola Calipari revealed the extent to which Italian intelligence pulled strings to gain the release of reporter Sgrena. The Italians had picked up the journalist from her kidnappers near Baghdad, but Calipari was accidentally shot by U.S. soldiers at a roadblock on the way to the airport. The events surrounding the incident remain a source of tension between Rome and Washington.

Although Sgrena still believes that her kidnappers were “very political,” they didn’t seem to mind that Rome refused to meet their demands, which included the withdrawal of Italy’s troops from Iraq. Sgrena’s release was allegedly brought about primarily by the delivery of up to 8 million euros in ransom money to middlemen in Abu Dhabi. But if Susanne Osthoff has fallen into the clutches of an al-Qaida group, even Sgrena believes that the chances of her release are slim. The former hostage believes that “one murder more or less makes no difference” to people like Zarqawi.

Terrorism expert Mustafa Alani from the Gulf Research Center in Dubai believes the Sunni fundamentalist Zarqawi usually doesn’t kidnap for money. “For al-Qaida, as well as for the larger groups of Iraqi insurgents, it’s the propaganda value of a hostage that’s so important — both to the Western public and to their own supporters,” says Alani, who is originally from the Iraqi city Fallujah.

Alani explains that Osthoff is a hostage of “little political value” for religiously and politically motivated groups, because a German isn’t a particularly attractive trophy for al-Qaida or the Iraqi nationalists. “Germans have no impact on the market in this segment of the kidnapping business,” he says.

Although the overwhelming majority of kidnappings and murders in Iraq are committed for criminal reasons, those crimes by both local insurgents and the religious fundamentalist terrorists will ultimately determine whether Iraq ends up slipping into the chaos of civil war. This is why it is so unsettling to see how little Iraqi officials, as well as American and British intelligence agencies, truly know about an insurgency that has been raging for two years and is increasing in intensity.

Part of this lack of knowledge arises from the fact the guerrilla movement in Iraq is not a homogeneous, national revolt. Comparisons between the Iraqi insurgency and other guerrilla wars in history are of little use. It has no Ho Chi Minh, Castro or Mao, at its helm and the specific political objectives for the daily attacks remain a mystery. The Washington-based SITE Institute, which monitors the activities of Iraqi insurgents on the basis of their publications on the Internet, counts more than 100 resistance and terrorist groups. This increasingly bewildering array of organizations has “no focal point, no leadership and no hierarchy,” says Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert with RAND in Washington. “It’s more of a constellation than an organization, and these groups have assumed a structure that guarantees them long-term survival.”

The supporters of former dictator Saddam Hussein have grouped themselves under names like “Flag of Iraq” and “Islamic Army in Iraq.” They liken their struggle to the anticolonial rebellion against the British in 1920. Their goal is to secure the influence of the Sunni minority, and they fear dominance by the Shiites and the Iranian mullahs with whom some Iraqi Shiite leaders have aligned themselves.

The Jordanian terrorist Zarqawi has both latched on to this insurgency and propelled it forward, and he is today considered al-Qaida’s point man in Iraq. His role model Osama bin Laden has dubbed the Iraq conflict the “decisive battle” in a third world war. Zarqawi is able to commit his bombings and murders with the help of a small army of foreign volunteers, religious fanatics who have found their way to Baghdad — and not just from the Arab world but increasingly from Islamic circles in the West. Indeed, there were likely more al-Qaida supporters in Brooklyn than in Baghdad before the war. It is a bitter irony indeed that the once very secular Iraq has become such a hotbed for the spread of jihadist fundamentalist ideology.

The remnants of that secular tradition are reflected in those Sunni groups who are just as attracted to Iraqi nationalism as to fighting non-Muslims. According to a study by the U.S. Army War College, the many-faceted Iraqi resistance movement is “more explosive than in Vietnam, a many-headed snake, incapable of unifying but difficult to kill.”

Statistics on the size of the terrorist organizations in Iraq are just as confusing. According to U.S. military estimates, their numbers range anywhere from 5,000 to 50,000 fighters, and they run the gamut from hotheads willing to fire a Kalashnikov or a grenade launcher for as little as $20 to highly specialized explosives experts with the skills to trigger Russian-made land mines with a mobile phone. Nowadays even children are apparently willing to die as suicide bombers. And in a recent suicide bombing near Baghdad, a Belgian woman who had converted to Islam before marrying a Moroccan became the first European woman to blow herself up for the insurgency.

To save their own skins, some Iraqis have even taken to selling the addresses of members of the new Iraqi security forces to terrorist death squads for a few dinars. The security situation has become so precarious that some Iraqi civil servants wear ski masks on their way to work.

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, is using generous political concessions to the Sunnis, thick bundles of cash for the Sunni clans, and offers of amnesty for Saddam’s officers in an effort to thin the ranks of the insurgents. His tactics are a reflection of Washington’s aim to divide the rebels. “My philosophy is that we must isolate Zarqawi and those who want to see Saddam back in power from the rest of the country,” Khalilzad says. Officials are already considering issuing a wide-reaching amnesty for any insurgents that do not fall within either of those two categories.

But so far these efforts have not led to a return to normality. The one goal that unites the various insurgent groups is still too tempting: handing a devastating defeat to the American occupiers. Indeed, some Sunni nationalists claim that this is the only reason they have been willing to align themselves with Zarqawi. “Once the Americans are gone, we will fight the jihadists,” promises Abu Kaka al-Tamimi, a former officer in Saddam’s elite Republican Guard who now trains suicide bombers. The holy war against the infidels and the promise of a place of honor in paradise holds little allure for him and others who apparently would be perfectly happy with a decent life in this world.

The American strategy of isolating Zarqawi’s core group of Islamists could still work, says terrorism expert Alani. The group of Iraqi nationalist fighters is increasingly distancing itself from Zarqawi’s cohorts, because they disagree with the goals of the ally of bin Laden. According to Alani, “Zarqawi wants to start an Islamist global revolution on Iraqi soil. The fate of Iraq means nothing to him.”

But the United States’ divide-and-conquer strategy also has its risks. “The leaders of the nationalist groups are concerned that more and more angry young Iraqis are joining Zarqawi’s group,” says Alani. “They see the leaders of the nationalist resistance as too weak and too willing to compromise.” According to Alani, these young recruits are attracted to Zarqawi out of a conviction that “no one can punish our enemies more effectively” than he does.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II has also commented on this fundamental shift in the Iraqi insurgency. Although Zarqawi ordered the series of attacks on three luxury hotels in the Jordanian capital Amman on Nov. 9, they were carried out by four Iraqis — as was confirmed by a woman from Ramadi, the only surviving attacker.

King Abdullah said that he believes that the al-Qaida terrorist network in Iraq, which previously consisted almost exclusively of non-Iraqi Arabs, is increasingly attracting locals. More and more Iraqis are being discovered among the ranks of killed or arrested jihadists, says Abdullah, and at some point this will also apply to the al-Qaida leadership in Iraq. “If Zarqawi is eliminated one of these days, he won’t be replaced by a foreigner,” the king believes. “It will be an Iraqi.”

Washington’s attempts to reduce the number of attacks, control crime and ultimately make the country a safer place have another significant defect: They have met with resistance within the Shiite-dominated government. Muafaq al-Rubai, national security advisor to the government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, believes that U.S. concessions will only encourage the insurgents to keep up their attacks, threatening to plunge Iraq into a decades-long conflict. Influential Shiite cleric Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has even asked the U.S. to give Iraqi troops free rein to stage tough counterattacks on the insurgency.

If the Shiites are in fact given carte blanche to fight the insurgents, it would likely remove one of the last remaining obstacles to civil war in Iraq. The country would then descend into years of the kind of carnage that once consumed Lebanon, bloodshed on a much greater scale than the attacks, kidnappings and general increase in lawlessness seen today.

Translated from German by Christopher Sultan

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This article has been provided by Der Spiegel through a special arrangement with Salon. For more from Europe’s most-read newsmagazine, please visit Spiegel Online at http://www.spiegel.de/international or subscribe to the daily newsletter.

The Department of Homeland Security considers Ramadan to be a radical, and when Notre Dame University in Indiana offered to hire him as a professor of religion and conflict studies, the Bush administration refused to provide Ramadan with a visa to enter the country.

In contrast, Britain’s government recently asked Ramadan to join a panel of experts to advise the government on how to deal with radical Islamists. Currently, he is a guest lecturer at St. Anthony’s College in Oxford.

Ramadan comes from a family well familiar with political philosophy, activism and conflict: His grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, became a co-founder of Egypt’s Society of Muslim Brothers in 1928, and was assassinated in 1949 for his religious agitation. In a recent interview, Ramadan talked about the rioting that has rocked the French suburbs, the deep-rooted problems with the integration of Muslims in Europe, and the need for modernization of Islam.

You are one of the most influential and one of the most controversial Muslim intellectuals in Europe. Where were you when the French riots broke out?

My Paris office is in one of those banlieues, Saint-Denis, one of the focal points of the unrest. But I must admit that I had no inclination whatsoever to expose myself to rocks and burning projectiles on the street at night.

That sounds a bit indifferent. Many Muslims pay attention to what you say — they listen to your taped lectures and read your writings. Don’t you feel compelled to make an attempt to convince these youths to turn away from violence?

Listen, my position is perfectly clear. There is no doubt that violence is not a solution and that the destruction of buses and cars must end. These crimes must be punished. There is also no doubt that a certain number of youths are descending into pure vandalism and uncontrolled anarchy. Naturally, reestablishing order is of critical importance, especially for the residents of the suburbs, who are bearing the brunt of the violence.

So you truly have no sympathy for the rioters?

Of course I do. But feeling sympathy and searching for explanations isn’t the same as believing that the violence is justified. I am firmly convinced that the government’s efforts to suppress the riots are inadequate, and that they will remain ineffective until we understand the message behind this outbreak.

And how do you interpret this message?

This revolt has nothing to do with Islam. Islam, as a religion, has been established in France for a long time, and the religious question has been resolved in this country. Islam does not threaten France’s future in any way. But it is the social question that poses a true danger to the unity of the republic. Politicians across the political spectrum have underestimated this reality. They stick their heads in the sand and mislead their constituents by attempting to denounce Islam as the source of the problem.

No one disputes the magnitude of social rifts in French society. But it just so happens that these divides run along ethnic and religious lines. Hasn’t Islam promoted or even encouraged the formation of social ghettos, the isolation of ethnic communities?

The concepts of unity and equality, which are idealized to the point of excess in France’s political rhetoric, are nothing but myths and blatant lies at the social level. The main purpose of the public debates over Islam, integration and immigration is to stir up fear. In a sense, politicians use these debates as ideological strategies, as a way to avoid confronting reality.

What are they attempting to distract from?

The truth is that certain French citizens are treated as second-class citizens, if not the leprous members of the national community. Their children are sent to ghetto schools and taught by inexperienced teachers, they are crammed into inhumane public housing developments, and they are confronted with an essentially closed job market. In short, they live in a bleak, devastated universe. France is disintegrating before our eyes into socioeconomic communities, into territorial and social apartheid. The rich live in their own ghettos. Institutionalized racism is a daily reality.

Isn’t Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy aware of this when he calls for targeted assistance for the poor, for dialogue with the Muslims and for relaxing France’s rigorous secularism?

Sarkozy is acutely aware of the potential for votes in the suburbs. In crises such as the current one, he shows his true face: contempt and rudeness. If he views entire sections of the population as “riffraff,” he shouldn’t be surprised if that’s the way they end up behaving. He is giving the police free rein in a climate characterized by lack of respect. He is fixated on the 2007 presidential election instead of developing a workable political structure for 2020. Changes will only take place in this country when the residents of the suburbs are treated as fully entitled Frenchmen, as part of the solution, not an expression of the problem.

That’s all very well and good — but doesn’t self-criticism have a place alongside criticism? Are Muslim immigrants truly interested in integration, or do they prefer segregation?

The attempt to Islamicize social issues perverts and falsifies political discourse. The overwhelming majority of Muslims in Europe value the fact that they live in democratic, constitutional states, states that guarantee them freedom of conscience and religion. But mutual trust is often shattered, and the result is that fear and racism are deeply affecting France, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Germany. By the time they have reached the second, third or fourth generation, the descendants of immigrants should no longer be stigmatized as ghetto children, as “scum” who are “out of control.”

Nevertheless, what makes the integration of Muslims so difficult, compared with earlier immigrants from Poland, Italy, Spain and Portugal?

Two things, I believe. First, this immigration no longer occurs in individual waves; instead, it is a large-scale and continuous immigration. That’s the problem of quantity. And then there is the issue of quality. For Muslim immigrants, religion is inseparable from their roots and identity. They feel that transforming themselves from Moroccans or Algerians into Frenchmen makes them bad Muslims. This makes integration more difficult because it apparently forces Muslims to choose between two alternatives: self-abandonment or self-isolation.

But hasn’t Islam remained a foreign religion in the Western world, a religion that has yet to enter the modern age?

There are traditionalists, adherents to a literal exegesis of the Koran. I have spent the last 15 years campaigning for a genuinely European Islam, one that requires evolution with respect to time and the environment, as well as a separation of dogmatism and rationality. Islam cannot place itself outside of history.

And where is the boundary between dogma and reason, between being faithful to tradition and being receptive to the modern age?

The dogmatic and, therefore, invulnerable core in Islam is understandably simple: acknowledgement of faith, prayer, charity and fasting. Almost everything else is open to interpretation and modification in space and time.

It does indeed sound clear and simple. Why don’t we put it to the test with an example: Is a Muslim permitted to break with his faith?

Not according to the majority opinion among Koran scholars. But the prohibition on apostasy arose at a time when the first Muslim followers of the prophet Mohammed were at war with neighboring tribes. At the time, changing one’s faith was tantamount to high treason or desertion. Nowadays this context has changed completely.

In other words, the fight against “infidels” is completely outmoded?

Even the concept of the infidel is misleading, because the infidel is normally someone with a different faith, someone who refuses to recognize the truth of the words of the Koran, as revealed by God. He has every right to do so, as long as he does not question my right to believe in my truth.

So each individual must become blessed in his own way? What about atheists?

The logic of freedom of religion implies freedom to be an atheist, even though, from a historical perspective, this has not been accepted in the Muslim world…

…and often leads to brutal punishment. How do you feel about equal rights for men and women?

We need an Islamic feminism. Traditional Islam views the women merely as mother, wife, daughter or sister. She has obligations and rights in this capacity. But we must come to a point at which we treat the women as an independent individual with a right to self-determination, as someone who can run her own life without coercion.

Should she be permitted to decide for herself whether to stop wearing the head scarf?

Of course, just as she is permitted to decide whether to wear the head scarf.

But that’s an illusion, at least in the real world. Women and girls are not emancipated within their families.

You’re right. This is often the case, but emancipation can only come from within; it cannot be dictated by someone else. A law banning the wearing of head scarves changes nothing, except perhaps external appearance. Naturally, Islamic feminism must also include the right to education, to work and the freedom to select one’s own husband.

That’s all fine and good, but can you explain, then, why you have publicly called for a moratorium on the stoning of women accused of committing adultery — rather than condemning the practice outright? Some would argue that’s hypocritical.

Once again, Islam can only be modernized from within. If I stand there and state that I condemn the practice of stoning, that this punishment is despicable, it changes nothing. My fellow Muslims will say: Brother Tariq, you became a European, a Swiss citizen, so you are no longer one of us. I want to trigger a process of contemplation and thought within the Islamic community. Critiques and attacks from the outside can produce tension. Incidentally, a number of U.S. states have imposed a moratorium on the death penalty, in an effort to buy time to think about the meaning and legitimacy of this penalty.

Is a tendency toward violence inherent to Islam? Isn’t it true that many Muslims view jihad as an elementary part of Islamic identity?

Are the Crusades an elementary part of Christianity? No. Every community has the right to self-defense. The Palestinians have the right to fight for their independence from Israel. But this goal does not justify all means. Nothing legitimizes the killing of innocent civilians. The suicide bomber who blows up Israeli children cannot transform himself into a martyr. The Palestinian problem is not an Islamic problem.

Where do you see the process of reform and modernization of Islam, of which you have been a proponent? Has it made any progress anywhere?

In Europe. The impetus must come from European Islam and then influence the Arab world. There is some overlap between the universal values of Western democracy and those of Islam — the constitutional state operating under the rule of law, the equality of citizens, universal suffrage, the changeover of power, separation of the private and public spheres. These are basic principles, and although they are not spelled out in the Koran, I do not believe that they contradict Islamic tradition.

That is an opinion that many Muslim legal scholars do not share.

An excessively literal interpretation of the Koran ever since the 13th century has led Islam into intellectual calcification and political tension. Remaining faithful to the texts must be distinguished from interpretation of historical and social context. If we begin applying this exegesis and hermeneutics, we will begin to see progress in Islam thought.

Your words are like those of a rationalist, an enlightened theologian with purely intellectual ambitions. But in political reality, in France, Great Britain and the United States, you are suspected of secretly promoting the expansion of Islam and sympathizing with violence.

Oh yes, I am one of the most maligned Muslim intellectuals. Tariq Ramadan, the slippery trickster. They talk about people like me the way they used to talk about the Jews: He is Swiss and European, but his loyalties also lie elsewhere. He says one thing and thinks something else. He is a member of an international organization — in the past, it was world Jewry, today it’s world Islam. I am disparaged as if I were a Muslim Jew.

Could that have something to do with your family history? Your grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, was the founder of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, an organization that envisioned an Islamic fundamentalist transformation.

Thoughts are not genetically inherited traits. I admire my grandfather for his anti-colonial fight against the British. He was very involved in education for girls and women. His five daughters — my aunts and my mother — all attended university. And the organization he founded was very progressive for its time. However, I am highly critical of the Brotherhood, with its affected, conspiratorial behavior, its hierarchical structures and its oversimplified slogans.

Were you ever a member of the Brotherhood?

I can assure you that I am no Muslim Brother, despite the fact that my critics have repeatedly launched this rumor in an effort to slander and harm me.

Do you ever think about forming your own party, organization or movement?

No. I am not a politician. I have often been approached in this regard in the past 15 years, but I have always declined these sorts of offers. I view myself as an independent, critical intellectual, as someone who tries to stimulate thought on the left and the right, to encourage intellectual evolution. The Islamic world is obsessed with the notion of strong leaders. This is a mistake. We don’t need powerful leaders, but rather unconventional, progressive thinkers with the courage to open our minds.

Translated from German by Christopher Sultan.

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This article has been provided by Der Spiegel through a special arrangement with Salon. For more from Europe’s most-read newsmagazine, please visit Spiegel Online at http://www.spiegel.de/international or subscribe to the daily newsletter.