Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

by Tony Horwitz

  “Libya’s voice is heard by three hundred million blacks living in America!” he went on, continuing his reading from JANA. “Eighty million Red Indians hear our voice! Pariahs everywhere hear our voice!”

  “Abdullah,” I interrupted, “there are about thirty-five million blacks in America and maybe a million Indians. No more. I swear it.”

  He paused for a moment, letting the statement sink in. “This is possible,” he said, “because you have killed all the rest.”

  * * *

  Not all Libyans were quite so committed. In fact, many among the several thousand demonstrators who greeted us near Rabta appeared to have arrived on buses an hour before. Bored and cold, they mustered a desultory “Down! Down! U.S.A.!” as soon as the TV cameras turned their way, then went quiet the instant the cameras shut off. It was the sort of gathering known in the trade as “rent-a-crowd.”

  While the cameras rolled, I tried to lose myself in the mob and meander off for a closer look at the plant looming a mile or so up the road. I had made it two hundred yards when Abdullah appeared, anxious and out of breath.

  “Please!” he yelled, tugging at my elbow. “Back to the bus!”

  “But I just want to chat with some people.”

  “This is not in the program,” he said.

  Back on the bus, we drove straight toward the gate of what looked like a huge industrial park. A few feet short of the gate, the bus swerved left and parked beside a low building where yet another stage-managed rally was in progress, this time involving a crowd of young boys shaking their fists and shouting, in Arabic, “Fuck America! Fuck Reagan!”

  The day was now almost gone and in another ten minutes it would be too dark to take photographs. Ignoring the demonstrators, the TV crews rushed toward the fence abutting the industrial park and began assembling their tripods and lights. Photographers and journalists followed. Hundreds of eyes and camera lenses were quickly trained on a horizontal building several hundred yards away, the closest of perhaps a dozen structures in the factory complex. The building was windowless and gray, resembling an enormous warehouse or airport hangar, and ringed with construction cranes. In the waning light, it was impossible to tell anything more about the place.

  Floodlights and microphones went on and the network reporters, jostling for position, prepared for their unrehearsed stand-ups. Three, two, one . . .

  “The factory here behind me in the Libyan desert . . .”

  “A controversial plant that the U.S. alleges . . .”

  “Chemical weapons that could be used against Israel . . .”

  Cameras rolled, shutters clicked, pens scrawled. In a few hours this sprawling gray structure would flash onto television screens across America, and onto the front pages of dozens of newspapers, described in sinister tones as possibly the largest poison-gas plant in the world.

  I spotted Abdullah standing to one side of the pack, taking it all in with a sour expression. The American media, perpetrating another Zionist-Imperialist-Reactionary Plot.

  “The pharmaceuticals plant,” I asked him, pointing at the gray building, “so this is it?”

  He shrugged and said, “As you wish.”

  * * *

  We were given a few more minutes before the handlers herded us through the crowd of juvenile demonstrators and into a cafeteria, apparently designed for workers at the plant. Pepsi, doughnuts and tangerines had been laid out for our benefit. I had been on enough official tours to know that food was a bad sign, indicating that the program was headed for maximum stall.

  Sure enough, a man stood up at the front clutching a twenty-page statement and wearing a glazed expression. His words, tedious enough to begin with, were translated from Arabic to English and then to French, to waste as much time as possible.

  “We welcome you to the peaceful village of Rabta,” he said tonelessly, studying his notes. “We welcome you as pharmaceutical personnel and as administrators of the new medical facility.”

  “Who is this clown?”

  “We welcome you to this peaceful village,” he droned on, ignoring the jeers, “that has been under threat from American arrogance. Arabs have always been leaders in medicine and pharmacology—”

  “Bloody hell. Give me some aspirin!”

  “—and this plant is another achievement for the realization of the future of Arab children. Libya, that bastion of peace and guidance, and The Green Book, the final solution for human justice—”

  “Phil, give me a reporters-in-the-cafeteria shot.”

  “—as stated by the Leader of the El Fatah Revolution, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi.”

  The speech lasted forty minutes, by which time the cafeteria looked worse than the El-Kabir lobby after Qaddafi’s surprise appearance: cigarettes stubbed in doughnuts, tangerine peels carpeting the floor, reporters slumped across tables, snoring. The director of the peaceful people’s pharmaceutical plant at Rabta folded up his notes and melted away, failing to answer a single question.

  “And now,” Abdullah said, “we go to see the plant.”

  Outside, the sky was black and the bus windows were already fogging up from the cold. We drove through the gate of the plant, or what looked like the gate of the plant; it was impossible to tell. Factory buildings loomed on either side. Factory buildings, or maybe parking garages, I couldn’t be sure. At one point, the buses paused before a large, well-lit tent. Through the open flap we glimpsed a dense crowd of men waving fists and chanting. It seemed that this was the next stop on our program, but after a brief consultation among the handlers the buses kept rolling through the night.

  I asked Abdullah where we were going.

  “We go now to sub-branch of plant.”

  We drove for another ten minutes. Abdullah corrected himself. “We go now to old Rabta, then to see plant.” After another ten minutes he updated our plans yet again. “I think maybe there is change in the program.”

  Ten minutes later, as we turned on to what felt like the smooth asphalt of a major highway, Abdullah announced, “We go back to Tripoli. There is no point in visiting the plant in the dark.”

  The pack was too weary and too inured to Libyan stunts to muster much indignation. Still, the chutzpah of our handlers was impressive. In most Arab countries, if a government wants to conceal something, it simply keeps journalists out, or smothers them in silence. Faced with the same situation, the Libyans opted for the Big Lie—pharmaceuticals, not poison gas—and the Big Con—a two-day bus ride to nowhere. Adding insult to injury, JANA would no doubt use our nonvisit as fodder for another bonfire of lies.

  TEN THOUSAND JOURNALISTS VISIT PEACEFUL VILLAGE OF RABTA!

  REAFFIRM THAT THE ABOVE PLANT IS A MEDICINES FACTORY!

  MASSES MOBILIZE AGAINST AMERICAN ARROGANCE AND FABRICATIONS!

  Domestically, the charade at Rabta would no doubt bolster the regime. But for an international audience, the phony tour was calamitous. By the time we’d reached the hotel, the pack had penned a hundred variations on the same theme; namely, that the Libyans had hurt their own case by producing nothing but fibs and evasions. The only “fact” gleaned from the entire program was the sight of radar and surface-to-air missiles at Rabta, hardly the sort of scenery surrounding the average medicine factory. It wouldn’t take much reading between the lines for the Western public to surmise that Libya was guilty as charged.

  But the Libyans had one last trick up their sleeves. The pack had just begun tapping telexes and shouting down crackly telephone lines when all communications in the hotel went dead. Then an announcement came over the loudspeaker. “All journalists are kindly requested to bring their bags to the buses by ten p.m.”

  “My friend,” an English journalist explained, “you’ve just been PNG’ed from Libya.” PNG is journalese for “persona non grata,” a polite way of saying we were kicked out of the country. The Englishman shook his head. “I haven’t filed a bloody word. And my
smalls are still at the laundry.”

  The hotel staff had a surprise of its own. Though we’d paid for a week’s accommodation, in dollars, and thus far spent only forty-eight hours in the hotel, the desk announced that we’d be refunded for only four nights, in Libyan dinars. The Libyan dinar is perhaps the world’s most worthless currency, even in Libya. We’d been lied to, sent on a two-day wild-goose chase, kicked out of the country—and now fleeced as well. Perhaps this is why we’d been allowed in to start with, to inject some hard currency into the Libyan economy.

  As a long line of journalists protested over their bills, I wandered over to Abdullah to get one last comment from Libyan officialdom.

  “Why are we being expelled?”

  “Expelled? No one is being expelled.” He looked genuinely hurt. “Mr. Tony, the program is over.”

  * * *

  True to form, the buses didn’t appear for another ten hours. The various People’s Committees responsible for the foreign press weren’t well coordinated. Either that or they wanted more dollars. Whatever the reason, and there probably wasn’t one, the pack was granted an overnight reprieve, which gave reporters time to haggle over their bills, recover underwear from the laundry and make restaurant reservations in Rome.

  Although there was only one scheduled flight to Rome, on Alitalia, we were assured at El-Kabir that there would be flights waiting at the airport, “to take you anywhere.” This was true, after a fashion: there were the usually scheduled and half-empty flights to Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Bangladesh and other nations friendly to the Socialist People’s Great Arab Jamahiriya. But like the buses, the promised planes to Europe never appeared. And a Libyan Air ticket was about as convertible as a Libyan dinar; Alitalia didn’t want to touch it.

  I was standing in a long line, hoping to convince Alitalia to change its mind, when I felt something brush against my hip. As I turned around, a young man sprinted off through the terminal. The airport was crowded, and I caught him in a clumsy tackle near the door. My wallet was still in his hand.

  Wrestling on the floor of a Middle East airport is a quick way to attract attention. I looked up to find myself surrounded by submachine guns. The soldiers escorted us to a small room, bare except for a portrait of Qaddafi. Then an official appeared whom I recognized as one of the handlers who had shepherded the pack for the past two days. I explained what had happened. The pickpocket said nothing. Then two soldiers grasped him by each elbow and he began screaming at the top of his lungs. He was thin and sallow-faced; his cheeks were covered in tears and his eyes seemed to bug out of his head. Then he disappeared into an adjoining room, and the official offered me a cup of tea.

  “Really, it’s no big deal,” I said, regretting that I hadn’t let the young man run out of the airport. After all, the hotel had robbed me almost clean already. “I just want to get on the plane.”

  One of the guards returned with the pickpocket’s passport. “You see, this man is Algerian, not Libyan,” the official said, showing me the document. “This does not happen in Libya.” There were loud thuds from the adjoining room. Then screams.

  “This does not happen in Libya,” the official said again.

  “Fine. I believe you. Now please, let’s just forget the whole thing. I don’t want anyone hurt on my account.”

  The official took me by the arm and opened the door to the other room. The Algerian was curled on the floor, clutching his head and weeping. One of the guards kicked him in the gut. “You see,” the official said, pulling the door shut, “we do not allow such things to happen in Libya.”

  For two days, I’d regarded Libya as a cartoonish regime, hardly deserving the demon status it had assumed in American imagination. But this small instance of brutality made all its other supposed crimes a little more believable.

  “What flight are you on?” the official asked. He didn’t want me hanging around. I showed him my Libya Air ticket and explained that the only flight to Rome was on Alitalia. He took me by the arm again, led me to the front of the line at Alitalia and talked briefly with the man behind the counter.

  “There was a mistake, but it has been corrected,” the official said, handing me two boarding passes. He hustled Geraldine and me past a hundred other journalists and straight through security and immigration.

  “Remember, this does not happen in Libya,” he said one last time, then added with a half-smile, “And please, tell all journalists, come to Tripoli again.”

  11

  KHARTOUM

  This Is the Way the World Ends

  When Allah made the Sudan, Allah laughed.

  —Sudanese Proverb

  The man behind the desk at the Sahara Hotel stared at me in disbelief.

  “You want to what?” he asked.

  “Walk. You know, stretch my legs.”

  “Where?”

  “Outside.”

  “But why?”

  “To see Khartoum.”

  “There is nothing to see. And it is dark.”

  There was nothing to see inside, either. The power had blacked out soon after my arrival, and the hotel’s only other guest, a Welsh water engineer, sat in the lobby reading a month-old London Times by candlelight. When I persisted, the man behind the desk gave in with an exasperated shrug. “If the power returns, I will give you our kerosene lamp so you will not fall in the holes,” he said.

  The Welshman laughed. “Give ’im a bloody blowtorch. That way he can keep the beggars away, too.”

  An hour later, the power was still down, so I ventured into the dark with the Welshman’s cigarette lighter instead. A leper squatted on a scrap of cardboard blocking the hotel’s door. As I stepped over him, he reached out and grasped my thigh.

  “Floos,” he said, offering the Arabic word for money. He tilted his head toward the dimly lit door so I could see his face. His eyes were covered by a milky film and his nose was a shrunken button. I clinked a coin in his metal cup and stepped into the street. He rattled the cup, and small boys enveloped me in the dark, shouting “Floos! Floos!” Their black skin was masked by fine white dust, like eerie trick-or-treaters. “Floos! Floos! Floos!” I scattered more coins and hurried off into the gloom.

  The night was so black that I paused every few paces to flick on the lighter and peer ahead. The street, which adjoined Khartoum’s central square, was edged with heaps of flyblown rubbish, or bundled beggars, it was hard to tell which. A few people still stirred in the night, rearranging meager blankets of newspaper and sackcloth. An old woman crouched to defecate by the curb. Each time I flicked the Bic, a soldier would approach from a doorway or sentry box to ask for a cigarette. Coup attempts were common in Khartoum, and I wondered how the soldiers distinguished enemy from friend in the dark.

  I was retracing my route to the Sahara Hotel when a figure stepped forward, announcing himself with the flicker of a match. He had coal-black skin and a wide, toothless grin.

  “Is you English man?” he asked. I nodded. He held up a large sack tied at one end with black cord. “I am Ali. Everything you want, I have.” He looked suggestively at the bag. “Gin, beer, bongo.”

  “Bongo?”

  “Is Sudanese hashish.” He lit another match and prodded the sack. It twitched. “Also I have python skin,” he said. “Life or dead. Your choose.”

  The match died and I ran ten paces down the street before tripping over something in the road. I flicked the lighter. It was a downed power line, strung a foot or so above the ground. Just beyond it was one of the holes the hotelkeeper had warned about, deep enough to swallow a bicyclist.

  A hand reached out and helped me to my feet. It was Ali again, rattling his bag of gin, weed and reptile skin. “Python, life or dead,” he said. “Your choose.”

  * * *

  I had come to Khartoum on impulse, with only the sketchiest of story ideas. For the free-lancer, Sudan offered distinct advantages. The local currency had tumbled six h
undred percent in the previous year, making Sudan the cheapest country in the Arab world. And it remained relatively unexplored: one of those blighted spots only visited by aid workers, nuns, natural disasters and representatives of the International Monetary Fund.

  “You can’t believe Khartoum is a capital,” said John Kifner, a New York Times correspondent and one of the few reporters in Cairo who’d actually visited the place. “I mean, the place is total dreck. Literally. The streets are paved with shit.”

  American diplomats in Khartoum received a twenty-five percent pay boost, as a hardship bonus. Even Egyptians regarded their southern neighbor with distaste. Sudan was filthy and poor, they observed without irony, and the Sudanese were lazy. This from a country where a government survey once concluded that the average Egyptian worked twenty-six minutes a day. A country that made Cairo look industrious and orderly by comparison was something I had to see for myself.

  On the plane from Cairo, I riffled through official literature whose vagueness rivaled the qat-addled prose of Yemen. The name Khartoum was derived from an Arabic word meaning “elephant’s tusk” or “sunflower seed,” though the reason for either moniker wasn’t explained. According to the Sudan Tourism Guide, “Currency exchange rates are, from time to time, announced by the Bank of Sudan.” Taxi rates were set “according to an official tariff announced from time to time.” From time to time, a new government also announced itself, usually over the radio waves, at odd hours, with an accompanying score of gunfire. Civil war raged in the south, as it had, from time to time, for twenty-one years. “Yet the people,” the tourism guide assured me, “are peace-loving and friendly.”

  Upon landing in Khartoum, it seemed miraculous that anything got done from time to time, or at all. The city was paralyzed; first by temperatures that crossed 100 degrees a few hours after sunrise, and then by choking dust storms, called haboobs, which gusted in from the desert, mingling sand with what was already an airborne compost heap of grit, shit, rotted fruit, rotted flesh, sweat and bongo breath. Traffic jams began at dawn as cars queued for scarce gas rations. They continued through the morning as commuters crawled toward the city center along three- and four-lane avenues reduced to one-lane ducts by craters, broken stoplights and drooping power lines. By the time most travelers reached downtown, the brief workday was almost done. Then the traffic fanned out of the city again, until three in the afternoon, at which point the city went completely dead, stricken by heat that was now beyond the endurance of even the ever-patient Sudanese. Then night fell, the power failed, and another day in Khartoum ended, exactly like the one before.