While Bin Laden was lionized by the young men around us, the star of each show was the brash, in-our-face (and also happily defunct) Al Zarqawi, a Jordanian who was the former leader of the Iraqi franchise of Al Qaeda. Al Zarqawi had walked their talk on cleansing “Muslim lands” of the presence of infidels with passion and utter ruthlessness, and without compromise. He was their man of action. He did, in their view, what others merely talked and fantasized about. The scene the young ones loved best on what we came to call TV Night was Al Zarqawi standing, legs planted wide, with a vicious, open-mouthed grin on his face, firing the entire hundred-round magazine of a Belgian light machine gun just past the camera with the sound jacked way up. We could almost hear his scream of whatever the Arabic equivalent is of “Get some!”
Each time an episode of mayhem and destruction occurred on the screen, the crowd pressing around Louis and me shouted, “Allahu Akbar!” and immediately swivelled their eyes to watch how we were enjoying the show. Without my glasses, I could read none of the signs or subtitles, so Louis read them out loud until I quietly asked him to stop. The DVD did not need a great deal of interpretation.
Obviously, these propaganda videos were intended to pump up the boys, to remind them that they were part of a large global cause in which sacrifice was a major element. And it was having the desired impact particularly on the younger mujahideen, whose eyes glistened with excitement as they watched the Western infidels being butchered and humiliated over and over again. The senior members of the group were less caught up in the show, and the laptop operator seemed to be choosing the clips to be displayed with some care. I could only imagine what he was skipping and I did not for a moment presume that anything was being avoided out of generosity but rather cold, hard pragmatism. They did not want to break their hostages, at least not yet.
In many ways, both for the assembled Belmokhtar group of AQIM and for me, the scenes that elicited the strongest emotion were the all too familiar images of black-hooded, orange-clad figures, chained hand and foot, shuffling around those tiny cages in Guantanamo. These were indignities perpetrated by my side—the “good guys.” Those images, and the scenes of German shepherds, fangs bared, straining to get at broken men cowering in corners, and the piles of naked bodies forced into obscene intimacy and, always, the iconic black-hooded figure, mutely perched barefoot on a box in a short black poncho with wires dangling from his outstretched fingers in the disgraceful Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad made me, in the midst of my own mental anguish, feel deep shame.
The leaden and menacing stares of our Al Qaeda captors eloquently made a mockery of our aggressive Western claims to harbour superior values. The looks on their faces declared that any such moral high ground had been well and truly abandoned by the West.
It is therefore at least paradoxical that those wretched videos and photos of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib may have resulted in Louis’ and my captivity being less violent than it otherwise might have been, for it seemed to me that we were spared worse treatment because our abductors were anxious to demonstrate that they didn’t stoop to such stuff, which, of course, we know is not generally the case. That particular myth, however, with that particular group of AQIM hostage takers, probably served us well.
Thus, I found that the most appalling of those TV Night video images were not the mass murders and individual assassinations perpetrated by Al Qaeda and their allies against our soldiers and civilians, which were never easy to behold but were less difficult to understand. That was simply Al Qaeda being Al Qaeda. Rather, it was the intimate and almost palpable proof of our side’s methodically applied, officially sanctioned, and so casually administered barbarity, parsed into the bureaucratic banalities and legal niceties of officially sanctioned abuse and torture, that was hard to absorb. Viewing such scenes, I could not help but believe that if we were capable of such outrages and carelessly willing to resort to torture-as-entertainment, then we had indeed strayed into truly dangerous ethical territory.
The ease with which faux-legal language was coined in Washington and unopposed throughout the West in a cursory attempt to legitimize the illegitimate, the arbitrary manner in which longstanding international conventions were set aside, and the glibness with which word games were employed to condone such practices should have stunned us all. The methodical development of “black sites” and concepts like “extraordinary rendition” (subcontracting torture) and “enhanced interrogation,” the invention of ersatz juridical explanations of why water-boarding was not torture, and other such despicable behaviour indeed made a mockery of our Western pretensions to be champions of human rights, dignity, and international justice. Further, without a shred of doubt, they have massively increased recruitment to the Islamist cause and markedly amplified the threat against Western interests and the security of individual Americans and their friends and allies.
If the dreadful events of 11 September 2001 could so easily dismantle the bulwarks of free, just, and open societies that had taken us centuries to build, then yes, our claims to a higher moral standard were in fact a sham, and surely there were no effective limits to what we were prepared to visit upon our enemies.
No, these were not made-in-Canada practices, justifications, and facilities, but how easily we in our country and our friends throughout Europe abandoned our much-vaunted principles and meekly, often enthusiastically, went along. The bulk of our usually vocal human rights advocates and politicians were muted or stunned into silence when the need to avenge the insult and atrocity of 9/11 was allowed to pervert the law and sully the reputation of our friends and neighbours—perversions that have done and continue to do the West incalculable harm throughout the world. We are clearly guilty by such association. And Louis and I were reaping the consequences.
When the passionate screams from the pumped-up junior mujahideen had faded, they disconnected the laptop and left us to try to sleep, snuggled against the wheel of Omar’s truck. I managed, with help from Louis, to lie flat on my back on our thin blanket and, for the first time since our capture, I managed four or five hours of nightmare-punctuated sleep. As I drifted off, I was comforted by the fact that it simply didn’t make sense for our kidnappers to have gone to such trouble just to execute us. I knew we were unlikely to be quitting those dunes very soon, but we did seem to have an immediate future. The longer term could await the morrow.
CHAPTER 5
VIDEO ONE
“I fear thee and thy glittering eye,
And thy skinny hand so brown.”—
”Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest!
This body dropt not down.”
We awoke on Thursday, Day 5, about a thousand kilometres north of the reviewing stand in Tillabéri. For the first time since that horrible moment the previous Sunday afternoon, we were not being hustled into a vehicle to smash our way cross-country. Looking around us we implicitly understood why.
Quite evidently, we had arrived. We were there, deep in the Sahara desert, impossibly far from any kind of familiar frame of reference. I recalled that when we had visited the far northern mining community of Arlit, in Niger, only three months previously (perhaps seven hundred kilometres east-southeast from where we were), I had been intimidated by the desert’s immediate vastness. There had been no transition. Step beyond that runway and there was pitiless nothing—forever, a nothing that would kill you very quickly. Walking on the outskirts of Arlit had been like touching the inner skin of the protective, atmosphere-preserving bubble of some science-fiction mining operation on a far-flung asteroid. But here in the far north of Mali there were no outskirts, no human or geophysical link—however tenuous—with anything I had known beyond, of course, Louis. I had never before felt so isolated and forsaken.
It was chilly but the sun was bright and the air clear. All around us people were stirring. Clad still in the clothes in which we had been captured, we combed what hair we had with our fingers and, in what was to become a morning ritual, shook the sand from our blankets and draped th
em over nearby bushes to air. Once we had begun to move about, one of the young lads approached with our initial desert breakfast. We then set off on our first self-programmed walk, following in the footprints we had made around our tiny track among the desert melons and between our sleeping position and those of some of our jailers. The younger ones were still asleep, with blankets pulled over their heads to block out the sun, while the older ones were busy with camp chores. Memories of getting teenaged daughters out of bed flooded my mind, along with the manifold ironies.
They let us pace, somewhat bemused as we went round and round. As soon as we began to walk the wrenching pain in my back again began to subside. We probably put in a couple of kilometres before returning to our sleeping position as the heat of the sun began to bite in earnest.
Omar approached and explained what were effectively the camp rules. He told us that we could ask to go loin (far) when one of us needed to defecate. We would be unobtrusively accompanied and we had to find a spot far enough but not too far away. However, as it would require revealing our nakedness (anathema to these prudish zealots), that place had to be well out of sight. And only one of us could go at a time, while the other remained in plain sight.
The rules for going pas loin (not far) were less complicated. We still had to ask for and receive permission to disappear behind a bush for a pee and we were admonished to do it modestly, preferably from a kneeling position, which was not a bad idea given the usually windy conditions. After a while we stopped asking permission to go pas loin and nobody objected.
When I asked for a toothbrush Omar said unconvincingly that he would see what could be done. In the meantime he taught us how to break off branches from a particular kind of thorn tree growing nearby, and then peel off the bark around the break so that the fibres expanded, like a straw broom, and explained how this could be used to clean teeth. The thorns of the same tree, he pointed out, made excellent toothpicks. He also told us of the arak tree, the horseradish-flavoured roots of which made the best toothbrushes. He reverently explained the merits of the arak root, called miswak, which was extolled in the Qur’an and had nineteen magical, medicinal, and even strategic properties.
With no arak trees nearby, I borrowed Hassan’s great bloody caricature of a commando knife and proceeded to hack branches from the designated substitute tree. Hassan was horrified that his cherished killing tool was being defiled by such a mundane task, but his frères, who clearly had little time for his macho posturing, were wryly amused. Louis and I were surprised at how effectively these brushes did the trick.
As soon as Omar had finished explaining the rules of our imprisonment we were joined by Jack and what we came to think of as his senior staff. This time the interrogation was a little more formal and aggressive, but not markedly so. He explained that we were his prisoners, that he led one of many groups of AQIM mujahideen and, speaking through Omar, outlined the organization’s objectives. He also asserted that he and his frères were strict and devout Muslims who unreservedly followed God’s word as revealed to the Prophet in the Qur’an without deviation or interpretation and to the letter.
He then, in quiet and measured tones, launched into a tirade against the hypocrisy of the Western-toady “apostate governments” (atheist or, more accurately, those who renounce belief) of the North African states (the near enemy) and the debauchery of the Jew-crusader, American-led Western governments (the far enemy) that had sent vast armies to ravage and occupy “Muslim lands.” This was, of course, a theme to which he and almost every one of our AQIM interlocutors returned again and again.
Having got such an opening salvo off his chest and moving fairly smartly to the business of the moment, Jack then explained that we would be making a video to let the United Nations and the Canadian government know that we were in the hands of Al Qaeda so that a negotiating process could begin. I expected them to require us to read some prepared confessional screed, full of strutting rhetoric. I feared that they would also require us to acknowledge blame for all manner of horrors and spout lies and calumny against most of what we Canadians and the United Nations stood for—but there were no such demands. “Just say who you are,” Jack outlined, “why you were in Niger, that we now hold you hostage, and ask your leaders to work to resolve your situation as expeditiously as possible, without,” he firmly insisted, “resorting to violence, for that would go very badly for you.”
That seemed straightforward enough and even in my still addled state I thought I could manage such a script. But I had a question. “If you want me to explain that we are your hostages, you had better tell me precisely who I am to say you are.” That resulted in a fair amount of discussion in Arabic without benefit of interpretation. It seems they were trying to decide whether they were Al Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb or Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, or, and as they finally agreed, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. It seemed to us that this whole routine was still a little novel for them and they were anxious to get it right. They had taken tourists before, but this was the first time they had grabbed people with international standing and they wanted to maximize the publicity impact of their coup.
Omar instructed us to follow them over a slight rise and down the reverse slope for little more than a hundred metres to a very large dark-green tent, which I had not known was there, nestled among a few sparse acacia trees. At the sight of the tent, my heart lurched, and I became for some moments quite terrified. Working away in the back of my mind over the past days had been the prospect that Louis and I would suffer the same fate as Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl at the hands of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Karachi in February 2002. Unlike nearly 300,000 YouTube viewers, I had not seen the dreadful video clip of his beheading but—perhaps worse—I had heard it described in excruciating detail and my imagination re-created the scene again and again, adding a seemingly infinite number of appalling variations.
At the sight of that damned great dark tent, surrounded by heavily armed, turban-wearing Arabs, my re-creation of that horror was given free rein.
Perhaps Omar sensed or even understood the cause of my disquiet, for as he walked between Louis and me he began very methodically to rehearse what we had just agreed would be the script. I was grateful for the diversion. He explained that I was to lead off and then Louis would get his say. I asked when Soumana, whom we had not seen for twenty-four hours, would speak, but this was quickly brushed off as “unnecessary.” As I looked around for further clues to what might be about to happen, I noticed no particular excitement in the faces around us: no ghoulish anticipation that something messy and important was about to occur. I began to settle down a little.
As we got near the tent we were held back because they were not ready for us. I grabbed a moment to ask Louis to be sure to add anything I failed to include and to correct any stupidities I might utter, particularly as I had been instructed to speak in French. He nervously agreed to do so. We were both acutely aware that our captors’ agenda was not congruent with our own. For them it was all about launching what they hoped would be expeditious negotiations. While that did seem like a useful objective, Louis and I were most immediately focused on the message, both visual and verbal, we would be sending to our families, who we knew would have been suffering terribly since they learned of our kidnapping—whenever that was.
Finally, we were ushered inside and there was a version of the tableau we have all seen in too many newscasts and movies. A black flag covered with white Arabic script was pinned to the wall of the tent opposite the side that had been opened to allow sunlight to illuminate the set. Standing immediately in front of that flag were four heavily armed men, a couple carrying AKs across their chests and the others holding the heavier, belt-fed machine guns. Two or three of them also had belts of ammunition criss-crossing their chests, Pancho Villa–like, and their faces were almost entirely obscured by their black turbans.
Louis and I were instructed to sit in front and at the feet of the armed tableau, and facing us
with their backs to the open side, the audience for the impending show, were all the remaining members of the group. As if for a class photo, the youngest and smallest sat cross-legged in front with the bigger ones kneeling or standing behind them. In the centre of the front row was the laptop operator from the previous evening. Later we learned that his name was Julabib.
He was clearly in charge of the proceedings and held in his right hand a small, family-type video camera. My back would not allow me to sit cross-legged like Louis, so I sort of perched sideways on my left hip, my legs bent at the knee out to my right and most of my weight supported by my straight left arm. The entire floor of the tent was covered by a multitude of carpets, which I took to be a good sign. I considered it unlikely that in such a water-starved environment they would purposely soak them in blood.
Once we were all in place the cameraman looked squarely at me until he knew he had my attention, and I got a very clear impression that this was going to be a one-take production. Camera held out before him as he watched the small, flip-out LCD viewing screen, he held up three fingers of his left hand, then two, and one. He pointed and I began to speak.
I tried to speak slowly and articulate carefully. I gave my name and then noted that I was the “Special Envoy of the Secretary-General of the United States [sic] for Niger.” I heard the error but was not to be deterred. I then explained that my mission had been to attempt to get the government of Niger to sit down with the Tuareg rebels with a view to forging a peace agreement and that in the course of my third visit to Niger my colleague, Louis Guay, and I had been captured in the late afternoon of Sunday, 14 December—five days previously—thirty-five kilometres from Niamey, Niger’s capital, and that we were now the captives of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. I urged “those responsible at the UN and in Canada” to engage in negotiations that would lead to our early release and indicated that the conditions in which we were being held were rudimentary in the extreme. I volunteered the fact that we were being treated “honourably” by our abductors (to suggest to our families that we were not being abused) and, as instructed, I cautioned against any kind of military action to secure our freedom.
A Season in Hell Page 7
