Ali was another PK machine gunner. Like Hassan, Ibrahim, Obeida, and Abou Isaac, he was black, and there was a big gulf between those who were black and those who were not, however much the Omars and Jack insisted otherwise. Louis and I guessed that Ali was from the northern part of Côte d’Ivoire or perhaps Guinea, but in the basic exchanges we had with him in pidgin French we never got a clear answer.
Although he had filmed the proof-of-life videos, our first conversation with Julabib occurred some weeks into our captivity. The moment was memorable. Alone, he approached our relatively isolated position and, standing at the edge of our blanket, introduced himself, saying, “Hi, I’m the media guy”—in English. We soon learned that this was practically the only English he knew but found it interesting that he would take the trouble to present himself that way. In fact, he wanted to learn more English and on three or four subsequent occasions I gave him rudimentary lessons. He was a serious student with an outstanding memory and a good ear.
In the course of such lessons we too learned a great deal. Within the group there was a distinct if informal hierarchy, rather like the distinction between officers and enlisted ranks in most Special Forces units. In this case the officers were almost all Algerian (we called them “the Mafia”), while the “enlisted men” were either from sub-Saharan countries or very young Algerians. Most officers were members of the council, a body that seemed to meet irregularly to consider important issues of policy and, perhaps, theology as it affected operations. It was also convened to confer with Jack whenever he visited. The council included Jack’s senior staff (Ahmed, Julabib, and Al Jabbar); his man inside the camp, Omar Three; the camp emir (first AR, later Jaffer); as well as Omar One, Omar Two, and Imam Abdallah. Hassan was particularly bitter about his exclusion from this body.
Julabib was the only member of the council who might have been Mauritanian rather than Algerian, but we were never certain. He was clearly well educated and probably had attended a technical school somewhere in the region. He knew his IT business, and was comfortable surfing deep in the Internet. He also knew the lingo and all the technical terms, and showed me photographs on his cellphone of me from the time I had been Ambassador to the United Nations, pictures I had never seen before. On one occasion we talked Photoshop (he used the old Photoshop 5, while I had progressed to CS2) and he showed me various photo manipulations (George W. Bush turning into a pig and other exciting clips), demonstrating that he knew how to get things off the Web.
Although he was usually smiling and very relaxed, I could tell from his eyes that Julabib was always our enemy. He was the most technically sophisticated among our captors (keeping up to date regarding news coverage in Canada of our kidnapping) and, along with Jack and Hassan, among the most dangerous. I suspect that rather than being a full-time member of Belmokhtar’s katiba, he belonged to AQIM’s media and propaganda arm, Al Andalus.
Hassan, like Julabib, was in his mid-twenties. He was by far the most complicated, intelligent, and scary of our fanatical jailers. He spoke French with an educated, colloquial European accent, and was familiar with western Europe and aware of the principal politico-economic currents of its history, asking me one day, “Which was the better leader, Napoleon, Hitler, or Stalin?” He was well trained militarily and seemed to have good military instincts. He would switch back and forth between a student–teacher relationship with me and that of captor–hostage in the blink of an eye. He was almost invariably menacing and aggressive, and I’ve never seen anybody sport a larger, heavier chip on his shoulder. He wanted to get even with everybody, but I was never sure for what. At one point he mused, “I thought of joining the Red Brigades or Baader-Meinhof but they were not really serious. Al Qaeda suited me much better.”
I strongly suspect that Hassan suffered from some kind of mood disorder. To this medically ignorant observer, he had all the signs but no medication. He had an IQ that was off the charts in terms of his ability to learn and process information. He said to me one day, clearly aware of the degree to which he made us uncomfortable, “I regret imposing myself on you all the time but it’s not every day I get to talk to a university professor”—which, of course, I’m not, but he was willing to settle for someone even associated with a university—”and I want to take full advantage of the opportunity,” adding darkly, “while I can.”
I taught him how to play Twenty Questions, and—paternalistically—decided to choose subjects that I considered would reasonably be within his ken. The first time, he got Winnie Mandela in seven. I failed to get his Al Capone in twenty.
He was starved intellectually. None of the brothers were remotely interested in engaging the issues crowding his mind. The kinds of discussions he had with me ranged across the entire spectrum. What, beyond greed, are the causes of and solutions to the growing wealth disparity gap within capitalist economies? When does the politics of the far right meld with that of the far left? What would have happened if Napoleon—or Hitler—had not invaded Russia? Is the United Nations a failure? While he tended to enter such discussions with a pretty classic leftist-contrarian perspective, once engaged he allowed himself to go where his abundant curiosity and inquiring intellect took him. Sometimes it was exciting to see where that would be.
He was full to the bursting point with pent-up anger and violence. And he scared the hell out of me. He was there at the abduction but I have no recollection of what he looked like during the initial grab. Subsequent to those fleeting and violent moments, he was always tightly masked and obviously that was for our benefit. I dreaded the day he would show himself unmasked.
At one point Hassan ran to us, brandishing his shortwave radio, and demanded that we listen to a Radio France Internationale program on Darwin, and then sought our reaction. It put us in a difficult position, and I retreated into some preposterous diplomatic bafflegab along the lines of “Well Hassan, an awful lot of wise people believe that Darwin’s evolutionary theory is proved daily,” and then I made the mistake of pointing out to this relatively short individual that people across the world are becoming taller and bigger and living longer as their diet improves.
He bristled and insisted that in fact people were becoming smaller and more compact and living shorter lives (perhaps relative to the 950-year-old giants in the Islamic scriptures or the satanic torturers in his hell). Obviously he was deeply conflicted, and did not report our heretical doubts as, so very clearly, they were also his. But he was disturbed by our gently tendered evidence and by our conviction, as I hummed, quietly to myself, George Gershwin’s wonderful “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”
A week after our arrival at Camp Canada, Hassan provided us with a few sheets of graph paper torn from a spiral exercise book and a single, much-chewed Bic ballpoint pen. Each of us was told to produce a detailed curriculum vitae. Without my glasses I wrote in large block letters and, as I still could not read what I had written, asked Louis to read it back to me to ensure that it was somewhat legible and that I had not written anything that would aggravate our situation.
Louis was summoned to meet with Hassan separately, and I could see them talking in a cave about four metres up the wadi wall, perhaps two hundred metres to the south of our tree. Some hours later, Hassan came for me and took me a few hundred metres in the opposite direction, leaving Louis in the cave. When I asked when I would see Louis again, he told me that was not my concern. I would not accept that and he partially relented with “in a few days,” which was the most I could get out of him.
First he took me through my public service career and current UN assignment, but he did not seem much interested in what I thought might have been salient details (like, say, the six years I had been Deputy Minister of Defence). Instead, he seemed to be filling in the blanks as if he were completing a form. As issues were raised and discussed in my various “interrogation” sessions, I was required to write short essays on topics such as whether the Israeli action in Gaza, just getting underway, was a war crime, or why Canada chose not to parti
cipate in the 2003 Iraq coalition but then agreed to join the one in Afghanistan. The interrogation was, at least as far as I was concerned, never violent. Indeed, I was never threatened with violence although Louis was. The discussions invariably turned into strident and often sophomoric debates on world issues and quickly I came to appreciate the extent to which this was far more about the provision of academic oxygen to the intellectually starved Hassan than anything to do with nourishing Al Qaeda’s information banks.
The most distressing aspect of this period, however, was Louis’ and my continuing separation. And then, as suddenly as it began, after three days, it ended. We were reunited late at night during a cold, heavy rain when the then commandant, Abdul Rahman, and Omar One escorted a wet and shivering Louis back to where I was occupying our old position. I am almost certain that that was because Hassan—whom they neither liked nor trusted—had been instructed to back off. As far as the group was concerned, his games were over. The others, at least his seniors, were not the least interested in his “product” but did want to ensure our survival in mind and body, if only for their own purposes.
Louis’ experience was different: more aggressive and less an intellectual stroll through Contemporary World Politics 301. Hassan threatened him with being stripped naked and staked out in the midday sun. It did not happen but he feared that at any time it might. We were awfully glad to get back together.
In sum, mine was not a serious interrogation. Hassan did not appear to us really to be one of the brothers, remaining essentially an outcast. His military skills and instincts were by far the most well founded but such knowledge, despite a dogged effort by Hassan to share it, did not dent the fatalistic day-to-day practices of the katiba.
Hassan particularly had it in for Louis and was constantly fomenting mistrust of his every action. Although his fellow mujahideen did not have much time for Hassan, some of his calumny stuck and was the principal factor in building a baseless case for the accusation that Louis had a mauvais caractère (roughly, a nasty personality).
When my clothes had finally deteriorated beyond the help of the cast-off pedal-pusher pants, they provided me with a rather formal and incongruous grey-on-grey striped jelabiyah, a cassock-like garment reaching well below the knees. It had a high Chinese collar and closed down the front with a score of buttons and came with matching pants. Louis’ clothing was doing only marginally better than mine so I gave him the tunic and kept the pants. The next morning as we began our walk on the Camp Canada track, Louis, decked out in his new long tunic, was greeted from afar by Hassan with a very loud “Good morning, Rabbi.” I doubt that any of those rural Salafist fighters, other than the European-educated Hassan perhaps, had ever even seen a rabbi, but the children liked the game and joined in with excitement and exultant menace.
This business of proclaiming Louis to be Jewish first started as a taunt by Hassan, who understood full well how we would interpret such a charade. It all too quickly developed strong legs and soon our guards, particularly the younger ones (who worshipped Hassan and his dark passion), sought to catch Louis in profile to ascertain that his nose was indeed Semitic. The more intrepid among them asked Louis or me to confirm that he was indeed Jewish, so they could confidently observe up close an example of their sworn, most bitter enemies, so regularly and grotesquely demonized by their unsubtle propaganda machine. However absurd, the assertion was chilling stuff coming from people who regularly and matter-of-factly insisted, “Whenever we encounter a Jew, we eliminate him.”
In response I would maintain, hating myself all the while for playing into their sordid, racist game, that Louis could not be Jewish; that since leaving La Rochelle in the early eighteenth century, his family had been Canadian for fourteen generations; that Cardinal Richelieu and the all-powerful Catholic Church had refused to allow “unstable elements” (like Jews and Protestants) to travel to the colony of New France—but to no avail. Nobody was interested in such facts, which were irrelevant, suspicious, and obscure to these desert dwellers. They had their story, it worked for them, and it was inexorably becoming received wisdom around their cooking fire.
After a couple of weeks of this, we were sitting on our blanket one soft, languid evening listening to Omar One spin his colourful Qur’anic tales of the derring-do of the Companions of the Prophet when we were joined by a succession of others: first Abdul Rahman, then Al Jabbar and Omar Two, and finally young Al Zarqawi and a couple of others.
At a break in Omar’s tale, Al Jabbar, pointing at Louis, said something in Arabic and rather formally asked Omar to interpret for him. Al Jabbar had, Omar said, been struck from the first time he had set eyes on Louis, had in fact been moved almost to tears, by how much Louis looked like Al Jabbar’s father—same chin, same nose. Indeed, he noted a little wistfully, were he to see Louis on the street in Algiers he would have taken him for his father, whom he had not seen in nearly two decades. There were a lot of pointed looks around the group and from then on there was little further discussion of Louis’ Jewishness.
Once that myth had been so effectively put to rest and references to “the rabbi” had abated, more subtle and baseless suggestions arose to the effect that Louis was insensitive to the attraction of Islam, or irascible, or anti-Arab, or friendly to Western engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan. While I sought to diminish Louis’ suspicions that this was all about setting him up for some unpleasant fate, that is precisely what it was, and we both knew it. These zealots needed a politico-religious justification for every act, every thought, every prejudice.
Nor did Al Jabbar’s carefully modulated gesture put an end to Hassan’s baiting of Louis or to his accusations that Louis was somehow disrespectful of the brothers or engaged in various forms of intelligence gathering. It just drove them underground.
CHAPTER 9
US AND THEM
Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turn’d round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
Louis and I spoke English to each other in the hope that this would make our own conversations a little more discreet. Louis is perfectly bilingual, speaking accentless English. I am very comfortable in French, even if I regularly hear myself making errors. We were well into our fourth week, however, when I spotted Omar One approaching our position one evening with the Qur’an in one hand (his right, of course) about twenty metres distant. I turned to Louis, who was a short distance away on the other side, and observed, I think fairly neutrally, “Louis, here comes Omar for a reading.”
Before Louis could reply, Omar proclaimed casually—in remarkably good English—”Yes, and I hope you will enjoy it today.” As the Brits would say, Louis and I were gobsmacked and immediately began to scroll through everything we might have said in English within earshot of Omar over the previous thirty days. We had been pretty careful but was that careful enough? When, a little shaken (which he so enjoyed), we queried him on his language skills, we learned that English was but one of the seven languages in which this itinerant preacher was proficient.
Louis and I worked hard to establish an effective, useful, even respectful working relationship with our captors, without appearing obsequious or submissive. Our obvious purpose was to build a rapport that would make our captivity as painless as possible while forging a connection that, we hoped, might make our execution less likely. We tried to keep our demands and complaints to an absolute minimum so that when we really needed attention, it might be forthcoming.
We sought to win their confidence and respect by demonstrating that we were strong, self-reliant individuals, secure in our belief in the value and importance of our UN mission and the purpose and direction of our work and lives. But we also endeavoured to demonstrate by word and act that we were not hostile to Islam or its practitioners, a religion and people we respected, even if our knowledge of the Musli
m world was not what it might have been.
From the beginning of this ordeal, it was crystal clear that their particular fundamentalist take on Islam would affect everything to do with our kidnapping and its resolution. Thus we sought to learn as much as we could about this important world religion, to be seen to be interested in its texts and underlying philosophy and, most challengingly, to be open to its teachings. We therefore welcomed Omar’s preaching and were interested in Omar Two’s Salafist philosophy, mystical beliefs, and lifestyle, and we sought to keep open the matter of our possible eventual conversion.
Our treatment at the hands of AQIM might usefully be compared with that of Soumana Moukaila, our UN driver. Soumana was a Muslim, a slave or servant of Allah, a brother in faith of our abductors, a member of the ummah. From our significantly ill-informed perspective, he also seemed to be a conscientious and observant Muslim. Having met him only thirty-six hours prior to our kidnapping, we knew all too little about him save that he was a pleasant companion, a committed family man, an outstanding driver, and that whenever possible he participated in daily prayers.
Clearly he did not adhere to the extreme philosophy of seventh-century fanatical fundamentalism espoused by our Al Qaeda jailers but as his co-religionists they were obliged at least to go through the motions of treating him differently from the way we kafirs (unbelievers), the infidel enemy, were managed: at a long arm’s length.
In fact, I believe they treated him considerably worse. He ate with them—which we never did—sat around their fire and dug into their single dish. He prayed with them and was plagued by their incessant preaching, sometimes three or four of them at a time going on and on at him, a few metres away from us, late into the night. They bent every possible effort to bring him into their fundamentalist fold, effectively seeking to brainwash him. I do not think that they succeeded, but how would I know?
A Season in Hell Page 15
