by Cam Simpson
Al-Nadi passed the disc to me, and I thanked him profusely. No problem, he said, adding that he’d had many copies made. It seemed like a sort of business card, evidence of his bona fides. We shook hands and said our good-byes and promised to be in touch.
The video the half-drunk al-Nadi had proudly handed over contained a newscast that had aired a few months earlier, on ABS-CBN, one of the largest broadcasters in the Philippines. After all the rhetorical dancing in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt, the newscast identified al-Nadi as the official representative of Daoud and Partners as he shook hands with the Philippine ambassador. The two were holding a formal meeting about Daoud’s use of Filipino citizens as menial laborers on U.S. military bases in Iraq.
A story appearing in the Manila Standard a few days after al-Nadi’s meeting with the ambassador provided more details. It reported that the Philippine government had formally barred its citizens from working in the increasingly dangerous war zone and that Daoud had been taken to task for violating the ban. The story added that foreign ministry officials finally had “secured an agreement with the Jordan-based firm Dawood [sic] & Partners to stop deploying Filipino workers to Iraq,” which it had been doing on a large scale and in defiance of the Philippine government.20
Within a week of my meeting with al-Nadi at the Grand Hyatt, a new story appeared in Philippine newspapers, reporting that government officials were blacklisting Daoud after finding that Filipinos in Manila had signed two-year contracts specifying they’d be working in Amman, “but upon their arrival, they were brought to the U.S. military bases” in Iraq.21 One of the bases was Al Asad, where the twelve Nepalis had been headed when they were kidnapped. In addition to the alleged bait-and-switch, the news story mentioned force: some workers said they had been forced to go to Iraq. Indian newspapers had been reporting similar allegations about Daoud, even before the twelve Nepalis were taken into Iraq and kidnapped.
Not long after, officials in one Amman embassy for a major “feeder” country showed me a shelf of three-ring binders filled with correspondence between its government officials and Daoud executives about the alleged mistreatment and deaths of foreign workers under its employ on U.S. military bases.
The weight of all this evidence made clear that Mansour had been telling the truth. Al-Nadi in fact ran a body shop, and he did so for Daoud. The paper trail at the embassy of the feeder country and interviews with others in Amman also confirmed that Daoud itself operated as a body shop for KBR Halliburton. This appeared to be much bigger than the tiny, fly-by-night operation portrayed on paper. Still, I lacked hard, specific evidence connecting Jeet and the other murdered men into a global supply chain stretching from Nepal to KBR and the U.S. military.
5
Late 2004 to Early 2005
Gorkha and Kathmandu
Kamala put on her petticoat and gathered a plain white sari prepared for the day, the ninth day since Jeet’s death. She walked alone down the steep trail beside the farmhouse and toward the well below the village, where she would take a ritual bath to mark her permanent passage into widowhood. As a wife in Nepal, she had been considered half her husband’s body. As a widow, she would be considered half a corpse. She was expected never to remarry or be with another man, staying faithful to her husband even after his death. An old woman was already at the well when Kamala arrived, standing at the far tap. She saw Kamala’s white sari and stared in silence.
Kamala finished bathing and wrapped herself in the cloth. Only a widow dresses in a white sari, a garment meant to serve not the wearer but the world. Widows are considered impure and the bearers of bad fortune, and must be marked clearly to make it easier for others to steer clear of them in the streets or to exclude them from ceremonies, for fear that their presence will curse the gathering and the gathered. They also must be marked easily for shaming if they are in the company of men who are not their sons or fathers. A woman, especially a young woman, who once was but no longer is married is no longer under the control of a man. Because she possesses sexual experience, she is considered dangerous. No matter one’s ethnic group, the widow’s duty to wear the white sari is shared across virtually every divide in Nepal: high caste or low, rich or poor, educated or illiterate.1
Once Kamala had shrouded herself in white, the old woman who had been watching from the other tap broke her silence. “What has the world come to, to see a day such as this?” she said. The words were sympathetic, but pounded into Kamala’s chest, and she struggled to maintain her composure in what was meant to mark the first moment of her new life. How on earth could she ever escape her grief if everyone forever saw her as this old woman did in this moment?
Four days later, Kamala’s father, long absented from her life and the lives of his other daughters, came to the village on the ledge. He stood before her in Jeet’s farmhouse bearing fresh clothes. He handed them over to Kamala and implored her to remove the white sari and never wear it again. “Do not stop dressing as you want,” he said. Then he asked her, “Where are your bangles?” The red bangles that Jeet had given Kamala are symbols of matrimony in Nepal, and unmarried women or widows are socially prohibited from wearing them, along with anything else that is the color red, as red symbolizes desire and is reserved solely for wives of the living. Kamala had removed them before donning her white sari. “Put them back on your wrists,” Kamala’s father told her. She changed her clothes as her father had commanded, and then silently cupped and extended her fingers and slipped the bangles over them and onto her arms. Kamala was stunned that her father would insist she break some of the most powerful taboos of their culture, but she did not question him. Perhaps, unbeknownst to her, he had witnessed the suffering of widows of fellow soldiers with whom he had served during the nation’s brutal civil war, or maybe one of his other daughters had implored him to take Kamala’s side. Regardless, from that day forward, Kamala would find the strength to ignore the disapproving stares she felt shoot down at her wrists. The weight of the red bangles reminded her of her father’s concern, and perhaps his love.
Jeet’s family had been so supportive of Kamala since her first day in the farmhouse, and then also of Kritika, that Kamala felt little fear for their security in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s death. Some extreme thoughts, some irrational fears, however, are inevitable when one is in a state of shock and grief. On one such day, a relative of Jeet’s offered Kamala a cigarette, telling the young widow that drawing the smoke and nicotine into her lungs would ease her anxieties. A single fear seized Kamala’s mind, one she immediately expressed: If smoking that one cigarette puts me in the grip of addiction, how will I afford the habit and still feed my daughter without a husband?
Your worries are irrational, the woman said. “You have a brother-in-law and a mother-in-law who love you. They will take care of you and your daughter.” Still, Kamala chose not to smoke even one cigarette that day.
She felt alone inside the walls of the home and among the family members who had once made her feel so welcome. Jeet’s mother was encased in her own pain, and the entire village watched her with concern. On occasion, the old woman still spoke of slipping into the gloomy shade of the mountain never to return. She no longer engaged with Kamala as she had before Jeet’s death, and turned away from her when the young widow cried out Jeet’s name and sought comfort. Likewise, when her own tears came, the old woman would not turn to Kamala for an embrace.
Kamala’s mother-in-law had asked the family’s eldest son, Ganga, to move back into the farmhouse immediately upon Jeet’s death, even though Kamala and the old woman had been managing the home seamlessly since before Jeet went to Jordan. Upon moving back, Jeet’s brother’s wife took to the old woman’s side and assumed the kitchen and household duties that had been Kamala’s exclusive preserve for nearly three years.
At first the daughters-in-law shadowed each other in the tiny space. Kamala found herself grasping at air when she reached for pots and pans that were now hanging elsewhere. Before long, Kama
la’s daily duties shifted out of the farmhouse and into the fields. Crops and cattle then became her responsibilities, though for many households, this often was the work left to children or to farmhands from outside the family. As she moved back onto the land, she carried Kritika on her hip, and would leave her crawling at her feet through the fields or in the forests as she assumed her new role in Jeet’s family.
The centuries-old stigma of widowhood in Nepal can be difficult to shed even in the most progressive and educated families, even for a woman who refuses to wear a white sari. In more conservative communities, the isolation and rejection of widows can be instant and complete, with women and their children literally cast out from their dead husband’s homes. It was more subtle and insidious for Kamala. She felt her value as a member of Jeet’s family slip away without mention or negotiation, as regard for her as a bearer of ill fortune hung around her like a cloud inside the farmhouse. Villagers who had once embraced her as the wife of their favorite son now averted their eyes. When she approached small groups, their conversation would abruptly stop. Inevitably, Kamala believed they were speaking ill of her. What she knew for certain was that people neither accepted her as before nor treated her with disdain. She had to endure not only a lack of compassion for her predicament but also a feeling of invisibility, which she found impossible to shed.
Jeet gently untangled the pumpkin vines with his strong hands, or carefully sculptured the red earth beneath the spinach stalks as he dipped between the rows of the vegetable patch on the terrace just below the farmhouse. He wore the long-sleeved white shirt and soft gray khakis he had worn on the day he left for Jordan. Usually this was how Kamala saw him in her dreams, standing in the middle distance on the terrace below the farmhouse and tending their vegetables. He never sang or spoke to her, as he had done in life, but she watched as he worked in silence, a vision she had seen hundreds of times before. At other moments in these dreams, she would see him closer to her, but still beyond her touch, smiling and contented beneath the mountain sky as he sipped her homemade rice wine. It wasn’t every night that Jeet came home in her dreams, but he appeared often enough that it brought Kamala a measure of comfort before she rose to face the isolation of her days.
Kamala’s mornings now began with her trudging up the switchback paths and into the forest high above the horseshoe so she could gather branches and leaves for the family’s cattle, as she had done with her sisters in childhood. Kamala thought of them as she climbed into the heights where the wind rolled up the treetops in waves. Her eldest sister, Maya, heard the news of Jeet’s death and she feared that Kamala might try to end her own life. But when Maya visited Jeet’s farmhouse in the first days following his murder, she instead found her nani hardened to the world. Kamala refused to show her suffering to anyone. “I cried even more after seeing her this way,” Maya said.
Kamala ascended the gorge to resume the chores of her childhood with the one person from the village with whom she now shared a bond, the young widow Heera, her acquaintance from their school days. Heera had moved back to the village and into her parents’ home after her husband died in an accident in India when she was just seventeen years old. Kamala always had felt ashamed at how the village regarded Heera, but she had never mustered the courage to break through the social constraints that kept her distant from her former friend. Heera had been the youngest widow in the village until Jeet’s death bestowed this shared status on Kamala, who was now eighteen. The two women immediately took comfort in each other’s company, but conversations about their dead husbands were rare, and when they did occur, they usually centered on prosaic matters, such as the differences between the men’s funeral rituals. The women did not speak of the inner and outer discord that ruled their lives on the ledge. Still, they became inseparable, each plainly visible to the other in a way she could not be with anyone else, and this was enough.
When she wasn’t chopping branches with Heera, Kamala sometimes accompanied her mother-in-law and Jeet’s eldest brother, Ganga, on long treks across the valley to the nearest town, where they had countless tasks related to Jeet’s death. Outcry over the murders had prompted the government to provide small charity payments to the families, but the paperwork appeared endless. For hours on end, Jeet’s eldest brother and his mother would not speak to Kamala on these long walks, marching far ahead on their own as Kamala fell behind, slowed by the weight of Kritika on her hip and surrounded by the endless silence of the footpath.
Kamala’s prized possessions remained the wedding gifts from Jeet’s family, the gold necklace crafted from paper-thin links and the small gold earrings he had given her not long after they eloped. These were the first pieces of jewelry she had ever owned, and she thought of her husband when she touched them or felt the gentle tug of the necklace’s weight. One night, Kamala lent them to her sister-in-law, who was attending a festival, but afterward, the woman didn’t return the jewelry, and Kamala discovered that her mother-in-law had taken the pieces.
Kamala delicately approached the old woman in the farmhouse kitchen. “My neck feels strange without that chain,” she said.
“Who cares?” the old woman replied. “No one’s going to look at you now.” The old woman told Kamala that she had given her son the jewelry in the first place. “Your husband didn’t earn the money for this; my husband did,” she said. “I bought it for you, so it’s mine, not yours.”
The pain of isolation and rejection became physical for Kamala. She hid alone in an upstairs corner of the house, praying for strength. She prayed she wouldn’t have to rely on the family she had become so dependent upon. She clung to Kritika, who was just two years old, and spent as much time as she could outside the farmhouse, and in Heera’s company.
* * *
The final approach to Kathmandu can be unnerving, even for those unaware of the city’s history of airline disasters. Jungle-covered mountain peaks ringing the Nepalese capital appear frighteningly close as soon as the belly of a plane dips beneath the clouds. Turbulence above the Kathmandu Valley often makes it feel like one’s plane is bouncing across these peaks in a descent that can unfold in flashes of blindness induced by thick fog or rain shrouding the city. When patches of sky do open, the city nestled beneath the mountains appears like none other, its thousands of low-slung buildings, most made from bricks fired in kilns across the valley and rising no higher than the treetops, are packed into chaotic clusters dotted by ancient pagoda temples and golden stupas, shrines built to honor Nepal’s most famous son, Buddha.
I flew into Kathmandu in May 2005 fresh from my trip to Amman. At this point, even basic information about the twelve men from Nepal remained beyond reach, as did specific evidence linking them into the KBR and U.S. military chain.
The only way to try to discover what had happened to these men was to retrace their journeys, from their villages up to the moments recorded in the four-minute video of their deaths, to find and speak with their families and others who had known them, to find the brokers in Nepal who first sent them, and any others whom they had encountered along the way.
Yubaraj Ghimire was the editor of Samay (“Time”) magazine, in Nepal, and one of the country’s most respected journalists. He had once been forced into exile after someone tried to assassinate him because of his work, and in 2001 he was arrested on treason charges by order of the nation’s king after he dared to publish something written by a Maoist. It cost him his job as editor of Nepal’s largest newspaper. Warm and soft-spoken, Ghimire believed in the importance of trying to piece together what had happened to the twelve. He agreed to help gather whatever official documents existed on the case.
After the killings, the Nepalese government had ordered a special inquiry, but the charge of the investigative commission was focused not on the twelve murdered men but, instead, on the riots that broke out across Nepal after the execution video aired. Of central focus to the panel, headed by a former justice of Nepal’s supreme court, was that the riots had targeted an industr
y that had become the biggest pillar of Nepal’s economy: the foreign labor recruitment business. The estimated one billion dollars wired home each year by overseas Nepalis had quickly outpaced all exports, tourism, and foreign aid combined. Ghimire provided a connection to a source who provided a copy of the commission’s secret report.
Even with such a narrow focus, the report included a substantial background section about the events preceding the riots, which could help me retrace the men’s journeys. It listed each man’s permanent home address, along with brokers involved in Nepal. It also had gathered up everything about the twelve held in the files of every Nepalese government agency, including contracts filed with the overseas employment office. The agency’s records showed that the twelve men “had been recruited on the condition of being employed at Le Royal Hotel through the Morning Star company” of Jordan. That was Eyad Mansour’s firm. It also gave identifying information about the main labor broker involved in Kathmandu, registered as Moon Light. Mansour himself had given me the same name.
Nine of the twelve had won “final approval” from the government to work at the Amman hotel. Such approval amounted to a rubber stamp, literally pressed into each man’s passport to get him past an airport check. Paperwork for the three remaining men had been lost within the Labour and Employment Promotion department, an unimaginably overburdened, understaffed, and noncomputerized labyrinth, with file rooms that on most days resembled paper mountains. The trio hailed from the same hometown in Eastern Nepal’s lowlands. The report also said that the twelve dead men were among a larger group of at least thirty-two Nepalis whom Moon Light had won permission to send to Jordan in applications filed simultaneously in June 2004. Eyad Mansour had put the overall group’s number at about eighty men.