Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  By early 1999 Amanda was eight months pregnant with our second child, and I was recalled from Aden for duties closer to home. On the day before Sasha was born we strolled between Dubai’s Jumeirah Beach Hotel and the soon-to-be-opened Burj Al-Arab Hotel. The latter was designed to resemble a billowing Arab sail, but when Amanda stood in front of it the similarity was striking: it mirrored her pregnant contours perfectly.

  Once again, we pulled up at the doors of the hospital in a hurry. ‘The anaesthetist will be with you soon, he’s just busy with someone right now,’ we were told. But the anaesthetist never showed up and Amanda gave birth without an epidural. One of the most frighteningly impotent moments of my life was being shouted at by the midwife to hold Amanda down as she screamed and writhed on the bed and the South African nurses yelled into the corridor, ‘Where’s that bloody anaesthetist!’ Sasha was born a perfectly healthy baby, although not a day too soon. Having run out of food in the womb she had started trying to nibble her own arms.

  In the early summer of 1999 I got a call from the United Arab Emirates Ministry of Information up the coast in Abu Dhabi. Would I like to visit the UAE’s humanitarian mission in the Balkans? I jumped at the chance. I had been to Yugoslavia a few times in the eighties, but it was a very different picture in the Balkans now. Slovenia had slunk quietly off to its own sovereignty before anyone noticed, Croatia had fought for its independence from Belgrade and there had been carnage in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the mid-nineties. Now the Serbs of Kosovo seemed to have embarked on wholesale ethnic cleansing to drive out the Kosovars, the ethnic Albanians, from their homes. This time the West appeared determined to intervene before it was too late. Serb convoys were bombed by NATO planes, while refugee camps were set up just across the border in Albania. But since the Kosovars were Muslims their plight struck a chord with Arabs, especially in the Gulf where vast sums are donated in charity to Islamic causes. The UAE had gone one step further, setting up its own refugee camp, run, protected and patrolled by the UAE Army.

  I was not the only Gulf-based journalist going on this trip. About a dozen others had been rounded up, mostly Indian expatriates working as staff writers on local newspapers. They looked very apprehensive as we boarded an ageing Russian Ilyushin jet for the flight up to the Balkans. This was not at all what they had signed up for, accustomed as they were to writing cosy articles about local news in Abu Dhabi, where danger is almost unheard of. Sure enough, the runway at Tirana airport was like a scene from the film Apocalypse Now, with US Army Apache helicopter gunships clattering through the sky, and military transport aircraft disgorging soldiers and pallets of ammunition. The journalists’ faces fell even further when, on arriving in the Balkans, it was announced that due to bandits it was too dangerous to reach the refugee camp by road, so we would now be boarding two UAE Air Force Puma helicopters for the flight up to Kukes in northeast Albania. It was a breathtaking, stomach-turning forty-five-minute flight through narrow alpine ravines and up over craggy ridges, and the Emirati pilots were superb.

  Down on the ground, the UAE camp was very impressive. Not for nothing was it known amongst the journalists as ‘the Gucci camp’. It had everything: clean, comfortable tents, three meals a day – including crates of fresh chickens prepared and cooked by legions of Indian workers flown up from the Gulf. I particularly enjoyed telling my BBC colleagues this when I visited them in their spartan lodgings by the lake, where I found veteran correspondent Feargal Keane boiling up some starchy spag bol for the nth day in a row. ‘Must dash,’ I said. ‘It’s roast lamb tonight. Can’t be late.’

  So organized was the UAE camp that it even had a telephone mast erected by engineers from Abu Dhabi so we could all use our UAE mobile phones in Albania for the cost of a local call. In the First Aid section refugees were lining up to be treated by army medics, some of whom were Arab women in camouflage uniform and headscarves. I was told they would soon be introducing ‘telemedicine’, whereby doctors back in Abu Dhabi would perform operations by remote-control video link. The camp also had a makeshift mosque, complete with long-bearded imam who oversaw the slitting of sheep’s throats to ensure it was done according to Islamic tradition and the meat was halal. Supplies and workers were flown in regularly by C-130 transport plane to the nearby Sheikh Zayed airstrip, built by UAE engineers on almost the only flat bit of land. But above all, the camp had good security. The local Albanian bandits, all armed with AK-47s, had a fearsome reputation for armed robbery and rape. A story was doing the rounds of how a group had broken into the nearby Italian camp and successfully abducted a Kosovan girl at gunpoint. When bandits tried it on at the UAE camp while I was there they were vigorously rebuffed; an army patrol scrambled immediately and caught them just outside the fence. I was told they handed the men over to the local Albanian police, who promptly let them go.

  But I was only at the UAE camp long enough to get a flavour of the whole operation. I would have liked to stay on to see the end of the story, to see the Kosovar refugees getting repatriated and returning to the homes they had been driven out of across the border. But, as I almost forgot, I was supposed to be covering the Gulf for BBC News and already an interesting story beckoned, one which I had more than a passing interest in.

  At eighty-nine years of age, Wilfred Thesiger was coming back to the Gulf for what could be his final visit. The man who had first inspired me to come to this region, over tea with my mother in his Chelsea flat twenty-two years earlier, was coming to the UAE to promote a newly published book of his photographs of a vanished Arabia. Remarkably, Bin Kabina and Bin Ghabaisha, the men who had travelled with Thesiger on his gruelling treks across the Empty Quarter of Arabia half a century ago, were still around. I found them sprawled on sofas in the airconditioned lobby of a five-star hotel in Dubai, beneath Thesiger’s black-and-white portrait photos of them as the young boys they once were. It was an extraordinary juxtaposition of two worlds. In a photo above them stood a dark-skinned Arab boy, his long unkempt black hair falling over his shoulders and his eyes glowering at the camera. He was dressed in rags but was naked from the waist up, his sinewy arm clutching an ancient rifle, while a line of empty dunes stretched infinitely past him. And now, on the cusp of the Millennium, that same person sat on the couch, a venerable old man with grey beard, turban and black kohl antimony painted around his eyes in the manner of some desert traditionalists. Thesiger sat between his two old companions, his eyesight, his hearing and his Arabic all failing now, but still able to trade stories of their harsh times on those great desert crossings in the forties and fifties.

  Thesiger appeared rather bewildered by all the people who milled around him and I could not be certain that he remembered who I was. For such an accomplished photographer he seemed surprisingly disconcerted by the flash of cameras going off around him and I remembered how, when I first went to see him on my own, he had said, ‘If we’re going to have a decent conversation you’re going to have to put that camera down and stop taking my photograph!’ Heaven knows what he thought now of my digital video camera and tripod for the mini-documentary I was making about him for BBC News.

  But when the then ruler of UAE, Sheikh Zayed Al-Nahyan, invited Thesiger to visit him in his palace in Abu Dhabi, I was allowed to accompany him, along with his publisher, Iain Fairservice. We drove in a convoy of airconditioned limos from his hotel to the palace gates, but at the first security checkpoint there was a problem. Men with walkie-talkies waved their arms and wore troubled expressions. The sheikh was not yet ready to receive him, so would we please return to our hotel and wait for the summons. Thesiger, who had spent a lifetime railing against almost every mechanical invention, was already complaining about the car’s air-conditioning. ‘Can’t we switch that infernal thing off?’ he demanded. It was June and 45°C in the shade outside so the driver thought he was insane. Thesiger refused to go back to his hotel, demanding to be allowed to sit beneath a date palm instead. This sent the sheikh’s protocol people into a complete flap; they had never seen
a guest get out of a car at the gates.

  Eventually our convoy was waved through and we trooped into a large ornate reception room to meet the oldest living ruler in the Middle East, and Thesiger cheered up. Sheikh Zayed was almost the same age as him and they had hunted together in the desert in the 1940s when Abu Dhabi was part of what was known as ‘the Trucial States’. Dirt poor then, with nothing but a mud-walled fort and a jumble of fishermen’s huts, it was incredible to think that since the discovery of oil and independence from Britain in 1971, Abu Dhabi had morphed into one of the richest places in the world.

  Thesiger and the sheikh quickly began to reminisce about old times. Sheikh Zayed, who had been ruler of Abu Dhabi for thirty-eight years, reminded his guest of the time they had gone hunting together and shot a rabbit, which the sheikh then threw to his dogs as a reward. But in those lean times, he said that Thesiger had been so hungry that he had snatched it back and eaten it himself. The whole room laughed at this, then Sheikh Zayed caught my eye and his son Sheikh Mohammed, then the UAE Chief of Defence Staff, introduced me (we had shared a washbasin at the UAE’s ‘Gucci camp’ in the Balkans only the month before). When I told Sheikh Zayed that both my daughters had been born in Dubai he declared they should be given UAE nationality. With his heavily hooded eyes and craggy desert features, it was hard to tell if the old sheikh was being serious or not; I decided he was joking. Since then I have often wondered if I should not perhaps have taken him up on the offer and given Melissa and Sasha a headstart in life with a prime piece of real estate on the fastest developing stretch of coastline in the Middle East.

  There was one last duty to perform with Thesiger in order to complete the film: I needed to interview him in his favourite milieu, the desert. This was no easy task in the sweltering heat of June, but the old explorer was more than up to it. Driven out to the dunes by his indefatigable publisher, we marched up the nearest sand dune in the full hammer heat of midday. Thesiger was dressed in a three-piece woollen English suit but he refused to make any concessions to the weather, remaining buttoned up all the way as he strode with the aid of a stick up through the soft red sand. His refrain was the same as it had been when I first met him all those years ago in 1977: the desert Bedu were a great and noble people ruined by oil; the world he had once known was gone for ever. It made for a sad and poignant interview, all the more so since not long afterwards he died in a Surrey nursing home, far from the deserts of Arabia or the dry bushland of northern Kenya where he made his home for so many years.

  I have the greatest respect for Thesiger’s skills in exploration, narrative description and photography, and, above all, his endurance in appalling conditions. I was lucky to have known him and am grateful that he gave me so much time, but I never found him a particularly warm personality and had he not done the journeys he did I doubt we would have been friends. In fact we did argue once, about Oman. He was critical of the transformation of a backward sultanate into a relatively modern, peaceful country with schools, roads and hospitals. I said I was convinced that most Omanis were happier now than before; Thesiger, I suspected, would have preferred them to remain in picturesque poverty. But beneath his gruff exterior he did have a sense of humour. When I took him to tea at the Royal Overseas League in London in the 1980s he asked me to open one of those tiny, fiddly UHT milk cartons. After wrestling with the seal for some minutes it finally burst all over my lap. I cursed, then apologized, but Thesiger smiled knowingly and said, ‘It’s all right, I knew that would happen. That’s why I passed it to you.’

  At the end of 1999 the job of BBC Middle East Correspondent in Cairo came up for grabs, and Amanda suggested I should go for it. Although our life in the Gulf was idyllic it was far from secure financially, and we had two very small children to support – Sasha and Melissa were born just fourteen months apart. The only guaranteed income I had was a small monthly stipend from The Economist, which I occasionally wrote for. If I went on holiday – or more worryingly, if stories simply dried up – I did not get paid. I was thirty-eight years old, and after five years of freelancing we decided it was time I grew up and got a salaried job with the BBC. An Egyptian friend, Ossama Nasser, warned me that Cairo was no place for a young family, especially after the soft life in Dubai, but we were deaf to his advice. I flew to London and waltzed through the interview. ‘What would you do,’ asked one of the interviewers, ‘if you got a call saying you could do any story anywhere in the Middle East and you had an unlimited budget?’ ‘I would assume it was a wrong number,’ I replied. Perhaps because I had taken such a big gamble in going out to Dubai in the first place and then watched it pay off, I now had a new-found confidence. I came out of the interview and went off to the cinema in the West End, but my mobile rang before I had even bought the ticket: the Cairo job was mine.

  Down in Dubai, there was one final story to report before we packed up and moved to Egypt. On Christmas Eve 1999 a hijacked Indian passenger plane landed at a UAE military airfield in the desert outside Dubai. There were over a hundred terrified passengers on board and at first no one was quite sure who the terrorists were or what they wanted. For me, as the Gulf correspondent there on the spot, it was a stringer’s dream: riding the wave of a fast-moving story and getting paid for every single interview I did on air. But it was also a struggle to manage on my own, relying on my mobile phone to gather the latest news from my sources in the UAE government and then immediately calling London to do the next interview. By midnight I had tracked down the airfield, talked my way through security and was camped out on a sand dune, watching the plane on the tarmac through binoculars with one hand while giving a live commentary for BBC World on my mobile. If anyone had seen me there it would have looked as if I was calling in an air strike. I could see a set of mobile steps being brought up to the plane and some passengers getting off; the UAE Ministry of Information initially thought the hijackers were Sikhs, but in fact it was a complex tale with connections to Al-Qaeda. It turned out that the hijackers were demanding the release of several Islamist prisoners in Indian jails, including one Omar Said Shaikh, a graduate of the London School of Economics. The plane was allowed to fly on to Afghanistan, where negotiations with the Indian government resulted in the release of Shaikh. Within three years he had gone on to lure the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl into being kidnapped by Al-Qaeda supporters in Pakistan, where a grisly video showed him being held in an orange Guantanamo Bay-style jumpsuit then beheaded on camera. It was to set a hideous precedent for future kidnappings by Islamists of Western contractors in Iraq.

  After Dubai, Cairo was a shock. To go from a squeaky-clean emirate of 700,000 people to the largest city in Africa and the Middle East was never going to be easy, but we managed to pick the worst day to travel. Our Egyptair flight coincided with the day expatriate Egyptian teachers in the Gulf were returning home for their holidays. The plane was crammed to the brim with electrical goods, all heading for the kitchens and living rooms of Cairo and beyond. Customs at the other end was a vision of hell, with chain-smoking passengers and customs officers shouting at each other at the tops of their voices. Our exhausted little family joined a queue that seemed to be funnelling towards an exit gate, only to find it peter out as the immigration official went off on a break and we had to start all over again. Already we could taste the dust in our lungs.

  But just as it all seemed too much, a balding man in seventies retro sunglasses came to our aid. It was Raouf (pronounced like a dog barking), the BBC Cairo office driver. He had been an Egyptian army driver in the 1973 October war in the Sinai and was completely unfazed by the chaos all around us. Throughout our years in Cairo he proved to be a godsend for our family and the friends who came to stay, fetching people from the airport at all hours, even driving us through the night all the way down to Sharm El Sheikh on an assignment, without ever once complaining. For me, Raouf typified the good soul and big heart that so many Egyptians have, with their innate desire to help and their profound need to see a guest i
n their country be truly happy. I am ashamed to say that when the pressures of work piled up I was often unable to match Raouf’s boundless reserves of patience and good humour.

  Everything about Cairo was different for me this time round. When I had lived there in the early eighties I had been a carefree undergraduate with no responsibilities, flat-sharing with friends, partying, flirting, exploring and sketching; Cairo had been one big wonderful playground. Since then the country’s population had virtually doubled in size, going from forty-two to seventy million people in under twenty years, and I was back with a young family. They all missed Dubai, with its open spaces, clean air and white sand beaches. When I played back some home video footage of our Dubai villa and its sunlit garden on our TV set our two-year-old daughter Melissa ran towards the TV and actually tried to climb inside the screen. But meanwhile I also had the onus of running a BBC bureau, under the faintly pompous title of Cairo Bureau Chief. In practice this meant managing the half-dozen local Egyptian staff who, although all charming, gave me two weeks’ grace then queued up to present me with their problems. One tendered her resignation because she was unhappy with her contract, another wanted better overtime pay, several wanted to be paid in hard currency, preferably dollars, instead of wobbly Egyptian pounds, while the Nubian messengers wanted the TV in their staffroom to show local soap operas instead of BBC World, of which they could not understand a word. Dealing with management issues like these was anathema to me and I could hardly wait to get going on my first assignment.

  This loomed within days and it was to cover the visit of Pope John Paul II to Egypt in February 2000. It was to be a historic visit, taking in St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula, and it coincided with his papal drive to heal the differences between the world’s three great monotheistic religions: Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Since the Polish pontiff was by now frail and in declining health there was much speculation about whether this trip would be his last, or even – hold the front page – if he would survive the trip at all.