Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  Egypt has a sizeable minority of Coptic Christians numbering around 10 per cent of the population and in Cairo the streets to the airport were lined with flag-waving children chanting, ‘John Paul Two! We love you!’ The foreign press corps dutifully gathered at the airport to see him kiss the ground, at which point I was supposed to be giving a live, running commentary for BBC World TV. Unfortunately, the overzealous security people had corralled us into an area from which we could see precisely nothing, so we had to be inventive. Egyptian state television was broadcasting the event live, so we got someone to watch it back in the office and give a running commentary on the phone to our producer beside me, who in turn whispered her commentary in my ear. By the time I told the viewers of the world what the Pope was doing they were hearing it third or fourth hand, but I hope they got the general idea.

  From Cairo we all flew down to St Catherine’s Monastery, a Greek Orthodox Christian retreat built into the mountains around what is believed to be the original burning bush of Moses fame. In the cool of the winter afternoon a hush descended on the assembled press corps as we waited in the orchard for the Pope to appear alongside the monastery’s chief monk. It was to be a deeply spiritual moment and there was no sound except for the soft cooing of the palm doves. Suddenly the silence was broken by a very English public-school voice.

  ‘All right, I admit it, I’ve cocked it up! Happy now?’

  It was Julian Manion, the larger-than-life ITN reporter, arguing with his veteran and fearless cameraman, John Steele. ‘Those two are like a married couple,’ remarked a nearby journalist. ‘They’re inseparable and yet they never stop bickering.’ It turned out that John had gone to great lengths to secure the best vantage point in the orchard, only to have Julian insist on relocating at the last minute. Having moved the camera, tripod and all their gear, they were promptly turfed out of their new position by an Egyptian security guard. The spiritual moment had most definitely passed.

  Back in Cairo, all was not well on the home front. Amanda and I had chosen our flat when we came up from Dubai on a recce the previous year, and although it was luxurious by local standards its walls concealed a shambolic wiring system. We returned one afternoon and turned on the lights only to see the wall burst into flame. The prospect of a full-scale fire in our building terrified us since we lived on the eighteenth floor and once we had extinguished the flames we investigated a number of emergency plans, including buying three hundred feet of rope with which to lower ourselves down to the street far, far below. Another option was to phone our friends the Bin Ladens for a helicopter – I am being serious here, since one of Osama’s entirely law-abiding and peaceful brothers lived in Cairo and his step-daughter went to the same nursery as our children; I enjoyed saying to Raouf on the school run, ‘Do you see that girl over there getting out of the Land Cruiser? Well, guess who her uncle is!’

  On top of the dodgy wiring, our daughters were struggling to cope with the local food. Both Melissa and Sasha, who at the time were aged just two and one, were at times very ill with food poisoning, which nearly scared Amanda into booking the three of them one-way fares back to London. For a while, though, we had the benefit of the Cairo branches of Sainsbury’s, which everyone pronounced as ‘San Zubairi’s’. Although the produce on sale was very different from the diverse and squeaky-clean fare in the supermarkets of Dubai, it still offered Cairenes more choice than they had ever known, and cheaply too. But the project was doomed. Egyptian wholesalers were not happy about being undercut and rumours began to circulate that there was an Israeli connection; noisy protests were organized and soon someone issued an unofficial street fatwa that anyone buying food from Sainsbury’s would be condemned to hell. Meanwhile food began disappearing out of the back door of outlets; the chain was haemorrhaging money. Before long the pride of British retailing was admitting defeat and the young managers who had come out to Cairo to ‘show Egyptians how it was done’ were returning home under a cloud: Sainsbury’s Egyptian venture had collapsed, reportedly costing the company close to £100 million.

  There were, however, a lot of pleasant aspects about living in Cairo that offset the unhealthy pollution, perpetual noise and questionable food. The Egyptians were every bit as friendly and welcoming as I remembered them from my student days, the sun shone for most of the year, albeit through a haze of smog, and we had the gardens of the Marriott hotel just a short stroll away. The Marriott was a converted nineteenth-century Khedive’s palace and one of our favourite pastimes was to spend an evening in its outdoor café, reclining on padded couches beneath palm trees decked in fairy lights, puffing on a shisha, sipping mint tea and savouring the warm night air and the ebb and flow of Arabic conversation. At times like this Amanda and I would congratulate ourselves on living here, but then all too soon I would be off on assignment again and she would be left to bring up these two blonde daughters of ours in a city that reverted to being strange and frustrating the moment I left for the airport. The life of a foreign correspondent can be very rewarding, but it is often not a lot of fun for the partner left behind.

  My experience of most Arab governments is that they have often employed all the available machinery of state in an effort to put a positive spin on any bad news about what is going on in their countries. But a noble exception to this rule is Kuwait. Its highly efficient Ministry of Information actually invited me over to cover a bad news story. For me, this was unprecedented.

  In early 2000, Kuwait had a serious drugs problem. In fact it probably still does, because the underlying causes have not changed: too much money chasing too little recreation, and an irresistible proximity to the smuggling routes from Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan in the East and the dealers and users of Europe in the West. According to official statistics there were at least 26,000 known drug-users in Kuwait, out of a population of less than two million. The government decided something must be done and in February of that year it started running a nationwide anti-narcotics campaign, which included posters everywhere of a popular Arab singer accompanied by the rather meaningless phrase, ‘I too am with you.’

  As part of the TV report I was making about the problem, I interviewed a jovial police brigadier who proudly displayed some of the objects used to conceal drugs – a radio, a pile of newspapers, an old shoe – all laid out on his enormous desk for my benefit. That night I went out on police patrol, filming the officers as they stopped and searched young Pakistani expatriates in a suburb of Kuwait City notorious for drug-dealing. They found nothing, but we arrived back at the police station just as a very stressed young man was being brought in. He was completely strung out on something and was lashing out with his feet at whoever came near him. ‘We know him,’ said one of the Kuwaiti officers. ‘His father is some big shot in the government, but that’s not going to stop us booking him!’

  The next morning I was allowed to conduct the first interview by a Western journalist with an inmate of Kuwait’s Central Prison. It was certainly a filming challenge as most of the prisoners did not want their faces shown. Since my film was going to be broadcast internationally on BBC World, anonymity was especially important for the foreign prisoners, most of whose families did not even know they were in jail and would be consumed with grief and shame if they found out from watching the evening news. In practice, this meant setting up the camera at knee height so the uniformed convicts could be seen milling around without us showing their faces. One exception was a twenty-something Kuwaiti heroin addict, who seemed happy to be interviewed in his cell, describing to me on camera how he had descended into addiction then a life of crime to support his habit. I could quite see how the government had no objection to this being broadcast as it was certainly a cautionary tale. There was nothing shocking about his prison conditions – he was probably better off here than on the street – but his windowless cell stank and there was an air of hopelessness about him. Yet this was nothing compared with what was to come.

  As night fell I was driven down to the far south
of Kuwait, past the oil fields and close to the Saudi border at Khafji. Here, in a rather basic villa by the sea, I was to witness a gathering of one of Kuwait’s most secretive organizations: Narcotics Anonymous. There were about a dozen men of various ages, all Kuwaitis, wrapped up in scarves against the chill of the northern Gulf winter. One had an ’oud, an Arabian lute, which he strummed while he sang a mournful tune that they all joined in. They were very reluctant to be filmed, telling me I could only record the sound, but once I switched the camera off they queued up to tell me their stories. One had gone over to Iran and picked up an opium addiction there (over 3,500 Iranian border guards have lost their lives trying to stop drugs being smuggled in from Afghanistan and Pakistan). Another had become an addict in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, of all places. In both cases it was boredom, just not having enough to do to fill the long, empty, bachelor evenings. But another addict, who spoke perfect English, told me how he had been completely ‘clean’ until he had gone to Cambridge to study. There, he said, he had tried hashish, but friends had persuaded him to experiment with harder drugs and by the time he came back to Kuwait he was addicted to heroin. He seemed to hold a grudge against Britain as a result. As I filmed him talking, his red-and-white chequered headscarf concealing his haggard face, it occurred to me that I could not see any rehabilitation or counselling taking place here. Still, I thought, as I left them to their mournful songs and the salty breeze that blew off the waters of the Gulf, at least they could console themselves with each other’s company. In this intensely traditional, tribal society these were members of a secret, taboo tribe that could never show its face in public.

  In the early summer of 2000 I flew down to the Asir mountains of southwest Saudi Arabia to make one of my more enjoyable films for BBC World: on Saudi tourism. For ten years I had been going to this region to explore the hill villages, with their fortress-like architecture and colonies of wild baboons. Now I was here to film French mountaineers from Chamonix setting up rock-climbing courses for Saudi teenagers, and I even tried out paragliding myself, jumping off a nine-thousand-foot ridge and doing a piece-to-camera as I soared amongst the eagles. I could hardly believe I was being paid to have so much fun.

  From there I crossed over into Yemen to tackle a rather more sensitive story. The year 2000 was the tenth anniversary of unification between the old North and South Yemen and it had not been an entirely happy marriage. The two partners bickered over oil revenues and in 1994 they nearly tore each other apart in a short and nasty civil war, even trading Scud missiles with each other. But with the North victorious, the past was being put behind and I flew into Sana’a to find banners and bunting hanging from the ancient city walls. Men gathered in groups dancing the bara’, a traditional Yemeni dance that involves stamping the feet to the rapid beat of a drum while waving a curved dagger in the air and twirling around in the centre of an admiring, clapping circle. The best performers tend to be old men who learned it from their fathers and grandfathers.

  I had been granted an interview with the president in his fortified palace on the outskirts of town. It was nearly a disaster. President Saleh insisted the interview would be conducted in Arabic and enquired if I needed an interpreter. Partly as a matter of personal pride and partly because I prefer to ask the questions myself, I replied that no, I would speak in Arabic. I knew that unification between North and South was the president’s pet project, something he was very proud of, so to get him warmed up I decided to open by asking him what he thought was the main benefit of this unification. By the look that suddenly appeared on his moustachioed features, I might as well have asked him if he often wore girl’s clothes as a child. ‘What?!’ he demanded, turning for an explanation to his official interpreter who had been retained for just such an emergency. It turned out that while the Arabic word I had used for ‘benefit’ was only slightly out, my question had come out as: ‘So, what’s the point of all this unification then?’

  After that, I thought it best not to take any chances with a man who had not hung on to power in one of the more violent countries of the world by being nice to his enemies. The interpreter, Muhammed Sudam, was pressed into service and the rest of the interview was conducted through him.

  But President Saleh was soon to have rather more important things to worry about than the subtle nuances of a BBC interview. Yemen and the US were forging an increasingly close military partnership, building on the low-key deployment of US military engineers to carry out de-mining projects in southern Yemen. The Commander of Centcom (US Central Command, based in Tampa, Florida), General Anthony Zinni, was keen to build on this relationship, and two months after my awkward interview with President Saleh one of the most modern ships in the US Navy steamed into Aden harbour for refuelling. The USS Cole was a guided missile destroyer with state-of-the-art communications equipment and it had berthed in what was supposed to be a friendly port. When sailors on deck noticed a small speedboat coming out towards them they at first assumed it was local traders hoping to sell some fresh produce – after all, the three men in the dinghy were waving up in greeting. Some of the Americans waved back. But the boat was packed with high explosives and was driven by fanatical suicide bombers directed by Al-Qaeda. When it came alongside the US warship it blew a hole so huge the ship nearly sank. Seventeen US sailors died that day, thirty were injured and the USS Cole had to be loaded ignominiously on to a Norwegian transport ship for the slow voyage round the Cape of Good Hope and back across the Atlantic to its US home port for major repairs. Washington demanded a full-scale investigation and full-scale cooperation, yet so murky was the plot that five years later there were still no full answers as to exactly who had hatched it and how.

  Meanwhile we had been back in England for the summer holidays, spending an idyllic few days on the Isle of Wight with my parents, who had seen all too little of their new grandchildren. Coming from Cairo, we could not get over how green the landscape was, and the weeks away from the dust and smog of the Egyptian capital did wonders for our lungs. But up in London on a visit, a friend told me that there was a whispering campaign going on against me at Bush House, home of the BBC World Service. ‘Frank Gardner’s missing the big story in the Middle East. He’s off doing films about drug addicts in Kuwait and tourism in Saudi Arabia when the real story is the Palestinians versus the Israelis.’ This was quite true, but I had deliberately left that to our very well-staffed Jerusalem bureau, figuring that as the Cairo-based Middle East Correspondent I had a duty to bring our audience news and features from the rest of the Arab world that they would not otherwise get to see. No sooner had I decided to rectify this than events on the ground propelled half the world’s press corps towards Jerusalem, including me. On 27 September 2000, the former Israeli defence minister (and later prime minister) Ariel Sharon decided to go walkabout on one of the most sensitive and controversial patches of land in the Middle East: the Haram Al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, site of the third-holiest shrine in Islam. Sharon was reviled by Arabs and blamed by them for the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in Beirut in 1982, so he must have known how provocative his visit would be, and he took no chances, surrounding himself with a hefty phalanx of security guards. The Palestinians went berserk. Within hours clashes had escalated into open gun battles between Palestinians and Israelis. The second Intifada, or Palestinian Uprising, had begun.

  Everyone feared the worst, a war between Arabs and Jews that could suck in even the moderate neighbouring states of Jordan and Egypt, which had already signed a peace treaty with Israel, as well as militaristic Syria with its rusting arsenal of chemically tipped Scud missiles. Like many big news networks, the BBC immediately began twenty-four-hour news coverage, sending reporters to the region who were expected to talk meaningfully on air within hours of arriving for the first time in the region. I was soon assigned to our Jerusalem bureau to help with the coverage; I took the short flight from Cairo to Tel Aviv, then made the one-hour drive east to the heart of the Holy Land. I had been given the dawn
reporting shift, so I went to bed early in a soulless Israeli hotel overlooking a park (in my experience Israeli hotel staff vie with Saudi consular officials for being the most unhelpful people in the Middle East). I had barely got to sleep when I was woken up by a rhythmic thumping in the middle distance. Heavy machine-gun fire, I told myself knowingly: someone must be getting a pasting. But the thumping continued unabated and when I peered out of my cell-like window I could see no sign of tracer fire lighting up the hills. I decided to get dressed and go outside to investigate. To my amazement I found a full-blown open-air rock concert getting under way in the park a few hundred yards away; the rhythmic beat was coming from a pair of giant speakers. Young Israelis were drifting up in twos and threes, smoking dope and swigging from bottles of Maccabee beer. This was no war zone, here were no politics: this was a slice of normal Western life and I had to pinch myself to remember I was in the Middle East. After three years of living continuously in the Arab world I found the contrast strangely refreshing, so I sat down on a grassy bank and watched the whole thing.

  That short, bizarre interlude gave me a precious breathing space before launching into the maelstrom of Intifada coverage. In the next few weeks I interviewed hapless Palestinians who had got a rocket through their kitchen because someone had used a nearby orchard as cover to fire on an Israeli road. I met terrified Israeli civilians in south Jerusalem who went to bed each night in fear of the next attack on their houses. I strolled amongst the Arab market-traders in the old walled city to hear their views and took a drink with Christian bar-owners. I listened bleary-eyed as my taxi-drivers, alternately Palestinian and Israeli, gave me their world view of events, forever blaming the other side for today’s sorry state of affairs. I tried hard to learn how to interpret the stilted language of press announcements put out by each side. Even months later, when I thought I was getting the hang of it, I nearly got the BBC into big trouble.