Eyewitness

by Garrie Hutchinson

  *

  Flight inspires meditation. Sitting in an airbus looking at the desert, dreaming of the great green river, and thinking that if the Australian landscape from the air looks as if it was painted by an Aboriginal painter, or Fred Williams, then the Egyptian landscape might have been painted by a New York abstractionist tomb painter – all stripes, in ’50s pastels.

  Through the window of the Egypt Air flight from Luxor to Cairo, the Nile’s dark green stripe, paralleled by another lighter green band of cultivation, floated onwards, upwards. The line of irrigated land beside the river just stopped, as if drawn with a ruler. Little dark blobs indicated signs of timeless activity.

  I had been in Egypt to research a book about travelling from Giza to Gallipoli in search of the Australian presence in this region of any number of ancient wonders. After landing at Cairo I intended to go to Israel, to visit the great Australian fast bowler ‘Tibby’ Cotter’s grave at Beersheba, where he had been killed with the Light Horse in 1916 – then on to Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Greece.

  We had been flying for an hour. We should have been descending. Tray tables were locked, seat backs were upright but we weren’t preparing for landing. We were circling.

  Traffic congestion perhaps. The mud-coloured outline of Cairo emerged now and again from the haze, in the soft light of the late afternoon.

  After an hour of circling, a rippling feeling of annoyance. Surely there wasn’t that much air-traffic above Cairo. What else could it be? An accident on the ground? Equipment problem in the plane? Maybe we had burst a tyre on take-off and were burning fuel. A quiver of anxiety rippled through my body. No information was forthcoming. Not from hostess, PA, not from anyone.

  More circling. This was really annoying. Ya’lla! Let’s go!

  Then a burst of Arabic over the intercom. It was not the Captain’s voice. It was high-pitched, fast, hysterical. There was a dim awareness in the back of the plane that something was going on at the front.

  I didn’t understand much of it. But I did compute a few words which the brainwaves automatically translated. Inshallah. If God wills it. Amman. Capital of Jordan. Libya, a country to our left.

  It was now evident that the plane was not circling but was flying on a level course. I looked out of the window. I was with Horus, god of the sky – the Egypt Air inflight magazine is named after him. The sun – Re – was setting in the west, swallowed by the mother of night, named Nut. Shadows on the wings. We were heading west. We had been hijacked.

  This was Flight MS 104, 27 March 1996. I was in seat 38K, near the back. Next to me were a couple of nut-brown Upper Egyptians with faces straight from a tomb painting. One was wearing an uncomfortable grey suit and the other a grey Egyptian drapery, the galabyia. They did not move or speak for the next 12 hours.

  In front of me were an array of a dozen Americans, big short-haired guys, chatty women and doing-what-they’re-told kids with excellent teeth. There was a jumble of Japanese, a medium-sized coterie of Canadians, and an effusion of Egyptians. There were also what I came to know as a nonentity of Non-Egyptian Europeans: me, two South Africans and what I took to be a Luxembourger. One hundred and forty-six travellers in all.

  Even at that moment it did not really sink in. Hijack. I’d been hijacked. I might die! I’d read about this, seen it on TV. Anything might happen.

  Peering down the aisle I could not see what was happening in the cockpit. The curtains separating us from the first-class section of the plane were drawn. Perhaps that was a figure moving across. It could have been a hostess, could have been a hijacker.

  We were not threatened physically, but emotionally the battering of silence began. We were not told anything by anyone. That was the Standard Operating Procedure. Don’t tell the passengers anything, they might do something.

  The captain’s voice, in Arabic for many seconds, then in briefer English. He said: ‘Please sit down. Please lower your voice. It is for your own safety.’

  So it was true. We’d been hijacked – and to Libya. This looming possibility was causing some whispered conversation between the Americans in front of me. They were doubly agitated; being hijacked is one thing but going to Libya is quite another. They remembered the tribulations of the hostages in Iran. We all thought of the hostages in Lebanon.

  But who had hijacked us?

  Presumably it wasn’t Hamas, active in the past few weeks, or we would already be in pieces over Cairo. Who would hijack a plane-load of tourists and go to Libya? Didn’t seem to make any political sense. Hezbollah had thus far stuck to their own neck of the woods in Lebanon. The P.K.K. had a grudge against Turks, and also Germans – but this was far south of their range.

  An Egyptian fundamentalist group such as the one that had been shooting up buses and trains for the past few years around Luxor, and was determined to crack the tourist industry, the backbone of the Egyptian economy, seemed the most likely bet. Gama’a al-Islamiya seemed a good candidate. This gloomy realisation was accompanied by the thought – they actually do kill tourists.

  But I was enveloped in the womb of the aeroplane. To me the fact that aeroplanes fly is remarkable enough – and if this one kept flying, we would be all right.

  Without seeing any physical violence, without being personally threatened I just went with the flow, so self-deluded that I found myself annoyed that I was not more afraid.

  An announcement over the intercom asked all foreign passengers to hand their passports to a wide-eyed hostess. There was a breeze of anxiety. Who were they looking for? Probably not Egyptians, but Americans, Israelis? Australians? Surely not.

  I held a hissed conversation with a hostess who, while clearly frightened, was trying hard to follow Standard Operating Procedure. I didn’t want to lose my passport. Losing your passport is more than losing your identity; if the worst occurs, it is losing the possibility of identity.

  No-one knew I was on the flight. It crossed my mind that this was a domestic flight, booked at the last minute, and that I was just a name in the computer, probably spelled wrong, unattached to nationality or anything else.

  Perhaps I would simply become a paragraph, ‘Aussie tourist disappears,’ with a follow-up par, a week later. ‘Aussie tourist was one of the dead hijackees.’ Wrong place at the wrong time.

  After an hour’s flying we landed in Libya. It was a smooth landing as the sinking sun illuminated the twin runways and single control tower of this military airfield near Tobruk. There was nothing else around, no people, no buildings – just desert.

  I couldn’t relax. I didn’t mind becoming a hostage, I found myself thinking, I just wanted to get off the plane. I didn’t want to sit there, waiting for passengers to be picked off one by one while the authorities refused to ‘give in to terrorism’.

  I wondered what it was that they wanted.

  An hour passed. I read the in-flight magazine, Horus, again. I was bored, and felt a rumble of annoyance work its way into my mind. How dare these guys do this to me! I am an Australian! Don’t they know that?

  Another hour. Occasional stabs of staccato Arabic punctuated the rhythm of the stationary aircraft. It was getting humid, and a little smelly.

  An aircraft is comforting and familiar, but it is also like a dream, a magic carpet, which could at any moment simply take off and land back at the original destination, and it would then be as if nothing had happened. Or it could just blow up.

  Then the curtain at the front of the plane parted and a vision emerged. It was the captain and he looked just like a young Omar Sharif. For some reason I found this comforting. We were in a movie. The Captain’s name was Imhotep Shehata Mohammed Nasser. Such names – all Egypt’s history is in those names.

  Captain Imhotep walked down the aisle, and spoke to passengers on either side. The hijacker’s demands were ‘small’. He exuded confi- dence and the smell of travel in Egypt, lemon cologne.

  What were the demands? They had messages for the world. They were broadcasting them on the aircraft radio t
o Israel, to Egypt, to the United States, to the Palestinians, to Syria, to Sudan.

  The main hijacker’s name was Mohammed Mahmoud Hemeid Selim, a 43-year-old cafeteria owner from Luxor, perhaps originally from the Arabian tribe of Beni Hilal. Many Egyptians are of ‘bedouin’ background. With him and the ‘explosive material’ were two teenage boys, Khaled Mohammed Hemeid Selim and Ahmed Hussein Kamel Selim. They had with them ammonium nitrates, potassium chlorates and black powder, considered to be explosive, allegedly supplied by Abdel Wahab Mukhtar Said Abdel Kerim, a 61-year-old mechanic of Luxor.

  The hijackers later claimed that they belonged to no terrorist group. They were said to be ‘deranged and mystified persons who believed in scruples and black magic’. They were also alcoholics and drug addicts – anything but Muslim fundamentalists.

  Except that one of the little demands was ‘to put pressure on the Egyptian government over the imposition of sanctions against the Sudan, after the expiration of the notice for the handing over the defendants involved in the attempted assassination of President Mubarak’.

  This presumably meant that the hijackers wanted Mubarak assassinated and objected to Sudan being penalised for the non-handover of the assassins.

  Not to mention fixing the pre-Israeli-election shelling and bombing of Lebanon, and the blockading of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. This seemed a pretty fundamental list of objections, but if they were at least passed on to presidents Gaddafi, Mubarak, Clinton, Assad, Arafat, and anyone else, we might get out of this.

  An hour passed. And another. And another.

  The curtain parted, and a dark head with shining eyes poked through, followed by an arm in green and black camouflage, carrying a black automatic rifle. He smiled and said, ‘Welcome in Libya! You are free!’

  Captain Imhotep’s voice said in Arabic and English, ‘The hijackers have left the place, peacefully.’ They shook the hands of the crew, thanking them for their kindness, and were driven off by the Libyans. Inshallah.

  The soldier, just a kid, said again, ‘Welcome in Libya!’

  The aircraft erupted in cheers and clapping, and chants of ‘Allah! Allah! Allah!’

  It dawned on me that we were out of the hijacking frying pan and into the Libyan fire. We were in Libya, but we were not yet free.

  People clapped, took photographs, a gust of cool air breezed in from the desert outside, and washed into the back of the plane. There was what can only be described as a physical wave of relief. I was not yet dead. I might have temporarily disappeared but I was not dead.

  Early in the black morning, an agitation of Libyan soldiers came down the aisle and ordered everyone off the plane onto the tarmac, which was lit by the headlights of perhaps 20 trucks, jeeps, buses and Japanese sedans with flashing orange lights.

  We were told to get on a bus. I chose the closest, a small 16-seater, rumbling to one side of the queue. On my bus were pale-faced crewcuts, the Americans and their exhausted children. We didn’t know where we were going, or what was going to happen to us. The Americans paled in the sliver of moonlight in the six-hour drive that followed.

  TV lights, camera flashes, the door opened and I was out. Like Monty and Rommel I was first into Benghazi. A hand emerged from the glare – then a sweating face, dark hair plastered on shining forehead, a moustache, a grin.

  ‘Welcome in Libya. You are free! Welcome to the best hotel.’ The best hotel sounded good.

  The hand pulled me from the bus. The other passengers got out behind me, and I was ushered into the foyer. The manager, for that was who it was, wanted me to say a few words for the TV cameras. I had no words. I was tired. I was unhappy about being here, wherever it was.

  ‘Where are we? What’s going on? Who is in charge?’

  Repartee being what you think of later, when I slumped into a white leather couch on the foyer of the hotel, I knew I should have said take me to your leader.

  Later after lengthy speeches and force-fed international hotel dinner food at the wrong end of the day, we were given rooms.

  I had a flash of inspiration. I looked in the wallet of informative material provided – guest services, postcards and writing paper. This told me where I was. There was some hotel letterhead paper – printed in green. Arabic at the top, sealed with writing and the symbol of Libya – two green hands holding a keyhole shape – a mosque, perhaps, containing a palm tree. But down the bottom of the page, some English. ‘TIBESTY Hotel. Jamal Abdelnasser St Benghazi: Tel 97178/93077/ 90642 … Fax 89171 97160 …’ That’s what the manager said – not The Best Hotel, but Tibesty Hotel.

  I dozed off, woke up, grey light streamed through the curtains. Benghazi looked a dump through the curtains. I went downstairs to see what was going on.

  The Green Revolution was in full swing. There were exhausted hijackees slumped all over the foyer beneath little green tickets, fluttering in the air-conditioning. They had messages – maxims – on them in English and Arabic, from Colonel Gadaffi’s magnum opus of the revolution, his little Green Book.

  ‘The House is to be served by its residents.’

  ‘Committees Everywhere.’

  ‘Who have neither family nor shelter society is their guardian.’

  ‘The Social i.e. national factor is the driving force of human history.’

  ‘In need freedom is latent.’

  I liked that one. I needed to get out of here in order to be free once again.

  In the foyer there was a commotion and a crush around the front door.

  Speak of the devil, it was the Colonel himself. He was mobbed like a film star. In close-up he looked like one – a man who woke up too early in a tent, went to make-up for a long day’s appearances on TV. His pancake was thick. He wore a sporting white jacket and a green-andwhite horizontally striped shirt. It was the uniform of a decaying playboy or Mediterranean yacht owner on the rocks.

  Gaddafi appeared among a loose scrum of uniformed security men, unfortunately not the famed Revolutionary Virgins, for the Libyan TV cameras. He chatted with a few hijackees. He spoke a few words of encouragement to them, presumably ‘you are free in freedom-loving Libya.’ I couldn’t get close enough to hear. Harried-looking Australians were not asked to Come On Down.

  But there was a result. Later that day I was sitting at a window seat of another Egypt Air flight to Cairo. The Egyptian Foreign Minister, Amr Moussa, had come to town and negotiated our release. Gaddafi showed he was a freedom-loving person, Egypt got its aeroplanes back, and would not object too strongly if Libyan planes flew pilgrims to Mecca over Egyptian airspace.

  On the ground in Cairo there was an announcement: great dignitaries were waiting for us, and would like to greet us personally. Egyptian ministers for Tourism and the Interior. The chairman of Egypt Air. Lights, more cameras, action: a party.

  The voice on the intercom asked our Japanese friends to rise and walk forward, tell the attendant on the door their name, and be announced to the waiting throng. And then the Canadian friends – there were 40 of them. Then the very good friends from Britain … from France … and our American friends …

  We were noticed by a hostie, a minute later. And now … the Non- Egyptian Europeans!

  That was us. We walked out, and were not greeted by ambassadors. Our names were not called out. Nor were our nationalities. We did not have our hands shaken by a minister.

  I caught up with the Times (London) of Thursday, March 28th, 1996. I thought, once again, how lucky I was to be hijacked by either a professional who’d had second thoughts, or an amateur who hadn’t really gone off half-cocked. In this paper, our adventure didn’t rate.

  But there were sobering stories about a German gunman holding seven hostages at Leienkaul; the British mine clearance expert captured by Khmer Rouge deserters in Cambodia; the unrepentant assassin of Yitzhak Rabin haranguing the court in Israel; and seven French Trappist monks abducted by the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria.

  A few days later, I left Cairo. My plans were out of s
ync. To catch up, I flew to Amman in Jordan, and travelled for the next month by bus through Syria, into Turkey, to a Greek island or two, and on to Istanbul and Gallipoli.

  From Istanbul I caught the train to Athens, on what was reported to be the Worst Train Journey In Europe. The reports were correct.

  Stumbling out of Athens Station at three in the morning, accosted by ouzo-influenced street crones, I found a railway hotel not far from the station.

  The desk man, a dapper European gent in a tight black coat and rose-red tie, asked where I had come from. Istanbul, Damascus, Amman, Cairo, Melbourne.

  ‘Ahh, Cairo. You have heard the news?’

  No, I had been on the train.

  ‘The massacre. Eighteen Greeks. Old ladies. In Egypt …’

  Where in Egypt?

  ‘The Pyramids Road. At the hotel.’

  What hotel? Surely it couldn’t have been the one I had stayed at …

  That was when a great wash of emotion hit me, like being dumped in the surf. It was a combination of exhaustion, travelling on nerves and a fractured schedule, and the backwash of the hijacking.

  I stared at the desk clerk. He must have thought I was another Australian macadamia. I picked up the key, went upstairs, and took a very long shower.

  Perhaps I had seen too many tombs and cemeteries between Alexandria and Athens, too much historical death. I couldn’t cope with any more.

  Postscript: The hijackers were extradited to Egypt from Libya for trial. In November 1996, Mohamed Mahmoud Hemid Selim, 43, was given a life sentence. His son, Khaled Mohamed Mahmoud Hemid, 17, received ten years. Ahmed Hussein Kamel Selim, three years. Abdel- Wahab Mukhtar Said, who supplied the explosives, was sentenced to seven years.