The Storied City

by Charlie English

  For the Ahmad Baba manuscripts, it had been good politics to include state employees in the operation, many of whom were not from Timbuktu, in case there was a catastrophic loss: “If there are crises, problems, the state is the state, so we made sure that the agents of the state were with us,” he said. Now, with the private libraries, he was among his own people: “We had a trust between us. We knew our manuscripts. The families had no need of protocols.”

  Fund-raising was central to the operation. Haidara had good relationships with the Ford Foundation and the Juma al-Majid Center, but the money they had given him didn’t last long. Diakité had meanwhile been working her contacts among the foreign governments and foundations she knew from her career in development. It was these organizations that would end up donating the largest quantities of cash.

  One of them was an Amsterdam-based foundation, the Prince Claus Fund, named for the husband of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. The fund, which was supported by the Dutch government and the Dutch national lottery, specialized in cultural development. It even had a “Cultural Emergency Response” program, set up in the wake of the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001. The point of this program, according to its coordinator, Deborah Stolk, was “to make an international fist against the deliberate destruction of heritage,” and in pursuit of this goal she had followed the crisis in Mali from the early days, attempting to identify people who could warn her about potential threats. The researchers at the University of Cape Town’s Tombouctou Manuscripts Project had put her in touch with Savama, and now she was in daily e-mail contact with Haidara and Diakité. She had never met them, but she felt Haidara “seemed to have a good track record,” especially since he had already worked with the Ford Foundation. What was more, the Dutch embassy in Bamako confirmed that the applicant was a trustworthy and knowledgeable partner in this field, although several years after the crisis she appeared to mistakenly believe that he had once been director of the Ahmad Baba institute.

  At the start of October, the information Stolk was receiving from Bamako via e-mail, phone, and Skype was increasingly alarming. In Haidara’s view, the need to take action to save the manuscripts was becoming urgent, Diakité told her, because of two recent developments. The first, a “good change,” as Diakité described it, was that since the MNLA had left Timbuktu, vehicles heading south were no longer being searched. This was “enabling,” according to Haidara. The “bad change,” on the other hand, was that the city’s occupiers had implemented a “search and seize” policy in private homes and businesses, and Haidara was growing more concerned that the manuscripts would become the target. In fact, the MNLA had left Timbuktu after the battle of Gao at the end of June, so the “good change” Diakité spoke of was now at least three months old. A search-and-seize policy, meanwhile, appeared inconsistent with the jihadists’ behavior since the start of the occupation. Still, Stolk and her Amsterdam-based team had little reason to question firsthand information from Mali, and after the destruction of the mausoleums, it fit the overall picture of jihadist vandalism.

  There was a further worrying development in Timbuktu at this time. The jihadist Vice and Virtue Squad had begun a crackdown on the city’s women and girls in mid-September, announcing an eleven p.m. curfew and a strict new dress code. No longer could they wear the light, transparent veils that were favored by the Songhay. Their hair, ears, necks, wrists, and ankles had to be covered by an Arab-style toungou, an opaque piece of cloth a dozen yards long, and they had to wear gloves. Women with manual jobs found it almost impossible to work dressed like this, but anyone who broke these rules could be punished by being locked in the new women’s jail at the BMS, now branded the Center for the Recommendation of Propriety and the Prevention of Evil. This “jail” was actually the tiny kiosk where the bank’s ATM had been kept. It wasn’t large enough for even one person to lie down comfortably, and had no water or toilet. Even so, more than a dozen women at a time might be packed inside.

  The man behind this morality mission was the “dark soul” who had invited so many Salafists to Timbuktu, Hamed Mossa. Mossa had just been appointed head of the Vice and Virtue Squad, and he and his men now went around Timbuktu beating and harassing those who weren’t conforming to the code. Within days, Mossa had become the “most famous and cursed man in the city,” as a local woman put it, and stories of his outrages abounded. When a teenage girl Mossa was chasing in his pickup eluded him, he locked up her father instead. On another occasion he ordered his men to grab a woman and throw her in the road “so that a vehicle crushes her head” because “she’s a bitch!” He would lift women’s clothes with the barrel of his rifle to check what type of undergarments they had on. Arrests he made became so frequent that when the children who played in the street around the BMS saw him returning without a new victim, they broke into a chant of “Hamed Mossa hasn’t had his breakfast.”

  On Saturday, October 6, the women’s fury at this new tyranny boiled over. That morning, a group of women who worked in the Petit Marché decided spontaneously to march on Mossa’s headquarters. As they approached the BMS building, the Islamic Police opened fire, shooting over their heads, and all but seven of the women ran for cover. These seven were brought before a group of senior jihadists, including Mossa, who warned them: “If you march again, you will see what will happen to you.”

  On October 8, Stolk received an e-mail from Savama describing this incident. The protest had been provoked by militia entering private homes to take unveiled girls into custody, the e-mail said. Against this alarming backdrop, Stolk was informed, the manuscript-owning families had indicated to Savama that they wanted to evacuate their collections. The lack of checks on the road south meant it was the perfect moment: there was a “window of opportunity” to get the manuscripts out.

  Diakité gave details of how it would work. The manuscripts would be taken to Bamako in lockers, each of which would contain 250 to 300 documents, via two routes: one would take the main track south to Douentza and then Mopti; the other would go west, via Lere and Niono. Each shipment would be accompanied by couriers recruited from the manuscript-owning families, and there would be “supervisory and security personnel” camped out all along both routes, ready to give “indirect support services” and help in case of emergency. For extra security, each courier would check in eight times a day over a “quick turnaround secure (revolve hardware and software) cellphone communication network,” Stolk was told. Once in Bamako, the manuscripts would be hidden in the safe houses Haidara had identified. All that was now missing was funding. When that was in place, the operation could begin.

  Stolk was convinced. She knew that there was a risk involved in evacuating the manuscripts, and that it was not known for certain it would succeed, but since there was clearly an imminent threat, this seemed the best option.

  On October 17, the Prince Claus Fund signed a contract with Haidara and Diakité for the evacuation of two hundred lockers of manuscripts, which had already been collected and prepared for evacuation by Savama. Stolk was told these were exactly half of the four hundred lockers, containing approximately 160,000 manuscripts, that needed to be moved in total, and the cost to the Dutch fund would be 100,000 euros, or roughly 500 euros a locker. This was a high price, given that a refugee at this time could travel with luggage from Timbuktu to Bamako for around forty euros, but running such an elaborate operation was expensive. (Haidara later said more than a hundred people worked on the evacuation, while Diakité put the number of couriers alone at three hundred.) The money wasn’t just for transportation either, but for “overall coordination, transportation costs, couriers, cell phones to be used during evacuation, stipendium for families/safe houses,” and so on, according to Stolk. Phones were a notable expense, said Haidara: “We bought lots of telephones, for everyone, and I sent credit every day to each person. . . . We had a trader here who gave credit, 5,000 francs [8 euros] for each person. And each week we
paid him. We organised that because every morning they called me . . . all my colleagues.”

  According to a later report of the evacuation in The New Republic that was fact-checked by Diakité, the first shipments started to leave Timbuktu the day after the Prince Claus contract was signed:

  On October 18, the first team of couriers loaded 35 lockers onto pushcarts and donkey-drawn carriages, and moved them to a depot on the outskirts of Timbuktu where couriers bought space on buses and trucks making the long drive south to Bamako.

  That trip would be repeated daily for the next several months, The New Republic’s correspondent noted, sometimes many times a day, as the teams of smugglers passed hundreds of lockers along the same well-worn route to Bamako.

  • • •

  STOLK KNEW THAT the first Prince Claus–funded shipments had arrived safely because she received a photograph taken that day by Savama officials. The image showed a large number of stacked steel boxes, with the disembodied arms of a man—apparently the eminent librarian himself—holding up a copy of the day’s newspaper, an authentication technique borrowed from the movies, as one of Haidara’s aides put it. She received further photos as the weeks went by.

  The manuscripts’ journey south was fraught, however, and barely a day went by without a courier ringing in with what Haidara described later as “petits problèmes,” which ranged from mundane breakdowns to ransom demands and dangerous run-ins with the jihadists.

  One of these petits problèmes concerned the Timbuktu office of Savama itself, which was on the Kabara Road, half a mile south of the town center. Savama had attracted the attention of the jihadists from the earliest weeks of the occupation, when the Islamic Police had called the organization’s administrative secretary, Sane Chirfi Alpha, to tell him they were about to requisition the organization’s assets. Alpha called Diadié, the vice president of the Crisis Committee, who also happened to be Savama’s treasurer, and together they hurried to see the jihadist police commissioner. It was true, the commissioner said; they had decided that since Savama was supported by UNESCO and had American funding via the Ford Foundation, it was a collaborator with Western interests, so they had decided to take it over.

  Diadié thought quickly. “I told him, you are right to bring me here,” he recalled. If the commissioner did not understand the purpose of Savama, Diadié was more than happy to explain it to him. In fact, it was an association of people who held manuscripts, and its purpose was to safeguard their collections and create a framework for their development and exploitation. Since the families had no means, they had asked UNESCO and other organizations for support, but that didn’t mean it belonged to the state or to UNESCO, not at all. Savama was the property of the people.

  “Here are the statutes,” Diadié concluded, showing the organization’s founding documents.

  The commissioner relented. He had been told Savama was part of UNESCO, but if it was a private organization, he would not take action. In fact, he would instruct his men to protect it.

  Two months later, Savama’s workers in Timbuktu had a more serious run-in with the police. Haidara’s nephew Mohamed Touré had a shipment to send to Bamako, and the trucks generally loaded their cargo close to the BMS bank in the Grand Marché. As the area was now crawling with jihadists, he arranged for the trucks to come instead to the Savama office at night. He planned to load several lockers there before the vehicles were driven back to the Grand Marché to be filled with other goods. He left the center of town with two ten-ton vehicles, pulled up next to the Savama building, and let himself in. Working by flashlight, he took four heavy lockers and carried them outside. It wasn’t exactly a covert operation—the large trucks standing by the building while flashlights flickered within—and soon they attracted the attention of one of the jihadists who had moved into the house next door. It was the Frenchman Gilles Le Guen, also known as Abdel Jelil.

  “I was in the process of getting the lockers out,” recalled Touré, “when Abdel Jelil came directly. He called to me, stopped me, and asked me what I was doing. I said I was in the middle of getting my books out because it was the moment to put them away for the rainy season. I was worried that the water would damage them.”

  Le Guen didn’t buy Touré’s story for a moment. “No,” he said, “you would not be doing that at this time of night. You are a thief.” He immediately called the Islamic Police, and soon a group of armed jihadists arrived. Among them was the commissioner himself.

  “I am not a thief,” the desperate Touré told the commissioner. “These things belong to me. Everything here is mine.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us you were doing something like this?”

  “I didn’t know that every time you moved your own belongings you had to tell the police.”

  The commissioner ordered that the trucks be taken with the lockers to the police station, where they were parked in a yard, and Touré was told to call witnesses for the following day who could testify that the manuscripts belonged to him, and to bring his papers. Touré quickly phoned Haidara to explain the problem, and he in turn began calling his contacts in Timbuktu.

  It wasn’t Haidara who called Diadié, but rather the commissioner. Diadié was asked if he was aware that two trucks had been loaded with Savama manuscripts and were on the point of leaving town. “Trucks?” said Diadié. “How?” Come see for yourself, said the commissioner. Diadié said he would, but before doing so he went to find Touré.

  Yes, Touré told him: as part of Haidara’s efforts to protect the manuscripts, they had taken “a certain number of measures” and had started to dispatch them to Bamako. They had been caught.

  Diadié was astonished. “When there were problems before, whose door do you knock on?” he asked. “Yet when you decided to take these manuscripts out, you didn’t even feel able to tell us you were doing it. If you want to do these things you have to tell us!”

  Still, he would come to Touré’s aid. He went to see the commissioner and told him that he had indeed known about the movement of lockers. Savama had an operation to make conservation boxes in Bamako, and it was as part of this program that the manuscripts were being shipped south. “I did not know they were leaving yesterday, otherwise I would have informed you,” he said.

  Touré also went to the police with his papers. The commissioner gave the young man a rap on the knuckles. “If you want to do things like this, you must come to the Islamic Police to get authorization. You must not take things like that, when no one knows what you are doing, otherwise people will say you are stealing.” The punishment for theft was severe, he warned.

  Touré agreed to ask before he moved manuscripts in the future, and the trucks and lockers were released. They stopped the operation for a while at that time, Haidara said, and the trucks went south without the lockers. When Touré started to move them again, he did it in the daytime.

  Le Guen, meanwhile, still seemed convinced he had caught a thief.

  It wasn’t only in the north that the manuscript smugglers ran into trouble. Later in October, Diakité told Stolk that government territory had become just as difficult, since numerous unofficial checkpoints had sprung up, manned by racketeers in uniform.

  There were a host of legal infringements on which Malian travelers could be picked up—vehicle licenses not being carried; ID cards that were out of date—while others were dreamed up on the spot. Each problem could paralyze a bus for hours until the individual passengers had talked their way through it or paid a bribe. Between Sevare and Bamako there were nine government checkpoints, and Haidara had to make sure the couriers could pay their way through all of them. “We always had problems,” he said. “The transport was expensive. But it is normal [in a war situation]. And the couriers were expensive. But what can you do? All the money we spent on transport we can justify, all that we spent on the couriers we can justify. But the amount that went into bribes—how can you justify that?”
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  Corruption made the tedious journeys south even more exhausting. Touré’s worst trip, carrying six or seven heavy but “very beautiful, very important” lockers, lasted more than a week and involved five types of transportation. It began well: after sweet-talking his way through a jihadist search at Douentza by speaking Arabic and pretending to be ill, he reached government territory on the first evening. After that, the journey grew more and more difficult.

  Whenever his manuscripts were found at a checkpoint, the uniformed officers made a big commotion. “They cried out when they saw the manuscripts,” recalled Touré, “saying, ‘Here we have a problem!’” Gendarmes were called. Touré would not say whether he paid them off, only that he “made them understand,” and that they gave him permission to continue.

  One bus broke down. Another went the wrong way and took him closer to Côte d’Ivoire than Bamako. Days later, exhausted, when he found what he hoped was the last minibus and negotiated a fare for Bamako, another set of gendarmes stopped him and took him to their barracks. He was kept there for a day as they looked over his papers, asked him questions, and opened the lockers. As soon as they did that, they knew they were on to something.

  A commanding officer was called. “Look,” he was told, “there is a young man who has brought the manuscripts of Timbuktu. They are everywhere!”

  Touré called Haidara, who phoned a contact in Segu who could negotiate with the gendarmes, and finally they agreed Touré should be taken to Bamako under escort for further questioning. At one a.m. he arrived at the notorious Camp 1 gendarme base in the old colonial quarter of the capital, where the questions continued. He answered the best he could, and in the morning Haidara arrived to tell them that he was on legitimate business.

  “I negotiated,” Haidara remembered.

  As soon as he was free, Touré set off again for the north.