The utter irrelevance of time to our captors was a cultural hurdle I had some trouble getting past. Time is the enemy of Western societies. We want everything right now and are not prepared to wait. We seem aggressively determined to ignore the imperatives of time-imposed realities (aging, health, education, books, food, newspapers, character, friendship, prudence, trust, professional seniority, politics), always preferring entertainment—fulfilment and action now, no matter how superficial and ephemeral—to knowledge, appreciation, and understanding later. When compared to the fickleness of our addiction to an ever-shorter, shallower, and more tyrannical news cycle and our need for instantaneous gratification in all our endeavours, the profound conviction of our abductors that time was on their side was truly unsettling. Because it is so evidently not on ours.
My AQIM captors didn’t care if it took another twenty, two hundred, or two thousand years to achieve their vision. In this, they were utterly serene. They accepted that they would win some and lose some, however long it took, but they knew with unshakable certainty and absolute clarity that Allah’s victory would be theirs. It was so written. The when just didn’t matter. That is a powerful weapon by any standard.
Time dans ce bas monde counted for nothing. Happily, they have an imperfect understanding of just how much it matters to us, but they are learning fast. They did not expect to achieve victory in their lifetimes, which they fervently hoped would be brief and end gloriously as they fulfilled God’s mission. It did not matter how many short generations of mujahideen it would take. When the alternative to their path was fifty thousand years of meticulously detailed and quantified torture in hell, what difference would a few centuries make?
I can only imagine how they would have reacted to President Obama’s speech on 1 December 2009 to the cadets at West Point, when he announced the Afghanistan surge by declaring, “I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.” I have not left out any of the President’s words between those two sentences. A little later, a White House spin doctor, apparently with a straight face, insisted that the Taliban and Al Qaeda “would be wrong to presume that time was on their side.”
The AQIM jihadis’ comprehension of the reality of life in the West was spotty—full of deeply cherished myths about our debauchery, godlessness, and decadence. They did appreciate enough of our attention-deficit-addled politics and society, though, to believe that we simply did not have the heart for a long haul, casualty-heavy, expensive, intense, brutal, no-holds-barred struggle. Particularly, of course, a struggle to achieve objectives that manifestly did not engage our vital interests and were, at best, abstract and mostly obscure to the bulk of our citizens. They drew, and I am certain they continue to draw, great strength from that understanding, just as they revel in playing David to our Western Goliath in Iraq and Afghanistan as their standing in much of the world continues to rise while we get it wrong again and again.
They despise virtually all of our most cherished concepts and beliefs.
“Democracy,” my kidnappers insisted, in part because of their perception of our fickle attachment to it, is “your religion.” “Do you really believe that 51 percent of your adult population is qualified to select your leaders?” They maintained that there was no limit to the hypocrisy of our commitment to what they considered a godforsaken form of government. “You love democracy when it suits you,” they would spit. But never—like the victory of the Front Islamique du Salut, or Islamic Salvation Front, in Algeria in 1992 or more recently, the Hamas electoral victory in Gaza—when it does not. They often asked me to square our love of democracy with our anxiousness to see pet dictators prevail in blatantly flawed elections across Africa, with our support of princelings, oligarchs, kleptomaniacs, and oppressive dictators across the Islamic world, and they would point to other places throughout the globe where the venerable U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s “sons of bitches” continue to prevail.
They hated the words freedom and liberty, believing them to be pernicious ideas, contrary to Allah’s purposes, concepts that inexorably led good, Allah-fearing men astray. Strict Islamic discipline had to be the order of their day, imposed by a jealous, ruthless, and vengeful god. How, they would ask, over and over again, could we find the reasonable application of Shari’a-sanctioned punishment (stonings and amputations) so barbaric compared to the atrocities and indignities that occurred in bloated Western prisons?
They detested the concept of anything that might be termed a human right, reserving particular scorn for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which they saw as nothing other than an ill-disguised Western weapon in the crusade against Islam. They insisted that all rights belonged to God, and it was an affront to Him to presume His purposes.
What, then, did they like? Where did they get their entertainment, find their fun? Well, aside from Islam, they didn’t.
They were not allowed to sing but they would sit, sometimes in full sun, and chant Qur’anic verses for hours on end, occasionally joined by a colleague or two who lent their voices to the monotonous rhythms. The soundtracks of the DVDs played on TV Night had also been filled with war chants, punctuated with the sounds of machine guns and massive explosions.
Ayatollah Khomeini said, “Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humour in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.” Our AQIM captors would not have sought an endorsement from this stern Shi’a cleric, but they certainly walked his talk.
Although our abductors constantly expressed a yearning to return to the “purity of the era of the Prophet” and eschewed all forms of “Western capitalistic excess,” they did suffer from an ill-disguised technological inferiority complex. They knew from bitter experience of the wizardry of Western weaponry and often said how much they wished to return to the simpler, more straightforward days of the sabre. I was happy to encourage them in this direction.
While they were quick to insist upon the shallowness of our godless values, the hypocrisy of our political thinking, and the wantonness of the death and destruction they saw us sowing so thoughtlessly about the world, they were consistently in awe of the West’s technological superiority and inventiveness, which—ominously—they swore they would use against us. They sought (I thought a little desperately) to make a virtue out of the fact that their weapons and equipment were not sophisticated or new, often saying, “We hope the Americans will come to the Sahara, and when they do, their advanced weapons will not save them from the wrath of Allah.”
There must have been a dozen shortwave radios in the camp but we were not permitted to listen. Radio France Internationale, BBC (Arabic), and Al Jazeera seemed to be their principal sources of information, and they quickly focused on the fact that Canada was one of the few countries in the world that did not criticize Israeli excess and the appalling butcher’s bill in Gaza. They convinced themselves that Canada provided Israel with $10 billion each year in military assistance and were unmoved by my insistence that, at twice our annual development assistance budget for the entire world, this was nonsense. But here as in most other areas they were not to be deterred from their cherished beliefs.
The Israelis began their punitive Operation Cast Lead against Gaza on 27 December 2008, two weeks after we were captured, and for over three weeks they pounded an area half the size of New York City, killing over thirteen hundred, including more than four hundred children. The Israelis lost thirteen. During this time our guards were glued to their shortwave radios, listening to the impassioned news reports that flooded across the Middle East and North Africa, and recounted to us whatever they heard, however exaggerated, as absolute fact. It wasn’t as if the bare facts weren’t bad enough. The brothers were beside the
mselves with anger and frustration.
In much the same vein, our kidnappers were aggressive regarding Canada’s participation in the coalition in Afghanistan, but it was Gaza that preoccupied them the most. As the predations in Gaza continued, our kidnappers became more volatile and unstable, and I began to despair about our future, which looked to be short and ugly. They had places to go and people to kill, and we were a distraction keeping them from their destiny. They resented us with ever-greater intensity.
PART THREE
THE MIDDLE GAME
CHAPTER 10
SOLO, PERDUTO, ABBANDONATO IN LANDA DESOLATA! ORROR!
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide, wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
Extreme fear and worry were the pervading themes of our Al Qaeda captivity: fear to the point of physical pain, fear that it would end suddenly with a sword, in a tent, on a video that would be seen by family and friends, and fear that it would go on and on and we would die of the heat, the food, the snakes, scorpions, or merely of broken wills and hearts.
The first five days were the toughest. The next period, while less dramatic, held its own particular horrors, many of them the creatures of our own overwrought imaginations. For the first weeks at Camp Canada, I was plagued by constipation and insomnia. I just could not get my mind to rest, to stop or slow down even if only for a few hours. I could not quit analyzing probabilities and options and endlessly producing largely unhappy end-game scripts. Each night, wide awake, lying as flat as possible to ease the pain of my damaged back, dark thoughts would churn endlessly through my head.
Surely Canada or the United Nations had seen the proof-of-life video we had made on Day 5 and as a result, our families would know we were alive. So why had we heard nothing? It was hard to escape the conclusion that we had simply been written off even if, rationally, I knew that to be unlikely. But where was the evidence? If somebody were, in fact, fighting our corner, would our kidnappers not have asked us for some explanation or clarification of something? Would our “negotiators” not have asked for further health bulletins or additional proof-of-life?
On Christmas Eve, Day 11, Jack swept into Camp Canada and immediately came to see us, accompanied by his staff and the senior officers in camp. First, as previously explained, he had Ahmed distribute “gifts.” Then, with some formality, when all had settled cross-legged in a semicircle around our blankets, Jack announced without preamble, “Your case is 95 percent settled. You will be going home very soon…. The remaining 5 percent relates to things our side has to work out. They are not your problem.” Our abductors seemed inordinately pleased with themselves. They clearly believed they had pulled off a major coup.
While we were surprised and unable to contain our excitement completely, I did reply that although this news was very welcome, I did not think these affairs were usually resolved with such speed and efficiency. It had been only six days since we made the video, and while we had no idea of the nature of their demands or in fact with whom they were negotiating, I expressed skepticism that either Canada or the United Nations could respond with such alacrity. My fishing elicited no information on either issue and our doubts were summarily dismissed.
Ahmed, he of the most malevolent eyes incongruously linked to one of the widest smiles, looked hard at Louis and said only semi-jocularly, “But given your lack of cooperation regarding your BlackBerry, Louis, perhaps we’ll keep you with us a little longer.” Louis had, as instructed, turned off his BlackBerry and handed it over to Omar One just before our hands were tied, thirty minutes after our capture. But in subsequent discussions with Hassan and Ahmed at TV Camp and Camp Canada, he had failed to satisfy them that he had revealed all of its secrets.
Jack and Omar One were quick to wave off this not-so-veiled threat from Ahmed because the occasion was about good news and the end to a quick, efficient AQIM operation. Louis and I were almost certain that there was a short-circuit somewhere in this story, however: that some major and dangerous miscommunication or miscalculation had occurred. We also more fully appreciated the extent to which we had a bitter enemy in Smiley Face.
My first thought, which bedevilled me constantly, was that Jack’s gang and whoever was negotiating for us had probably not taken the same negotiating course, had not read the same manual, had not seen the same hostage movies. Thus I worried Jack might not know that the first rule of hostage negotiation is never say no. I speculated that if, say, AQIM demanded the release of a few hundred of Al Qaeda’s worst miscreants from a score of NATO jails in return for our lives, our negotiator might have replied along the lines, “Well, that certainly won’t be easy, but we’ll see what we can manage.” I worried AQIM might have taken this to mean that our side had agreed, at least in principle, to a major prisoner release, even if the names and numbers were still to be precisely determined, and I thought that such a miscommunication could cause things to head downhill very quickly.
I had no idea what might have prompted such a major disconnect so early in the negotiating process, what intermediaries may have been involved, or what, precisely, had caused the wheels to come off, but come off they certainly had. Thus on Christmas morning Louis and I shared a dread that something seriously bad had occurred—spiked with desperate, irrational, forlorn hope that it hadn’t. At best our captors seemed about to lose a lot of face.
Despite our concerns, an upbeat atmosphere persisted in the camp, and the feeling that we might actually be heading home was dramatically reinforced by what Louis and I termed “the Boxing Day da’wa.” Little by little we allowed ourselves to believe it might actually be about to happen.
The Islamic faithful, we were taught, are required to perform da’wa, essentially what Christians would call evangelism. The term denotes a “call” or “invitation” to follow Islam, and it is the duty of every Muslim to explain their faith to the uninitiated, in effect to ensure that as many people as possible are given an opportunity to embrace Islam and thereby remove any possibility of copping an ignorance plea on the Day of Judgment. In addition, the da’wa doer earns credits—something like Roman Catholic indulgences—by performing this duty.
By the time the twenty-seventh member of the katiba had been brought to us to perform his da’wa, relying upon the ever more strained and economical interpretation services of Omar One, there were no words and phrases we had not heard a dozen times as each sought to explain the glories and marvels of Islam and urged us to sign up. This was the only time we got to hear from Moussa, whom we had dubbed The Veteran, and we couldn’t help think that there must be something to Jack’s announcement if they were bringing the blind bomb maker and the imam into the act.
After the Boxing Day da’wa the positive mood persisted in the camp for a few more days. I came to believe that Hassan was allowed to proceed with his “interrogations” over this period because it was understood that we were on our way home and he had better get what he could out of us (within the norms laid down by Belmokhtar) while it was still possible. Inexorably, though, that mood of expectant optimism among our jailers soon drained away into the hot sand in the absence of any follow-through, to be replaced by sullen restlessness. Our initial apprehension had been well founded. Whatever else it was, it was a false start and our captors became resentful, embarrassed, and bitter. They were also eager to let us know it, though nobody ever explained to us what the business had been all about, and why or how it had come off the rails.
Each night after bidding Louis goodnight, as I retreated into my own turgid mind space, the strains of Manon’s despairing dirge—”Sola, perduta, abbandonata, in landa desolata! Orror!” (Alone, lost, and abandoned in a desolate land! The horror!)—would fill my head as I lay awake hour after hour. Without sufficient sleep, I was less able to cope with the largely banal challenges of the day. So in the mornings and most evenings I walked hard in the hope that I might become sufficiently tired to allow some sleep, and
each afternoon Louis struggled to make our disintegrating loafers walk-worthy.
The constant stress caused in each of us a startling and disturbing loss of short-term memory, to a point at which I seriously wondered if I was losing my mind. It was only when Louis first exhibited and then admitted to precisely the same symptoms that I became less concerned. In the deep recesses of what memory remained, I vaguely recalled reading something about this phenomenon in victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. Having recognized the problem, we made all too half-hearted attempts to rectify it through a variety of mental exercises such as trying to recall the birthdays of each member of our extended families or the words to favourite songs.
While, at least in my case, these exercises tended to confirm the problem rather than mitigate it, they began my compilation of a list of songs—a virtual playlist—that helped release the tension that our predicament generated. Sometimes the selections were blindingly obvious (“Please Release Me, Let Me Go,” “Homeless,” “Et maintenant,” or “Guantanamera”), sometimes wry (“When I’m Sixty-Four,” “Dice Are Rolling,” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So”). There were maudlin entries (“Stand By Me,” “Till the Morning Comes,” “Va, pensiero,” “Bring Him Safely Home to Me,” or “I Just Called to Say I Love You”), bathetic ones (“Are You Lonesome Tonight?” “Heaven Can Wait,” “Le dernier repas,” and “Find the Cost of Freedom”), stirring entries (“Men of Harlech,” “The Holy City”), the chorally inspiring (the Miserere and Spem in Alium), and the wistful or desperate (“Maybe Tonight,” “Someday Never Comes,” “Un bel dì vedremo,” or “Ready to Run”).
A Season in Hell Page 17