A Season in Hell

by Robert R. Fowler

  CHAPTER 11

  BLAISE COMPAORÉ AND HIS MARVELLOUS GIFT

  With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,

  We could nor laugh nor wail;

  Through utter drought all dumb we stood!

  I bit my arm, I suck’d the blood,

  And cried, A sail! a sail!

  At Thornhill on Day 81, Omar One, rather formally but with real anger and bitterness, announced to us that they’d had it with Canadian negotiators. They no longer trusted them and would have no more to do with them. Their erstwhile Canadian interlocutors, whom he never named, had, he railed, been duplicitous and dishonest. They kept promising things that never happened, he reported, and agreeing to meetings that never took place. It was all about delay, he insisted, and fiercely proclaimed that such a tactic would not work.

  This was devastating news to us, with appalling implications, even if we could not avoid the irony of our murderous Al Qaeda kidnappers complaining about our compatriots’ dishonesty and untrustworthiness. Further, he told us, once Canada had been disqualified from further direct engagement in the determination of our future, AQIM had sought a regional leader who might “take an interest in your case.” However, he spat, everyone they had approached had refused outright. “They all,” he said with force and conviction, “were willing to let you die.” Observing the anticipated shock in our faces, he added with a theatrical pause, “Save one.”

  Blaise Compaoré, President of Burkina Faso, was, Omar allowed, the only one willing to step forward and endeavour to save our lives. “Your future” he concluded, “is now entirely in the hands of President Compaoré,” and with that he walked away, leaving us to mull over these unhappy tidings.

  And I had thought that things couldn’t get much worse.

  A decade earlier I had worked hard, and with some success, to make President Compaoré an international pariah and had, I knew well, attracted his enmity as a result.

  Between 1988 and 1999, the United Nations deployed four peacekeeping and observer missions to Angola (UNAVEM I, II, III, and MONUA) in an effort to limit, if not stop, the carnage in the Angolan civil war, which had been raging off and mostly on over twenty-five years. It was the bloodiest of Africa’s proxy wars between East and West. The cost of these UN operations was a few billion dollars, and they achieved nothing because none of the principal players on the Security Council, who had voted these massive and expensive undertakings into existence—just to be seen to be “doing something”—were committed to seeing them succeed. Instead, they sought to ensure that their ponies would prevail in the surrogate contest between capitalism and communism (ideologies that concerned the Africans very little)—the spoils of which were Angola’s riches.

  When I took Canada’s seat at the Security Council table in January 1999, I knew that we could do little about the grand confrontations in the Middle East—most notably the building disaster in Iraq—but I did think that, just possibly, ten years after the Berlin Wall had come down we could put an end to this vestigial Cold War struggle, in which most outside participants had forgotten what they were doing there but could not bring themselves to stop doing it. It was clear to me that if the seemingly endless Angolan civil war were to be stopped, it would have to be done outside that country; that the answer lay in preventing oxygen from reaching the fire, rather than sitting around in New York designing by committee ever more ineffectual fire extinguishers.

  In 1992, the government of President José Eduardo dos Santos had won UN-supervised elections, which international observers had judged to be free and fair. Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA (Union for the Total Independence of Angola) did not like that outcome, particularly as his CIA backers had assured him that it would go the other way. So, dropping the pretence of a democratic option, UNITA rebels decided they could do better by returning to the bush and digging up their guns.

  By controlling Angola’s rich diamond fields, Savimbi could fund his bloody insurrection forever, as neither diamond markets nor consumers seemed to care where the stones came from (despite UN sanctions, which nobody seemed interested in enforcing). Furthermore, arms and fuel suppliers knew that the sanctions prohibiting what they were up to remained as toothless and token as the day they were born around the Security Council’s horseshoe table. That said, while the diamond markets in London, Antwerp, Tel Aviv, Mumbai, and New York had yet to appreciate the fact, consumer attitudes were changing, largely as a result of aggressive reports issued by Global Witness and forthright individuals like Alex Vines of Human Rights Watch and Ian Smillie of Partnership Africa–Canada, as they prosecuted their campaign against “blood diamonds.” That venerable commodity was just starting to look less and less like the bedrock of the forever business.

  For its part, the government of Angola, the internationally recognized victor in those elections and at the helm of the seventeenth-largest oil producer in the world, could afford to resist UNITA indefinitely; thus, it was a perfect civil war. I judged that only through a no-holds-barred, well-researched and well-documented operation aimed at identifying the perfidy of the sanctions busters, and yes, the hypocrisy of many of the main players at the United Nations, who had become so adept at looking the other way, could the paradigm shift and the supply of war materiel to the UNITA rebels be cut off.

  To get a genuinely tough report through the Council, however, we needed a mechanism that would be immune from the political interests and pressure tactics that had always prevented pertinent information from being considered. So we created an arm’s-length expert panel beholden to no government (including Canada’s), and reporting to me as chairman of the relevant Security Council sanctions committee. I then went to Angola and interviewed half a dozen UNITA defectors and learned in exquisite detail where all the bodies were buried.

  An awful lot of feathers were ruffled both inside and outside Africa by our two reports on the how, when, where, and, above all, the who of sanctions busting vis-à-vis Angola. But it worked, and also restored a little credibility to the Council’s deliberations and, indeed, to the tattered reputation of sanctions as an effective instrument of multilateral diplomacy. Above all, it ensured that the bulk of UNITA’s blood-drenched diamonds was denied access to international markets.

  On 10 March 2000, I issued the first of those two reports (known, however immodestly, as “The Fowler Report”). For the first time in UN history, it “named and shamed” a long list of those complicit in supporting UNITA, contrary to the dictates of a whole raft of Security Council resolutions outlawing such behaviour. The provisioning of UNITA had sustained the devastating civil war, which over twenty-five years had killed over half a million people, displaced 4.3 million others, or a third of Angola’s population, and caused that country to be judged by UNICEF “the worst place in the world to be a child.”

  With the publication of that report those, such as Russian “lord of war” Viktor Bout, who had been supplying arms and facilitating their illegal shipment to Savimbi, understood that henceforth they would be exposed to public scrutiny and held accountable. Those who had been buying Savimbi’s diamonds through the back doors in London and Antwerp came to realize that they were putting at risk the vast and entirely legitimate bulk of their businesses. Eventually, Savimbi could no longer pay the few arms dealers still willing to furnish him with war materiel. He ran out of fuel and ammunition and was soon defeated and killed. Africa’s longest war was finally over.

  Most prominent among the sanctions busters named in our report were two sitting African presidents, Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo and Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso.

  On the few occasions I ran into President Compaoré between the publication of that Security Council report and my capture in Niger, it was clear that he had not welcomed the publicity I had provided. At one meeting in early 2003 at the Elysée Palace (the French president’s office and residence in Paris), President Compaoré, who is a tall, fit, articulate, and handsome gentleman, draped a long, strong arm around my shoulders, his th
umb digging deeply into the muscle beneath my collar bone, and said through clenched teeth—and a big smile—”You really must come and see us in Ouagadougou, Mr. Ambassador.”

  I replied, “But, Mr. President, will I be allowed to leave?” He threw his head back and laughed loudly and then smiled as he walked away, giving me an enigmatic wink over his shoulder.

  So, Omar One had just told us that the matter of whether we would live or die now lay in the hands of West Africa’s elder statesman, a man whom I had branded an international criminal in a very public manner. All concerned knew that those findings, which had received wide media coverage, were well founded and documented.

  Why, then, had President Compaoré taken on such an assignment, if indeed he had? Had no one else been willing to do so? What about Malian President Amadou Toumani Touré (universally known as ATT) in Bamako? What were AQIM’s recruitment criteria? Was AQIM simply messing with our heads? If so, to what end? One thing did seem to compute. Many, particularly in Africa, concur with the dictum that la vengeance se mange très-bien froide (revenge is a dish best served cold). All Blaise Compaoré had to do to see my captivity prolonged, and have me suffer an unpleasant death, was nothing at all.

  That, though, is precisely what he did not do.

  The next evening, Day 82, the entire council, led by Abdul Rahman, trooped to our location at Thornhill on a formal visit. They sat in a half-circle in front of us and AR said, through Omar One, “The President has sent you gifts.” With a come-hither movement of his left arm, he directed a line of the children forward, each bearing a medium-sized carton. There were eleven in all and they contained quantities of wondrous stuff: vitamins, sardines, cookies of every description, fruit juices, candies, Kleenex, toothbrushes and paste, great bars of soap and chocolate, which, even at nearly fifty degrees, were enormously welcome.

  We were at a loss to understand what this was all about, but I was not about to be fooled again. This was obviously no overture to liberation, but nor did it make any sense to give us such stuff if we were about to be killed.

  We were urged to open each carton and examine the contents as, quite aside from their evident curiosity, they needed to see what the boxes contained from a security perspective even though we were certain that the containers had already been subjected to some considerable examination.

  It is hard to describe how excited we were by those cartons and how perplexed. No Christmas stocking had ever held such valued treasures. We were starving. We immediately opened a package of biscuits and passed them around. Their first reaction, every one of them, was to refuse. “These things,” they said lugubriously, “have been sent by President Compaoré to you. They are not for us.”

  But I could see Omar One salivating. So we insisted, and with some reverence each of these tough, heavily armed, beturbaned, weather-beaten, raggedly clad warriors of Allah slowly and very tentatively reached into the extended package and extracted a rectangular, sugar-coated cookie with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and began, rather self-consciously, to nibble at the opposite corner, smiling, just a little.

  Then, looking embarrassed, Abdul Rahman signalled that he had something important that needed to be said. Obviously ill at ease, he reported that at some point as the trucks were being unloaded somewhere between wherever we were and Ouagadougou—perhaps two thousand kilometres distant—one of the cartons had been dropped. A corner had been crushed. Inside, two packages of biscuits had been pulverized. On examining the damaged carton and discovering the destroyed packages, a few of the younger ones had believed they had the right to eat the crumbs. They were wrong, he sternly said, and they had been punished. It would not happen again, he assured us, and he wished to apologize for such unacceptable behaviour. Then he stared at the ground in front of him, deeply ashamed.

  Most of the others seemed equally embarrassed and they stared straight ahead, avoiding any eye contact with us. I could not comprehend what I was witnessing. Here were these vicious desert warriors, dedicated to the path of bloody, no-holds-barred jihad, planning martyr operations against civilians and particularly targeting aid and humanitarian workers—but they did not steal cookies. I felt certain that every one of them was not only capable of but in some cases anxious to slit our throats, but they were devastated that some of their number had nicked “our” cookie crumbs. It was at that point I really appreciated the depth and the single-mindedness of their commitment to jihad and the breadth of the cultural gap between us.

  In the dying evening light Louis and I were surrounded by piles of goodies, not necessarily what we would have chosen if we had been sent into a supermarket and told to fill four or five shopping carts, but wonderful nonetheless. I do not like sardines, but I sure appreciated those rich, oily, salty, very nutritious ones. Nor am I a big cookie fan, but we savoured each one of those suckers in the weeks to come, carefully planning which treats we would allow ourselves over the coming days.

  Deciding what to eat ourselves, what to hoard, and how much to share with which of our guards and in what manner became a welcome respite from thinking about when and how they would kill us. It all required management and subtle adjustments. How long would we seek to extend these supplies? Which items would deteriorate in the heat first and which would suffer most in the seemingly ever more random movements across the desert? Cookies, we found, do not respond well to being hurled into the back of a pickup truck under heavy weapons and ammunition with four or five men bouncing around on top. Similarly, waxed cardboard Tetra Paks of mango juice cannot withstand such stresses, to say nothing of those temperatures. And then there were the dozen large bars of chocolate.

  For a while, we were fairly parsimonious with our stash, both vis-à-vis our captors and between ourselves, but hunger, attrition, and environmental losses took their toll. So we set our supply-planning horizon to two or three more months rather than the five or six remaining in our original eight-month survival plan. We thought the twelve or fifteen litres of juice would spoil first and, anyway, that stuff was just so damn delicious. We had fraught discussions over whether to enjoy it straight up or cut it with the iffy water to make it stretch. Louis favoured the former and I the latter, not only because that would prolong my enjoyment of those delicious juices but also because even a little made the water palatable.

  As the meals became more spartan—just rice or macaroni, twice a day, cooked in powdered milk, again and again and again—we took to sending two or three tins of sardines to the “kitchen” so that they might flavour the common pot. Now and then we would add or substitute a package of cookies. These gestures were much appreciated by some and abhorred by others.

  Both Hassan and Omar Two saw these gambits for what they were, efforts by us to curry favour with our kidnappers, and they deeply resented the extent to which the ploy was working. Both tried to get us to stop. Hassan insisted that we husband our resources, asserting, “This could last much longer than you think and you will need these things to keep you alive.” Omar Two took a more aggressive stance by simply sending the gifts back with whichever kid was available whenever he was in the kitchen.

  But even Omar Two could be tempted. We had received a number of metal tubes of effervescent vitamin tablets—both vitamin C and multivitamins—which we were told President Compaoré had personally insisted be included in the shipment. The vitamins were probably the most important element of this bounty. Whether or not this makes sense from a medical perspective, from Day 82 onward, I was no longer concerned about scurvy.

  Every second evening, Louis and I shared a cup of water into which one of these tablets had been dissolved. It became our pre-dinner cocktail. On rare occasions, if one of us was feeling under the weather, we would have another. Omar Two was vividly interested in the containers and regularly dropped by to see if we had emptied one yet. Assuring him he could have them when empty, we asked what he wanted them for. A little defiantly he replied that he wanted to fill them with honey, so that he would have honey with him a
t all times. Then we recalled that honey was their all-purpose medical response to battlefield damage. Get shot—pour honey into the hole.

  Of course Compaoré’s care packages were important from a nutritional point of view but, more important, they were vital from a sociological and a psychological perspective. This was—at Week 12—the very first evidence that somebody out there was doing something to alleviate our plight. We assumed, or perhaps just hoped, that all kinds of things were happening in an effort to win our release, but this was the first hard evidence we had received. It was tangible, unambiguous, and so deeply appreciated.

  As a result of President Compaoré’s largesse, we became less victims, less helpless—more in charge of our own destiny. We had a measure of free will restored. With these assets, we suddenly had choices. We were able to express favour and disfavour, show generosity, demonstrate sympathy or withhold it. Some of our captors allowed themselves to be a little seduced by it, others remained impervious, but all tacitly acknowledged that it altered the captor–captive paradigm.

  Over the next few days Louis’ special skills again came to the fore as he constructed sturdy web bags from carefully tied together discarded strands of rope so that our precious cartons—which none of the mujahideen was overjoyed to see added to the already overburdened vehicles—would not suffer too much damage as we moved from place to place.

  As the katiba council trooped away from our position into the darkness on Day 82, leaving Louis and me to catalogue this mother-lode of delicious stuff, I asked Abdul Rahman how we might thank President Compaoré for his thoughtfulness and generosity, and he replied, “Soon you will speak to him.”