A Season in Hell

by Robert R. Fowler

  Then, as the truck started to roll, Chaffi leaned across me toward the driver’s window, looking worried, to ask whether Abou Zeid had agreed to release the two women. Belmokhtar angrily growled something and gestured “Just go, now!” Baba needed no further encouragement. He slammed the truck into gear and off we rumbled in a lonely two-vehicle convoy, leaving a hundred Al Qaeda warriors in our wake, uncertain whether we were leaving or escaping.

  A few minutes later, Chaffi and Baba confirmed that in those last moments Belmokhtar, by word and deed, had indicated he was taking the decision to free all four of us out of Abou Zeid’s hands; the deal for his hostages (Louis and me) had been done for almost two weeks and he would not abide seeing the two women left behind to die while Abou Zeid haggled over details.

  I suppose, too, that it was a matter of face. First was the fact that he had made his deal and would see it honoured, and second was the issue of whose vision, value system, and authority would prevail among AQIM forces in the southern Sahara. Moreover, this struggle for status and leadership was being played out before the eyes of the assembled clans, and Belmokhtar could not blink. In Chaffi’s view, as confirmed by Baba, Belmokhtar had made clear to them that his will would be done, by force if necessary.

  After about an hour of hard driving, with me sandwiched between Baba and Chaffi, and Louis perched on two spares, grasping a couple of tie-down ropes as if he were clinging to the rigging of one of Nelson’s frigates in a gale, we suddenly crunched to a stop in the deep dusk. Baba tersely explained we would be making some phone calls. He said he had made a deal with our abductors that he would not fire up his satellite-phone until we had travelled thirty kilometres from the place at which we had been liberated. Now that we had come that distance, it was time.

  We would not, however, be calling Mai and Mary, as Louis and I had fervently hoped. That would have to wait—for reasons I still do not fully comprehend—until we entered the cellphone net on the outskirts of Gao, in southern Mali, some thousand kilometres to the south.

  While Baba got on his sat-phone, I left the cab and walked back to the second vehicle, where for the first time I saw the two European women. The shock was physical. I recoiled with horror at the sight of those small, troubled white faces, twisted with pain and concern, wispy hair askew. They were in evident distress. The older woman, Marianne Petzold, was by the window. Despite what she had just been through, she whispered a courteous introduction as she sought to allow her companion, Gabriella Burco Greiner, to exit the truck from the middle position.

  Gabriella was in urgent need of going loin. They explained that they, along with Gabriella’s husband, Werner, and their fellow hostage, Edwin Dyer, had contracted a virulent form of dysentery some weeks previously and had all been suffering terribly. Abou Zeid had refused to give them the medicines that their governments had provided. It did not look to my untrained eye as if Ms. Petzold would last another hour, let alone sixteen to eighteen hours of hard driving across the trackless desert.

  In a brief conversation with Gabriella, I learned that Marianne was a seventy-seven-year-old retired French teacher from a small town near Hamburg. Gabriella, a city official from Zurich in her early fifties, and her husband, Werner Greiner, a fifty-seven-year-old lawyer who practised in Zurich, were Swiss citizens. Their fellow captive, the Briton Edwin Dyer, originally from Buckinghamshire, was the sixty-one-year-old manager of a plumbing supply business in Vienna, where he had lived for forty years.

  Baba signalled that the calls were about to go through. As he passed me the phone, he told me that he had been unable to reach President Touré so instead I would be speaking to the head of Mali’s Security Service, to whom Baba was reporting on this assignment and who had been designated by President Touré as the senior officer managing our file. When he came on the line, I thanked him for having liberated us and asked that our deep appreciation be passed to President Touré. For his part, he congratulated us on our freedom, telling us that the President would be informed we were free and assuring us we were in good hands with Baba and Chaffi. This helped, but not completely. Louis and I were both still not absolutely convinced that we were indeed free and clear.

  The satellite-phone was then passed to Chaffi, who called President Compaoré and got straight through. That same deep, distinctive voice I had last heard precisely six weeks before from the top of a dune by Algeria’s border offered similar congratulations, and I finally believed that it was true. We were free, while remaining in perilous circumstances. I told President Compaoré that his cartons had nourished our bodies and his “On va vous sortir de là” had sustained our wills. I said we would be eternally grateful, for he had done exactly what he had said he would do. I hope he understands the extent to which that remains true.

  As I was talking to the President, Ms. Burco—not a tall person—was jumping up in front of me shouting, “Help my husband—you must save my husband!” as she tried to wrest the phone from my ear. While I had deep sympathy for her appalling dilemma, I also needed to complete my call with President Compaoré. Eventually Baba placed himself between her and me and when I had finished, Louis had a chance to thank President Compaoré. Louis then handed the phone back to Baba who, a little reluctantly, passed it to Gabriella. She then pleaded the case for her husband, urging President Compaoré to do everything in his power to get him and Mr. Dyer out as well.

  Once the calls were completed, and we were on our way again, I took the only turn Louis would permit me in the back of the truck on our run to freedom, giving him the chance that I had just enjoyed to talk things over in the cab with Baba and Chaffi.

  The night was cool but not cold. The spares and lots of bedding made a comfortable seat. There were ropes against which I could brace and I was free. I felt like that woman in the bow of the Titanic but didn’t much like the image. It was a delicious time and I savoured every moment, including a spectacular sunset, glimmering almost purple through a building sandstorm on the western horizon. Finally, I could appreciate its startling beauty. Soon the stars shone brightly, the wind was sweet against my face, and I could release all those carefully corralled thoughts about my family now that, once again, it seemed we had a future together. Furthermore, no one could see my tears.

  But dammit, the stars revealed that we were heading due east and not south as I knew we must. Inexorably, nagging doubts seeped back into my troubled mind. Might we have simply been passed on to some other group of miscreants who would seek to extract their pound of flesh? Sure, Compaoré and Baba and Chaffi talked a good game and seemed to be still doing so inside the cab with Louis, but was all as it seemed? After about ten minutes of this I simply decided that I would not allow my mind to go in those directions yet again. So I closed down the second-guessing instinct honed so carefully over the preceding four and a half months. Half an hour later, we turned sharply south, never again straying from that bearing.

  After another few hours Baba drove a few hundred metres off the rough track we had been following and we pulled in behind a small rise. I asked why we were stopping and he said he thought that the women travelling in the second vehicle simply could not take much more; an argument I could hardly disagree with, even if Louis and I were anxious to put as much distance as possible between us and the AQIM horde.

  Chaffi handed Louis and me a Tetra Pak of juice to share, noting that it was the last one. They had brought lots but a week wandering about in the Sahara had all but eliminated their supplies. “Those women drank almost everything we had,” he said ruefully. Not surprising, I suppose, given their dysentery, but a little worrying. The lieutenant prepared a very simple meal, distressingly similar, in fact, to the standard fare of AQIM, but I didn’t care and I wasn’t hungry.

  Marianne was in terrible shape. In addition to dysentery, she was impossibly thin, had cracked a couple of ribs, and only a few days before had been stung by a scorpion. When I saw the damage it had inflicted, I appreciated more fully how lucky Louis and I had been to avoid such a
fate. Her arm was hugely inflamed between hand and elbow with a large, shiny, black, very painful-looking swelling that looked as if it were about to burst. I was later told she spent six weeks in hospital in Germany receiving skin grafts to replace the necrotized flesh.

  As we prepared to get some rest, Marianne asked if Louis and I would sleep close to her and Gabriella and, of course, we agreed. Each of us took turns helping her to stand up, sit down, and eventually lie down. Gabriella looked after her when she had to go loin and explained to us that throughout their captivity Edwin Dyer had performed all these tasks; Gabriella and Werner had looked after each other but Dyer had done everything for Marianne.

  The wind had been building for some time and as we started to prepare our sleeping positions a sand-laden gale was blowing, visibility was down to a metre or so, and anything not tied down or tucked beneath us was soon cartwheeling across the desert into the night.

  I don’t think anybody slept much. At about four o’clock in the morning Louis and I got up and started walking about, the wind having significantly abated. When we saw that Chaffi was also awake, and that nobody else was sleeping, I suggested we get underway. He agreed. By the time we’d had a little to eat and drink and had loaded up, the first signs of a brilliant red sunrise were showing in the east.

  We had no choice about where we were as AQIM captives, but Chaffi and Baba did. They had put their heads into the lion’s mouth time after time, taking significant personal risks. On our long drive to freedom on 22 April, I sat between them as Louis hung on, hour after hour—refusing all relief—in the back. They told me that Baba had made eleven trips deep into the desert to talk to our captors and, not incidentally, to bring us the backpacks. Chaffi had made four, including one to bring us President Compaoré’s eleven cartons. They were each asked to take on these perilous missions by their respective presidents, but they did not have to do it, did not have to put their lives at risk for us. Of course they had been compensated in some manner or other for their remarkable services, but that does not mean they were any less courageous or that we owe them any less gratitude.

  Baba spoke limited French, so much of our conversation was interpreted by Chaffi. They were neither friends nor rivals, merely professionals who had been through an awful lot together on our behalf.

  Baba Ould Cheik was a rough frontiersman type. A Malian Arab from the northern wastes, he was neither subtle nor sophisticated. He was the mayor of the tiny desert village of Tarkint, on the edge of the Sahara, and had been involved in the negotiations leading to the release of German tourists in 2003 and of Austrians in 2008. To get us out of there, he and Chaffi had to deal with some hard and unforgiving men. He knew them because he had dealt with them before and they trusted him. President Touré gave that mission to just the right guy—however rough around the edges—and thank heavens for that. We are very fortunate that the President of Mali took such a vivid interest in our welfare, because Baba was also a politician of sorts, and not among his supporters.

  Baba travelled the desert with a battered, well-oiled, and well-used AK-47 always close to hand. A little disconcertingly, he had our captors adjust the firing pin while we awaited permission to depart following our liberation. He needed to be certain that it was in good working order as he considered it entirely possible that we might meet some different nasty folks on our run to freedom, people who would recognize marketable commodities when they saw them. Chaffi, on the other hand, brought along a beautifully chased, single-barrelled, twelve-gauge shotgun, not the weapon I would choose when venturing into Al Qaeda–land.

  Mustapha Liman Chaffi was a very different kind of negotiator and perhaps both types were required to get the job done. Chaffi told me he was Mauritanian and had been doing “special tasks” for President Compaoré for many years. He was a deeply intelligent, subtle, tenacious, and courageous person.

  On our long drive out of the Sahara we talked of many things, and I quickly realized that I was dealing not only with a West African political practitioner of enormous experience but also an extremely sophisticated observer of the broader African scene. So I asked him, “What’s been happening in Africa over the past four and a half months?”

  “Where in Africa?” he replied, presuming, perfectly reasonably, upon my ignorance.

  “Well, start in Tangiers and when you get to Cape Town, stop.” He laughed good-naturedly, took a deep breath, and proceeded to do just that. He knew who had done and was contemplating doing what to whom in every nook and cranny of that great continent.

  Africa is huge (20 percent of the earth’s surface—bigger than the continental USA, Western Europe, China, India, and Japan combined). Chaffi knew many of the secrets, successes, and failures of its fifty-three extremely different governments. He knew a lot of the key personalities and a great deal about the continent’s rich linguistic and religious make-up, which make Africa more diverse than any other major region on the face of the earth. His exposé was masterful and I wish I could have recorded it.

  We talked of my UN mission in Niger and he offered informed insights into the challenges I had faced there. Both he and Baba strongly shared my suspicions that we had effectively been handed to AQIM by the government of then President Mamadou Tandja of Niger.

  I asked him to tell of his first meeting with AQIM and he recounted this harrowing tale:

  After our phone call with President Compaoré and his discussion with Omar One on 10 March, there had been further calls and eventually Chaffi was invited to go north to meet with Belmokhtar. He was given a set of precise coordinates and told to be at that location, deep in the Sahara, at a certain hour on a certain night. He and a colleague, I think from the Burkinabé armed forces, surged north over a few days until his GPS told him that he had arrived at the right spot about an hour before the agreed time.

  He left the lights on, as instructed, and waited … and waited. Four interminable hours after the designated rendezvous time vehicle lights flashed in the distance some hundreds of metres away. He waited as he had been directed for somebody to approach him. Two hours later lights flashed again but from a different direction. Then another wait, following which lights flashed from the four points of the compass and then all four vehicles drove in close. Somebody approached his window and, without a word, handed him a slip of paper with another set of coordinates and a new time for the following evening. Then abruptly, all four vehicles departed.

  He got out his GPS and determined that the new rendezvous was far distant, so far that he was not sure they could make it. They drove for most of the next twenty-four hours. Then at the next rendezvous they went through essentially the same routine. At the point when four vehicles revealed themselves, he was relieved of phones, GPS, and all other electronic devices and was told to follow them. For some hours he tore after them until they reached a camp, where he met Belmokhtar the next morning. Not everybody would find that fun.

  On the trip that had secured our liberation, his fourth into the Sahara, he and Baba had been wandering about the Sahara for ten days—far more than we had thought—as Abou Zeid stewed about whether or not he would release the Europeans and on what terms. Chaffi confirmed that our deal had been done—fully settled—when our abductors told us on Saturday, 11 April, Day 119, that we were to be freed. Over the intervening ten days Baba and Chaffi had moved from bleak spot to bleak spot, using up their fuel, water, and food and trying their health and patience as Belmokhtar and Abou Zeid wrestled over the details and our big liberation show was being brought together. He was not surprised when I described our perilous end game and did not consider my worries unfounded when I told him I believed that had he and Baba left the desert because either their supplies or their patience had been exhausted, it would probably have spelled the end for us.

  The most distressing moment in that long drive south out of the Sahara came when Chaffi spoke of the trip Compaoré had asked him to make to “negotiate away the death-threat ultimatum” immediately following their recei
pt of the third video, made on 31 March, Day 108. Once deep in the Sahara, he had again been put through the stressful vetting procedure to ensure he had not been followed and that Belmokhtar was not being set up. When he finally arrived at Khaled’s camp late in the evening, he had been told that the emir would not see him until the next morning. Negotiations opened early and had been confrontational and difficult from the outset. Chaffi said it had been like talking to a stone wall. He could not get them to budge on any issue. Finally, late in the afternoon, Jack abruptly stood up, declared the discussions were at an end, and instructed Chaffi to leave the camp immediately. Chaffi asked for a few more minutes but Belmokhtar just walked away.

  Chaffi returned to his vehicle and began very slowly to pack up and then stopped. He spread out his blanket, sat down, and began to read. Various of Belmokhtar’s lieutenants passed by and asked him why he had not gone, why he was disobeying their chief’s orders, but Chaffi engaged them in innocuous conversation, regaling them with all sorts of stories that had nothing whatsoever to do with the reason he was there. Bit by bit he won back their interest and then their confidence.

  Soon Jack walked by and observed, “You’re still here!” However, rather than again sending Chaffi away, he sat down with the others, saying little, and Chaffi continued his inconsequential stories, seeking to nurture some kind of rapport.

  Eventually, Belmokhtar sent all save Ahmed away and said something along the lines of “Where were we?” And seamlessly the negotiations resumed, to conclude four or five hours later, as they all sat in the absolute darkness of the desert well past midnight. Chaffi returned to Ouagadougou over the next two days, the ultimatum having been lifted and an agreement in place that the third video was deemed no longer to exist and would never be aired. I believe, however, that portions of the audiotrack may have received some subsequent distribution. It is reasonable to assume that had Chaffi left Belmokhtar’s camp as originally ordered, we would have been nourishing hyenas in the Sahara shortly thereafter.