A Season in Hell

by Robert R. Fowler

  Prior to our arrival, military psychiatrists had briefed our families on what might emerge from the aircraft and how they should behave. It was explained that after four and a half months of being told what to do by our jailers, of having been deprived of any free will, we would react badly to being given instructions by anyone, even those we held most dear, so they had to be careful about demanding anything. Unfortunately, this wise advice seems not to have stood the test of time.

  When the aircraft door opened, I saw Mary and Mai clutching each other at the foot of the stairs and a moment later I fell into Mary’s arms and managed to say very little, savouring the moment I had dreamt of all those long months. She was so evidently well, whole, and happy, and I was safe and with her. I looked around for our daughters but they were being held back against the possibility that we would not be presentable. Mary explained that they were all awaiting my arrival at the Landstuhl Medical Centre a few kilometres away, where we were headed.

  The girls had been to the base department store and decorated my hospital room with all the things they imagined I had missed: my beloved jujubes, chocolate bars, photos and letters from the grandchildren, a denim shirt, and the current edition of Foreign Affairs. It was a wonderful reunion. Finally I knew for certain that we were all to be allowed to have our lives back.

  Everyone was talking at once, and my story and theirs emerged in bursts and bits, all of it punctuated by tears and laughter. Eventually, some stern doctors shooed them away to their accommodation across the street at Fisher House, a largely privately financed facility for the families of U.S. service men and women damaged in Iraq and Afghanistan. As she left though, Mary served notice that she would be back at dawn and that she expected to be able to “sleep over” the next night, something she managed to do against all odds.

  The medical staff was beyond outstanding, giving Louis and me exquisitely sensitive and gloriously efficient care. Our stomachs were examined and treated, our blood tested and rehabilitated. Everything was x-rayed and the compression fracture damage to my lower back and coccyx was confirmed. The ravages of too much sun were zapped with liquid nitrogen, and industrial-strength drops caused sand to bubble from my ears for days. We were given exercise advice—although we were judged to be in “remarkably good condition,” if a little anemic and emaciated—and offered lots of wise counselling by young military psychologists who had seen far worse.

  All the while, hospital rules and regulations were relaxed and suspended to allow us to catch up with our families between tests, treatments, and debriefings. In the halls, waiting rooms, and cafeterias, all of us were moved by the sight of so many young soldiers who had paid much heavier prices than had we through their service in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  By the end of the third day we were allowed to go out to a local restaurant for dinner, and the Guays and our various minders were understanding about our desire to have this moment en famille. At the end of a marvellous few hours, selflessly allowing me the full limelight, Antonia informed us that she was pregnant with her first child, which was the perfect happy ending to this Fowler misadventure.

  After a couple more days and further batteries of tests we flew back to Canada on Tuesday, 28 April 2009, where there was a quiet welcome reception in the Billy Bishop Lounge at the Canadian Forces Base portion of the Ottawa airport. Finally—after a warm farewell to Louis—Mary and I found ourselves at the home I had left in a snowstorm nearly five months before, the girls having gone back to their own homes to rebuild their lives with their own families. Suddenly everything seemed so normal, so solid, and so familiar that I couldn’t help wondering if it had really happened.

  EPILOGUE

  FILLING IN THE BLANKS

  The many men, so beautiful!

  And they all dead did lie:

  And a thousand thousand slimy things

  Lived on; and so did I.

  In early November, about five weeks prior to Louis’ and my capture, our next-door neighbour, CBC correspondent Paul Hunter, joined Mary and me for coffee in our kitchen, where we were discussing journalist Mellissa Fung’s recent kidnapping in Afghanistan. Paul knew that I had held a variety of security and international affairs–related jobs in the Canadian public service and was anxious to get my take on the most appropriate media posture with regard to this calamity.

  He said that the government had urged the CBC to be extremely circumspect in its reporting of Fung’s kidnapping and to rigorously stick to factual accounts if anything needed to be covered at all. Paul allowed there had been a lot of internal soul-searching, but led by John Cruickshank (then head of CBC News), management had agreed to follow such a strategy. Paul clearly believed that “the Corp” had taken the right decision, as did I, and was pleased that the imperative of protecting the safety of his colleague had trumped the need to get the story out.

  “Great,” I aggressively and not a little uncharitably replied. “It’s wonderful you’ve come to such a wise decision when the life of one of your fellow journalists is at risk, but what will you do when I get kidnapped?”

  On my return to Canada at the end of April 2009, Paul, who had offered Mary extraordinary support and friendship throughout my ordeal, told me that he had recalled this conversation almost every day I was away. His steadfast insistence that the CBC refrain from airing any material that could have a negative impact on Louis’ and my situation or cause our families extreme worry and pain was influenced by this recollection and his belief that the CBC did have a commitment to be consistent—to treat others the way it had treated its own.

  There is no doubt that the CBC decision to stick to factual, non-speculative reporting, and as little of that as possible, was the right one. Further, its intelligent and sensitive approach did influence other journalists and outlets—but by no means all—and that posture helped the resolution of our kidnapping and saved our families a lot of grief.

  During a September visit to Niger, two and a half months before our kidnapping, Louis and I had been accompanied to the troubled north by Minister of Defence Djida Hamadou. We got along well. I liked him and I believe the feeling was reciprocated. In the course of that visit he had invited me to be his guest at the celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of Nigerien independence, which would take place from 17 to 19 December 2008, centred this particular year in his own political constituency of Tillabéri, 120 kilometres up the N1 highway, northwest of Niamey.

  On Friday afternoon, 12 December, as we left a long, confrontational, and unpleasant meeting with Minister of the Interior Albadé Abouba (known widely as President Tandja’s “adoptive son”), I received an urgent request through our accompanying protocol officer from Minister Hamadou to meet him in his office as soon as possible. We went there straight away. When we arrived the usual coterie of hangers-on and supplicants was absent from his outer office. We were ushered into the inner sanctum to find only the Minister, no slouching, bored, and cynical generals, no fawning political assistants.

  Mr. Hamadou was evidently ill at ease. He was pacing and did not ask us to sit. He apologized for being brusque but said he would get straight to the point. He had been looking forward to receiving us in Tillabéri the following Wednesday and Thursday, he allowed, but he had just been told by President Tandja that he would instead be representing the government at the local and very subsidiary independence celebrations in Agadez, in the north. Therefore he was sorry but he would not be there to honour his invitation and receive us in Tillabéri along with the President and the remainder of the government. With the attitude of someone repeating unequivocal and unwelcome instructions, he noted that we were welcome to proceed to Tillabéri but that the President’s decision was final.

  I guess my surprise showed, but he offered nothing more, shrugging heavily with palms raised, as if to add, “What can I say?” I suppose I ought to have read more into it. The meeting was over in less than three minutes and as we retreated from Minister Hamadou’s office, confused and not a little annoy
ed, Louis and I wondered what Tillabéri would be like, surrounded by a palpably hostile government, now that we had been unhosted.

  In the aftermath of the 11 December 2007 AQIM attack on UN premises in Algiers, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations asked its most accomplished diplomat, former Algerian Minister of Foreign Affairs Lakhdar Brahimi, to chair a panel of experts to look into the “strategic issues vital to delivery and enhancement of the security of United Nations personnel and premises and the changing threats and risks faced by it.” To that end, the panel (universally known as the Brahimi Panel) produced a report entitled Towards a Culture of Security and Accountability, and presented it to the Secretary-General on 9 June 2008, six months before our abduction and a few weeks before my appointment as Special Envoy.

  Paragraph 250 of the Brahimi Panel report noted, in part, “The primary responsibility of Member States for the security and safety of UN officials and premises is a guiding principle of the United Nations security management system. This responsibility derives from the inherent function of government to maintain law and order on their national territory.”

  Perfectly reasonably, the executive summary also noted in paragraph 18, “Member States are not equally well-equipped to provide that security. Indeed, it is quite often in those countries where capacity is modest or lacking altogether that the most serious risks exist. All the UN can and should expect from the host government is that it provides security to the best of its ability. The central element of the cooperation and trust between the two sides is information sharing about security conditions.”

  The issue with regard to Louis’ and my kidnapping, of course, was that the government of the member state in question, that of President Tandja in Niger, detested the United Nations in general and my mission in particular. Not only were the President and his Minister of the Interior not providing me with security to the best of their ability over the weekend of 13 and 14 December 2008 but they were, I believe, allowing or perhaps encouraging information relating to our security to be shared with Al Qaeda.

  Utterly germane to our kidnapping—indeed, to everything we learned while being held captive by AQIM—the Brahimi Panel observed in paragraph 60 that “the explicit targeting of the UN by terrorist groups represents a sea-change among the threats the Organization faces at present and will continue to face in the foreseeable future. The UN is being targeted by terrorists for what it is and what it represents, not because its people happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or for what any part of the Organization happens to have done at a particular place, at a particular time. As such, this threat is not confined to any one country or region; indeed, for this specific type of threat—that of al-Qaeda and similar organizations—the UN is a potential target everywhere it has a presence.”

  Of course the government of Niger was fully informed of our plans for the entire trip, including that fateful weekend. Before leaving Canada we checked on several occasions—as we did each time we visited—to ensure that the UN resident coordinator’s office in Niamey had provided the host government with copies of our latest itinerary, and we received assurances that this had been done. We proceeded in this way to facilitate the organization of our official meetings and specifically to allow the host government to assess the security requirements and put in place adequate protection so there would be no embarrassing incidents.

  This responsibility, as noted by Brahimi, is the exclusive province of the host government, be it Canada’s responsibility for the preservation of the health and safety of foreign leaders attending meetings in our country, or Niger’s responsibility to protect the UN Secretary-General’s representatives.

  Finally, I was at pains to ensure that the Niger government had our itinerary well in advance of our arrival precisely because I wanted to provide as little leeway as possible for President Tandja’s government to misconstrue the purpose of my visit or to avoid its security responsibilities or, indeed, to invoke a lack of transparency on our part as an excuse to reject my mission and send me packing, as I knew the President and some of his officials would have dearly liked to do.

  On Monday, 15 December, the day following our kidnapping, Nigerien Minister of Communications Mohamed Ben Omar told an Agence France-Presse reporter, “The diplomat had not informed authorities or the UN office in Niger of his trip,” a government of Niger line that was deployed for many days following our disappearance and was much reported in Canada. When we arrived in Niamey from Paris, on the evening of Thursday, 11 December, Louis and I were met at the steps of the aircraft by a vehicle from State Protocol and whisked away to the VIP lounge, where we were greeted by the chief of protocol, a representative of the presidency, the acting UN resident coordinator, the World Food Programme country director, and a number of senior officials, without having to worry about any customs and immigration formalities. Then we were taken off to our hotel in the same big, battered, clapped-out Mercedes driven by the same venerable old government retainer who had acted as my driver for the Niamey portions of my two earlier visits. And again a motorcycle outrider, with siren blaring, led the way. Not, I think, the attributes of a private, unofficial, or unsanctioned visit, or one about which the host government and the local UN Office were unaware.

  Following the last meeting on Friday afternoon, 12 December, we discussed our weekend plans with our accompanying protocol officer at the Grand Hotel. We explained that the trip to the mine was fixed for Sunday and that on Saturday we intended to drive outside of town to get a feel for the country beyond formal and official encounters. He offered the view that the old Mercedes would not be up to the roads outside the city. Anticipating this, we told him the United Nations had offered us a four-by-four SUV suitable for such conditions and a driver who was a native of the local area and knew the way to the mine at Samira Hill. Further, we stressed that there would be lots of room for the protocol officer in the UN vehicle, where he could occupy the front passenger seat as he had for meetings within the capital.

  He said that he would check with his office and let us know that evening. A few hours later, as promised, he called to say that “it had been decided” he would not accompany us. He wished us a good weekend and said he would see us at the hotel at 8:00 a.m. on Monday.

  So who handed us to AQIM? Because surely somebody did. It had to be someone who had access to our itinerary, so it could have been anyone in or close to the UN Office in Niamey, or the UN Office responsible for the West African region in Dakar, or even someone at UN headquarters in New York. A number of individuals at each of these locations knew of our plans.

  I believe it is much more likely, however, that the government of President Mamadou Tandja arranged—however indirectly—for information relating to our movements to reach AQIM. Aside from stopping the interference of a pesky foreigner from the United Nations, an organization that had so embarrassed Tandja in 2005 by suggesting that his people were starving—when, of course, they were—both he and his enforcer, Albadé Abouba, had every reason to want my mission to fail or just stop. The last thing they wanted was to see an end to the Tuareg rebellion.

  The continuing rebellion allowed Tandja and his supporters to claim that the enemy was at the gate, even if the gate was many hundreds of kilometres north of the capital. Further, in December 2008, the President had one year left in his second five-year mandate and the constitution forbade a third term. He wanted to stay in power, and his backers needed him to do so. They had already begun to moot the requirement for constitutional changes that would allow Tandja to stay on. His plans for a referendum on that issue were twice ruled illegal by the Constitutional Court, so Tandja disbanded the court and dissolved the National Assembly. In June 2009, he announced that he was suspending the government and would rule by decree.

  While a continuing Tuareg rebellion reinforced his case for such powers, how about Al Qaeda grabbing the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy at the very gates of the capital? Now that was an enemy at the gate that
even Washington, New York, and Paris could not ignore.

  Ironically, I think that the combination of deteriorating domestic circumstances, flagrant disregard of parliament and the constitution, the ravages of continuing rebellion, curtailment of the freedom of the media and the NGO community, a worsening food crisis, and perhaps also suspicions regarding our kidnapping—suspicions widely entertained throughout the country and the region—caused growing resentment among a desperately ill-served population. Finally, a coup was launched in February 2010 that deposed Tandja and his government.

  The interim Prime Minister was Mahamadou Danda, the former very helpful economics and public affairs officer at the Canadian Office in Niamey. And, most relevant to my mission, the rebellion in northern Niger is over. Various rebel factions talked peace with the interim government and have handed in their weapons. Following my release, I was able to resign my UN appointment knowing that in a rather unorthodox way my mission had been successfully completed. In March 2011, as promised by the coup perpetrators, Niger returned to civilian rule.

  As for Tandja, after a year of house arrest following the February 2010 coup, press reports noted he had been sent to prison in the wake of an extensive audit that alleged he may have looted the treasury of one of the poorest countries in the world of some $125 million during his time in office. However, in May 2011, the appeals court ruled that it was impossible to try a head of state after that individual had left office. The court ordered Tandja’s release.

  On 9 January 2009 (our twenty-seventh day of captivity), Mary and Mai were invited to a meeting at DFAIT, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, their first since our capture on 14 December. They were met by a small group from DFAIT and the RCMP, and no other departments or agencies were present or allowed to be there. They were told almost nothing beyond the fact that there was no proof we had been killed.