A Season in Hell

by Robert R. Fowler

  The next Westerner to be executed by AQIM was Michel Germaneau, a year after Dyer’s murder. An Agence France-Presse report out of Mali noted, “The Frenchman was decapitated before the eyes of the head of the radical AQIM group that was holding him, Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, who last year executed a British hostage, Edwin Dyer…. AQIM has announced that it executed Germaneau, a seventy-eight-year-old aid worker, on Saturday [24 July 2010], in revenge for a joint raid last Thursday by Mauritanian and French troops, in which six fundamentalists were killed. Germaneau was seized in Niger on April 19.”

  French hostage Pierre Camatte was released on 23 February 2010, three days after four members of AQIM were freed from Malian jails and after vigorous intercession by both French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and President Nicolas Sarkozy. Camatte had been taken by the Abou Zeid katiba at the end of November 2009 from his hotel in Ménaka, in the far eastern part of Mali. According to the 30 March 2010 edition of Jeune Afrique, he knew the date of his release because he kept a scrap of cloth in his pocket, which, at the moment of his liberation, contained eighty-nine tiny knots.

  There is a vigorous debate—only some of it public—about whether governments should even negotiate, let alone make any kind of deal, with hostage takers or, more specifically, pay ransoms or exchange prisoners to free their citizens. This dilemma is particularly acute when it involves those who have been sent into harm’s way by those same governments or international organizations acting on behalf of their member states. The attitudes of governments, organizations, companies, NGOs, and families across the world toward such hostage crises cover the full spectrum of opinion and practice on this thorny question, and a great deal of hot air is expended seeking to justify one stance or another.

  There tends also to be a significant difference between what governments do and what they say, and this seems to me quite reasonable. There are good arguments on most sides and a wealth of unhappy experience to buttress just about every position. Every time a “principled position” is invoked, there are exceptions. Many countries adopt what are more or less admittedly pragmatic approaches while others proclaim immutable doctrine, but I know for certain that everybody has blinked at one time or another.

  I am also well aware that there is no way I can be objective about such issues. I’ve tried, but it’s just not possible.

  In Ottawa, British High Commissioner Anthony Cary formally protested the way Canada managed Louis’ and my release (and then called the Globe and Mail to say that he had done so, as reported by Geoffrey York on 10 October 2009). According to York, “Sources say that the British government complained to Canada about its willingness to let Mali negotiate with the kidnappers, arguing that Ottawa had ‘betrayed international convention.’ ‘The job of releasing Mr. Dyer was made more difficult,’ said a source. ‘There was considerable anger.’“

  I cannot but speculate on what Mr. Cary’s DFAIT interlocutors might have said in response. From my perspective, he should have been told to get stuffed: that Canada neither needed nor appreciated such cravenly self-serving and condescending preaching from the Brits. And I certainly hope they demanded an explanation of how my release made freeing Edwin Dyer “more difficult,” but I guess everybody understood full well that what Cary really meant was that my beheading would have made Mr. Dyer’s beheading easier for the British government to explain.

  Further, as the High Commissioner was acting on instructions, I would like to think he might have been asked to convey to Her Britannic Majesty’s government the view from Canada that they were a gang of egregious—not to say perfidious—hypocrites.

  Perhaps, though, it did not happen that way. Perhaps we said we were sorry, for that is our default position on most issues. Equally likely, whichever hand-wringing officials at Foreign Affairs received Cary’s démarche had probably not bothered to do their homework. Had they done so, they might have discovered that while the Brits work hard to maintain the façade of a steely-eyed “never make concessions—never pay” policy, if it’s important enough, they find a way to get the matter sorted.

  In that regard, I wonder whether DFAIT called in High Commissioner Cary in the early moments of 2010 to discuss the release of Peter Moore, the British IT expert who spent thirty-one months in captivity after being kidnapped in Baghdad. Moore was released on 30 December 2009 after being tortured, beaten, and subjected to mock executions. I am glad that Peter Moore is home and safe with his family in Britain.

  On 2 January 2010, John Burns of the New York Times wrote, “Britain’s Foreign Office has denied it engaged in a deal, saying Britain holds to a policy of not negotiating with hostage-takers and not offering any ‘substantive concessions’ to them. But within hours of Mr. Moore’s release, the leader of the group accused in his kidnapping as well as the deaths of at least five American soldiers was transferred from American custody to Iraqi hands” and subsequently freed.

  More recent is the case of Raymond Davis, an American held in a Pakistani jail for seven weeks after he shot two men dead in the streets of Lahore on 29 January 2011. Davis was suddenly released after somebody allegedly paid US$2.34 million to members of the two men’s families. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insisted that the United States did not pay, but somebody did.

  Then there was the release on 21 September 2011 of Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer, who had been jailed in Iran for espionage since their arrest in July 2009 on the border with Iraq. Upon their liberation, President Obama said, “We are deeply grateful to His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, the Swiss government, and to all our partners and allies around the world who have worked steadfastly over the past two years to secure the release of Shane and Josh.” On 23 September USA Today reported that according to the lawyer for the two men, Masoud Shafiei, “Oman paid the $1 million bail.” How happy I am that they are home, and, yes, how generous of the Sultan.

  My point here is not to question or challenge policy—anyone’s—but rather to highlight the fact that a degree of flexibility and innovation, not to mention humility, is inevitably part of any successful outcome. When, instead, doctrinaire and vainglorious posturing replace effective diplomacy, people get dead. I am also, of course, suggesting that henceforth, Canadians take no hypocritical crap from our close friends.

  Despite the profound commitment of so many, it seems to me that few of the lessons that should have been learned (principally by senior officials in the Ottawa bureaucracy) about the command and control of such a complicated case have even been acknowledged. On our return to Canada, Louis and I were asked by the RCMP and by DFAIT to participate in “lessons learned” exercises, and, of course, we were happy to agree to do so. As far as we are aware, though, neither organization has held such exercises. Neither Louis, who continued to work for DFAIT for more than two years after our release, nor I was ever even debriefed by DFAIT following our return from Al Qaeda captivity. I have, however, been extensively and, in most cases, expertly debriefed by other agencies, domestic and foreign—including the United Nations and even the New York Police Department—but not by Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs. As I am convinced that similar cases will inevitably occur, I hope this account might encourage better management at home and abroad, as well as the selection and training of appropriate individuals in order that they may be qualified to handle such cases before they happen.

  In the fall and winter of 2009, over a period of a few months, AQIM took three Spaniards, two Italians, and two Frenchmen in separate kidnappings and then murdered the seventy-eight-year-old Michel Germaneau after he had spent three months as their captive. On 16 September 2010 they took seven people—five French, one Togolese, and one Malagasy—releasing the French woman and the two Africans five months later. In early January 2011, they took two young Frenchmen from a restaurant in downtown Niamey and headed north. They were intercepted, first by Nigerien forces and then by very fast-acting French Special Forces, but tragically both hostages were killed in the
ensuing battles. Also in January 2011, they took an Italian woman from southern Algeria.

  Our release was in so many respects “a near run thing,” as the subsequent deaths of Edwin Dyer, Michel Germaneau, Antoine de Leocour, and Vincent Delory have brought home so clearly. If we are alive today, and even relatively sane, it is because some remarkably fine and skilled people were able to navigate impossibly complex national and international shoals to make the scenarios I doubted were practicable, as I lay there in the sand, achievable. I owe those brave, tireless, and creative few, and all who helped them, an enormous debt of gratitude.

  For years Canada has been in the forefront of efforts to bring a measure of stability to the troubled Sahel region. We were leaders in the initial “coalition of the willing” seeking to restore order in Somalia. Despite the appalling torture-murder incident involving our troops that so marred that deployment, Canadian soldiers had considerable success in bringing an all too temporary respite to the violence that had plagued the region in central Somalia they were charged with protecting. Our diplomats, aid workers, and soldiers also struggled, along with many others, to bring an end to the murderous civil war between the Arab north and the African south of Sudan and then to monitor the ensuing peace agreement.

  A number of us—notably Allan Rock, then representing Canada at the United Nations—made a serious, if not yet successful, stab at stopping the predations of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, which has laid waste to northern Uganda for a generation and more recently to the northern Congo, and seen the abduction, rape, and murder of over thirty thousand children over the last two decades.

  Canadians helped bring order to the prevailing chaos in the region through peacekeeping along the Ethiopia–Eritrea ceasefire line and by supporting Lloyd Axworthy’s UN Good Offices Mission between those warring cousins. We have been deeply engaged in the search for a durable peace in Darfur, in western Sudan, and across the fragile border in eastern Chad. Canadians have been prominent in their steadfast support of multilateral efforts to ease the suffering of the seven million Darfuris through assistance to African Union and UN peacekeepers and effective international agencies like the World Food Programme, UNICEF, and the UN High Commission for Refugees, and stalwart NGOs like Oxfam, CARE, and Médecins Sans Frontières.

  I became involved in these efforts through my appointment in the spring of 2005 by Prime Minister Paul Martin as the leader of his Special Advisory Team on Sudan (in company with Senators Roméo Dallaire and Mobina Jaffer), as we channelled nearly $200 million in equipment, training, and support to the African Union’s peacekeeping mission as it deployed to Darfur.

  Canada’s enormous development efforts undertaken across the Sahel over many years, but particularly in Senegal, Mali, Ghana, and Ethiopia, have been a key part of this same attempt to stabilize and support the region. But all this work would be for naught were a Somalia-like contagion to sweep across the Sahel, which is AQIM’s avowed objective. It behooves Canada to stay the course and continue to bend every effort to help our friends in this fragile part of the world to resist such an appalling eventuality.

  This is by no means the stuff of exaggerated threat analysis, nor is it about the puffing of military budgets. Rather, such unrest is an evidently present danger, as recent attacks in Nigeria so eloquently attest. Early in 2011, AQIM issued a statement offering support, weapons, and training to Boko Haram, a violent jihadi sect operating across northern Nigeria. The sect also has acknowledged links to the Somali terrorist group al-Shabab. In June 2011, Boko Haram (which might be translated as “Western education is dangerous”) attacked police headquarters in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, killing seven people, and on 26 August a Boko Haram suicide bomber destroyed UN headquarters in Nigeria, killing twenty-three and wounding more than eighty.

  Following the bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad in 2003 and the attack on UN facilities in Algiers in 2007, this most recent assault on the United Nations underlines the extent to which the hatred of the UN by the jihadis is profound and implacable. Further, the expansion of violent Islamic extremism into Africa’s most populous and influential country has sombre implications for the stability of the entire West African region. It also puts paid to any suggestion that in the wake of the elimination of Bin Laden, Al Qaeda is dying and its affiliates are withering away.

  It is virtually certain that a goodly portion of the enormous quantity of arms—some quite sophisticated, like state-of-the-art, shoulder-fired anti-air missiles (SA-24s)—looted from Gaddafi’s arsenals in Libya will have found their way to jihadi movements throughout Africa and perhaps beyond. This will only embolden AQIM and enlarge the jihadi threat to the broadest definition of regional stability.

  Inevitably, and always surprisingly, I am asked whether I came to “like” any of our captors. Usually this is at least in part a query about whether we were to any extent afflicted with the much-documented Stockholm syndrome, whereby captives come to empathize with their captors. I’m afraid, though, that the answer is neither nuanced nor complicated. The gulf between who and what they are—between their beliefs, methods, and purposes and mine—was simply too wide to allow for any possibility of friendship or empathy. After seven years as a hostage of Islamic jihad in Lebanon, Terry Anderson nailed it just right when he replied to the same line of questioning by saying that the minds of his captors were alien to him.

  We spent the lion’s share of our time in captivity with Omar One. He had an intriguing background and was an entertaining storyteller, but how could that trump the fact that he had constantly threatened our lives and caused us and our families to suffer such extreme anxiety? How could we be friendly with a rabid zealot who almost frothed at the mouth in one discussion about the United Nations, as he spoke longingly of donning the “martyr’s vest” and joining a meeting of international delegates discussing woman’s rights and equality between the sexes? One who was sufficiently unhinged to espouse a version of the infamous “blood libel,” an anti-Semitic calumny that dates back to the first century?

  Omar’s version launched from the unfortunate contemporary fiasco that resulted in the government of Chad taking legal proceedings against six members of the French NGO L’Arche de Zoé in 2007 for abducting over a hundred children. With flagrant disregard for just about everything, the NGO had taken children from the war-torn areas of eastern Chad and Darfur, supposedly but not necessarily orphans, and sought to dispatch them to “good homes” in France. This, sadly, is more or less fact. According to Omar, however, their real purpose was to import young Muslim children from Darfur and Chad to be sacrificed in secret Jewish blood ceremonies.

  He told us—and there is no question in my mind but that this lycée-educated, well-travelled, multilingual individual believed every word—that these children were placed in transparent drums on a stage before rapt audiences of Jews across Europe. Spikes would then be introduced into the barrels until they reached the children, and as the poor wretches writhed in an effort to escape, more spikes would be added. As the barrels slowly filled with blood it would be siphoned off by ingenious plumbing to a bakery below the stage, where it would be added to matzo cakes to be consumed by the audience during dark religious rites. How could there be any kind of bond with people who thought like that?

  On occasion I am asked how the experience has changed my outlook on life. The answer is, superficially, hardly at all. More profoundly, perhaps a little more so, although that is not terribly evident in my day-to-day behaviour. In the wretched months described in this book I didn’t really believe that I would be given a chance to answer this question, but I convinced myself that if I did, everything would be different. But it wasn’t and isn’t. I’m fortunate to be among those who have suffered such experiences without becoming afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder—at least, not so far—but I regret that I’ve seen most of my good intentions dissipate over the months following my release. I’m ashamed to find myself muttering about the driving habits of the
guy in front of me, or how long it takes to get served at the post office, but those reactions are more rote than real.

  Nevertheless, as perhaps has become all too evident, I no longer have any time for political correctness and circumlocution. I am appalled by the extent to which our contemporary lives are attention disordered, informed by valueless priorities, and affected by posturing, visionless politicians, by shallow media, and by our pervasive ignorance of history and the world around us. So, yes, I’ve become a grumpy old man.

  I now find it more difficult to share the pet peeves of friends and members of my family. But nothing is more important to me than those people. My friend Allan Gotlieb talks of QTR (quality time remaining), and the nurturing of mine has become a lot more important than ever it was. Now it is mostly about spending it well with my family and those close friends. I doubt that, absent this searing experience, I would have understood this to the extent I do now. I know with surprising confidence that every day is a gift and should be honoured as such and fearlessly, triumphantly celebrated.

  APPENDIX A

  A CONCISE HISTORY OF AL QAEDA IN THE ISLAMIC MAGHREB

  The following encapsulated history of AQIM is gleaned largely from diverse Internet sites.

  In the late 1980s the Algerians decided to give multiparty democracy a try, and a number of religious parties prepared to contest the election called for the end of 1991. Vice-President Ali Belhadj of the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS, or Islamic Salvation Front), the most important Islamic party, was a young preacher, born in Tunisia of Algerian parents. Belhadj had already spent some time in jail for threatening the security of the state through his preaching. He offered telling views on democracy in the long run-up to the elections, which not incidentally had been urged upon Algeria’s traditional military-backed governments—dominated by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN, or National Liberation Front)—by a number of Western countries, Canada among them. In February 1989 Belhadj stated, in words that could have sprung directly from the lips of my zealot kidnappers, “There is no democracy because the only source of power is Allah through the Qur’an, and not the people. If the people vote against the law of God, this is nothing other than blasphemy. In this case, it is necessary to kill the non-believers for the good reason that they wish to substitute their authority for that of God.”