Al Jabbar, right, gave Camp Canada its name and was unfailingly decent to us.
Imam Abdallah sought to have as little to do with us as possible.
Abou Isaac, left, was one of two steady sergeant types brought in to replace the unstable “children,” who were expelled on Day 95.
Moussa, right, was a bomb maker who’d had a bad day, losing his eyesight and right hand.
Harissa was one of “the children,” or young recruits. His gentle disposition and fierce pride at being an AQIM cadet were an unsettling combination.
In 1987, Chadian troops equipped with “technicals” drove the heavily mechanized Libyan army across the Aouzou Strip, which separated the two countries. While this shot is almost twenty-five years old, the method of packing and riding, the weapons, and the style of dress are all very similar to those we witnessed during our hundreds of hours spent traversing the Sahara in AQIM battlewagons.
The deathstalker is one of the more deadly scorpions and among the most common in the Sahara. Along with the venomous Sahara desert viper, they were a constant threat.
Both of these landscapes are fairly similar in appearance to Camp Canada.
We made the second proof-of-life video on Day 52, a full forty-seven days after recording essentially the same message on Day 5, but this time we were joined by our UNDP driver, Soumana Moukaila.
Agence France-Presse reported that I was wearing a serviette, which, in Canada, the English-language media translated as “briefcase” (which it is) rather than “scarf” (which it is also). This mistranslation resulted in stories that insisted we—being tenacious bureaucrats—were still in possession of our “briefcases.”
The Sahara desert stretches across northern Africa, from the Atlantic coast to the Nile and from the Mediterranean coast to what remains of Lake Chad. At 8,600,000 square kilometres, the Sahara is larger than the continental United States.
The above photograph of the Namib is strikingly similar to what I took to be a sea of impassable dunes on our way to make the third video message, during which—on Day 108—an ultimatum death sentence was issued by our captors.
Our mental and physical health depended on maintaining our regime of walking four to six kilometres each day, but our shoes began to come apart after about three weeks.
Someone tugging at the baggage in the back of one of the trucks inadvertently fired a rocket-propelled grenade through one of our blankets. I thought the cavalry was coming.
On arrival at Camp Canada, I knew I had to find some way to keep track of the passage of time. Otherwise, I feared I would lose my tenuous hold on reality. Each line on my belt represents a day of captivity.
On arrival at TV Camp, Omar One reverently explained the merits of the arak root, called miswak, extolled in the Qur’an and from which we made toothbrushes.
We were each given a pair of tiny scissors, which we used for everything. I always considered that they could, in extremis, serve a darker purpose.
I have every reason to believe that this prosaic invention saved my life by putting an end to my acute constipation.
I have no way of knowing, but I think the mujahid making the cell phone call in this screenshot from an AQIM video, above, is doing so from the Ait el Khaoua dunes in Mali, facing Bordj el Mokhtar in Algeria, the same area from which Louis and I spoke to our families on Day 87.
When I couldn’t reach Mary on either our home phone or her cell, my captors urged me to send her an SMS. So I did, ineptly phrasing it in a way that caused her to believe I had been freed.
Edwin Dyer was beheaded by Abou Zeid, the thug in the upper-right corner of this AQIM screenshot, a month after our release. I was devastated. So very often had I envisaged that Louis or I would suffer just such an end.
Michel Germaneau, a seventy-eight-year-old French aid worker, was beheaded by AQIM just over a year after Dyer’s murder.
Mustapha Chaffi was with President Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso when we called from the dune on Day 87. He made four arduous and risky trips into the Sahara to win our release.
Baba Ould Cheik, right, was President Amadou Toumani Touré’s chief negotiator with Al Qaeda. Baba made eleven perilous, two-thousand-kilometre round trips into some of the most dangerous territory in the world on our behalf.
In this screenshot, taken from a remarkable video of our liberation deep in the Sahara, I am to the right of the two machine gun–toting figures, beside Louis. Sources in a friendly country forwarded to us the AQIM video recording of our release.
In Bamako, we expressed our deep gratitude to President Amadou Toumani Touré of Mali and his foreign minister, my old friend Moctar Ouane, for bringing us safely home.
The next morning we flew to Ouagadougou to pay our respects to President Compaoré and to thank him, too, for the essential part he had played in bringing our ordeal to a happy conclusion.
In Ottawa, Mary receives my call from Gao, on Wednesday, 22 April 2009, at dusk, to say I was free.
The RCMP insisted on taking a “before” picture, which I dressed for after showering at the hotel in Bamako.
When the aircraft door opened at the U.S. Air Force base at Ramstein, I saw Mary and Mai, Louis’s wife, clutching each other at the foot of the stairs. A moment later, I fell into Mary’s arms.
From left to right, Linton, Ruth, Justine, Antonia, Mary, and I take a walk in Trier, not far from the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center.
Louis and I say farewell following our arrival in Ottawa on Tuesday, 28 April 2009.
Three weeks later, Mary and I paid our respects to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
About the Author
ROBERT R. FOWLER joined the Department of External Affairs in 1969 and worked in Paris and at the UN in New York. Beginning in 1980, he served as Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Ministers Trudeau, Turner, and Mulroney. In 1986, Mr. Fowler became Assistant Deputy Minister in the Department of National Defence and then served as Deputy Minister. He was Canada’s longest-serving Ambassador to the United Nations, following which he was named Ambassador to Italy and also Personal Representative for Africa of Prime Ministers Chrétien, Martin, and Harper. Fowler retired from Canadian public service in 2006 and is a Senior Fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. He was appointed an Officer in the Order of Canada in 2011. He lives in Ottawa with his wife, Mary.
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praise for A SEASON IN HELL
“A Season in Hell is an engaging, clearly written story: subtle, informative, at times very moving, but never maudlin.”
—Literary Review of Canada
“What a remarkable book this is. The writing is clear, compelling, visceral. The analysis is formidable. The story leaves you gasping. Fowler spares nothing: not himself, not Al Qaeda, not the Canadian response from the RCMP to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It’s been eons since I’ve read a work of non-fiction where every page grabs your heart or your head or both. It’s an autobiographical tour de force.” —Stephen Lewis
“Through this fascinating account of his time spent in gruelling captivity, Robert Fowler shows us the power of the human spirit in the face of adversity and danger. His courage and determination allowed him to persevere through moments of physical and emotional duress unimaginable to most. With an eloquent narrative, Fowler beckons us to think critically about today’s global dangers and our common humanity.”
—Kofi A. Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations (1997–2006), Chairman of the Kofi Annan Foundation
“In A Season in Hell, Robert Fowler has captured the terror of his ordeal in direct, rich, and vibrant prose. He writes of his abductors with a surprisingly even hand, humanizing those he could easily have flayed with anger and resentment. In the heat of the desert, the resilient old Africa-hand employed the great skills he’d developed in his decades as a diplomat, and through the grace of his writing, with the pain
of injuries all too real, shares a deep understanding of the complicated politics and worldview of the men and child soldiers who grabbed him, ultimately delivering a riveting narrative about an experience many others would not have survived.”
—Lt.-Gen. the Honourable Roméo A. Dallaire (Ret.), Senator
“A story of courage and determination in the face of fear and terror; a story of international political intrigue where the personal and political stakes could not be higher; a story told in a manner that spares no quarter; and a story that is true. Robert Fowler has long been one of Canada’s most distinguished and effective diplomats. Now he is among Canada’s most distinguished heroes.”
—James Orbinski, MD, author of An Imperfect Offering and Chair in Global Health at the University of Toronto
Credits
Cover design: HandsDesign.ca
Desert photo: iStockPhoto.com Group photo: courtesy of The Globe and Mail
Author photo: Joseph Cartright Photography
Copyright
A Season in Hell
Copyright © 2011 by Robert R. Fowler.
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EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN.: 978-1-443-40206-4
Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
First published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd in a hardcover edition: 2011
This Harper Perennial trade paperback edition: 2012
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Pages 341–42 constitute a continuation of this copyright page.
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