That a white master or mistress would be preferable seemed a sickening irony. Over the years reporting from Africa, I have visited the slave forts on the Ghana coast and seen the desperate scratchings on the walls of the cells where thousands of men, women and children were jammed before being shipped to the Americas; the steamy jungle port of Calabar, one of the principal trading posts; and the large tree at Zanzibar where the slave market was held which inspired David Livingstone to fight against slavery. You get used to feeling shame. But, until going to this market last week, I think I had never appreciated just how humiliating it is for people to be on sale, and my stomach turned as the girls all tried to catch my eye or touch my hand.
In theory, the women are not slaves. ‘We’re agencies,’ insisted one of the traders. ‘You pay us to have them but, once you’ve taken them home, it’s up to you if you pay them.’
How much would a decent wage be, I asked? ‘Obviously, you would want an experienced one,’ he replied. ‘She could do all your washing, cleaning, cooking and look after your baby. If you paid her £20 a month, she would be extremely happy.’
He claimed that he would not take a cut of the wages but antislavery campaigners, who would like to see the market closed down, insist that this is not true. ‘The traders make the girls believe they are their property and, even if you buy one, they are only on loan and must pay the traders to cover their costs,’ explained Desire Kuikui, from the Catholic Children’s Fund. ‘There is little difference from slave-trading of old.’
The Ivorian authorities are so sensitive about the market amid the current international focus on child slavery in West Africa, after the docking in Benin of a boat suspected to have a cargo of child slaves, that when my colleague Justin Sutcliffe started photographing the girls we were arrested.
Surrounded by shouting and drunken police, we were manhandled into a police car and held for five hours in the nearby 27th Precinct police station, accused of being spies. Sutcliffe’s film was confiscated and destroyed, apart from one that he had managed to hide, and we were interrogated by a series of officers who kept demanding: ‘What is the tenure of your mission?’ Describing what had happened as ‘a serious incident’, they harangued our poor terrified interpreter for letting us go into ‘sensitive areas’.
It was an uncomfortable, if not particularly threatening, experience and, as we sweated it out in the oven-like police station with not even a warm Coca-Cola to quench our parched lips, it was hard to get the picture of all those women on the benches out of my head.
Before our arrest, one of the traders had insisted that ‘the girls are free to leave here any time’. That may be true but, according to Apolle, a girl with whom I had a snatched conversation, they have nowhere to go. Claiming to be 17, but looking more like 14, she said she had travelled for several days to get to Abidjan from the east of the country. ‘I was told by a man that he would employ me in a big department store and train me, but when I got here he left me,’ she said. ‘Now I have no money to get home and know no one here. My only hope is some nice lady like you buys me.’
More women end up on display at the market every week, coming from all over the country, as well as neighbouring Mali, to the city that styles itself as the Paris of West Africa. At first sight, particularly by night with the glittering lights of the high-rise buildings reflected in the lagoon, Abidjan does look affluent. But, during the past few years, it has become as riddled with unemployment and crime as any West African city and, in the heat of the day, the lagoon stinks.
‘This market is a function of the socio-political situation of the country,’ said the youngest of the traders.
And perhaps more than anything that is a function of the megalomania of African leaders. Nowhere illustrates that more vividly than Yamoussoukro, the surreal capital of Ivory Coast, created by the late President Félix Houphouët-Boigny out of his home village and renamed after his mother. This city in the middle of nowhere has eight-lane highways but no cars, and lines of motorway lights which long ago lost their bulbs. Oddest of all, though, is the world’s tallest church – 170 metres high with 30-metre foundations.
Built in just three years between 1986 and 1989, compared with more than a century for St Peter’s in Rome – on which it is modelled – the Basilica de Notre Dame de la Paix cost £200 million and uses marble from Italy and Spain and stained-glass windows from France, as well as French-made lifts to whizz visitors to the top of the dome. It seats 18,000 people but, on a good Sunday, draws just 500 and has absolutely nothing to do with Africa.
At the Abidjan slave market, I recalled the words of the church guide. ‘It is nice to have something stunning in our country,’ he said. ‘But maybe it would be nicer if we didn’t have ugly things, too.’
I often wonder how long we would have stayed in that police station in Abidjan had it not been for a fortuitous call to my mobile phone. I had telephoned the Sunday Telegraph to tell them of our plight once it was clear we were not simply going to be warned and relieved of some dollars. I had also called the British embassy who, as always in these cases, sounded as though they wished we did not exist; how I longed sometimes to be an American. I had recently started house-hunting so my mobile kept ringing with estate agents bursting to tell me of ‘highly desirable’ properties with ‘original features’. Edward from Foxtons was only momentarily fazed when I explained I was in a police station in the Ivory Coast and perhaps this was not a good time. Monsieur l’inspecteur was getting very cross and threatening to snatch my phone, when it rang again.
It was Michael Daly from the Margaret Mee Foundation at Kew Gardens, phoning to invite me to a conference on the Amazon.
‘Michael, it’s not really a very good time,’ I replied. ‘I am under arrest in Abidjan.’
‘Côte d’Ivoire!’ he exclaimed in stentorian tones. ‘I was our last ambassador there. Put me on to them at once.’
‘C’est monsieur l’ambassadeur de l’Angleterre,’ I told the inspector with a little bit of poetic licence. ‘He demands to speak to you.’
The inspector went pale and literally stood to attention as he answered. Moments later we were freed.
9/11 – Back to Where It Started
War in Afghanistan 2001
I was on book leave in Portugal, and it was my first day of writing after several months of research in the Amazon, when my sister-in-law telephoned and told me to switch on the television. A plane had flown into the World Trade Center and a thick plume of smoke was rising from one of the twin towers. I stared in grim fascination as over and over again I watched the second plane come from a clear blue sky, smash into the second tower and turn into a fireball.
‘Mummy, Mummy, plane crashing!’ shouted my son Lourenço. He was just 2, and I had been thinking about giving up the peripatetic life of a foreign correspondent to write books full time so I could be more of a mother. But, as I stayed glued to the television that afternoon, one pundit after another started linking the attack to the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Maps of Afghanistan were produced to show where he was hiding. All those years after the battle for Jalalabad, I felt a familiar shivering in my guts. I knew I had to go back.
The Taliban were not granting visas for Afghanistan so Justin and I decided to go to the Pakistani city of Quetta. Not only was it just the other side of the border from Kandahar, where the Taliban were based, but it was also the home of my old friend Hamid Karzai.
There was only one decent hotel, the Serena, and we managed to get rooms just in time. Within days it would be so packed that they were charging journalists $100 a night to sleep in the laundry room.
Just as in my old Pakistan days, the lobby was full of ISI agents in grey shalwar kameez and aviator glasses. Pakistan was once again living under a military dictator – General Pervez Musharraf, who had seized power in 1999. We journalists were not allowed out of the hotel without a policeman ‘for your safety’ and had to sign a disclaimer accepting ‘all life risk’. There was no way my best
Afghan contacts were going to talk with a Pakistani policeman present so I was constantly trying to shake mine off. Eventually, I discovered that if I went into the Fuji photo shop just off Jinnah Road, I could escape via a back exit that led on to a market which I could walk through and jump into a friend’s waiting car.
The Karzai house was in Satellite Town, the area of Quetta where many Afghan refugees lived, and was always crowded with tribal elders sitting cross-legged on the floor munching at sugared almonds from little bowls. Since 9/11 it had also become the focus of reporters, diplomats and CIA agents. This was extremely galling for Hamid, who had spent years trying to get officials in London and Washington to listen to his warnings that his country was being taken over by terrorists. ‘None of this need ever have happened,’ he would complain.
Days were spent interviewing tribal leaders and Afghan commanders but curfew meant evenings had to be spent back at the Serena. The manager did his best with a nightly barbecue in the orchard of lamb saji, leg of lamb rotating on an enormous skewer, washed down by fresh apple or pomegranate juice. However, sitting under the stars, with the sound of bubbling water in the little channels criss-crossing the orchard, began to lose its charm as the weeks went by waiting for war.
There was already an autumn nip in the air when one night Karzai’s nephew, Jamil, joined me in the orchard for dinner. He was accompanied by three men who, it turned out, had defected from the Taliban. One in particular had a horrifying story.
I was one of the Taliban’s torturers
Sunday Telegraph, 30 September 2001
‘YOU MUST BECOME so notorious for bad things that when you come into an area people will tremble in their sandals. Anyone can do beatings and starve people. I want your unit to find new ways of torture so terrible that the screams will frighten even crows from their nests and if the person survives he will never again have a night’s sleep.’
These were the instructions of the commandant of the Taliban secret police to his new recruits. For more than three years one of those recruits, Hafiz Sadiqulla Hassani, ruthlessly carried out his orders. But sickened by the atrocities that he was forced to commit, last week he defected to Pakistan, joining a growing number of Taliban officials who are escaping across the border.
Mr Hassani has the pinched face and restless hands of a man whose night hours are as haunted as any of his victims’. Now aged 30, he does not, however, fit the militant Islamic stereotype usually associated with the Taliban.
Married with a wife and 1-year-old daughter, he holds a degree in business studies, having been educated in Pakistan, where he grew up as a refugee while his father and elder brothers fought in the jihad against the Russians. His family was well-off, owning land and property in Kandahar to which they returned after the war.
‘Like many people, I did not become a Talib by choice,’ he explained. ‘In early 1998 I was working as an accountant here in Quetta when I heard that my grandfather – who was 85 – had been arrested by the Taliban in Kandahar and was being badly beaten. They would only release him if he provided a member of his family as a conscript, so I had to go.’
At first Mr Hassani was impressed by the Taliban. ‘It had been a crazy situation after the Russians left; the country was divided by warring groups all fighting each other. In Kandahar warlords were selling everything, kidnapping young girls and boys, robbing people, and the Taliban seemed like good people who brought law and order.’
So he became a Taliban ‘volunteer’, assigned to the secret police. Many of his friends also joined up, as landowners in Kandahar were threatened that they must either ally themselves with the Taliban or lose their property. Others were bribed to join with money given to the Taliban by drug smugglers, as Afghanistan became the world’s largest producer of heroin.
At first, Mr Hassani’s job was to patrol the streets at night looking for thieves and signs of subversion. However, as the Taliban leadership began issuing more and more extreme edicts, his duties changed.
Instead of just searching for criminals, the night patrols were instructed to seek out people watching videos, playing cards or, bizarrely, keeping caged birds. Men whose beards were shorter than a clenched fist were to be arrested, as was any woman who dared venture outside her house. Even owning a kite became a criminal offence.
The state of terror spread by the Taliban was so pervasive that it began to seem as if the whole country was spying on each other. ‘As we drove around at night with our guns, local people would come to us and say there’s someone watching a video in this house or some men playing cards in that house,’ he said.
‘Basically any form of pleasure was outlawed,’ he continued, ‘and if we found people doing any of these things we would beat them with staves soaked in water – like a knife cutting through meat – until the room ran with their blood or their spines snapped. Then we would leave them with no food or water in rooms filled with insects until they died.
‘We always tried to do different things: we would stand some prisoners on their heads to sleep, hang others upside down with their legs tied together. We would stretch out the arms of others and nail them to posts like crucifixions. Sometimes we would throw bread to them to make them crawl. Then I would write the report to our commanding officer so he could see how innovative we had been.’
Here, in the stillness of an orchard in Quetta, sipping green tea as the sun goes down, Mr Hassani finds it hard to explain how he could have done such things. ‘We Afghans have grown too used to violence’ is all he can offer. ‘We have lost 1.5 million people. All of us have brothers and fathers up there.’
After Kandahar, he was put in charge of secret police cells in the towns of Ghazni and then Herat, a beautiful Persian city in western Afghanistan that had suffered greatly during the Soviet occupation and had been one of the last places to fall to the Taliban. Herat had always been a relatively liberal place where women would dance at weddings and many girls went to school – but the Taliban were determined to end all that. Mr Hassani and his men were told to be particularly cruel to Heratis, who were Persian-speaking, unlike the Pashto-speaking Taliban.
It was his experience there that made Mr Hassani determined to do whatever he could to let the world know what was happening in Afghanistan. ‘When I was in Herat, after the capture of Mazar-i-Sharif in August 1998, truckloads of Hazara people were driven into the square,’ he said. ‘There were 450 prisoners, mostly women and children, herded into three metal trucks. It was baking hot, maybe 50°C, and they had no food or water. They were gasping and many had fainted but we were told not to let them have anything or let them out for the toilet. We kept them in that square for two days.
‘Maybe the worst thing I saw,’ he said, ‘was while on duty in Kandahar jail. There was a man beaten so much, such a pulp of skin and blood, that it was impossible to tell if he was dressed or not. Every time he fell unconscious, we rubbed salt into his wounds.
‘Nowhere else in the world has such barbarity and cruelty as in Afghanistan. At that time I swore an oath that I will devote myself to the Afghan people and telling the world what is happening.’
His plans to escape were thwarted when he was appointed as a bodyguard for Mullah Omar because he comes from the same Ghilzai tribe. ‘He’s medium height, slightly fat, with an artificial green eye which doesn’t move, and he’d sit on a bed issuing instructions and handing out dollars from a tin trunk,’ said Mr Hassani. ‘He doesn’t say much, which is just as well as he’s a very stupid man. He knows only how to write his name “Omar”.’
Mr Hassani’s contact with the Taliban leadership made him more and more disillusioned. ‘It is the first time in Afghanistan’s history that the lower classes are governing and by force. There are no educated people in this administration – they are all totally backward and illiterate. They have no idea of the history of the country and although they call themselves mullahs they have no idea of Islam. Nowhere does it say men must have beards or women cannot be educated; in fact, the Koran sa
ys people must seek education.’
He became convinced that the Taliban were not really in control. ‘We laughed when we heard the Americans asking Mullah Omar to hand over Osama bin Laden,’ he said. ‘The Americans are crazy. It is Osama bin Laden who can hand over Mullah Omar – not the other way round.’
While in Kandahar, he often saw bin Laden in a convoy of Toyota Land Cruisers, all with darkened windows and festooned with radio antennae. ‘They would whizz through the town, seven or eight cars at a time. His guards were all Arabs and very tall people, or Sudanese with curly hair.’
He was on guard duty when bin Laden joined Mullah Omar for a bird shoot on his estate. ‘They seemed to get on well,’ he said. ‘They would go fishing – with grenades.’
The Arabs, said Mr Hassani, have taken de facto control of his country. ‘In my last days in the Taliban, the Arabs were so in control that even when we were eating they were saying you must eat this amount. All important places in Kandahar are under Arab control – the airport, military courts, tank command.’
Twice he attended Taliban training camps and on both occasions they were run by Arabs as well as Pakistanis. ‘The first one I went to lasted ten days in the Yellow Desert in Helmand Province, a place where the Saudi princes used to hunt, so it has its own airport. It was incredibly well guarded and there were many Pakistanis there, both students from religious schools and military instructors. The Taliban is full of Pakistanis.’
He was told that if he died while fighting under the white flag of the Taliban, he and his family would go to paradise. Soldiers were given blank marriage certificates signed by a mullah and encouraged to ‘take wives’ during battle, basically a licence to rape.
When Mr Hassani was sent to the front line in Bagram, north of Kabul, a few months ago, he saw a chance to escape. ‘We were sixty-two friends and our line was attacked by the Northern Alliance and they almost defeated us. Many of my friends were killed and we didn’t know who was fighting who; there was killing from behind and in front. Our commanders fled in cars, leaving us behind.
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