Small Wars Permitting

by Christina Lamb

  At Bulawayo’s vast West Park cemetery, it is easy to spot the recent arrivals – a large plot, freshly dug, with row after row of graves, barely a plank’s width between them. The gravestones tell their own story. All were born in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Over on the other side in the children’s section is a line of tiny earth mounds, the graves of babies who have died in the past week.

  At the edges of the graveyard are odd areas of tossed earth. ‘People come in at night and bury their relatives secretly at the margins because they cannot afford proper burials,’ explains Pastor Useni Sibanda, who leads a church in Bulawayo and speaks for the Save Zimbabwe Campaign, an umbrella grouping of church groups and other civic organisations.

  Those who can, join burial clubs – macabre savings groups based on Christmas clubs, only instead of hampers people in a street or a workplace join together to pay for each other’s dead. Others register sick relatives under false names at hospitals, knowing they cannot afford a funeral.

  Nobody knows how many have died of hunger. But doctors in Zimbabwe say the population’s chronic malnutrition, combined with HIV, leads to the onset of full-blown Aids far faster than anywhere else in Africa.

  Father Oskar Wermter, a German Jesuit priest working in Mbare, Harare’s oldest township, has spent thirty-seven years in Zimbabwe and says he has never seen things so bad, even during the liberation war. ‘How do people survive in this situation?’ he asks. ‘The answer is many just don’t but you don’t see them.’

  Tears in his eyes, he tells the story of Chipo Kurewa, a lively teacher in her forties whose home was bulldozed during Operation Murambatsvina. ‘After that, she was in constant trouble, struggling to find work and accommodation and then diagnosed HIV positive,’ says Wermter. He took Kurewa to a centre to get anti-retroviral drugs, but then she disappeared. ‘One day I got a phone call from Botswana. It was her – she’d gone to find work. About six weeks later she arrived in a terrible state. A kind lady in Gaborone had put her on a bus. But she had meningitis. Three days later she was dead.’

  I ask after Stella, one of his parishioners, who had taken me round Mbare eighteen months ago to see those who lost their homes in Murambatsvina. I remembered her flamboyant clothes and vivacious manner, despite the horror we were seeing and the risks we were taking. ‘Dead,’ he replies bluntly. ‘This is becoming a land of the elderly and very young, the unqualified and underqualified – in other words, the most vulnerable.’

  There are other effects too. All the children I speak to are much older than their size would suggest, and a recent study found that more than one in three people in Harare suffers mental disorders. The main reasons were inability to find food and having belongings taken away by the authorities.

  Zimbabwe is not yielding photographs of children with stick limbs and flies on their mouths, the images we usually associate with famine in Africa. Something more sinister is under way, almost as if life were just draining out of the country.

  At a shack selling firewood in Emakhandeni township, just outside Bulawayo, Sibanda stops to load up and says: ‘If the middle classes have been so pauperised that teachers are forced to become prostitutes to feed their family and use firewood because there’s no more power, imagine what’s happening to the most marginalised.’

  Inside the shack, a girl of 15 lies dying on a bed, her blankets soiled and life fading away. Her lips are parched and her eyes flicker weakly at us. The family do not even ask for help. They know it is the same in every shack in every township. Besides, even if we got her to hospital, there would be no drugs.

  At Mpilo hospital in Bulawayo, the Japanese-funded paediatric unit was opened in 2004 and is remarkably clean and modern. Inside there are numerous empty beds. Few can afford the bus fare to the hospital.

  The only medicines have been donated by a foreign aid agency. On the babies’ ward, none is connected to a monitor and only two have drips, even in the malnutrition room. By one cot sit a couple whose 7-month-old daughter desperately needs intestinal surgery, but who have been told they must buy a drip, which they cannot afford. ‘We had to borrow to pay the bus fare to get here,’ says the father as he watches his wife cradle the sick child.

  There are only two young nurses to staff the ward of forty-five seriously ill babies, treating, cleaning and feeding them. ‘Anyone that can go has left the country,’ says one of the nurses, pointing out that her monthly salary of Z$3.2 million (£4.50) barely covers her bus fares of Z$120,000 a day. ‘I eat nothing during my shift as I can’t afford it.’

  The only reason she and her colleague are still here, she says, is they are newly qualified and the government is withholding their diplomas. ‘They’re doing it deliberately to stop us going.’

  There is no sign of any doctors. According to a Unicef official, 50 per cent of all health posts in Zimbabwe are vacant and there are more Zimbabwean nurses in Manchester than in Bulawayo.

  It is not just doctors who are leaving. Over the past few years, the University of Zimbabwe has seen its number of lecturers fall from more than 1,200 to just over 600. According to the Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe, more than 5,000 teachers left between January and April this year.

  The magnitude of the exodus becomes starkly clear across the border in South Africa, to which the majority of people flee. At the Central Methodist Church in central Johannesburg, Zimbabwean refugees are literally spilling out on to the road.

  More than 3,000 sleep there every night, cramming the corridors and steps, each with a zipped bag containing all they could carry. Yet every person I talk to is a professional: accountants, bankers, headmasters.

  One was the clerk of the High Court – forced to flee, he says, because he witnessed the secret police interfering with ballot boxes during a legal challenge by the opposition to presidential elections.

  Most have left because the alternative was to starve. ‘We just couldn’t afford to feed our families,’ says a group of teachers recently arrived from a school in Masvingo.

  They have to leave the church by 7 a.m. every day and wander the streets hoping to pick up work as labourers or gardeners, or just begging. One man earns more in a day’s gardening than he did in a month of teaching science in Zimbabwe.

  Most of the refugees are men looking for money to send back to their families. But on the ground floor is a room packed with women and children. One woman, Joyce, sits watching her 2-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter scrape leftovers from someone’s pan of sadza (grain meal). ‘My husband passed away and I couldn’t get work in Bulawayo,’ she says. ‘I thought if we came to South Africa we might still have hope of a life.’

  It was a hazardous journey, crossing the crocodile-infested Limpopo river with the two toddlers on her back. ‘I was very frightened both of crocodiles and border guards,’ she said. ‘But I kept thinking there is nothing left for us in Zimbabwe.’

  ‘The numbers have been going up dramatically this year,’ says Bishop Paul Verryn, who has fought off parishioners’ protests to shelter the Zimbabweans. ‘We used to see five or ten arriving a day but for the last few months it has been twenty or more. It’s a cataclysmic collapse of a country.’

  * The names of the rape victims have been changed for their protection.

  Where’s bin Laden?

  Sunday Times Magazine, 18 March 2007

  ‘YOU’RE A GREAT GUY, Crazy, but you ain’t that clean,’ says the American, spraying his hands with anti-bacterial sanitiser after slipping a $100 note into the palm of one of his local informants.

  The American is dressed in long baggy shalwar kameez and sporting a beard. But he will never be taken for a local here in the frontier town of Peshawar. We have met before, two years ago in the bar of the Mustafa hotel in Kabul, where such characters hung out amid its pink-marbled walls and mirrored ceilings, pulling out knives and guns to see whose weapon was the largest.

  His name is ‘Dave’ and he works in ‘private security’ and maybe it is and maybe he does. But what he is re
ally is a bounty hunter in search of the $25 million pay day – Osama bin Laden.

  On one thigh is strapped a Glock pistol and out of his pocket he pulls a packet of Cipro (a powerful antibiotic used by the military), a couple of which he swallows after a visit to the bathroom. ‘Occupational hazard,’ he grimaces.

  Over time most of his fellow bounty hunters have given up despite the high prize. But ‘Dave’ has ended up here in Greens Hotel where last night in bed a cockroach crawled across his face and the windows look out on to the jagged mountains of the Khyber Pass. ‘This is the place,’ he says. ‘Not Afghan-land.’

  His eyes bulge as he speaks and I can almost see the $$ signs flashing up in front of them. He talks conspiratorially of the valleys of Dir and Tirah. ‘That’s where the big guy’s holed up,’ he says. But he is yet to go. According to the fixer he calls Crazy, any who have tried have been tortured, stripped and castrated. Their eyeballs have been plucked from their sockets; their ears hacked off; and their tongues ripped from their mouths. Dollars have been stuffed in their pockets and notes pinned to their groins declaring: ‘This is what happens to agents of the USA.’

  Some 7,500 miles away the last CIA agent to come close to killing Osama bin Laden digs his spoon into a thick slab of strawberry cheesecake in a Manhattan diner and smiles coldly.

  ‘He killed 3,000 Americans, here in my city, and I wanted him dead,’ says Gary Berntsen. ‘I wasn’t going to ask permission because I knew I wouldn’t get it.’

  A large-framed man with pale-blue eyes, he tells me that he will be 50 this year, the same age as bin Laden. The diner is packed with harassed Christmas shoppers, squashing into the melamine booths with armfuls of shopping bags. It seems an odd place to ask if he has ever previously killed anyone.

  It is a world away from the mountains of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan into which Berntsen’s team of four agents and ten Afghans ventured to try to kill history’s most wanted terrorist.

  They failed, as Berntsen has been regularly taunted through bin Laden’s subsequent release of more than seventeen videos and audio tapes. The attempt – code-named Operation Jawbreaker – is to be given the Hollywood treatment by Oliver Stone. But it has left Berntsen, who has since divorced and retired from the agency, a haunted man. He insists that if President George Bush had not refused his request to send troops into Tora Bora to block his escape, the al-Qaeda leader would be dead. ‘There isn’t a day when I don’t think, if only,’ he says.

  Astonishingly that was the last positive sighting of bin Laden, more than five years ago, despite the most extensive manhunt in history, and the biggest-ever reward.

  The trail has gone stone cold. ‘It’s not just we’ve no trace, but we don’t even know which zone he is in,’ admits one US intelligence officer. Agents have taken to referring to him as Elvis.

  Although bin Laden has released no new video since October 2004, hardly anyone believes he is dead.* On the contrary, US counterterrorism officials, admit he is very much in control of a resurgent al-Qaeda. So embarrassing is the failure to find him that George Bush, who once demanded, ‘We want him dead or alive,’ now rarely mentions him.

  To piece together how it was that the combined efforts of the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, Special Forces, Navy Seals, Interpol, MI6 and SAS managed to lose bin Laden, it makes sense to start where they lost him in Tora Bora.

  Following the route taken by bin Laden in mid-November 2001 when the US bombing of Afghanistan sent the Taliban fleeing the capital, I drove from Kabul to Jalalabad in a battered white pick-up between two Afghans.

  That evening I went for dinner at the palace of the Governor. A warlord turned administrator, Gul Agha Sherzai looms like a bear with a bushy dyed black beard, missing front teeth and an elaborate turban. I found him presiding over a long table of tribesmen chewing and slurping food which included a bowl of mutton soup he told me he made himself. He insisted I sit next to him and began tearing off hunks of fatty meat, which he plonked on my plate in between sucking the flesh off a large bone then wiping his mouth on the end of his turban. I remembered a British official telling me how Jack Straw lunched with Gul Agha then was incapacitated for days afterwards.

  I asked him why he thought the Americans cannot find Osama and he laughed so much his big shoulders shook. ‘Poor Americans scurrying here and there, not knowing who to believe,’ he said, puffing on a Marlboro Light. ‘They think they can solve everything with dollars.’ He should know. Gul Agha received millions from the CIA for helping oust the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

  After dinner, he took me on a tour of the palace he had just renovated. In the audience room was a painting of the man who built it, King Abdur Rahman. ‘My grandfather,’ announced Gul Agha. They may both hail from the Barakzai tribe but I know Gul Agha is the son of a champion dogfighter, not a prince. However, this was not the time to quibble over ancestry. He wanted to show me the basement where the Russians used to kill people, leaving the walls stained with blood. Gul Agha has turned it into a disco. The tour ends outside with a final flourish of warlord kitsch – a display of coloured lights round the fountain and swimming pool.

  Early the next morning as promised Gul Agha sends some guards to accompany me to Tora Bora – a police vehicle and two trucks of men with Kalashnikovs, one of whom introduces himself as Commander Lalalai, a famous old mujahid. We speed through the streets scattering donkey carts and men on bicycles. Eventually we turn on to an unmade road towards the White Mountains. ‘Tora Bora,’ points the driver Mahmood.

  Every so often, Mahmood puts on a terrifying burst of speed, throwing up so much dust that we can see nothing as we hurtle along the narrow track and I grip the side of the door. ‘Al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda!’ he explains. Occasionally the truck in front would screech to a halt and Commander Lalalai would jump out and start berating Mahmood for not going fast enough, saying we could be killed by ‘bad guys’.

  After two hours we stop at a schoolhouse that was used by the CIA as their base camp during the battle for Tora Bora and collect two more vehicles of guards. Now we have twenty-six gunmen. The road has turned from dust to stones, making the journey even more bone-shaking. But the scenery is spectacular, swirled toffee mountains as far as the eye can see, rising to black rock, under a deep-blue sky. On the other side lie the passes to Parachinar and the tribal areas of Pakistan.

  Eventually our convoy pulls up under a tree and everyone piles out. ‘Now we walk ten minutes,’ says Mahmood. In Afghan time that means at least double but I take the risk of leaving food and water in the vehicle. It is a decision I will regret.

  An hour later we are still climbing the stony track along a dry river bed, breathless from the thinning oxygen. But the guards are happy. They hold hands, pose for photographs and pick me some lavender. Every so often we pass people with donkeys or small children bearing bundles of wood – the slopes all around have been denuded of trees. The women hurriedly pull their shawls over their faces.

  Finally we stop and they point across the gorge, shouting, ‘Osama house, Osama house.’ At first I can see nothing, then I can just make out a few holes and ruins on the terraced slopes. We clamber across past a burnt-out tank and over some large bomb craters and come to a series of mud-walled ruins.

  I realise that the reason I did not see it is that it is not what I am expecting. Where are the James Bond-style hi-tech cave systems with internal hydroelectric power plants from mountain streams, elevators, ventilation ducts, loading bays, caverns big enough for tank and truck, and brick-lined walls that were portrayed in newspapers at the time? What about the vast network of tunnels that led to Pakistan?

  First used by mujahideen fighting the Soviets in the 1980s, Tora Bora is really just a natural stronghold of caves made by rainwater dissolving the limestone. When bin Laden took them over, he used dynamite to extend them and built some mud-brick houses. Among the ruins is a circular hole around three feet high that seems to be the entrance to a tunnel.

  A combination of Af
ghan scavengers and US and British intelligence have scoured the caves and nothing remains to suggest their past purpose. In one an SAS team found plans for al-Qaeda’s next attack in Singapore. Berntsen told me that US agents even scraped the sides of the cave for DNA in the hope of finding they had killed bin Laden.

  It was clear from the craters that one hell of a battle had gone on. One of the trees along the bluff must have been where Gary Berntsen’s team of four CIA agents crept into position. From there they could observe the encampment unseen and used laser guns to mark out bombing targets.

  Their instructions were clear. ‘I don’t want bin Laden and his thugs captured. I want them dead,’ said Cofer Black, head of the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center. ‘I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice,’ he continued as he handed over a large black suitcase containing $5 million. ‘I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the President.’

  Berntsen had set up CIA operations in a Kabul guesthouse after the fall of the Afghan capital on 13 November 2001. As soon as he picked up reporting that bin Laden and as many as a thousand of his followers were massed at Tora Bora, he knew they had to act. He went to the US Special Forces commander at Bagram and asked for an SF team to go down there together with some of his agents but was refused. ‘He said it’s too disorganised, too dangerous, too this, too that.’

  ‘I knew if I didn’t do anything bin Laden would escape the country with his entire force so I just improvised. I sent four guys into those mountains alone to look for a thousand people – it was a very, very large risk. If they’d been found they would have been tortured and killed and I would probably have been fired.’

  His small team with their Afghan guides left in late November 2001, scaling the 10,000-foot mountains. After two days they spotted bin Laden’s camp, complete with trucks, command posts and machine-gun nests. They estimated there were between 600 and 700 gunmen with bin Laden.