Then we boarded the flight to Kuala Lumpur.
The Malaysian airport had changed beyond recognition since I had last been there—all marble walls and gleaming floors. It seemed more welcoming somehow. As we disembarked from the plane, I held back a little. I wanted to see my family get safely through passport control. That way if there was any problem, I would be around to help sort it out. From a distance I watched them present their passports. I held my breath. Moments later they were allowed through.
My entry was more complicated. I had hoped to be able to pay for an entry visa at the airport, but it was soon made clear to me that this would not be the case by the team of task-force officers, heavily armed, who arrived to take me away for interrogation. I used my mobile phone to make a desperate call to Rachel.
“They won’t let me in,” I whispered urgently. “They’re saying they want to send me back to London.”
“Don’t worry, Lewis,” Rachel’s soothing voice said calmly. “We’re through and we’re safe. Leave everything to me—I’ll deal with it from here.”
I clenched my eyes shut. “No,” I told her. It wasn’t meant to be like this. I was always going to be on hand, ready to absolve Rachel of any blame should something go wrong. Now it was looking as if she would have to shoulder all the risk.
“I’ll be fine, Lewis. Don’t worry. We’re at the hotel now. We’ll just keep our heads down and get on the flight to London in a couple of days. We’ll see you then.”
She hung up.
Minutes later I was being interrogated again, by unfriendly Malaysians and apologetic airline staff whose responsibility it had been to check my Malaysian visa situation when I had left Amman. I argued with them; I begged them; finally I accepted the inevitable—that I was to be deported to London. And it was only then that they decided they would issue me a three-day transit visa. I felt suddenly as though all my cares had been lifted, and I hurried into a taxi to have a relieved and joyous reunion with my family at our hotel.
Stage one was complete.
Stage two was always going to be more difficult, but the fact that the fake Spanish passports had so easily fooled the official when my family entered Malaysia filled us all with confidence.
We spent the two days before our flight to London visiting around Kuala Lumpur—more to fill the time than out of a genuine desire to go sightseeing. We were all too excited and nervous for that. As we sat down together at mealtimes to eat, I forced my family to practice the few words of Spanish that Rachel and I knew between us, and we repeatedly went over the cover story that I had constructed for them until they could recite it with confidence. My mother had married a Spanish man living in London, which was how they had gained Spanish citizenship. She had brought Ahmed and Marwa to visit Malaysia because it was a Muslim country. They had long wanted to see Malaysia because they had heard how wonderful and modern it was, but they were looking forward to getting back home.
Every time I heard them repeat the story, I smiled. It sounded convincing; the passports were good; we were going to be okay.
The morning of our departure the tropical rains came like a constant waterfall, purging the streets of crowds and cleansing the grayness of the city. We checked out of the hotel and piled into a taxi, the pouring rain messing my mother’s neatly groomed hair as we did so, then traveled the short distance through the torrent to the airport. Once we arrived, Rachel and my family checked in separately, and I waited behind, watching them go through immigration. This was the last hurdle: as soon as I saw them go through, we would have succeeded.
Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. The official looked at Rachel. He looked at my family, each in turn. He examined their passports with agonizing slowness. And then he let them through.
I smiled inwardly; on the outside I did my best not to let any emotion play on my face. I walked confidently toward passport control, knowing that now that my family was through, I should have no difficulty. My papers were scrutinized, and they were scrutinized once more. The official tapped something into his computer, and I started to feel the familiar sense of dread that I remembered from my last illicit journey. Why I was kept waiting there, I don’t know, but kept waiting I was. I heard the final call for my flight being announced, and I looked at my watch. Five minutes and still I was being held. Eventually, without any explanation for the delay, my papers were stamped and I literally sprinted toward the gate.
The corridor that took me there twisted and turned, and I attracted a few curious glances as I tore around the corners until finally I found myself at the seating area at the entrance to the gate. And there I stood still, desperate to catch my breath but unable to do so on account of what I saw. There, before me, were three task-force officers, bulletproof vests on full display and U.S.-style machine guns gripped firmly in their hands. With them was an official-looking British woman in a brown business suit. And by her side, sitting down and looking more dejected than scared, were Rachel, my mother, my brother, and my sister. Apart from them, the area was deserted.
The brown-suited woman approached me. “Can I see your passport, please?”
I handed her my travel document, and she gave it a cursory glance.
“Are these people with you?” Her face and voice were expressionless.
I felt everyone’s eyes on me. What could I say? “We’re traveling together, yes,” I replied quietly.
“Are they your family?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
She turned to the task-force officers and gave them a nod. We’ve got them all, it seemed to say. One of the officers disappeared, and it was obvious that he had gone to tell the airline staff that the flight could now depart.
There was a heavy silence, which the woman broke with her monotonous voice. “Walk with me,” she addressed us all. My family looked at me for guidance, but there was little I could do other than nod to indicate that we should do as she said. They stood up and followed us, the armed guards walking behind with their fingers still on the triggers of their guns. As we walked, I suddenly realized that in my pocket I had my family’s Kurdish-Iraqi passports, documents that I on no account wanted to be discovered now that we had quite clearly been caught. If there were no Iraqi passports, I reasoned in my panicked mind, there would be no deportations back to Iraq. They would have to use the Spanish passports, which I knew looked authentic. I stopped and said to the woman, “I need to use the toilet.”
She hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and pointed at a door a little farther down the corridor. “Okay,” she said. “Toilet’s over there.”
I hurried through the door. The room was empty, so I shoved one passport into each of three toilets and flushed them away, this time not bothering to shred them as I had done to my own passport several years before. There wasn’t time for that, and as a result I watched in horror as the toilets backed up. I couldn’t worry about that, though, so I took a couple of moments to regain my composure, then headed back to my family and their armed guard. We walked on in silence.
My mind was churning. Surely there was something I could do, something I could say to get us out of this mess. Eventually I turned once more to the woman and said, “Look, please, I need to talk to you alone for ten minutes.”
“All right then.” She nodded and took me to one side.
We took a seat together by a large observation window, through which I could see planes taking off as if to taunt me. “What’s the matter?” I asked the woman. “Why are we being held?”
She indicated the Spanish passports that she had in her hand. “Do you speak Spanish?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No.”
“Then why does your family have Spanish passports?”
“My mum married a Spanish man.” I recited the lie as smoothly as I could. “She has citizenship.”
The woman acted as if she had not heard what I’d said. “Where did you get these passports from?”
“I told you,” I insisted. “They’re naturalized S
paniards.”
“No they’re not,” she almost spoke over me. “These passports are counterfeit. They are very, very bad copies. I see them all the time—they’re made mostly in Thailand. How much did you pay for them?”
She looked me straight in the eye, and I saw in that moment that I wasn’t fooling her. But I couldn’t bring myself to answer.
“Did you pay a lot for them?” she insisted.
I nodded.
Her face assumed an expression of something approaching pity. “Well let me just tell you,” she continued, “that these things are produced in Thailand for between a hundred and two hundred dollars. They are the worst I’ve ever seen, and you are unbelievably lucky to have come through immigration with these.”
As I listened to her words, my blood ran cold. How could I have been so foolish? Within seconds my plan to rescue my family had been revealed for the ill-conceived scheme that it really was, and I had no idea what would happen to any of us now. The woman stood up, smoothed down her suit. “Come with me,” she said abruptly as she walked back to where the others were waiting, a look of expectation on their faces that I had to dash with a single glance and a shake of my head.
We were led to a processing area. Full of desks and computers and phones, it looked more like a call center than anything else, and quite out of place in the environs of the airport. Each desk was covered with piles of passports and other documents, and we were given seats and told to wait. We remained there for a couple of hours, our hearts heavy, the knowledge that we had failed bearing down on us like a crushing load. Overcome by emotion, my mother started shouting at me, and I argued back but only half-heartedly because I knew that what she was saying—this was my fault, I had been too hasty, didn’t I know what was at stake here?—was right. Rachel calmed us both down. How she did so I can’t think, because she must have been as sick with nerves as the rest of us. But I thanked God that she was there to exert her calming influence on us all as we fell once more into oppressive silence.
We were searched, our luggage was claimed as evidence, and then we were led around the corner from the processing area. I had noticed a few people being taken that way and the guards who accompanied them returning alone. As the same happened to us, I realized why.
In front of us were two enormous cells, one facing the other. Fronted by thick iron bars, one of the cells contained men, the other women, and between the two cells, sitting down, was a fat but threatening Malaysian guard. Along the back wall of each cell was a series of doors, and in the corner was some sort of receptacle that I assumed was the toilet. Around it was a thick, dirty puddle that encroached into the main area of the cell, contaminated with something I could not quite make out, though the stench of human feces and urine gave me a good idea what it was. The part of the floor that was not wet with water and human excrement was black with dirt and covered with a ghoulish human kaleidoscope of prostrate bodies, perhaps three or four hundred of them in each cell. There was not enough room for them all, so they overlapped each other as they lay there, unmoving. None of them seemed perturbed by the flies that were swarming around the room. Maybe, like horses on a hot day, they were used to them.
I couldn’t bear to look at Rachel or my family. Suddenly, from behind, I heard screaming. It was my mother. “La! La! Bidoun Sijan! No! Not prison!” she shouted hysterically. I watched helplessly as two guards dragged her toward the prison doors; she collapsed herself onto the floor to make it more difficult for them, then continued her terrible weeping. The faces of my brother and sister were stricken too. To have escaped the horrors of Baghdad prisons and undergone all the dangers they had put themselves through only to end up in a stinking cell in a strange country: I couldn’t imagine what was going through their minds. Wordlessly the women were segregated from the men.
I could think of nothing to do other than try to get a message to somebody, to let people know what was happening to us. The only people I could think of were Rachel’s parents: it would devastate them to think of their little girl in such a horrific situation, but they had the right to know, and maybe they could help. I had placed my mobile phone in one of my bags, but these had been checked in. Suddenly, however, I saw them arrive and be placed a few meters away from us. Quickly I moved toward my bag to get the phone; but as I did so, one of the officials saw me, a Sikh man wearing a turban. As I lunged for my bag, he grabbed me by my arms, pulled me away, thrust me against the wall, and lifted me up by my neck. He made as if to punch me with his free arm but clearly thought better of it at the last moment.
“Who do you think you are,” he spat at me, “doing all this hero business? You think you’re Robin Hood?”
I hardly knew what to say. I had only been there a few minutes and already I had marked myself out in their eyes as a troublemaker. Shocked into silence, I looked him up and down as he held me there against the wall. On his jacket he wore a badge with a grotesquely happy, yellow smiling face and the slogan “Service with a Smile.”
Eventually the unsmiling official put me down, but his eyes stayed on me. I didn’t try to grab my phone again.
I watched as Rachel, my mum, and my sister were pushed into the cell, somehow retaining a sense of dignity—despite my mother’s tears—as they stepped over the carpet of human traffic to find themselves somewhere to sit. Rachel turned and managed to force a smile at me that I could not reciprocate as my brother and I were forced into the main cell.
Silently we picked our way to the back of the cell, receiving grunts of discontent from a few of the people whose limbs we accidentally nudged against but who otherwise treated us with complete indifference. We examined the three doors at the back of the cell. Scrawled into the dirty paint on each door was a label: “The Turkish Embassy,” “The Iranian Embassy,” “The Iraqi Embassy.” I opened the Iraqi door and looked around the corner. The room was no cleaner or more welcoming, but it was filled with Middle Eastern faces who as one looked up to see who the new arrival was.
“Salam,” I nodded at them.
They greeted me in return, so I gestured to my brother and we both walked inside.
The Iraqi Embassy was no more than three meters by three meters. Right away I could tell that its eight or nine occupants were shady characters—no doubt they thought the same of me and my brother—but they were welcoming enough, given the circumstances. We found ourselves an empty area and sat down, shocked into silence with disbelief at what had happened to us. There were single sheets of newspaper on the floor, the only protection between us and the hard, cold concrete. The strip lighting above us was intolerably bright, and the air conditioning was on full blast, no doubt to battle feebly against the disgusting stench, though in reality all it did was make the place uncomfortably cold. No matter how many cells you’ve been in, you never quite get used to being treated no better—and often worse—than animals; but my brother and I did our best as we settled down and started waiting.
After a few hours, we were given food. Its arrival was announced by the sound of someone shouting outside the main cell, followed by a melee as some of the inmates scrabbled to get their share. My brother and I were hungry, so we stood up to go and claim our food, but one of our fellow Iraqi prisoners told us to wait. “There’s always enough to go around,” he said, “but it’s filthy food. You probably won’t want to eat it even when you get it.”
He was right. When our turn came, an official handed each of us, through the bars, a small polystyrene box. We opened it up to find a mound of crusty, dried-out rice with a suspicious smell—the remnants, I later found out, of what they had fed the Malaysian staff at a previous meal. Laid on top was a pile of fish bones. There was no meat attached to them, just the skeleton, as if we were being presented not so much with a meal as with an insult. The fish was enjoyed, the carton seemed to say, by important people. The bones are for you. We also were handed a nylon bag full of lukewarm water to drink.
The agonizingly slow minutes turned into hours, which turned into days.
Indeed it was difficult to keep track of time in that terrible place. In the main cell, where people had been languishing for who knows how long, certain individuals had become so ill from the conditions that they were hallucinating, shouting out at shadows, laughing hysterically, or causing violent fights because of an imagined slight. Back in the Iraqi Embassy we fell into conversation with our fellow Middle Eastern prisoners—Syrians, Palestinians, Iranians, a true melting pot of Arab culture—and I was astonished by the lengths to which some of them had gone to get themselves to a place of safety. A couple of them had had huge tattoos drawn on their arms and backs in an attempt to make them seem Westernized. Many of them had been trying to get to Australia, New Zealand, or Japan—Japan in particular, because at that time, I soon learned, a large mafia organization there was dedicated to the dirty business of people-smuggling. These people asked me questions about the UK, awed that I had made it there and astonished that I had risked coming back. To kill the tedium of the passing hours I told them about the geography and history of Britain, drawing crude maps in the dust on the floor and even at one point telling them the story that Rachel had told me about how William of Orange had fought in Ireland. It was a surreal moment, seeing these rapt Middle Eastern faces being taught British history in a Malaysian jail by one of their number, their faces a picture of concentration like a group of children hearing a fairy tale.
Occasionally I went to the front of the main cell, treading over the human carpet of Bengalis and Sri Lankans, and Rachel did the same in the opposite cell. The first time we did this, she smiled across the corridor that divided us and, as cheerfully as she could, called, “You take me to the nicest places, Lewis!” Then she removed something from her pocket: it was the restaurant menu from the hotel where we had been staying. “Now then,” she called, “what shall we have for lunch? Lobster?” And so we carried on, doing our best to crack jokes, to make light of the situation and raise each other’s spirits; but we knew it was an almost impossible task.
Escape from Saddam Page 24