by Sally Cooper
‘Y’all come back now, hear?’ shouted Cole, as the Humvee roared down the drive and disappeared into the night.
21
Fortress UN
It was Thursday afternoon, the last day of the working week. Our office was beginning its wind down and I was looking forward to the weekend. Mirwais and Faheem were out of town, mentoring our trainees in Herat. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ismail slowly and methodically packing up his desk, closing his files and replacing them on the shelves behind him, twisting the lid onto his heavy ink pen and placing it in the inside pocket of his jacket. I sat at my desk, flicking mindlessly through news websites, waiting for Qasim to return from his errands so we could finally go home.
A sense of foreboding had descended over Kabul and it wasn’t a pleasant place to be. The days were warm and crisply stark but winter was rapidly approaching and the trees were almost bare. The once-green lawn of the Karwan Sara was now parched and the last of the summer’s roses were almost gone. Like the change in season, a summer of bomb threats had been followed by an autumn of kidnap warnings.
‘Break, break, break.’ My two-way radio sprang to life. My hand was suspended over my keyboard but my eyes darted across to the black handset sitting on its charger on the corner of my desk.
‘To all Uniform November call signs, please be advised that we are now in lockdown, repeat, we are now in lockdown. No further movement in Kabul until advised by Uniform November Base.’
I glanced up to see Ismail looking across the room at me. His weekend had just got shorter. Lockdowns were being increasingly issued without any explanation – and no-one ever asked why.
‘Can you call Qasim and tell him he needs to come back now?’ I asked Ismail.
With the kind of patience I would never understand, Ismail sighed and shuffled back to his seat. I returned to my computer screen.
While the UN’s security network covered its own galaxy of agencies, the Afghanistan NGO Security Office issued security information for the country’s network of NGOs. I picked up my mobile and called Oliver.
‘The UN’s just gone into lockdown – has ANSO said anything?’
‘No, I haven’t heard anything.’ He sounded surprised. ‘It’s been a quiet day and we’re kind of scratching for stories.’ Like the Ghan’s budding generation of radio journalists, Oliver’s print charges wore trainer wheels. ‘I’ll see if someone can follow it up. I’ll let you know if we hear anything.’
My radio bleated out the same warning at regular intervals while Ismail and I sat in silence in The Bubble’s increasing darkness. The distant throbbing of a helicopter nudged closer and closer until I realised that there was more than one. The skies were buzzing. Something was up. I went back to my surfing and clicked onto Reuters. ‘Three foreigners kidnapped in Kabul.’ I read it, and read it again. Then I read it again. It couldn’t be true.
But it was. Three UN staff had been dragged at gunpoint from their vehicle in broad daylight, not far from the compound in which they worked. The Bubble didn’t tell me but the world was finding out. This was very bad indeed.
‘Ismail, there’s a news story here that says three foreigners have been kidnapped in Kabul. I think that’s why we’re in lockdown.’
‘Really?’ was all he seemed able to muster, slowly digesting the information. ‘My God,’ he added, raising his eyes to the heavens and shaking his head.
The details remained sketchy and my radio silent. I sat at my desk, completely still save for the tremor that was running through my stomach. In recent months, there’d been a string of kidnappings in Iraq, all of which had ended in brutal beheadings, videotaped and broadcast over the internet. While my internal compass had helped me navigate many experiences in the Ghan – from haggling for coats to driving past two men skinning a recently slaughtered cow by the side of a busy road – I was struggling with this one. Like the Dyncorps bomb, there was nothing in my life to date that could help me navigate this.
The UN needed to get its people home so the lockdown was temporarily lifted before dark. In the window of a single hour, UN cars scurried across Kabul, from compounds to guesthouses. We drove the ‘back way’, behind Wazir Akbar Khan where the streets were quiet and we could get a clear run. Qasim stopped for no-one, barely changing gears as he took each corner. I swapped seats with Ismail; he sat in the front while I sat, my scarf wrapped tightly around my head, hunched in the back. I didn’t know who had been kidnapped or how it had happened but I knew for certain that I didn’t want to be dragged from our car. It was getting dark when we drove up the laneway to the Karwan Sara. As the gates shut behind, I breathed a sigh of relief, as if being inside a foreigner guesthouse was protection from the world beyond its walls.
News of the kidnapping travelled fast along the Kabul grapevine. The Karwan Sara’s guests gathered that night and compared the same notes over and over again. We remained in the corner of the dining room as if there were safety in numbers and sanctuary in a corner.
Halfway through dinner I stepped outside to do my radio check. The Uniform November radio traffic was constant but subdued. Everyone was toeing the security line tonight.
‘Uniform November Base, this is Uniform November Four Three. Radio check, do you copy?’
But Uniform November Base responded to someone else. I waited for a break and tried again.
‘Uniform November Base, this is Uniform November Four-Three. Radio check, do you copy?’
Silence.
‘Uniform November Base, this is Uniform November Four-Three, can you hear me?’
More silence until another call sign came on with another radio check.
I clicked the buttons on and off and tried again, but the airways were filled with voices of my colleagues oblivious to my bleating. Why had my radio died … now … tonight?
I pulled my phone out of my bag and dialled Bing’s number.
Nothing. I looked down at the screen; there was no network. I stood in the cold and the dark of a garden once full of summer friends and better memories. I felt like I was in the middle of a dream where I screamed but no-one heard me, where my life was no longer my own. I wanted someone else to fix this for me but there was no-one. It was just me.
I walked to my room and dusted off the sat phone I carried for times of emergency. I couldn’t miss my radio check, not tonight. I called Bing, who was surprised to hear from me.
‘My radio doesn’t seem to be working properly and the phone network is down.’
‘Yeah, the network’s been up and down all afternoon,’ he responded wearily.
‘Anyway, I just thought I should let you know I was alive. I have a spare radio at the office. I’ll get it tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I hope things get sorted out quickly,’ I added lamely.
‘Me too. Thanks.’
I hung up, glad I wasn’t him.
The following morning was Friday but the city seemed quieter than usual. Ismail made the trek to the office and collected the spare radio.
‘Is there any news?’ he asked, handing me the radio in the car park of the Karwan Sara.
‘No, nothing.’
‘This is not what the people do,’ he said, shaking his head in dismay and getting back in the car.
Huddled together in our winter woollens, the assembly of foreigners spent the day on the Karwan Sara’s brown lawn, not far from our phones and only metres from my radio. I was grateful for their company as we sat in the fading autumn sun, talking about anything but the obvious.
By Sunday there was still no news. The three – two women and a man – seemed to have vanished into thin air. The Afghan authorities said there was no trail and were waiting for the kidnappers to make their demands. That afternoon, the UN summoned its international staff to a meeting. Much to Bing’s annoyance, I’d done my best to avoid attending these get-togethers in the past. They talked of danger and distrust, stirring up fear of Afghans and anything beyond the high walls of the compound and the locked doors of big white cars. Under the
current circumstances, it would have been unwise to miss this one.
The conference room at UNOCA was crowded, expat staff milled around in groups, talking in hushed tones. I took a seat near the door, unwilling to commit myself further. The meeting began with an update on ‘the situation’. The update was there was no update. The details of the kidnapping were reiterated. The three, from Kosovo, the Philippines and Northern Ireland, had not locked the doors of their car – but a single lock would never deter a gang of heavily armed men.
I didn’t know any of the hostages. They worked for Elections and had been in the Ghan on short-term contracts. But the expat community in Kabul was tight-knit. Social groups formed around offices and guesthouses, everyone knew someone who knew everyone else. When Bing asked if anyone knew any of the hostages, one or two hands were slowly raised around the room. Necks strained to see who they belonged to.
‘One of them lives with me.’ I heard a dulled, hesitant voice and saw it belonged to a man I recognised. He was the IT guy. Although I didn’t know him, he had always smiled and said hello to me on my sorties to UNOCA. My stomach dropped. In establishing a connection to someone I knew, however vaguely, the three had become real. I felt awful.
‘Okay, does anyone have any questions?’ asked Bing, keeping his tone matter-of-fact. A thin, freckle-faced young woman seated in the centre of the throng stood up. I had seen her around, usually in a pack with other blue ID tags. She cleared her throat and in a loud American accent asked, ‘Is it true that the kidnappers have a list of other international staff they plan to abduct?’
Before Bing could answer, her question was followed by one from the other side of the room.
‘If they’re beheaded, will we have to evacuate?’ The southern drawl belonged to a rotund man from the logistics office. A surge of voices rose up, talking over each other. Bing shook his head and held up his hands to quell the babble.
I was horrified. Not two minutes ago, it had been established that there were a number of people in the room for whom the three hostages were more than just names in a news story, who went home every night and saw their friends’ belongings, woke up to their empty rooms and wondered if their friends would ever come home. Were my colleagues just insensitive or completely ignorant? Perhaps they were caught up in the moment, perhaps they were just plain scared. Perhaps, like many foreigners in Kabul, they were the product of expat fortressing. They woke up in their UN guesthouse each morning, travelled to work in the UN vehicle, worked in a UN compound. I couldn’t be in this room, in this Bubble, any longer. As Bing tried to silence the crowd, I slipped out the door, out of the building, into the car and out the gate, away from the fortress and The Bubble.
Two weeks later, the three had still not been freed. The wait went on. The Ghan’s mobile phone services flooded subscribers with a series of text messages asking anyone with information about the whereabouts of the hostages to call a hotline. The messages were in English and anglicised Dari. Dari is written in Arabic script but the Ghan’s growing army of texters was adapting it to the Romanised form of the standard Nokia. The kidnapping was being viewed as a national outrage. ‘This is not what we do.’ Afghans everywhere repeated Ismail’s sentiment. For them, this evil has once again come from ‘outside’.
Yet despite the text messages and the occasional story on the BBC, the hostages slowly receded from people’s conversations. The unthinkable had become the ordinary. Life went on and, although everyone was still mindful of the situation, there was work to be done. Over the last three weeks there had not been one reported incident of violence or even threats of violence towards the international community, while the kidnappers’ deadlines were constantly revised.
The UN kept a tight grip on its staff and I was prohibited from going out at night. I was beginning to go stir crazy.
‘Peter and I are going out for dinner, do you want to come?’ asked Cole one evening.
‘Mmmm … what if I get seen?’
I wasn’t worried about being kidnapped. My fear was that one of my eager UN colleagues would see me driving by and feel the urge to tell Bing.
‘We won’t tell,’ grinned Peter and Cole. ‘Come on.’
Later that evening, under the cover of darkness and the hood of my winter coat, Peter, Cole and I slipped quietly into a waiting taxi. Our destination was an obscure Chinese restaurant, one of the few in Kabul whose sole mission was actually to serve food. Like many other countries, China had a proprietary stake in the new Afghanistan. Beijing was funding a number of large-scale infrastructure projects but perhaps the country’s most notorious (and, it must be said, unofficial) contribution to the reconstruction effort was the number of ‘Chinese restaurants’ that had begun to spring up throughout the city. With Chinese waitresses in high heels and miniskirts and a menu devoted almost entirely to Jack Daniel’s, their clientele was limited to Kabul’s ever-expanding legion of goatees and ‘geographic bachelors’.
Peter had discovered our nameless Chinese restaurant on one of his sorties. It was behind an obscure dark blue door on a busy street a few blocks from the Karwan Sara. He rang the bell and, moments later, a middle-aged Chinese woman opened the door with a smile. A pale pink apron covered her brown woollen trousers and floral blue shirt. There wasn’t a miniskirt in sight as she shepherded us indoors with maternal urging and a string of Mandarin. Inside was the standard replica of Chinese restaurants from Guangzhou to Gundagai: round tables, pink plastic tablecloths, soy sauce bottles and, best of all, Chinese customers slurping and chewing their way through chicken with black bean sauce and Szechuan beef. Kabul seemed like a long way away.
One morning, a week or so later, I sat hunched at my desk, rubbing my hands together to warm them and waiting for my computer to kick in so I could begin my day. The lads were out collecting interviews for their next programs and Ismail was downstairs opening the studio. Like most Afghans, he’d left the door open behind him and I could hear the jiggle of the enormous key chain he carried everywhere he went.
It was now a month since the three election workers had been taken hostage. The news had drifted from the front page but the IT guy’s smile hadn’t returned. I began my day with the usual check of news websites.
UN HOSTAGES FREED.
It jumped out at me as the news of the kidnapping had a month earlier. I stared at my computer screen. Just as I was reaching for my phone, it rang.
‘Did you hear? Is the UN saying anything?’ It was Oliver, ever the vigilant reporter.
‘No, not yet. I’m reading it on Reuters.’
‘There’s a press conference at the Ministry of Interior in half an hour – I’ll call you when I know more.’
‘Great. I’ll let you know when the UN makes a statement.’
I sat in silence, my radio dark, my mood lifted.
‘The hostages have been freed,’ I told Ismail gleefully as he walked back into the office.
He clasped his hands in front of his chest, raised his eyes up to the heavens and smiled. ‘Thanks God,’ he said. Ismail always had more than one thank you for the powers that be.
The UN made no official announcement that the hostages had been freed. Oliver called back and said no-one at the press conference could get their story straight. Had the hostages been released or had they been rescued? Government officials each repeated the same story word for word, as if coached to sing from the same songbook. Claims that the three had been rescued in a daring early morning raid by the Afghan National Army failed to hold water against an eyewitness account reported in the New York Times. The story quoted a Kabul pharmacist who looked out his window that morning to see a Toyota Corolla pull up outside his shop. What caught his eye was the woman in the driver’s seat: one of the hostages, whom he recognised from the pictures he’d seen on television. A clearly marked UN car pulled up behind, the woman got out of the Corolla followed by the two other hostages, walked to the UN car, got in and drove away.
The journalist in me would like to have known
the story, the aid worker in me was happy to watch it die. I wanted life to go back to normal, or as normal as it had ever been in the Ghan. A life where I was no longer the prisoner of the Karwan Sara, where I wasn’t trapped inside an expatriate fortress, and one in which the world wasn’t divided into ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Inshallah.
22
Thinking Outside The Bubble
When I was a child, the arrival of a new family car was as about exciting as things ever got in my small world. Its smell, its pristine upholstery, all those buttons just waiting to be pressed and the promised excitement of journeys yet to be made. The new IRIN Radio car had been a long time coming. Like many things in the UN, procuring a vehicle took a long time, though ours, at six months, had taken longer than most.
There were many reasons for the delay, but the most crucial was that I had stipulated that our new car be anything other than white, and that it was not to have any UN markings. Procurement had no problem with the request, though actually filling it had proved problematic. There weren’t a lot of paint shops in the Ghan so our new car could be either Afghan National Army Green, US Embassy Silver or Warlord Red. I made an executive decision and went for the green, asking if it could perhaps be toned down a bit, less military and more green, something that, with the requisite amount of Kabul dust, would soon blend into the surroundings. I later reported this to Ismail who said it was a bad idea. ‘Some of the bad people will think we are generals and shoot at us.’ I found this neither reassuring nor flattering. Although I had now been in the Ghan for a while and I liked to run a tight ship, I didn’t think I bore that much resemblance to an Afghan general.
Then an eleventh-hour phone call set us back another week. Apparently there’d been trouble with the paint.