Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar (10 page)

“Not here. We're going someplace.”

A few minutes later, Liam collected Mairead and the three of us went out to the sidewalk, where a driver in a sedan was waiting. As we drove down the Falls Road, Mairead, totally incurious about why I was there, told a long and complicated story about the romantic travails of one of her girlfriends—something about another man, another woman, a bad case of shingles, and a vacation in Spain—to which I said nothing and Liam grunted at the proper intervals.

We turned in to a working-class neighborhood of old council houses, and the driver stopped before one in the middle of a nondescript block. It was identical to all the row houses on either side save for its bulletproof metal door and the four or five locks the driver had to manipulate to get us inside. It was the classic two-up, two-down row house that dominated West Belfast—I'd been in so many over the years that I could walk through them blindfolded—but the distinguishing feature of this one was the complete lack of any furnishings or knickknacks or personal touches that suggested someone actually lived there.

As Mairead puttered in the kitchen, Liam and I settled in the front room of the safe house. With rather remarkable forthrightness, he detailed the
Provisional's financial structure, the various enterprises—illegal or otherwise—that kept the guerrilla movement going.

“But yes,” he said, “criminality is something we always need to be on guard against, but in this, there's a tremendous difference between us and all the other groups. You look at the Officials [the Official IRA], they're just a bunch of fucking gangsters. The same with the [Loyalist] UDA. With us, the vast majority of the money that's raised—I'd say 95 percent—goes straight into the armed struggle. With the UDA, it's what, maybe 5 percent? And that's why we're winning.”

He had a point, because even its bitterest enemies conceded the Provisionals' reputation for discipline, for fiscal responsibility. But I was curious how that was maintained, why the lure of easy money didn't corrupt. Were the Provos really so ideologically pure?

“I don't think that's it.” Liam smiled. “I think it's because when we find one of our people working a fiddle, skimming off the top, whatever, we kill them. We've got a proven track record on that.”

We talked for a very long time. Of all the “hard men” I'd met in Northern Ireland, Liam seemed the hardest: measured, supremely self-controlled, a man driven by calculation rather than emotion. But then something altered that appraisal slightly, and it happened at precisely eleven o'clock.

Liam was discussing the IRA's “punishment squads,” the young paramilitary wannabes who enforce discipline in the IRA neighborhoods, when his digital watch sounded the eleventh hour. He broke off in mid-sentence to go to the far side of the room and turn on a radio. The lead story on the BBC was of a British soldier killed that afternoon by a roadside bomb outside a small village in Derry province, the handiwork, it was presumed, of the IRA. As the report continued, Mairead came in from the kitchen where she had been relegated with a shocked look on her face.

“Liam, that's so weird,” she exclaimed when the report ended. “I mean, we were in that village just yesterday!”

Liam fixed her with a baleful gaze, to which Mairead seemed utterly oblivious.

“I mean, it's scary, isn't it? I mean, it could have been us driving down that road when the bomb went off.”

Every man has his Achilles' heel, and Liam's was named Mairead; if he ever got popped, I was quite sure it was going to be because of her.

By the time Liam and I finished talking it was hours past curfew, so I spent that night in the safe house, in a small spare bedroom at the top of the stairs. I was awoken in the morning by the sound of the television and a high, almost giddy laugh that I couldn't at all place. Coming down the stairs, I spotted Liam sprawled out on the carpeted living room floor watching a Road Runner cartoon, laughing like a child whenever the coyote got stomped or run over or blown up.

Late that afternoon, Seamus stopped by my hotel in downtown Belfast. I was surprised to see him because he'd never just dropped by unannounced before, and I knew he didn't really like coming into the neutral zone, felt much more comfortable up in the West Belfast “tribal areas.” He seemed distracted, tried to chat about bullshit, but his heart wasn't really in it.

“So, how'd it go?” he asked finally.

“Good.”

I could see he was relieved by this, as much by the brevity of my response as by its content; he didn't need or want to hear any details. He nodded, and then gazed down Shaftesbury Avenue—the so-called Golden Mile of Belfast, with its fancy shops and cafés and nice restaurants, an oasis of affluence that the authorities promised might be the future of all Belfast if only “The Troubles” could be brought to an end—and then turned back to me.

“So, you want to get a drink?”

JOSHUA HAMMER

I STOOD IN THE CORRIDOR OF A RAMSHACKLE BUILDING CALLED
Beit Agron in central Jerusalem, the headquarters for foreign journalists and military and government spokesmen, shaking with rage and humiliation. Seconds earlier, I'd been called a liar and then physically ejected from the office of the Israeli government press director. Now, as I took a deep breath and headed down the stairs, I thought back to the incident that had led to this point—an innocent comment I'd made two years earlier about a meal, a compliment that would brand me in some people's eyes as a pro-Palestinian stooge—and wondered if that remark would ever stop haunting me.

It was May 29, 2001, when the phone rang over breakfast at my home in Jerusalem. My interpreter, Ali, was on the line, breathless with excitement, informing me that my weeks-long attempt to meet the leadership of the Popular Resistance Committee, a coalition of armed factions in Gaza, had come through. “You need to drive down immediately,” he said.
Newsweek
photographer Gary Knight and I drove to the Erez Crossing, the checkpoint dividing Israel from the Gaza Strip, where we passed through a long corridor leading into Palestinian territory and caught a taxi to Gaza City. There we picked up Ali and sped along the coast, past fortified Israeli settlements
and Israeli troops peering out through bulletproof slots in cylindrical guard towers, to a scruffy tea shop in the hardscrabble town of Rafah, on the border with Egypt, where we were supposed to meet our contact. He turned out to be an elderly man in shabby clothing and rubber sandals, who led us on foot through sand-filled alleys to a concrete-block house where five armed men in black ski masks were waiting for us.

The men searched us, then led us into a small and airless room. Our host, the commander of a cadre of Palestinian fighters who called themselves the Fatah Hawks, wore a black-and-white-checkered kaffiyeh wrapped tightly around his face, so that only his eyes were visible. Perched on a wooden chair and flanked by two bodyguards, he proceeded to deliver a monologue for half an hour about the armed resistance. For the most part, this consisted of boasts about the number of Israeli settlers and soldiers his men had shot and scathing criticism of the U.S. and British governments—“Bush and Blair”—for their support of Israel. The speech, delivered in Arabic in a low monotone, soon became repetitive; so when the commander, who went by the ubiquitous Middle Eastern nom de guerre Abu Mohammed, suggested a break for lunch, Knight and I could barely conceal our relief.

As if on cue, the door swung open, and two of Abu Mohammed's underlings—muscular men with black ski masks pulled over their faces and AK-47s slung over their shoulders—entered the room. They carried trays of hot and cold meze, an assortment of small dishes of traditional Arabic cuisine. The masked men set the trays on a low wooden table and beckoned Knight, me, and Ali to sit on pillows on the floor. “Please,” urged our host, his voice muffled by the checkered cloth in front of his face. “Begin.”

And we did. It was one of the most sumptuous spreads that I'd ever been offered during the six months I'd spent as
Newsweek
's bureau chief in Jerusalem, shuttling between Gaza and the West Bank amid the intensifying violence of the al-Aqsa Intifada: Bowls of hummus gleaming with pools of olive oil and dollops of chickpeas artfully arranged on top. Baba ghanoush, a stew of eggplant and tomatoes spiced with garlic. A pot of dark, fermented
fava beans, known as
ful
, that singed my tongue as I sampled it with a spoon. Fresh tomato and cucumber salad speckled with pine nuts; skewered chunks of chicken; succulent lamb kebabs; and piles of hot flat breads, straight out of the oven, charcoal-black and crisp in places, doughy and chewy in others. The gunmen-turned-waiters hovered around us solicitously, like some parody of the staff at the Four Seasons, wielding liter bottles of Coke, Sprite, and Fanta and refilling our glasses at every opportunity. Abu Mohammed joined us, tucking the lower part of his kaffiyeh underneath his chin so that his mouth would be freed up for eating. Knight and I dived into the spread ravenously, Then, when nothing remained but a few half-eaten pitas scattered among the empty plates, a large rectangle of baklava—gooey, oozing nuts and honey—made its appearance, served with glasses of tea and cups of Arabic coffee. When it was over, Knight and I reclined on our pillows, bellies bloated, awash in good feeling, marveling that in the middle of a war zone, the Fatah Hawks had played the role of hosts with such panache.

It was then that Abu Mohammed motioned for Ali to leave the room with him. Two minutes later, the interpreter slipped back inside. He looked stricken.

“Guys,” he said. “There is a problem.”

“What kind of problem?” I asked.

“It seems,” he said, “that we have been kidnapped.”

At the time of our abduction, the al-Aqsa Intifada was nine months old, and it was gaining force and fury across the occupied territories. Following the right-wing Israeli leader Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the Temple Mount, or Haram al-Sharif, on September 29, 2000, angry Palestinians—already frustrated by the breakdown of the Camp David peace talks—had gathered at Israeli checkpoints, hurling stones and firebombs at soldiers. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak ordered a swift and lethal response, and during the first two weeks of the uprising dozens of Palestinians, many of
them teenagers, were killed by rubber bullets and live ammunition. Soon the armed wing of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, muscled aside the stone throwers, firing on Israeli bases and ambushing settlers as they drove down bypass roads in the occupied territories. In late 2000 militants from the radical Islamic groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, freed by Arafat from Palestinian Authority jails, regrouped and launched the first of what would become a wave of suicide bombings inside Israel. Sharon and his Likud Party were swept into power in February 2001 by an Israeli electorate disillusioned with Barak and attracted by Sharon's promise of a hard line against the uprising.

Nowhere did the violence seem more relentless, the confrontation more intractable than in Gaza, a sliver of overcrowded territory along the Mediterranean Sea, where roughly 1.2 million Palestinians shared the turf with 5,000 Israeli settlers. These Jews, who insisted that Gaza was their biblical inheritance, lived locked down inside fortresslike communities such as Kfar Darom and Gush Katif, protected by barbed wire fences and cordons of Israeli soldiers. To drive them out, the Popular Resistance Committee had embraced the tactics employed by Hizbullah guerrillas during the eighteen-year Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon: suicide bombings, roadside booby traps, ambushes, and mortar attacks. For the settlers, traveling beyond the perimeter of their compounds meant moving in armored convoys across miles of hostile territory, much as nineteenth-century wagon trains traversed the American frontier. The sandy wasteland was filled with buried roadside bombs; Palestinian snipers laid ambushes from half-finished buildings that offered a perfect vantage point over the highway. “The fighters aren't as sophisticated as Hizbullah, but they're getting better,” Lieutenant Leor Bar-On, a Gaza-based Israeli soldier, told me during my reporting from the strip in May. “It's no longer a popular uprising. It's becoming a full-scale guerrilla war.” Fueling the conflict was a constant flow of weapons passed to the militants through dozens of tunnels burrowed
beneath the Egyptian border into Rafah, a highly effective smuggling operation dominated by a single Palestinian family.

In the polarized atmosphere of the al-Aqsa Intifada, meanwhile, the role of journalists covering the conflict had become excruciatingly difficult. More than any other place on earth, perhaps, reporters here were working in a fish bowl. The influential pro-Israeli lobby in the United States, as well as the Israeli right wing, parsed every word we wrote for traces of pro-Palestinian bias. They would fire letters to our editors and send volleys of e-mails if anything was perceived to have violated their notions of objectivity. When I wrote an article about Palestinians who lived in fear of being stoned by Israeli settlers on the road leading to their West Bank village, I received a torrent of correspondence accusing me of ignoring the sniper attacks on Israeli settlers by the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades. (The accusation wasn't true; I'd addressed it in several previous articles.) The Palestinians, too, were highly sensitive to reporting that seemed to tilt too much in favor of Israel. But they lacked the sophistication, and the smoothly oiled media machine, to maintain the pressure that their Israeli counterparts were capable of. In our case, they opted for a cruder approach to make their point.

Now we sat on a couch in the airless room where we'd just eaten lunch, jolted by volleys of automatic weapons fire from just outside the window. Israeli bulldozers were knocking down houses along the border strip with Egypt, clearing an open field of fire, and the militants were shooting back. “Don't worry,” Abu Mohammed said, in a feeble attempt at reassurance, “it's three or four houses away.” The militants had confiscated our cell phones, and we were cut off from the outside world. Abu Mohammed handed Ali a typed press release in Arabic, apparently prepared by our abductors well ahead of time, that explained that we were being detained to protest U.S. and British government support for Israel. “We're going to be held until six o'clock,” Ali said. “It's just a symbolic kidnapping.” Assuaged by this promise,
we sat quietly, dozing off in the hot afternoon, awakening occasionally to face the surreal sight of our armed guards staring at us through their black ski masks and kaffiyehs. But as the hours wore on we grew more nervous—especially after we learned that the terms had changed. Now, the commander told Ali, we would be held until “the Western media took notice.”
What if nobody paid attention?
we wondered.
What if they put on a kidnapping and nobody heard?