Who Killed Daniel Pearl (14 page)

He laughs. We laugh. With Suzanne, his wife, whenever we get together we talk about the bad times, that were, in a way, also the good times— days passed with only the flame of cigarette lighters for light, the trenches, the night before the victorious offensive of Donji Vakuf, when three or four of us amused ourselves by guessing in what order the stars would come out. Sort of ah, Bosnia, that we know so well,
doobeedoobeedoo.

But the truth is—during the symposium, with Samir, on the hills around the city where I always go in pilgrimage, in the old city and the new, at the phone building that's been completely rebuilt and at the ruins that remain of the library, where till the end of my days I'll see, roaming through the rubble in his Ray Bans, his earrings, his brown fedora pushed back off his forehead, his gold vest, Ismet Bajramovic, known as Celo, the chief of the hoodlums of Sarajevo, at the Holiday Inn, in front of a bar in the rue Marsala Tita where a man just started barking one morning, and as I cross the paths of all these men and women who have gotten used to their crutches—I'm thinking of only one thing: I'm not in the Bosnia of today, but of yesterday. I'm not even in my own yesterday, but in
his
yesterday, that of Omar, in those days of April or May 1993 when I could have, or I should have, run into him. What does he do? What does he see? The town of Split, OK, in Croatia—but after that? Mostar? Sarajevo? What does the model student do when he arrives? Does he meet Kemal? The president? Does he witness, as I do, the startled moral and military reaction of the Bosnians? Does he see the lambs become wolves, the victims change themselves into fighters who render blow for blow on the two fronts—fascist Serbs on one side, Croatian paramilitaries on the other—where now, the war has spread?

I went to the Bosnian outpost of the French secret services, but there were no archives predating 1994.

I saw Amir, the man from the Bosnian services with whom I had concocted some still-born projects to transport arms across Turkey in that same year of 1993: He has a file on a Pakistani named Sheikh Omar, but who was born five years before the one I'm looking for, and who arrived in February. Is it the same one?

I went back to see Izetbegovic, retired to his home in the Sarajevo suburbs. A modest house, with only a guard at the street entrance. A Twingo parked in front serves as a staff car. Worn furniture. Medicines on one table. Books.
Le Lys et la Cendre
in a Bosnian translation. A satchel of black skaï that he says, with a smile, I gave him—I can't remember when, but I don't dare ask. Where is Gilles? He seems surprised and disappointed that Gilles Herzog, the companion of my Bosnian adventures
,
isn't there. He has heart trouble. You look better, Mr. President. You don't look the way you did the last time, as if you were going down slow, à la Mitterrand. Aha! But you should see a doctor all the same, come to Paris and see my friend Professor C. Oh, no, he says. But his daughter Sabrina appears ready to say yes. It obviously scares her to see him so pale, so tired, his large blue eyes taking up his whole face now, and I sense that she wouldn't be against his contacting Professor C. But no, he says with a smile, that would be silly, there is a moment when a man has lived his time and must put himself in the hands of God.

“But you? What did you come to talk to me about? You didn't just come back to talk about my heart and my health? Omar, you say? Omar Sheikh? Oh, all that is far away, so far away. Why dig up all those old stories? I know the international community attached a lot of importance to the foreign fighters who came here during the first two years of the war. But you, you know the truth. You know there was just a handful, and I did everything to stop them. And frankly, you who know the situation—Bosnia, of course, has no access to the sea, so where did they come from, these fighters? Who brought them here? Do people know, for example, that there were training camps in Slovenia? Can you explain to them that the grand mosque of Zagreb, under the authority of Sefko Omerbasic, regularly sent us recruits for jihad?”

And then, since I insist, since I tell him I'm writing a book and it's important for me to know, he searches his memory, turns to Kemal, his wartime advisor, and then his son, who are both sitting in on the interview and who, so far, have said nothing. He remembers, yes, he has a very vague memory . . . Perhaps not the Omar I'm looking for, but a group of young Pakistanis who came from London and proposed the formation of a foreign brigade of fighters. It was in the Tuzla region. But he has the impression they were Shiites—is that possible? Could my Omar have been a Shiite?

No, I tell him. Absolutely not. On the contrary, he was adamantly anti-Shiite. But wait one second—fighters? A brigade? At the same time I came to you in Geneva, with others, to propose the formation of an international brigade—remember?

He nods then, the gesture of one who was right before you were and would like it to be recognized. “Now maybe you understand why I wasn't wild about the idea. But rest assured, the speech I gave you was the same I gave them. I told them, too, no, thank you, that's very kind, but we have our fighters—Bosnia needs arms, it's true, but she does not lack young men ready to give their lives for the defense of their country.”

The president is tired. He's not breathing so much as panting. Again he has taken on the same translucent mask that Mitterrand had at the end. The thought crosses my mind, as it always does, that this admirable man, this Bosnian De Gaulle, the man who, for four years, struggled to keep Bosnia and the cadaver of his idea alive, could have been playing a duplicitous game and making fun of me a little. Isn't that what my friend Robbe-Grillet said, right from the start?

“Izetbegovic? Aha! What a great joke! Did you ask him to explain his Islamic declaration? ”

Isn't that the opinion as well of Jovan Divjak, the Serb general who defended Sarajevo? Wasn't that why, in the last year of the presidency of the “old man,” he refused to attend the ceremony where I was awarded the
Blason
, the Bosnian legion of honor I'm so proud of, the only decoration I've ever accepted. I leave him. He hasn't told me anything.

I went to Bocinja Donja, an old Serbian village 100 kilometers north of Sarajevo that they say Izetbegovic gave as a fief to a hundred veterans of the 7th Muslim brigade, from the Middle East. There, in this village where women wear black burqas and the men long beards, where it is forbidden to speak to strangers and, of course, to drink alcohol, in this village that greets the outsider with a sign at the entry reading, “Be afraid of Allah,” where life comes to a standstill for prayers five times a day, I finally found a man willing to talk to “the friend of Alija” and maker of
Bosna!
He is a veteran, now a schoolteacher, and willing to recall a young, exceptionally brave Pakistani, dedicated, solid as a bull, excelling in hand-to-hand combat and knife fights but nonetheless willing to pick up a shovel to dig a trench or do other menial labor. Nice boy, in other words, of above-average intelligence . . . although with a laugh that made his comrades' blood run cold. He said Europe was dead and there was nothing to expect of it. He explained that ammunition didn't grow on trees and should be used sparingly, which was why the knife was preferable. He was—and the schoolteacher remembers this, for the young man bragged a lot and liked to flaunt his exploits—a chess champion in England, and in the evening, around the fire, while the others watched, fascinated, he ran through all the battles, all the deployment strategies, as if they were huge chess games. He was obsessed with Bosnia's lack of access to the sea and said it was hemmed in, that Croatia was the enemy because only through Croatia could the Muslim nation secure a sea port. Any pictures of those days? Photos? You'd have to go to the military archives. There were some photos taken at Gradacac, he's sure of that. The problem was that Omar was out of control, a little loony, and the military police finally had to expel him because one day, in a fit of anger, he profaned a Chechnik tomb. What an extraordinary man! What a loss! Except . . . Again, is this really my Omar? Or is it still another with the same name? How is it that no one ever spoke of Omar's expulsion, for example? And why is it that this man, too, remembers him as a Shiite?

And so I went to Solin, near Split, in Croatia. There, in this lovely city on the Dalmatian coast, I went back to the two-story building that was the stopover, the logistical base, and the depot for the Convoy of Mercy. I found the trace of a Muslim NGO, the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), involved in the financing of fundamentalist groups in central Bosnia, with which Omar would have been in touch. I learned that he spent time with a dozen or so Arab fighters who had trained in the Afghanistan war and were on their way to Sarajevo, as well as with a certain Abdul Rauf, also a veteran, but Pakistani, a member of Harkat ul-Mujahideen, just arrived from Kashmir, who gave him a letter of recommendation for the Harkat representatives in London and Lahore.

“You're strong,” he had said. “You're motivated. You speak any number of languages. You know modern techniques. Why don't you get the appropriate military training? Why not go first to Afghanistan, where there are excellent camps, and you'll come back trained for combat against the Serbs?”

Omar protests that he's still young, he has to finish his studies, only with great difficulty did he convince his father to let him leave on this Bosnian expedition and, for now, his father is still the one who decides everything.

“We'll talk to your father,” says Rauf. “I'll organise a meeting for him with Maulana Ismail, imam of the Clifton mosque, a holy man, who is experienced at guiding young English Muslims to our places in Afghanistan and who will find the words to convince him, I'm sure. It's an honor for a family to have a son who abandons his useless studies to consecrate himself to the life of jihad.”

Here, at Solin, Omar decides to wear a beard.

The vagueness, the contradictions, the lack of substance of these bits of information may be due to a number of things.

The first might be that Omar, at this time, is not yet the person he will become. He has a negligible existence. And so, he leaves behind him equally negligible traces. No records, it's normal. Past history rewritten, it's classic. Omar went to Sarajevo and fought there. But at the time he was far too insignificant to have made much of an impact.

The second might be found in the explanation of Asad Khan, the Convoy of Mercy organiser, whose address I found in London and who has become, a decade later, the head of a sort of all-purpose NGO that sends its “convoys” not only to Bosnia, but to all theatres of “Muslim misery.” He receives me one evening in his office in the east of London, the office that dates from Omar's time. He tells me about his combat for the Chechens, and the other contemporary martyrs of the war of civilizations. He also says it's rotten luck for him to see the name of his dear association systematically linked to the itinerary of a terrorist.

“Did you know that for ten years, I haven't been able to set foot on Pakistani soil for fear of being arrested in connexion with Omar?” he says. “Did you know my name was even in the police report of the interrogation by the Indian police, in 1994? And can you imagine that in this police report, I am at the head of a list that includes the most important terrorists of Pakistan and Kashmir, noted as an ‘associate of Omar in England'?”

But he has a theory, Asad, an explanation he begs me to listen to and to tell others, because, really, he is sick to death of the misrepresentations on the part of the press.

“Omar accompanied us as far as Solin, near Split, in Croatia, where the Convoy had its base. But he became ill during the trip. Not the flu, a sort of seasickness, with vomiting and diarrhea. He comes to aid Bosnia, he wants to play tough guy, but he's all soft inside, like Jello, and it's a burden. And if they have such great difficulty remembering him in Sarajevo, if you haven't found a trace of his presence in the field, it's because, the morning we left Solin, this valliant being, this hero, this jihadist-in-the-making who dreamed of exploits, of blood spilled, of martyrdom, quite simply didn't wake up in time, and he let us finish our mission without him. Omar never entered Bosnia, that's the truth. Never. We went there, to Jablanica, near Mostar, to distribute our truckloads of food and clothing. And we picked him up at the base in Solin on the way back, and took him home, sick, to London. Subconsciously deliberate mistake. Shame. I've rarely seen a man who felt quite as ridiculous. But that's how it happened. So he came by to see me three or four times in the next few months, here, in this office. He felt so guilty! He always came with a little cheque, fifty pounds, sixty—here, it's for the Convoy, I'm so sorry, excuse me . . . ”

Of course I understand the interest Asad Khan may have in telling me all this. I sense that it is vital for him to separate his own destiny from that of Omar and to squelch the rumors that, since 1994, say that everything started with him, during that trip. But there's something that has a ring of truth in his tale, a real sincerity. And I have to admit that, despite its overall implausibility, I find my assumptions shaken. A detail, for example. A tiny detail: A few months later, passing through Split, I discovered while combing through the Croat papers of the period that during those weeks, perhaps even that day in Solin when Asad Khan says Omar stayed behind, there was a chess match between two international masters, Ivan Ljubicic and Slobodan Kovacevic. Does one in fact confirm the other? Could it be that Omar preferred chess to Bosnia? That he put on this phoney display of illness so he could watch a bold and magnificent gambit? That would be enormous. But after all . . .