Who Killed Daniel Pearl (15 page)

The third explanation is that of Saquib, his friend from the London School of Economics, who is visibly very surprised when I tell him Asad Khan's story.

“I can't believe it,” he says. “I can see him, so clearly, in October, going along the walkways of the London School, and then walking down Houghton Street, when he proposed kidnapping the Indian ambassador and the son of a Pakistani minister. I can hear him as if it were yesterday, telling me about how he fought in Bosnia.”

“He really said fought?”

“Yes, he said fought, there's absolutely no doubt that that's what he said. I can't believe he lied.”

“And so?”

“And so, I can only find one explanation,” Saquib concludes. “There were two trips to Bosnia, not one.”

The one, in other words, that may have ended at the gates of the promised land, the way Asad Khan described it. And another, soon after, without Khan, without the Convoy of Mercy, just him, just little Omar, erasing the failure of the first journey and, this time, going all the way. I'll come back, of course, to Asad.

“What do you think?” I ask. “What do you think of the possibility of Omar returning, without you, to Bosnia?”

Asad thinks about it. Nods his head. And replies, confirming Saquib's words, “Yes, why not? Omar wouldn't have lied about it. Perhaps there was a second trip, without me.”

And then, there's a last hypothesis, a sort of a middle-ground theory, between one extreme and the other. There is one hypothesis, ultimately, that is the most plausible, and that both the supporters of the golden legend and those of the lamentable, subconsciously deliberate mistake can agree upon. But no—I'll wait and reveal this last theory in due time, at the moment during the investigation when it actually occurred to me . . .

For the time being, what matters is this fact, and this fact alone: Whatever Omar may have accomplished, whether or not he went to Mostar or Sarajevo, whether or not he saw combat, whether or not the man at Bocinja Donja is telling stories or if it is Asad Khan who's rewriting history to disengage himself from responsibility, what is important in any case, then, is that the Bosnian affair, in Omar's own, never-varying words, decided everything. In other words, we can assume that this sudden consciousness of a world where it's a crime to be a Muslim, and where another destiny seems possible for European Islam, profoundly shakes the happy Englishman he was. Here, without the shadow of a doubt, is a model student, an Englishman, a cosmopolitan adolescent who, everything seems to indicate, has never thought that his belonging to the world of Islam and to that of the West were in the least bit contradictory, and who topples over the edge into madness in a very precise place.

And that, this obvious fact, I find profoundly disturbing.

Let me be clear.

Basically, I'm not surprised.

I always knew there were foreign fighters in Bosnia.

I saw them in Donji Vakuf, strange, haggard, marching like robots, without apparent fear, along the Serbian lines.

I saw them at Mehuric, near Travnik, Ivo Andrik's city; at Zivinice, Bistricak and Zeljezno Polje in the Zenica region; at Igman where, on 23 August 1994, during one of my last trips, an “international brigade” liberated the village of Babin Do; and even on the Dobrinjna outskirts of Sarajevo itself, where the 50-man “Suleiman Fatah” unit took part in defending the area during the darkest hours of the siege, in April and May 1993.

And I learned from Izetbegovic himself—who had received the information when the little plane taking us to see the Pope in April 1993, when the war with the Croats was at its fiercest, landed in Rome—that a brigade of foreign combatants (the 7th, linked to the 3rd Corps of the official Bosnia-Herzegovina army) had been discovered to have committed heinous acts of violence in the towns of Dusina, Vitez, Busovaca and Miletici, in the Croat zone. I myself wrote the draft of a communiqué, to be sent to the chief of staff and the press agencies, disowning irrevocably the “handful of lost soldiers” who had committed these horrors and dishonoured the Bosnian cause.

I quickly learned, as well, of the questionable role played by the Muslim NGOs—for example, supposedly charitable organizations like “Muassasat al-Haramain al-Khairiya,” or the “Charitable Establishment of the Two Holy Mosques.” I contacted them in Zagreb in the spring of 1993 before learning they were channeling money to the dreaded “mujahid battalion” of Zenica, and that their operations were a secret to no one, including the Croat authorities. (It should be remarked in passing that President Izetbegovic is not entirely wrong in saying these foreign fighters did not fall from the sky, and that to get to Sarajevo, they had to have strong non-Bosnian—in other words, Croat—accomplices.)

One day at staff headquarters in Travnik, when I was looking at some archived video images I was thinking of using in
Bosna!
, I came across footage the archives service of the 7th Corps had inadvertently left on the cassette, where one could see Arab mujahideen, their long hair dyed with henna and tied with a green band, playing soccer with the heads of Serbian soldiers.

And, concerning the mere presence of foreign fighters, I'm not mentioning all the things I heard but did not personally see, yet, given the sources, feel compelled to grant a certain credibility: another detachment, linked, again, to the 7th Corps, in the Mount Vlasic region; a unit of Tunisians and Iranians in the Bistricak village area, not far from the headquarters of the 33rd Division of the regular army; another in the Banovici sector that reportedly took part in the Vozuca offensive; the seventy Pakistani and Kuwaiti “Shiite mercenaries” of Tuzla; the detachment of the Revolutionary Guards from Iran, who arrived in May 1994 to act as “religious police” in the ranks of the mujahideen battalions. For further evidence there's the interview of Abu Abdel Aziz, the Kashmir-trained war lord who became inter-army commander of all the foreigners stationed in Bosnia, that ran in
Time
and in the Saudi London daily
Al-Sharq al-Awsat.

To say nothing of after the war, when all these “foreigners,” contravening the conditions of the Dayton Accords requiring them to leave the country, remained in Bosnia, married, had children and obtained Bosnian nationality, and might have made Sarajevo the center of international Islamic terrorism in Europe, had society not resisted. Their projects were many: a plan, in liaison with the Algerian GIA, to assassinate the Pope, in September 1997; two years before that, a plan for a car-bomb, in revenge for the condemnation to death of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, mastermind of the first World Trade Center attack; the 1998 affair of Algerian Bensayeh Belkacem, which imagined a simultaneous attack on the American embassy at Sarajevo and the bases of the international forces stationed in Bosnia; the case of Imad el-Misri, an Egyptian close to Osama bin Laden, who was arrested in July 2001 in the Sarajevo suburb of Ilidza, carrying a Bosnian passport; and finally, the case of the Bosnian veterans—such as Jasin el-Bosnevi of Sarajevo, and Almir Tahirovic of Novi Travnik in central Bosnia—who went to Chechnya to fill out the meagre ranks of the fundamentalist brigades and, more often than not, lost their lives.

In short, the case of the foreign fighters has always been an open secret for the handful of intellectuals, journalists, and humanitarians who pleaded for Western military action from the very first day.

But the foreign fighters' presence had no influence upon what those cognescenti observed in Sarajevo, and in central Bosnia as well, of the profoundly tolerant, moderate, and, to sum it up, European nature of Bosnian Islam itself—women without veils, alcohol served in the cafés, secular habits. And when confronted by these foreigners with their ridiculous rules, their sermons, their empty pharaonic mosques, Bosnians showed the solid cynicism of those who have no desire to die and who, abandoned by all and dependent solely on their own forces, took what little help was offered to them.

Better still, no matter what one may say, the albeit shocking presence of these combatants remained marginal, circumscribed to certain regions of the country and in no way contaminating (or at least less than has been said) the morale, the culture, or the functioning practices of the army of Bosnia-Herzegovina: soldiers of three nationalities with Serbian and Croatian officers in some cases commanding troops made up of a majority of Muslims. Of course there were imams, but they were no more than chaplains in a French regiment. And there was the 7th Regiment, to which many of these units were attached, which was commanded by General Alagic, who, in that capacity, covered up their war crimes—but I observed them enough in action to be able to attest to the fact that they were not, in any case, a fundamentalist or Islamist corps.

As for Izetbegovic himself, I knew his past. I could see that, like all the Bosnians, he used the support of these “Arabs”—whom he disliked and feared—without scruple. But I also saw that I could talk to him without difficulty about Salman Rushdie and his support for the Bosnian cause. I saw that Gilles Herzog and I had no trouble convincing him, the pious Muslim just returned that day from Ryad, to come to Europe to meet Margaret Thatcher, and the King of Spain, and, especially, the Pope. I can see him still, strangely pensive after his meeting with John Paul II, in the
Mystère 20
François Mitterrand—either clever or a good sport— had sent to Rome to bring us back to France, and then to Sarajevo. Could it be that the holy man had unsettled him? What kind of an Islamic fundamentalist could be so moved, so shaken by the head of the Catholic church? When I had doubts, when people in France jeered at my support for the author of the “Islamist Declaration,” I remembered how uncomfortable everyone was following the screening of
Bosna!
in his honor at a cinema in the Latin Quarter in Paris.
“BHL!”
the Bosnians of Paris chanted,
“BHL! Bosnia-Herzegovina Libre!”
No, no, some of his counsellors grumbled, we don't like the “secular Islam” mentioned in the film's commentary, we really don't like that. But this led to Izetbegovic's typical style of arbitrating: “BHL is right. Maybe we should think this idea of ‘secular Islam' through.” A conservative. Perhaps a nationalist. But one who never gave in when it came to the essential, the multicultural dimension of Bosnia that he had defended and whose cause brought us together—he, the Muslim man of letters, astute reader of the Koran; and I, a Frenchman and a Jew, a friend of Israel, who never, in any circumstance, failed to say who I was and what I believed. How many discussions between us, but peaceful ones, about Jewish destiny, the mystery and the question of Israel . . . And as for his Bosnia—
our
Bosnia, I should say— how many times did he tell me, with the touch of melancholy that appeared every time he found a moment's respite from his role as commander-in-chief to reflect and talk: “I could be happy with a little Bosnia. I could consent to the partition that everyone, from the West to Milosevic, seems to desire and whose first effect would be peace. I could build a refugee state for all the persecuted Muslims of the region. Well, maybe I'm wrong. I know I'm considered a stubborn old man, a dreamer, but you see, that's not my idea. I cannot say good-bye to the beautiful dream of a multicultural, cosmospolitan Bosnia!”

Even if I think that at the time I should have brought up the issue of the Islamists' presence more clearly, denounced it more loudly, devoted more than just allusions to it in
Le Lys et la Cendre
, even if I say that I gave in, at the time, to the classic syndrome (whose effects I have often pointed out in others) of the intellectual who fears he will harm the cause he stands by in telling the whole truth, I still think, today, that I was— that
we
were—right to respect this simple theorem. Not: “The fact that there are Islamists in Bosnia should dissuade us from intervening.” Rather: “The longer we wait to intervene, the more Islamists may rush in. It is because we do not intervene that, politics by nature detesting a void, Islamists utterly foreign to this Bosnian civilization may assume our role and profit from the despair of an abandoned population, to take root in the Balkans.”

The new element, then, is, as always, the appearance of an individual, of a singular destiny, of a discreet body.

The new—and terribly troubling—element is this idea of a man, one man alone, who plunges towards the worst in the very location that was, in my eyes, the center of honor and courage.

Here is a man who arrives in the European capital of sorrow. Here is a course of action that follows motives initially not all that different from those at the very same moment inspiring French human rights militants, as well as others who see, in the situation in Bosnia, the great test of late 20th century Europe—the advent of fascism, the Spanish civil war of our generation, etcetera. Except that, since noble causes sometimes produce dissimilar effects, his conversion to Islamism and to crime dates exactly from this point.

The Devil is not in the details, but in the great causes, and in History.

CHAPTER 5
FROM ONE PORTRAIT, ANOTHER

In Pakistan, I did all I could to meet Omar.

I contacted his family, who referred me to his lawyers.

The lawyers advised me to consult the President of the Supreme Court.

In November 2002, I went to see the police, who said, “Yes, why not? You just have to go to Hyderabad and negotiate with the warden of the prison.” So I went to see the warden of the prison who said, “It's not as simple as all that. Omar has just been transferred to the prison's maximum security sector, the Mansoor Ward, and only the minister, Moinuddin Haider, can authorize you to see him.”