Who Killed Daniel Pearl (43 page)

Yet there is a detail I haven't discussed before, perhaps because, up until now, it wasn't entirely clear to me: It's the odd and, come to think of it, unprecedented fact that, when you consider the biographies of all of Omar's accomplices, when you go down the list of the names and the chief to whom each one, like all jihadists, has sworn allegiance, we realize that these seventeen men are not from one group, nor from two, but from all the groups, all the parties, all the factions of the Islamist movement of Pakistan.

Usually, there's one particular group behind a particular crime.

For the Sheraton, it's the Lashkar.

For the grenade attacks or the bomb at the bus stop of Kupwara, or the market at Chadoura, in Cachemire, it's the Jaish.

For the suicide bombing against the American consulate of Karachi, it's the Harkat ul-Mujahideen.

The Harkat ul-Ansar, become the Harkat ul-Mujahideen, for the kidnappings of tourists in Kashmir, at the end of the '90s.

Sometimes, as in the case of the 13 December 2001 attack on the Parliament in New Dehli, two groups join forces, in this case the Jaish and the Lashkar e-Toïba. But that's rare. Very rare. These organizations despise one another. They fight among themselves as much as they fight the common enemy. Remember the conflict over the control of the goods and real estate holdings of the Harkat ul-Mujahideen when Fazlur Rehman Kahlil and Masood Azhar split up, early in 2002. Consider the way the ISI itself operates, and the energy it spends not to unite, but to divide the groups that might be tempted to gain too much importance and do without its supervision . . . And there's the case of the Jamiat ul-Ulema e-Islam splitting, under the influence of the services, into three groups (the JUI-F of Fazlur Rahman, the JUI-S of Sami ul-Haq, and the JUI-Q of Ajmal Qadri) which, though ideological triplets, are engaged in a struggle that is all the more bitter. In short, it's every man for himself. The logic of a sect with schisms, crimes among friends, rivalries of proximity, mutual denunciations—to such a degree that the absolute rule is that of permanent and ferocious competition between organizations pursing the same goals
but
fighting over the same territory and the same sources of funding. The rule, with very few exceptions dictated by circumstance, is “one crime, one group”—one beautiful jihadist crime, like a rare resource not to be shared, at any price, with the brother enemy.

But here . . .

The strange thing about this particular crime is that it is impossible to attribute to this group or that; its distinctive characteristic in the history of Pakistani or bin Laden-style terrorism is that it has given rise to a concerted effort on the part of groups that are otherwise divided in every way.

Hyder, alias Imtiaz Siddiqui alias Amjad Hussain Farooqi alias Mansur Hasnain, is a member of the Harkat Jihad e-Islami.

Arif, alias Mohammed Hashim Qadeer, comes from the Harkat ul-Mujahideen.

Adil Mohammen Sheikh, the policeman, Suleman Saquib and Fahad Nasim, his cousins, from the cell in charge of scanning the photos and sending them by e-mail to the
Wall Street Journal
and to the news agencies, all belong to the Jaish.

Akram Lahori is the emir of Lashkar, which is also the group Fazal Karim and Bukhari belong to.

Asif Ramzi, Lahori's lieutenant for the Pearl operation, is the boss of the Qari Hye which is a sort of subsidiary of the Lashkar.

Abdul Samat, as far as we know, is a member of the Tehriq e-Jihad, a small group founded in 1997 by dissident elements of the Harkat.

Memon is from the Al-Rashid Trust.

And as for Omar, he has his own personal group: the Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty.

In short, every group, it seems, is there.

It's like a parliament of Pakistani Islamism.

It's a crime syndicate united around Pearl's body in life, and then his cadaver in death, as it has never gathered for any other.

On one side a lone man, fragile, representing only himself.

And on the other, the ISI, and al-Qaida—and now, the jihadist syndicate in full force.

Never seen before.

A matchless alignment for a murder that is decidedly one of a kind.

CHAPTER 2
THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

One initial explanation is obvious. Pearl was a journalist. Just a journalist, working in one of the countries of the world where it is least propitious to be a journalist, where all journalists are, as such, in permanent mortal danger. Because they are insubordinate? Free agents? Because of their annoying tendency to disobey, to refuse to toe the line? No. The real reason is that they are perceived, on the contrary, as not being free, not in the least independent—the real problem is that, in the imagination of the Pakistani military man with the low forehead, or the Islamist militant on fire with his saintly hatred, they are, by definition, spies, and nothing distinguishes a
Wall Street Journal
reporter from a CIA agent. A free journalist? Contradiction in terms. A journalist who is not linked to the intelligence agencies, the “three letters,” of his country? An oxymoron, unthinkable. I've seen what I'm talking about. I've felt it myself—the extraordinary difficulty of gathering information in Pakistan without giving the impression that you are an informer. I've observed it every time, these last few trips, when I tried to explain that, all right, perhaps this wasn't a novel in the classic sense, but at least I was independent, investigating on my own and researching only the facts. Every time I met the officials, the chiefs, and deputy chiefs of this insane police force, I observed the eyelids heavy with suspicion, the tarantula-like stare, the ill-humored air of mistrust dripping with sly innuendos, that seemed to say: “Cut the crap, we know very well that an independent writer is a term that makes no sense . . . ” No one doubts that this is why Danny died. No one doubts that the bloodthirsty cretins who made him say he was a Jew actually believed he was also an agent of the Mossad or the CIA. From this standpoint, his death makes him a martyr for that grand cause which is freedom of the press. We have to add his name to the long list of journalists, Pakistani and non-Pakistani, imprisoned or dead so that the press, and its freedom, might live. To salute Daniel Pearl, to honor his memory and his courage, is to pay tribute to all those living who, after him, accepted the same risk as he had in going, whatever the cost, to do their jobs in Karachi: Elizabeth Rubin, Dexter Filkins, Michel Peyrard, Steve LeVine, Kathy Gannon, Didier François, David Rohde, Daniel Raunet, Françoise Chipaux, Rory McCarthy, and others whose names I am forgetting— the hot iron in the wound of Pakistan, the honor of this profession.

A second good explanation is that this entire event happened in a country—a region? a world?—where, since the Afghanistan war and in anticipation of the war in Iraq soon to come, Washington was generally looked upon as the capital of the Empire of Evil, the home of the Antichrist and Satan: Daniel Pearl was American. A good American? There are no good Americans, the sects of the assassins think and say. Opponent of Bush? Democrat? Appalled at the blunders of Dostom and of the American Special Forces at Mazar-e-Sharif? An American who, according to Danny Gill, his friend from Los Angeles, probably would have joined the clan of liberal minds who would have thought twice before supporting George Bush's absurd war? “Exactly,” they insist. “That's almost worse. It's the Devil's greatest ruse, the trick of the Demon. It's the ploy they've found to disarm the Arab nation . . . ” Wasn't he sympathetic to you? A friend of the dispossessed? Wasn't Daniel Pearl one of those Americans who object to hateful stereotypes, reject chauvinism, and take the defense of the downtrodden? “Right, thanks, we know. During those eight days, we had plenty of time to see that this sap wasn't even hostile towards us. But that's not the question. We don't care what an American does or doesn't think, because the crime isn't thought, the crime is America. We don't give a damn about what your Danny did or didn't do, because America isn't a country but an idea, and it's not even an idea but the very countenance of hell.” Pearl was killed less for what he thought or did than for what he was. If he was found guilty of anything at Gulzar e-Hijri, it was the singular, unique, ontological crime of simply having been born. Guilty of being, and of being born . . . Guilt without a crime, essential, metaphysical . . . Doesn't that remind us of something? Can't we hear, behind this kind of trial, the voice of another infamy? Pearl is dead because he was an American in a country where being American is a sin, stigmatized with a rhetoric that echoes the sin of being a Jew. Pearl was the victim of this other crap called anti-Americanism and which also makes you, in the neo-fascist eyes of the fundamentalists, the dregs, the scum, a subhuman to be eliminated. American, hence a son of a bitch. America, or Evil. The old, European anti-Americanism blended with that of the religious fanatics. The rancid hatred of our French
Pétainists
given a third-world damned-of-the-earth makeover. I finished this book at precisely this moment. In my ears, the planetary clamor, that made of America a region, not of the world, but of the spirit—and the blackest spirit, at that. Better to live as a serf under Saddam than free thanks to Bush, the global crowd proclaimed. One could, like me, refuse Bush's war but, nonetheless, find this clamor despicable. Daniel Pearl died of this.

And then, finally, there's a third reason. Pearl was a Jew. He was a Jew in a country where Judaism is not a religion, and even less an identity, but another crime, another sin. He was a positive Jew. He was a Jew in the way Philip Roth or Albert Cohen are Jews. He was proud of it. Affirmative. Didn't one of his colleagues tell me the story of this scene in Peshawar, an Islamist fiefdom, where, in a group of journalists asked about their religion, he placidly replied “Jewish,” which turned the atmosphere glacial. He was a Jew like his father, like his mother. He was a Jew like one of his grandfathers, Chaïm Pearl, who gave his name to a street in B'nei Brak, Israel. He was this sort of Jew able, at the moment of supreme martyrdom, to proceed in the sanctification of the name of Jew. And he is most surely a victim of modern anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitism that starts, in fact, with B'nei Brak, ties the name of Jew to the name of Israel and, without renouncing any of its timeworn clichés, readapts them to a new set of charges, reintegrates the whole thing into a system where even the name of Israel has become a synonym for the worst of this world—making the figure of the actual Jew the very face of crime (Tsahal), of genocide (the theme, trotted out ever since Durban, and even before then, of the massacre of the Palestinians), of the desire to falsify history (the Shoah as a lie designed to conceal the reality of Jewish power). From Durban to B'nei Brak, the new clothing of hatred. From “one Jew, one bullet,” chanted by some NGO members in Durban, to the Yemeni knife that actually murdered Daniel Pearl, a sort of a sequence. Daniel Pearl is dead because he was a Jew. Daniel Pearl is dead, victim of neo–anti–Judaism that is blossoming before our eyes. I've been talking about this neo–anti–Judaism for the past twenty-five years. There are a few of us who have sensed that the processes of legitimization of this ancient hatred are being profoundly reworked, and who have written about this fact for the past quarter century. For a long time, the rabble said the Jews are hateful because they killed Christ (Christian anti-Semitism). For a long time because, on the contrary, they invented him (modern, anticlerical, pagan anti-Semitism). For a long time it was because they are supposed to be a race who will always be foreigners in any land and this race must be erased from the face of the earth (birth of modern biology, racism, Hitlerism). Well, my sense is that that's all over. I have a feeling we will hear less and less that the Jews are hateful in the name of Christ, the anti-Christ, or racial purity. And what we see is a reformulation, a new means of justification for the worst which, as in France during the Dreyfus Affair, but on a more global scale this time, will associate hatred of Jews with the defense of the oppressed—a terrifying stratagem. That, against the backdrop of the religion of victimization, using this transformation of the Jew into executioner and the Jew-hater into the
new
Jew (that's right, the rabble is intimidated by nothing, slander is nothing new to them, they can very well lift towards real Jews the pure image of a victimized “Jew” now embodied by others) will legitimize the murder of a Jew as the henchman of Bush and Sharon: “Busharon” as they would say. Again, Daniel Pearl died, of this.

So there are three explanations that might satisfy me.

Three reasons to kill Daniel Pearl, each one separately and all the more so together, are adequate to explain the outcome of this drama.

Except that it doesn't work.

No, none of these reasons, however strong and solid they may be in and of themselves, manages to convince me.

None of them explains why it is this particular Jew, this journalist, this American, and not some other, whom al-Qaida, the secret services, and the entire syndicate decided to eliminate on the morning of 31 January 2002.

And that, because of a detail which, for the past year, has unceasingly intrigued me: Daniel Pearl was kidnapped on the 23rd; on the 23rd, the kidnappers know that he is a Jew, a journalist, an American; on that day, they are perfectly conscious of this hyperbolic triple guilt; and yet, they wait until the 31st, eight days after the kidnapping, to decide to punish him for being this triple culprit, which is bound to mean that something happened during those eight days—an element appeared that was not there on the 23rd but that would be there on the 31st and would make the ultimate decision to kill him inevitable.