Merchants of Men E-Book

Loretta Napoleoni

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

A groundbreaking exploration of the new breed of criminals who control both the refugee pipelines and the kidnapping of Westerners to fund terrorist activities in the Middle East. Every day, a powerful and sophisticated underground business delivers thousands of refugees along the Mediterranean coasts of Europe. A new breed of criminals, risen from the post-9/11 political chaos and the fi­asco of the Arab Spring, coupled with the destabilization of Syria and Iraq and the rise of ISIS, controls it. The ever-increasing political volatility has offered them new business opportunities, from trafficking millions of refugees to selling Western hostages to jihadist groups. The kidnapping industry in the Middle East is now worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Loretta Napoleoni's exclusive and meticulous research into the business of kidnap and ransom, and its link to terrorist activity, is based on first-hand accounts - from interviews with hostage negotiators to the experiences of former hostages themselves. Merchants of Men is a fascinating and eye-opening exploration of this most shocking of financial interdependencies.

Leseprobe

In memory of Luigi Bernabò

contents

Preface

Prologue

Part 1

Chapter One: Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb Protocol

Chapter Two: Feeding the Bears

Chapter Three: Trafficking Migrants

Chapter Four: The Economics of Piracy

Chapter Five: The Somali Diaspora’s Gulf Connection

Chapter Six: Smoke and Mirrors of the Syrian Civil War

Part 2

Chapter Seven: The Negotiator1

Chapter Eight: The Ransom

Chapter Nine: The Golden Hour—Anatomy of a Kidnapping

Chapter Ten: The Prey—Seeking a New Identity

Chapter Eleven: The Mythology of Western Hostages

Part 3

Chapter Twelve: The End of Truth

Chapter Thirteen: Playing Chess with the Hostages’ Lives

Chapter Fourteen: A Refugee Love Story

Chapter Fifteen: The Political Boomerang

Epilogue: Brexit

Glossary

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

preface

My research into kidnapping and human trafficking started more than a decade ago. Shortly after 9/11, I began meeting, in several cities around the world, with people involved in anti-terrorism and money laundering. They all agreed that the Patriot Act had prompted the Colombian cartel to establish joint ventures with Italian organized crime to launder their drug revenues in Europe and Asia and to find new routes to bring cocaine to the Old Continent. Venezuela, the infamous Gold Coast of West Africa—from where cargoes of slaves had sailed to America—and the Sahel became key transhipment areas.

African smugglers soon tapped into this business, carrying cocaine overland. Gao, in Mali, became their main hub. From Gao, cocaine travelled across the Sahara to the Mediterranean shores of Morocco, Algeria, and Libya. From there, a fleet of small boats took the drugs to Europe.

In 2003 a group of former members of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) involved in smuggling in the trans-Saharan regions branched off and kidnapped thirty-two Europeans in Mali and southern Algeria. The hostages were transported along the trans-Sahara contraband routes to camps in northern Mali. The European governments paid rich ransoms to get their citizens back, enough to bankroll a new armed group: al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Among the people I have met since 9/11 are several hostage negotiators. As brokers between the parties, they have unique insight into the kidnapping business. From our conversations, it emerged that the abduction of the thirty-two Europeans proved that snatching Westerners could be an important profit center for criminal and armed organizations. Hunting season for Western hostages was now open.

By the second half of the aughts, a mere five years after 9/11, the cocaine business accelerated the destabilization of the Sahel. Several failed and semi-failed states appeared, prompting their citizens to become economic migrants seeking passage to Europe. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb was quick to invest part of the profits of its kidnapping business into trafficking migrants.

Negotiators believe that the governments’ failure to publicly denounce the kidnapping crisis in the Sahel prevented any proper intervention in the region. Hence it was easy for the kidnappers to branch off into human trafficking.

As a chronicler of the dark side of the economics of globalization, I discovered that the policy of secrecy on the part of governments sprang from their wish to hide the failings of globalization. The proliferation of failed states and regions where law and order has broken down since the fall of the Berlin Wall provided an opportunity for kidnapping and trafficking to flourish in a way that was historically unprecedented. And the secrecy of the great nations allowed the conflagration to proceed unchecked. It was as if all the firefighters had decided to go on strike during a forest fire.

Leading negotiators and former hostages agree that the supply of valuable prey has been plentiful. For the past twenty-five years a false sense of security about the globalized world has encouraged young, inexperienced members of the First Nations club—I will call them Westerners even though they may be from Tokyo or Santiago as easily as from New York or Copenhagen—to explore and report from every corner of the global village, as well as to bring aid to populations trapped inside war zones or plagued by political anarchy. These journeymen reporters and humanitarian aid workers have become some of the primary targets of modern kidnappers.

Since 9/11 the number of kidnappings has increased exponentially and so too have the sums demanded for ransom. In 2004, $2 million could free a Western hostage in Iraq. Today over $10 million can be paid. A member of the Italian crisis unit joked that freeing Greta Ramelli and Vanessa Marzullo—two young Italians kidnapped in Syria in 2014 and sold to al Nusra—cost Italy close to a percentage point of its GDP, €13 million! Equally, the number of private security companies specializing in abduction has multiplied and the cost of employing them has skyrocketed. A decade ago $1,000 was the going rate per day. Today it is $3,000.

Is the economics of kidnapping immune from the laws of economics? Ten years of exceptionally low inflation coupled with strong competition among kidnappers and private security firms should have pushed prices down but instead, they have gone up. The reason is simple: the number of prospective Western hostages is almost infinite, and governments and private negotiators compete with each other to free their own citizens, driving prices up for fixers, informers, drivers, and others.

Today we know that exporting Western democracy to every corner of the global village has backfired. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world has become a much more dangerous place not only for North Americans and Europeans, but also for Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans, millions of whom have been forced to become migrant laborers and economic refugees. As Middle Easterners share this bleak destiny, the core business of hostage takers in this region is shifting again, the focus now being on trafficking people escaping the miseries and depredations of civil war. Today these merchants of men handle a new variety of human cargo: not hostages but rather migrants. A surreal interdependency, therefore, links the kidnapping of Westerners and the trafficking of migrants.

When, in 2015, the migrant crisis erupted in the Middle East, kidnappers and smugglers easily became traffickers. They already had a sophisticated organizational structure in place, and plenty of money from trading hostages to invest in this new venture. Netting about $100 million per month in the summer of 2015, the merchants of men delivered tens of thousand of people per week to European shores. It is a profitable business because demand far outstrips supply, and the cost of reaching Europe keeps rising. Ten years ago someone could pay a smuggler $7,000 to be brought from West Africa to Italy. In the summer of 2015 that sum was the price to cross the short distance from Syria to Turkey to Greece.

Fifteen years after the destruction of the Twin Towers, most of the Muslim world is on fire. The winners are the merchants of men, and a mix of criminal and jihadist groups who snatch, buy, and sell people for a price. What next?

The migrant crisis could force an entire continent to confront the hypocrisy of its own politicians who kept silent when they should most have spoken out, and the absurdity of the myth that we are moving towards an integrated and egalitarian Europe. But above all, it will expose once again the fragility of our respect for human life and our defence of human dignity. The merchants of men are no different from the slave traders of the eighteenth century, the colonizers of the nineteenth century, or the Nazis of the twentieth century: they have all thought that the lives of others are theirs to dispose of freely.

Due to the nature of their profession I could not mention the names of the negotiators who helped me understand the complex phenomenon that is kidnapping. Their anonymity must be protected for security reasons; these are people who often risk their lives to save someone else’s, people who have extensive networks of informers in countries where kidnapping is an everyday occurrence. Instead of creating aliases for them, I have removed their names and indicated in a general way something about their general sphere of influences or origin. And most often, I have simply referred to them as “a negotiator” or “the negotiator.”

prologue

It is 3 p.m. and outside it is already pitch dark. A carpet of snow covers the suburbs of Umeå, a university town in the north of Sweden. The streets are empty and the few cars we encounter drive with their high beams on. Without these searchlights illuminating the road, the road would be indistinguishable from the front gardens of the houses. As we drive, the combination of darkness and snow-reflected light plays strange optical tricks.

When we reach the hotel, I open the car door and step into what feels like a meat locker. It is cold—so cold that I can measure the capacity of my lungs as the sub-zero air fills them. It is the end of November 2006; technically speaking it should still be autumn, but it surely feels like an arctic winter.

We have come to Umeå for the Iraqi Equation, a political art project that is part of an effort by a group of artists and intellectuals to carry on the opposition to the Iraq War well beyond the “preventive strike.” After months and months of demonstrations against the military intervention, in Spring 2003 the world went quiet, perhaps shell-shocked by Bush and Blair’s defiance, and by their indifference to public opinion. Three years later, our group is still campaigning; it is our duty because we know what is happening in Iraq.

Among the artists are several Iraqis. They fled as soon as the coalition forces landed, targeted by the many armed groups operating within the country. The invasion has unleashed a rage repressed for decades, as criminal, jihadist, newly formed Shia militias, and pro-Saddam groups turned against the civilian population. For those who escaped and now join us in this room, their flight from Iraq is merely physical. Their hearts and minds are still there, linked by an invisible thread to the bloody reality of “liberated” Iraq.

We were told that there would be many Iraqis at the opening of the exhibition, but we did not expect two hundred of them. They outnumber the Swedes. Men, women, and even children, bundled up in warm clothes, have come from near and far, braving the Nordic climate. They silently stream into the exhibition rooms, shake our hands, smile, and begin peeling off layer after layer of clothing. Soon the most spoken language here is Arabic.

Some women extract huge containers of food from their bags, all wrapped in tin foil, and place them next to the cheese and vegetable snacks the organizers of the exhibition have provided. Their food looks so colorful and delicious. The aromas tease our nostrils. As Catherine David, the artistic director of the project, begins her speech, we feel as if we are starting a celebration, perhaps a wedding between a Swede and an Arab. It is a magical and unforgettable feeling. For a moment we all forget that this is the opening of an event to denounce military aggression.

Later in the evening, as people start to say goodbye, a young man approaches me. Quite fair for an Iraqi, he has broad shoulders and is of medium height. He introduces himself as Rashid, a common Iraqi name, but I know that this isn’t his real name. Something in his light brown eyes seems uneasy with that name. He also speaks English with a strong French accent, as North Africans do. Rashid says that he has read my books and wants to congratulate me on my work. We begin talking. He wants to know about my contacts in London with former mujahideen. Do I know so-and-so? He mentions several Algerians who have fled to London after the military coup and received asylum.

Rashid is a troubled soul. I realize he wants to talk to me about something dark in his past, but doesn’t know how to begin. So I suggest we go back to the hotel and have a hot chocolate. And so we do.

He never tells me his real name, but he reveals his nationality and age: he is from Algeria and has just turned twenty-nine.

His father was one of the founders of the Islamic Salvation Front. Soon after the military coup (backed by the French and other Europeans), Rashid’s father was imprisoned together with Rashid’s brothers. They all vanished inside the maze that is the Algerian political detention system. “When the police came to arrest my father and brothers, I was fishing,” says Rashid. He was the youngest of the family, at the time was only fifteen years old, and wasn’t interested in politics. He wanted to become a sailor and a fisherman and travel the world. “But after they took my father and my brothers, I was forced to deal with politics.”

Rashid’s mother arranged for him to leave Algiers right away. But that same evening, after returning from his fishing trip, he joined a group of men who belonged to his father’s party, several of whom had fought in Afghanistan as mujahideen. They went south, to the edge of the Sahara, where they regrouped and began plotting their return.

Rashid spent the next few years in southern Algeria, in the Saharan desert, thousands of miles from his beloved sea. He never joined the GIA, the Group Islamiste Armé, the organization born from the ashes of the Islamic Salvation Front that fought against the military regime for almost a decade, triggering yet another bloody civil war in Algeria. Instead, he became a smuggler, endlessly traversing the trans-Saharan routes.

Then came 9/11. “Everything changed,” he says. “For years we had led a monotonous life, smuggling mostly cigarettes from Algeria to Mali and to West Africa. But suddenly new opportunities materialized. The entire region was bursting with rage and pride. We began trading arms, drugs, and then someone had an idea: let’s have a go at kidnapping.”

From a smuggler, Rashid became a kidnapper, a job he loathed.

When Rashid stops talking, I look outside. It is snowing so heavily that the sky is white. What a contrast this must be with the heat of the Sahara, I think. What a change for people like Rashid, born and raised in a hot climate. “Why are you telling me this story?” I finally ask. Rashid does not answer immediately. For a while he looks straight into my eyes, searching for the right words. “Someone needs to know,” he says.

He departs from the hotel on foot, leaving prints in the snow that the storm quickly erases. I know I will never see him again. I do not even know where he lives or what he does. All I know is that some time after his group began trafficking migrants from West Africa to Libya, Rashid managed to get on a boat to Italy by pretending to be an Iraqi refugee. It was 2005 and Europe was welcoming those coming from Iraq. From Sicily, he reached the sanctuary of Sweden. When they asked him where he was from, he said, “I am Iraqi.” With a lie that harmed no one, he finally escaped a violent life he had not chosen. Can we blame him?

PART 1

chapter one

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb Protocol

In late January 2011 Maria Sandra Mariani set out from San Casciano in Val di Pesa, a small town in Tuscany, heading to the southeast corner of the Algerian Sahara. The fifty-three-year-old Italian woman was looking forward to her annual holiday in a breathtakingly beautiful region of the Maghreb. She had booked a group tour of the region’s natural features and archaeological ruins—some dating back as far as the Neolithic period—and was planning to spend a few days visiting local villages. Every winter since 2006, Mariani had vacationed in the Sahara desert, partly as a tourist and partly as a “humanitarian aid volunteer” to, in her words, “bring medicine and goods to the local population.”2 As she had done many times before, she booked her tour with Ténéré Voyages, a well-known travel agency specializing in the Sahara. And as in the past, Aziz was going to be her guide. Aziz, a polite Algerian whom Mariani had befriended over the years, had even visited her and her family in Tuscany.

When Mariani landed at the Djanet Airport, approximately one hundred miles from the Algerian-Libyan border, the first person she saw was Aziz. He welcomed her, and seeing how pale she looked, he asked if she had had a rough journey. Mariani admitted that she was not feeling too well. “I must have eaten something bad on the plane and I felt awful,” she says, “but we left right away. We were heading for the desert of Tadrart,3 between Algeria and Libya. A few days later, I was still unwell. Aziz suggested we stop in a small tourist resort, with just a few bungalows, which was also owned by Ténéré Voyages.”

Mariani took a couple of days to recover. By February 2, she felt well enough to go on a small excursion. “We had a great day,” she recalls. “The light, the air, the scenery, everything was perfect. I was happy, happy to be well again, happy to be in my beloved Sahara.”

Mariani and Aziz drove back to the resort at sunset. “I got out of the car and suddenly, while we were walking towards the bungalows, Aziz saw two black SUVs fast approaching. Thinking that they were robbers or smugglers, he told me ‘go, go, they should not see you,’ and I rushed to the bungalow, but they had already seen me. As I learned later on, they had spotted me with binoculars; they were on the lookout for foreigners. I was not veiled because there was nobody around. We were in the middle of the desert and the hotel was empty, so I did not think to disguise myself. But they saw me and they knew I was a Western tourist,” remembers Mariani.

The men quickly surrounded the middle-aged woman, Aziz, and the hotel concierge. “For a long time they kept asking, ‘Where are the other tourists? Where is your husband?’ They could not believe that I was alone,” says Mariani. “They also spoke in English because they thought I was English. Twenty days earlier, in the same resort, there had been a large group of English tourists for the New Year’s holidays.”

Frustrated, the men, who clearly had expected to find a large number of Westerners, grabbed Mariani and pushed her into the back of one of the SUVs. A couple of them forced the concierge and the guide to follow in Aziz’s car. “When they locked me in the SUV, we all understood that they were not robbers or smugglers, but kidnappers. I felt hopeless, my heart sunk and I gasped for air,” says Mariani. “Later on, when I asked them ‘Who are you?’ they looked at me and proudly said, ‘We are al Qaeda.’”