Borderlines. Michela Wrong

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ are lifted and deposited on the harbour front, morsel by painstaking morsel. A brigade of whippet-thin stevedores then springs into action, T-shirts stained with sweat, loading the sacks by hand into the Isuzu trucks lined up in anticipation.

      But such moments are becoming ever rarer. A well-used port makes for dark, polluted waters. Sanasa’s are an inviting, translucent blue; zebra fish nibble and flit around greasy anchor ropes. Container vessels increasingly bypass Sanasa, leaving it to process the occasional, surreptitious dhow. Painted sky-blue, these tiered schooners waft in laden with sugar, cheap Chinese plastic sandals, the odd microwave oven and state-of-the-art 4x4. Not an inch of space is wasted. By the time they depart, the dhows have been transformed into smelly, bleating vessels of animal distress, loaded to the gunwales with goats and camels destined for the butcheries of Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

      ‘Wordy but helpful’, someone had scrawled in the margin.

      Sanasa’s remoteness, its very inefficiency, lends it a particular advantage. Rarely coming to the attention of officials in Lira, it is popular with smugglers, petty traders, who do their calculations in their heads, and livestock owners, who ignore frontiers as they follow routes established by nomadic forefathers. It makes for a rich mix of languages and faces, a polyglot blurring of nationalities and customs.

      For most of the day, the town sits stunned into near-imbecility, paralysed by the joint assault of light and heat. Pock-marked mongrels lie by the whitewashed trunks of old neem trees, tongues out, stomachs pumping like pistons. The only sound comes from the cawing of the crows picking for forgotten fish scraps along the cement jetties, crunchy with salt crystals. It is in the evening that Sanasa stirs. Under the arcades, harbour workers sip cold Coke, relishing the bracing zing of ammonia from the sea and providing a running commentary on the comings and goings from the town’s lone brothel. Urchins dragging adult-sized flip-flops trawl, half-hearted, for custom, carrying neon-coloured plastic basins of hot peanuts. They stand uncomplainingly, ignored, absorbing the gossip of the baritone-voiced adult world. As a velvet night descends, the spot-lit bars and restaurants, each with its dizzy halo of insects, become helpful landmarks for residents accustomed to manoeuvring the streets as much by feel as by sight.

      I turned the page, expecting more, but the passage ended there. Winterdale’s creative juices had clearly run dry.

      Next came some photocopies of unclassified cables between a US deputy ambassador in Lira and the State Department, dating back to the early 1990s. One highlighted snippet read:

      Sanasa is merely one of a handful of settlements whose proximity to a poorly defined colonial border is a potential source of strategic concern. Yet when Western diplomats raise the issue with officials in either capital, their concerns are laughed away … The line is that the governments established by the two former rebel movements now running Darrar and its progeny, North Darrar, are ideological soul-mates, with near-identical, progressive agendas. ‘We’re brothers!’ officials will often tell embassy personnel. Families in the border areas, they say, are interconnected by marriage, friendship and commerce and barely know themselves where the frontier begins or ends. ‘Who needs a border when there’s trust on both sides?’ is a refrain we often hear in these parts.

      But, evidently, the picture was not quite as harmonious as it seemed. For on the night of 7 June 2001, something had happened on Sanasa’s outskirts, and it was hard to believe that individual explosions of temper could have escalated quite so quickly had the incident not tapped into long-accumulated grudges.

      I stretched, checking my watch, abandoning my shawl. It was eight a.m.: the heat was rising, hotel staff would be up. I rang room service to order breakfast and opened the second, fatter, file, marked ‘THE INCIDENT’. This one was a mess. It contained a collection of transcripts from local-radio broadcasts picked up by BBC Monitoring, several editions of Africa Confidential and scores of press cuttings that contradicted one another in key details. The newspaper titles scrawled on the scraps meant nothing to me. I guessed they represented the contrasting views from the two neighbours’ capitals.

      One thing they agreed upon: that on the evening in question, fifty-five-year-old Ahmed Ibrahim had settled his bill at a restaurant on the Sanasa quayside, shouted farewell to the proprietor, and boarded his 7.5-tonne Isuzu. In the summer months, like most local drivers, he always waited till nightfall before moving. In daytime, the tarmac got so hot it could rip black fronds of rubber from tyres. He drove in darkness towards the border post on the edge of town.

      What happened after that was murky. Some accounts claimed Ahmed was a hardened smuggler of cigarettes and cheap gin, accustomed to oiling his passage across the border with bribes. According to this version of events, his usual routine was sabotaged by an unexpected change of the Darrar guards: the two middle-aged regulars he had spent years befriending had been replaced by eager-to-impress youngsters, who insisted that he remove tarpaulins, unbuckle ropes and make his goods available for inspection.

      A rival version painted a different picture. His truck laden with vital pharmaceutical supplies destined for a clinic across the frontier, Ahmed – a law-abiding, respectable father of six – had negotiated the North Darrar border crossing without a hitch, only to discover that Darrar’s border post had shifted twenty metres closer to Sanasa since his previous trip. He had realised this a split-second after his truck had careered through the barricade, snapping it in half, bringing two Darrar guards piling out of a freshly painted hut, stuffing handfuls of pasta into their mouths, AK-47s at the ready.

      Whichever version was true, a shouting match had broken out, which attracted the attention of the North Darrar guards on the other side of no man’s land, who radioed a local militia for backup. A first rifle shot was heard – perhaps no more than the spasm of a nervous finger on a trigger – but the damage was done. Next came an answering fusillade, and someone, unbelievably, upped the ante by throwing a grenade, the explosion deafening everyone. When the noise and smoke subsided, Ahmed Ibrahim lay spread-eagled in the sand, breath bubbling from the granular pink mash that had been his face. Arterial blood was pumping from one border guard’s thigh while another lay motionless, arms clasping a warm pile of entrails. Two more were writhing silently in the sand, squirming jumbles of bone and muscle.

      The initial incident had not made the international news. On domestic television, it led the evening news broadcasts in both countries, but was consigned to a seven-line announcement read by carefully expressionless newsreaders. In the two capitals, emergency cabinet meetings were called, inquiries commissioned, generals summoned. Three days later, a motorcade of tanks, armoured personnel carriers and camouflage-painted trucks, dispatched by the government of North Darrar, trundled through Sanasa, heading for the blood-spattered checkpoint. A week later, Darrar’s tanks reached the front line and the artillery opened fire. Both sides, the geeks from Jane’s Weekly noted with interest, were using the same models of tank, the stolid T-55 bequeathed to the region by the Soviet Union during the Cold War era when the superpowers fought their battles by African proxy.

      Leafing through the cuttings from The Economist, the New York Times and the Financial Times, it was clear that what had puzzled the Western journalists, diplomats and academics who had covered what followed was that Sanasa seemed so insignificant, the trigger incident so trivial, and both sides had so much to lose. Their articles smacked of exasperation: ‘Why can’t these people behave like adults?’ they implied. It was not, I guessed, that these observers had forgotten the grotesque consequences of a single shot fired in Sarajevo, or the arbitrary connections made between the flattening of the Twin Towers and Baghdad’s invasion. There was something more arrogant at play. In those cases, cause and effect might well seem disproportionate, historical justifications near-nonsensical but, dammit, they had occurred in places that mattered. The West could not tolerate a seeming absence of logic in a region so dry and hungry. Quixotic decision-making was a luxury denied countries this poor, as were the ingredients of most foreign policy: a leader’s hunger for dignity, a community’s СКАЧАТЬ