Just before noon on May 3, 2010, John Struczynski, a janitor at Birmingham Airport in the British Midlands, observed something peculiar. A balding, middle-aged passenger had entered the shower room in the Emirates Airlines first-class departure lounge and emerged after what seemed like a long time. But when Struczynski stepped inside the facility to check it, he saw that the shower and floor were bone-dry. Then he noticed, at the bottom of a diaper bin, a cardboard carton containing a single egg, dyed blood red. Mystified, and suspecting that something illegal was afoot, Struczynski alerted airport security.

A few minutes later, a pair of plainclothes counterterrorism agents accosted the passenger, led him to a private room, and searched him. Beneath his shirt, they discovered ribbons of surgical tape wound around his abdomen. The tape encased three woolen socks ranging in color from brick red to marbled brown. The man claimed they were duck eggs, and he offered the police a curious explanation: his physiotherapist had recommended that he wear the eggs pressed against his belly to force him to keep his muscles taut and strengthen his lower back.

At that point the police phoned Andy McWilliam, a veteran investigator with , a branch of the British police established in 2006 to combat offenses ranging from badger baiting to ivory trading. From the officer’s description, McWilliam felt all but certain that the eggs were those of the peregrine falcon, the fastest animal alive, a bird of prey that nests, in the UK, from Wales to Scotland. Peregrines suffered during the fifties and sixties, largely because of the widespread use of the pesticide DDT; by the early seventies, only about were left in Great Britain. The pesticide was banned throughout the world beginning in the early seventies, and since then the population has climbed back to . But the birds are still protected in the UK, and the theft of their eggs in the wild .

“I suggested to the police that they arrest him on suspicion of possessing wild bird eggs,” McWilliam says, “and I told them that I’d be down there in two hours.”

McWilliam contacted a well-known raptor breeder named Lee Featherstone and asked him to head to the airport. Featherstone confirmed that the eggs strapped to the man’s body were indeed peregrine and, using a digital monitor called an Egg Buddy, determined that 13 of the 14 were alive, two weeks from hatching. (The remaining egg, the dyed one, was a chicken egg, presumably a decoy in case the man had been stopped on his way through security.) The next morning, as the chicks-to-be continued to incubate, McWilliam and two counterterrorism agents interrogated the suspect in a room near his holding cell. “We let him string us along about the duck eggs, and then I took over the interview,” McWilliam recalls. “I said, ‘You and I both know these are not duck eggs, they are falcon eggs.’ ”

“At that point,” McWilliam says, “he realized that he couldn’t pull the wool over us any longer.” The detained man, who carried Irish and South African passports identifying him as 48-year-old Jeffrey Paul Len­drum, reluctantly admitted over the course of several interviews that he had taken peregrine eggs from cliff ledges in the Rhondda Valley, in southern Wales. Lendrum insisted that he believed the eggs he’d pilfered were no longer alive and said that he had been transporting them, via Dubai, to his father’s home in Zimbabwe to add to the family egg collection. It wouldn’t take McWilliam long to conclude, though, that this was no ordinary trophy hunter.

InterpolÌęestimates that the illegal wildlife trade is worth as much as , among the world’s most lucrative black markets. But that trade extends well beyond elephant ivoryÌęČčČÔ»ć rhino horn. Back in November 2009, police in Rio de Janeiro stopped a British pet-shop owner who was trying out of the country in his suitcases. In May 2017, police in East Java rescued about two dozen critically endangered yellow-crested cockatoos that a smuggler . And multiple people have been arrested over the years for moving finches from Guyana to New York, pit the songbirds against each other to see which one sings fastest. One common smuggling M.O. is to dope the birds with rum and stuff them inside hair curlers.

Falcons, which encompass 39 species, are distributed on all continents except Antarctica. In some parts of the world, particularly in the UK, the threat posed by DDT gave way to a new menace: compulsive collectors from their nests, blowing out the contents and mounting the shells. The thefts threatened numerous species—red-backed shrikes, ospreys, golden eagles, peregrines—before the Scottish police, in coordination with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, launched in 1997. Many of the perpetrators, it turned out, were middle-aged men driven by a need that even they ­struggled to understand. “Certain individuals just become obsessed with it,” McWilliam said in an interview for the 2015 documentary . “It’s a self-obsessive, self-indulging crime. And why people risk going to prison for a bird’s egg, it just beats me.”

Those crimes seem quaint next to the illegal raptor trade in the Middle East, where devotees of falconry—the age-old sport of hunting quarry with a trained bird of prey—pay dearly for rare birds. “These falcons are worth a lot of money,” says Mark Jeter, a recently retired assistant chief at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife who follows the trade. “I always say, If there is a $50,000 bill flying around, someone is going to try to catch it.” In 2013 in Doha, Qatar, for example, a man on the legal market for a pure white gyrfalcon, the world’s largest raptor and a bird so prized for its power and beauty that medieval kings .

Demand in the Middle East is now mostly fueled by the spread of falcon racing, a sport that puts a premium on larger, stronger, and faster birds. But the —to which the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia are signatories—bans the import and export of peregrines and gyrfalcons, and since 2002, the UAE proving their legal provenance. Because of these restrictions and thanks to recent genetic advances, captive breeding has become much more popular.

Many enthusiasts in the Middle East, however, still believe that wild birds are genetically superior, and unscrupulous falconers have spent hundreds of thousands for birds acquired by “trappers” in , , and other raptor-rich environments. In 2005, for example, the illegal smuggling of saker falcons from Central Asia that the bird was . By many accounts, the UAE has cracked down; according to , conducted by the nonprofit Center for Advanced Defense Studies, the UAE had the highest number of bird-trafficking seizures between 2009 and 2017, with the emirate of Dubai as the world’s most common destination.

“It’s not something that they shout about,” I was told by a leading breeder. “I’ve seen falcons come in when I was there last time. They had been hooded, and they were in a horrible state. The trappers had driven 3,000 miles from Siberia with the birds. The Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and the Saudis are getting involved. The Saudis make the Emirates look like beggars.”

The smuggling of eggs is much less common. And investigators believe Lendrum is essentially a highly specialized trapper—a daredevil with the skills to locate wild eggs in the most inhospitable places on earth and travel thousands of miles across international borders to deliver his prizes.

I spent more than a year on Lendrum’s trail, meeting acquaintances, family members, breeders, law-enforcement officials—and finally Lendrum himself. He insisted that his misdeeds have been grossly exaggerated. He told me that he’d only stolen live eggs out of nests twice in his adult life, both times to rescue the unhatched chicks from grave danger. He claimed that he had never traded with Arabs and that the actual prices for birds of prey on both the legal and illegal markets are so low that nobody could make a living smuggling eggs.

“The way Andy McWilliam blew the whole thing out of proportion, and got the media involved, they might as well have erected a gallows for me,” he said. But the more I learned, the more Lendrum’s denials failed to stand up to scrutiny.

The path that led me to Jeffrey Lendrum began at the central train station in Cardiff, Wales, when I met Ian Guildford, a Welsh investigator with the National Wildlife Crime Unit, on a windy, unseasonably frigid May morning. We followed a four-lane highway north and picked up McWilliam at a McDonald’s at a shopping center in Merthyr Tydfil. McWilliam is a stocky 61-year-old with a square jaw and thinning silver hair. He hopped in the car and we drove on past Aberdare, a coal-mining town sunk into ruin since the industry’s collapse in the 1960s.

Southwest of Aberdare, we switchbacked up through denuded pale-green hills, covered in places with netting to prevent landslides. Below us lay the stark and treeless Rhondda Valley, carved by glaciers during the Ice Age and bordered to the north by the red-sandstone peaks of , dotted with the burial cairns of Bronze Age tribes. When we reached the top of the escarpment and got out of the car, I was nearly blown off my feet by a gust of wind. I righted myself and followed the two officers across a treeless meadow, sinking to my knees in spongy tufts of grass. Bent against the gale, we arrived at the edge of the cliffs. The ground fell away sharply, exposing gray-black outcroppings divided into steplike ledges sheltered from the wind: perfect spots for peregrines to lay their eggs.

“We’re at the end of the bloody world,” shouted Guildford, a rangy, bespectacled Londoner with tousled brown hair, who has lived in Wales for three decades. We walked around the edge of the cliffs to another overlook, this one providing a panoramic view of the entire escarpment. McWilliam and Guildford scanned the sky with their binoculars, searching for peregrines, but weren’t able to spot any.

During his interrogation of Lendrum in May 2010, McWilliam became increasingly certain that he was covering up more than he admitted. Yet he also knew that, under British law, the police could keep Lendrum in custody for just 36 hours before charging or releasing him. With the clock ticking, McWilliam searched Len­drum’s baggage and located his Vauxhall sedan in the airport’s long-term parking lot. He found carabiners, ropes, GPS devices, a satellite navigation unit that confirmed Lendrum’s movements in the Rhondda Valley—and, most incriminating, an incubator that had been adapted to plug into the car’s cigarette lighter.

Lendrum, he discovered, had roamed these cliffs for days, armed with grid points that narrowed the search zone, keeping an eye out for male falcons returning to their nests. “We tracked Lendrum’s vehicle,” McWilliam said, still shouting into the wind, “and we were able to say that he’d been down here in early April, three weeks before the nests were robbed.” After locating the ledges where the females laid their eggs, Lendrum had picked four different aeries and stole live eggs, according to his own admission to investigators. To pull off the theft, he would have had to set a fixed rope at the top of the escarpment and rappel down, scooping the eggs into an insulated bag as the peregrines flew off in terror.

Lendrum’s trial was set for August 2010, and McWilliam used the summer to gather more evidence. Prosecutors would detail in court how the detective located Lendrum’s locker in a Midlands storage facility, finding more incubators (purchased on eBay before his mission), a copy of a letter from Len­drum to the author of a newspaper account describing his arrest in Canada in 2002 for stealing falcon eggs, and correspondence concerning a 1980s scheme to smuggle eagle eggs from southern Africa to a buyer in the United Kingdom.

As McWilliam described to me, he played a DVD confiscated from Lendrum’s carry-on and watched as he dangled by a rope from a helicopter over cliffside gyrfalcon nests, later found to be near Kuujjuaq, in Inuit territory in northeastern Quebec. He pored over laptop files that chronicled in minute detail a reconnaissance trip made to Sri Lanka in February 2010 in search of the eggs of the rare black shaheen peregrine falcon. “One seen flying off rock 
 good site with large overhang, several places with droppings,” an observation read. “Military guarding elephants in area and every time [you] step [from] the car, they come out of the trees to ask what you are doing. Hard access to rock and military make this a no go.”

Lendrum—or whoever had written the entries in his possession—had also cased the international airport in Colombo. “A few meters inside doors to departure area there is a security checkpoint consisting of a row of standard baggage X-ray units, walk-through metal detector,” the file read. “The guy who patted me down was very good at it and had been well trained.” McWilliam’s hunch, he believed, had been correct: he was in the presence of a sophisticated and prolific wildlife criminal.

Jeffrey Lendrum was born in 1961 in what was then white-ruled Northern Rhodesia. (His grandfather was apparently Irish, which enabled him to obtain an Irish passport.) The family soon moved to Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, a bustling railway center on the highveld, the vast grasslands covering southern Africa. As the oldest of three children, Jeffrey sometimes joined his father, Adrian, a human-resources manager at Dunlop Tires, on trips to nearby , a game-rich wilderness of granite outcroppings with . From the age of eight, he earned a reputation as a nimble climber, scrambling up trees and rock faces studded with bird’s nests. In the seventies and eighties, Matobo was the site of one of the world’s most ambitious ornithological field projects. Run by a retired math teacher and bird enthusiast named Valerie Gargett, the African Black Eagle Survey recruited volunteers to observe large Verreaux’s eagles, a protected species, through courtship, nesting, and incubation, then watch the chicks fledge and venture out on their own.

Invited to assist on that project, and later to lead peripheral surveys of augur buzzards and African hawk-eagles, the Lendrums gained access to hundreds of nesting sites compiled by the Rhodesian Ornithological Society (now ). For nearly a decade, while guerrilla war raged in the bush between the white-minority regime and black rebels led by Robert Mugabe, father and son roamed the park together. “It was derring-do stuff,” says Pat Lorber, a former Black Eagle Survey member. “They would throw a claw into a tree and climb up as high as they could. It required a lot of skill and not a little risk.” Yet many team members eventually became suspicious of the Lendrums. They would report that a chick had fledged, recalls Lorber, “and we would drive by and there was nothing in the nest, and it didn’t look like it had been touched for a year. There were lies, inconsistencies. After a while, Val said to me, ‘There is something going on.’ ”

In October 1983, police raided the Lendrums’ home and discovered more than 800 eggs stashed in drawers, as well as live peregrine eggs refrigerated into a state of suspended development. Prosecutors charged that many had been stolen from nests inside Matobo. In court, witnesses made allegations—never proven—that Jeffrey Lendrum was selling live raptor eggs on the black market. The Lendrums insisted that they were only gathering dead eggs for their collection.

Jeffrey’s mother, a schoolteacher, and his younger sister and brother were not implicated in the scam. But after a three-month trial, father and son were found guilty of fraud and possession and theft of specially protected wildlife, fined thousands of dollars, and given four-month suspended sentences. Adrian Lendrum was also ordered to surrender his Toyota pickup truck, incubators, and egg collection. Shortly after, Jeffrey, now 23 and a pariah in his hometown, left Bulawayo and resettled in South Africa.

Lendrum would say that he gave up egg collecting once he settled in South Africa. For more than a decade, as the newly independent country of Zimbabwe economically disintegrated under President Mugabe, he moved mining equipment and spare auto parts into the country. Word got around—and would later be Ìę —that he’d been a member of the Rhodesian Special Air Service, an elite unit during the civil war. But Lendrum’s name does not appear on any SAS rolls.

Around 1998, a girlfriend introduced him to Paul Mullin, a British expat who worked for an American company building internet infrastructure in southern Africa. Mullin has since changed his name—for reasons that will soon become clear—and now lives in Hampshire, in southern England. (At his request, șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű is identifying him by his former name.)

“We used to have coffee and a chat about Africa,” he told me. “Jeff would say, ‘Come up to Zimbabwe, we’ll go on safari.’ We started driving frequently to Bulawayo, Matobo, and Hwange National Park.” The pair became business partners, traveling from Botswana to Kenya buying tribal art and shipping it to England, where they set up a couple of African crafts shops that ultimately failed. But the two men complemented one another well, Mullin says: “Jeff could speak the local lingo, he knew the areas, he knew how to barter, and I had the money.”

This is where, Mullin alleges, their adventures began. According to him, Lendrum didn’t immediately reveal his more controversial activities. But by the early 2000s, Mullin claims, he began joining Lendrum on illegal trafficking journeys.

Here we should pause to state that Mullin and Lendrum are no longer friends. In 2008, Lendrum took up romantically with Mullin’s ex, who’d recently had a child with Mullin. Lendrum and the woman are no longer together, but the two men have spoken only a handful of times since.

Lendrum maintains that Mullin’s allegations are lies born of that grudge. Regardless of his motives, however, Mullin does have evidence of their exploits—plane tickets, diaries, notes, and video, including the one McWilliam watched in 2010—that clearly shows Lendrum approaching falcon nests and the pair’s helicopter pilot laughingly describing them as “fucking criminals.”

According to Mullin, Lendrum frequently offered a rationale for his work, arguing that the chicks would be better off being cared for by wealthy Arab falconers in a protected environment than exposed to harsh conditions in the wild. “What is the mortality rate of a bird in the wilderness?” he would ask. (In fact, nearly 80 percent of Verreaux’s eagles, for example, die during their first year in Matobo National Park, usually starving to death in the fierce battle for territory.) “Jeff took those chicks and eggs and brought them to Dubai, where they have wildlife hospitals better than human hospitals,” Mullin says.

He’s not far wrong: the Ìętreats more than 11,000 raptors a year and boasts its own ophthalmology wing and intensive care unit. Dubai’s , Sheikh Butti bin Maktoum bin Juma Al Maktoum, a nephew of ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, has his own personal falcon breeder, Howard Waller, a leader in the field who also happens to be from Bulawayo.

Because Waller has known Lendrum since their school days together, he has long had to dodge accusations that he must be Lendrum’s buyer. “It’s always assumed it’s me,” Waller said when I visited him in northern Scotland, where he is based much of the year, “and there’s nothing I can do about that. I can’t change my childhood. What I can say is that we took different paths. My path was falconry and breeding falcons, and his path was collecting eggs. It’s always been a thrill for Jeff. He likes to beat the system.”

Lendrum’s younger brother, Richard, echoed that sentiment. I met him in Johannesburg during the South African summer. He’s a lean, tan outdoorsman who for years has published the successful hunting and conservation magazine . “We both love wildlife. It’s just that Jeff has gone a slightly different way,” he said with the trace of a smile.

From the time they were boys in Rhodesia, Richard said, he took little interest in the family egg collection, “turning a blind eye,” as he put it, to Jeffrey’s activities in the parks. But he was close enough to believe that, at some point, his brother went into illegal business with Middle Eastern buyers. “There are breeders who want these birds from around the world, so they get ­intermediaries to do their dirty work for them,” he says. “It’s well-documented that Jeff got caught.” Richard wasn’t certain when his brother began stealing eggs. He first learned about it in 2002, he said, when Jeff was arrested in Canada.

Like Waller, Richard believes that his older brother was mostly in it for the thrill. “It’s a high-adventure, high-adrenalineÌęway of eking out a living,” he told me. “It’s just gone a little wrong.”

Over time, Lendrum’s missions became increasingly audacious. In June 2001, Mullin says, he accompanied Lendrum on the first of two trips to snatch gyrfalcon eggs in Canada. The massive raptor, whose plumage ranges from gray to snowy white, dwells in the far northern latitudes, laying its creamy pink eggs, four or five to a clutch, in depressions at the edge of cliffs.

“It was a military-style operation,” Mullin told me. Lendrum recruited an old pilot friend, and in Montreal the men loaded a rented Bell 206 JetRanger helicopter with cold-weather gear, power units, lights, cameras, a professional video recorder, GPS devices, climbing equipment, and mobile incubators. For cover, they posed as filmmakers with the National Geographic Society.

The pilot, when I later reached him, refused to talk. Lendrum himself admitted to traveling to northern Canada with Mullin and the pilot, but he claims it was a sightseeing trip. Regardless, the trio flew 900 miles north to Kuujjuaq, an Inuit village at the northern edge of Quebec, choppering deep into uninhabited wilderness. The pilot hovered next to cliffs that towered above lakes south of Ungava Bay. In Mullin’s video, Lendrum can be seen coolly approaching a gyrfalcon nest by dangling from a fixed line fastened to the helicopter, and carrying an insulated bag, presumably for eggs.

Mullin didn’t film any actual snatches, but he claims that Lendrum grabbed eggs from nests as female gyrs anxiously circled nearby (another allegation that Lendrum disputes). Over the course of a week, Mullin estimates, the men raided 19 gyrfalcon nests and gathered about a dozen live eggs, then flew safely back to Montreal and on to Heathrow Airport. “All the eggs were wrapped in socks and stashed in Jeffrey’s carry-on, surrounded by other material to keep the temperature right,” Mullin says. “Jeff kept monitoring the temperatures, making sure they were still alive.” The pair parted ways at Heathrow, where, according to Mullin, Lendrum flew on to Dubai. Lendrum says that all of this is “rubbish.”

What’s not in dispute is that Lendrum and Mullin returned to the ArcticÌęa year later. This time they hired a helicopter and a local pilot in Kuujjuaq. Again they flew into the wilderness, but Lendrum had the pilot leave them at various cliff ledges and return every couple of hours to ferry them to new spots—a plan that raised the pilot’s suspicions. “Any wildlife photographer who’s serious would ask to be dropped off at sunrise and picked up at sunset,” the pilot told me, requesting anonymity to avoid further association with the caper. “Who in the hell keeps asking me to go back to town?” He remembered the pair from their trip the year before, and now Mullin’s amateurishness with the camera made him even more wary. “I’ve worked with wildlife photographers a lot,” he said, “but the guy in the back seat was just playing with the camera.”

On their third day in the field, the two men stumbled around for hours in whiteout conditions. “We were freezing to death,” Mullin says. “We got a total of seven eggs, and that was enough.”

The next afternoon, Mullin says, brought disaster. “We were in our room at the inn, shooting the shit, and then out of the blue there’s a knock on the door. I looked at Jeff. I said, ‘This is it.’ I opened the door, and in rushed four guys from provincial wildlife protection and the SĂ»retĂ© du QuĂ©bec. They said, ‘Are you Jeffrey Lendrum and Paul Mullin? You’re under arrest.’ ” The authorities, who had been tipped off by the pilot, seized the eggs, as well as two incubators and the rest of the men’s equipment. According to law-enforcement sources, the men were fined a total of $7,250 for six counts related to illegal possession of wildlife.

This was when Mullin decided to change his name, which had been published in Canadian newspapers. He ended his telecommunications gig in Africa and moved home to southern England. Lendrum went to England as well, marrying a French-Algerian woman in 2002 and moving in with her and her two teenage daughters in a quiet Northamptonshire village. Mullin was best man at their wedding.

The egg thief had—ostensibly—­settled down. But a few years later the marriage ended, and in 2008, Lendrum took up with Mullin’s ex, triggering the bitter falling-out between the longtime friends.

WhenÌęLendrum was busted in Birmingham in 2010, he was dividing his time ­between England and Johannesburg. That August, one count of theft of a protected species and one count of attempting to export a protected species. “We had a chat beforehand,” McWilliam recalls. “He knew he was going to prison, and when they said two and a half years, he looked at me and shrugged. I think his attitude was you win some, you lose some.”

At Hewell Prison in the Midlands, Lendrum was known by fellow inmates as the Bird Man. McWilliam visited him, hoping to gather intelligence about egg-smuggling networks in Great Britain and the Middle East, but Lendrum would surrender no information, insisting again that his operation in the Rhondda Valley had been a one-off.

Nonetheless, the two men continued talking, in phone calls that Lendrum would make to the investigator every few months from prison, and then on parole after he was released nine months into his sentence, with the requirement that he remain in the United Kingdom for another nine months. “He was staying somewhere down south in England, he was quite bored, and he’d ring me up to talk,” McWilliam recalls. “He might see something in the newspaper about elephant ivory or call me about a parking ticket. He talked about rhino horn and how regulators were going at it all wrong. I had a bit of a rapport with him. I respected him without wanting to condone what he did.”

Lendrum was 51 by the time he completed his parole in 2012. He headed back to South Africa, chastened and determined to make amends. His brother helped him get back on his feet, giving him a job at African Hunting Gazette, verifying hunting lodges’ claims about how much game they had on offer. But the Bird Man’s attempt to go straight quickly encountered obstacles. Subscribers , protesting the hiring of a convicted wildlife criminal. Jeffrey begged readers to keep an open mind. “Obviously, I am not perfect,” he wrote. “I was judged by a judge and paid the price…. Do I have to keep paying? I am sincerely sorry. Is there no place in your thoughts to give a criminal a chance after doing his time?” But Len­drum’s note of contrition failed to stem the steady pressure from Gazette subscribers and advertisers, and in 2014, his brother had to cut him loose.

It was perhaps inevitable that Lendrum would be drawn back to the aeries. In Octo­ber 2015, he traveled to southern Chile, registering under his own name at a hotel in Punta Arenas, in Patagonia, and carrying his usual array of incubators and climbing equipment. This time, however, a suspicious clerk had done a Google search and turned up articles about his arrests. He alerted Chilean authorities that Lendrum was flying out of South America via São Paulo, and the trap was set. On October 21, in a bizarre echo of his arrest five years earlier, Brazilian police detained Lendrum in the Emirates Airlines lounge in São Paulo as he waited for a flight to Dubai. According to Brazilian court records, he was carrying an incubator containing four eggs of a rare peregrine that lives in Tierra del Fuego.

“I don’t know how it happened or what was involved. It took us all by surprise,” says Richard, who surmised that his brother’s lack of legitimate employment drove him to return to his old ways.

As it turned out, Lendrum had one more trick up his sleeve. The court for theft and smuggling, but his lawyer persuaded the judge to release him on bail pending appeal. Lendrum surrendered his Irish passport. Then the egg thief slipped out of Brazil and dropped from sight.

In May 2017, shortly after my trip to Wales, I reached out to Mullin for help tracking Lendrum down. Their mutual friends thought that he had resurfaced in South Africa, which has no extradition treaty with Brazil, and was holed up at his sister’s house in Cape Town. Mullin gave me a cell number.

I reached Lendrum on the first try, identifying myself as a journalist who had just spent a day with McWilliam in the Rhondda Valley in Wales. He was wary, defensive. “Andy McWilliam is telling people that I was selling birds for a fortune,” he said in a pronounced southern African accent. “Everybody writes absolute rubbish about me. The whole media has portrayed me as the Pablo Escobar of the falcon-egg trade. Now I can understand why Trump calls it the fake media.”

Lendrum insisted he had nothing to do with the Arab falcon trade. “I must have climbed to a thousand nests and found an egg failure rate of 45 percent,” he told me. “I collected nothing but rotten eggs in Matobo, but that was used in evidence against me in England.” McWilliam, he insisted, had blown the case out of proportion to inflate the importance of the National Wildlife Crime Unit. “Andy said to me, ‘Your case was like manna from heaven for us,’ ” Lendrum said (a quote McWilliam roundly denies). “Soon after my trial, a law-enforcement officer was caught with an egg collection and got a 14-week suspended sentence. I got two and a half years in prison. How unfair is that?”

I asked Lendrum if I could visit him, and he said he would consider it. But when I called back a few days later, he told me that he had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. “It’s a bad deal,” he said. He didn’t feel up for talking further.

Seven months later, I flew to Johannesburg on assignment and decided to seek out Lendrum one last time. Through friends of his family, I learned that his life had continued to spiral down. He was unemployed and living alone in a small rented home near Pretoria. Radiation treatment had weakened him, and he’d also been badly injured in a car accident in Johannesburg. Whatever money he might have made smuggling falcon eggs had been spent long ago.

“He’s got a very tough life,” Richard told me when I met him at a coffee shop in northern Johannesburg. “Nothing great at all.” Richard doubted that he would talk to me. His brother had ambitions to write a book, he said, and didn’t want to give away his trade secrets—or betray his powerful clients.

Two hours later I got Jeffrey Lendrum on the phone, and he suggested we meet south of Pretoria at the Forest Hill City Mall in Centurion—a town formerly known as Verwoerdberg, after Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid. An Uber drove me across the parched plains of the highveld, past farms and tin-roofed shacks, to a giant shopping complex near a highway interchange. I made my way, as Lendrum had directed, to an Ocean Basket seafood restaurant overlooking an indoor ice-skating rink. He walked up to me minutes later, stuck out his hand, and introduced himself.

“You probably recognized me from my photos,” he said affably.

Lendrum’s receding hairline, black-framed glasses, and striped button-down shirt, hanging loosely over a pair of khaki shorts, made him look more like a clerk in a sporting-goods store than a daredevil adventurer. But he was tanner and healthier looking than I expected.

“I haven’t been doing anything, just trying to get better,” he told me. “I haven’t been well at all.”

Sitting across from me in a booth, sipping a cappuccino, Lendrum maintained again that, with rare exceptions, he had taken only addled (meaning dead) eggs and said that it made no sense that he would smuggle live falcon eggs for profit. “There’s no money in it,” he told me. “Listen, if falcon eggs were worth, say, $20,000, I’d have a Bell 407 helicopter parked outside, OK? To me it’s nonsensical.”

He characterized his 2001 trip to northern Canada as an innocent adventure. “It’s the most beautiful place in the world,” he said. “In a week, it changed from a place where you could land your helicopter on the lakes to greenness and bears and all the rest of it. If you had come out with me, you would have had such good fun.” Lendrum admitted that he’d raided gyrfalcon nests, but only to retrieve dead eggs for research. He had no explanation for why he was traveling with an incubator. “I thought to myself, I’m going there to check and see which eggs are addled, and to take the infertile ones to a Montreal museum,” he said. “I thought maybe I’d expose something like the DDT problem that happened with peregrines in the 1960s.” But his arrest—a misunderstanding, he said—forced him to abandon his plans. Likewise, he claimed, his nest-raiding trip to Wales nine years later had been a conservation mission.

The South American escapade was another well-intentioned lark gone wrong. Lendrum said that he’d been going down to Chile on a regular basis—six visits in a decade—drawn by some of the most bountiful and varied birdlife on the planet. “Magellans, oystercatchers, flamingos, peregrines—it’s incredible,” he said. On this trip, as with the others, he flew to Punta Arenas and drove to the tip of the continent, where he climbed inside volcanoes and rappelled down cliff faces to inspect some 18 peregrine nests. He admitted raiding one nest of live eggs—but only because the “female peregrine had died,” he said. “I took four eggs out of the nest,” he told me. “I honestly didn’t think that there would be a problem, maybe just a fine. I really wanted to get those birds into greater kestrel nests in South Africa.”

The escape from Brazil was relatively easy, he said. He traveled south to the country’s border with Argentina, then walked through the jungle for a day, carrying a GPS and a backpack full of food and water, evading patrols. He said he got a new passport from the Irish embassy and flew back to Johannesburg. (His Brazilian lawyer, Rod­rigo Tomei, cast doubt on that account, saying that it’s more likely his former client simply grabbed a bus across the border and flew home on his South African passport. “Nobody was looking for him at the time,” he said.)

Lendrum told his story persuasively, looking me straight in the eye and leaving me to wonder, for a few moments at least, whether he had been wrongly judged. But many elements of his account were contradicted by the facts: the eggs seized in Quebec were live eggs, not addled, and he had no explanation for the incubators that the police had confiscated. He was flying to Dubai with those Patagonian falcon eggs, not to South Africa to get them into kestrel nests.

At one point in our conversation, out of the blue, Lendrum did make a startling assertion. “Look, I was asked to steal live eggs,” he said. “And I said it’s 99 percent unlikely that it would work. The length of time the eggs would be out of the nest, keeping them warm, keeping them on me—it’s just too long. A lot of people have asked me. In my book I will expose a lot of people.”

As our meeting wound down, I found myself wondering why Lendrum had agreed to talk to me at all. Perhaps he reasoned I already knew so much about his life that his only recourse was to bombard me with alternate facts. Maybe he hoped he could charm me into believing that all his convictions were bogus. But the weight of the evidence was overwhelming.

Still, Lendrum struck me as a tragic figure in some ways. A wildlife lover, ornithological expert, and master outdoorsman, he had followed a twisted path, driven by his misplaced obsessions and the thrill of the chase. Now, despised by conservationists, deserted by friends, broke, and sick, he had lost almost everything.

I asked Lendrum if he envisioned returning to a life of egg-hunting adventures. “I’m getting too old for it,” he replied, a little wistfully. The prostate cancer had depleted his energy, and the car accident had damaged the nerves in his neck and limbs. “I can barely raise my arms,” he said.

Lendrum shook my hand and slowly moved off. Then, before disappearing around the corner, he turned and hit me with a mock proposition. “Do you want to steal some eggs sometime?” he asked, grinning. “We’ll go into the Rhondda Valley and see how many peregrines we can get—right under Andy McWilliam’s nose. You do the climbing. We’ll make millions.”

That, I thought, would be the last I’d see of Jeffrey Lendrum.

I was wrong. Six months later, on June 29, : “Rare Bird Eggs Importation Prevented by Border Force at Heathrow.” A passenger from South Africa identified as a 56-year-old Irish national had aroused the suspicion of customs agents, who’d stopped him, searched him, and discovered 19 eggs from protected birds of prey—reportedly African fish eagles and black sparrow hawks, as well as two newly hatched vulture chicks—in a customized belt hidden beneath his clothing. Under British policy, a suspect is not identified until he is charged in court, but I had little doubt who it was.

Sure enough, a month later, that Jeffrey Lendrum had been arraigned near Heathrow and charged with three counts of fraudulently evading prohibition—i.e., importing protected wildlife—then packed off to the Dickensian-sounding Wormwood Scrubs Prison in London to await a plea hearing in August. The details from the court appearance were skimpy—Lendrum’s defense had reportedly argued before the judge that his client was on his way to declare the eggs and chicks stashed in his hidden belt before he was intercepted—and I had a wealth of questions that, for the moment, couldn’t be answered. How had he procured the eggs? Who was he delivering them to? Why had the Border Force stopped him? And, most of all, what the hell was he thinking?

I flew up to London for Lendrum’s pretrial hearing on August 23. His attorney, Keith Astbury, had told me that his client intended to plead not guilty. But a jury trial would be a huge risk and could result in a far tougher jail sentence—up to seven years—than a plea bargain would. Did he really think he could get away with it? Astbury wouldn’t comment.

At Isleworth Crown Court, in a drab London suburb a few miles from Heathrow, I sat in the empty public gallery of a tiny second-floor courtroom, waiting for Lendrum to appear. I knew from Astbury that Lendrum had no interest in talking to me. But I hoped to make eye contact at least.

It wasn’t to be. Court officers escorted Lendrum from a holding cell to a bulletproof booth at the rear of the courtroom, completely out of sight of the gallery. I heard his disembodied voice—faint, downcast—say “I’m not guilty.” When I stood and craned my neck in an attempt to get a look at him, a court officer motioned furiously for me to sit back down. Lendrum’s solicitor promised to provide the judge with records about his client’s ongoing cancer treatment to expedite a request for bail. Then his trial was set for January 7, 2019.

Lendrum was taken out of the courtroom and put in a van back to Wormwood Scrubs to await the latest gamble of his risk-filled life. Given his record of the past few years, it was a bet he seemed destined to lose.

Contributing editor Joshua ­Hammer () is a longtime foreign corre­spondent and the author, most recently, of .

The post The Egg Thief appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Just before two o’clock in the morning on Thursday, March 3, 2016, the phone rang at TomĂĄs GĂłmez Membreño’s home in La Esperanza, 70 miles west of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. Membreño, a leader of the (COPINH), the country’s most prominent environmental-activist group, groped for the receiver. The organization’s attorney was on the line, and the news he had was grim.

“The first thing he said was, ‘Tomasito, are you OK?’ ” recalled Membreño, a short, muscular man in his late thirties wearing cutoff jeans and a green T-shirt emblazoned with the words NO IMPUNIDAD—no impunity. “It scared me, because I knew that something must have happened. I said, ‘Yes, I’m fine. I was asleep.’ He said, ‘They shot Berta.’ ”Ìę

Berta Isabel CĂĄceres Flores, Central America’s most renowned environmentalist and a 2015 winner of the prestigious for grassroots activism, had been leading a campaign to stop the construction of the Agua Zarca dam on the Gualcarque River, which the Lenca, the largest of Honduras’s nine indigenous groups, consider sacred. The 44-year-old CĂĄceres had organized protests, road blockages, and other acts of civil disobedience against Desarrollos EnergĂ©ticos S.A., or DESA, the large Honduran hydroelectric firm that is building the dam with funding from a consortium of development banks. Over the previous two years, the campaign had spiraled into violence. Honduran security forces shot and killed several demonstrators. Two major international backers pulled out of the project under worldwide pressure. CĂĄceres was harassed, threatened, and forced to defend herself against charges of inciting violence. “People from the dam company would meet us at the river and tell us that we would be killed,” Membreño told me.Ìę

In January, at a staff meeting in the same conference room where I was now speaking with Membreño, CĂĄceres had shared with her colleagues a recent nightmare: a giant snake had leapt out of the ground and pounced on her, suffocating her to death. “The conclusion that we drew,” Membreño told me as we sat at a battered wooden table in the luridly decorated room, which was covered with murals of Amazon-like peasant women, giant ears of corn, indigenous battles against conquistadores, and newly painted portraits of CĂĄceres, “was that this would be Berta’s most dangerous year, and her enemies would want to kill her at any moment.”Ìę

On that March night, Membreño drove through the deserted streets to CĂĄceres’s home, a small lime green box two miles outside town. The police had already removedÌęher body by the time he arrived. Inside he found Gustavo Castro Soto, 53, a fellow activist from Mexico who’d been staying with CĂĄceres while he attended a COPINH workshop.Ìę

The gunmen had arrived between 11:30 p.m. and midnight, Castro told Membreño. Hearing noises, CĂĄceres had gotten out of bed and gone to the back door. “Who’s there?” she called out. At that moment, the attackers kicked their way inside and fired four shots at her at close range. One gunman then entered the guest bedroom and fired on Castro. The bullet tore through his hand and took off part of his ear. He fell to the ground and lay still, playing dead. Then the assassins left. A few minutes later, Castro heard CĂĄceres calling to him weakly from the next room.

“Gustavo, I’m dying,” she moaned.Ìę

Castro went and cradled her in his arms. “Stay, Bertita, stay,” he said.

Moments later she died.

The murder of Berta CĂĄceres added another prominent name to the long list of environmental activists around the world—from Brazil to the Philippines, Colombia to Thailand, Cambodia to Russia—who have been killed in recent years. At least 767 people died in conflicts against extractive industries and poachers between 2010 and 2015, according to the London watchdog group . Last year alone, 185 were slain in 16 countries, the highest annual death toll on record.Ìę

Almost a third of those 767 killings took place in Brazil, earning the vast South American nation a dubious distinction as the most lethal place on earth to be an environmentalist. Running a close second—and a clear number one on a per capita basis—is Honduras, an impoverished country that forms one-third of Central America’s violent Northern Triangle, which also includes Guatemala and El Salvador. Between 2010 and 2015, 109 Honduran activists were killed. Last year’s per capita rate—eight out of a population of eight million—is about four times that of Brazil’s, which saw 50 environmental activists killed out of 200 million. “Hondurans are being shot dead in broad daylight, kidnapped, or assaulted for standing in the way of their land and the companies that want to monetize it,” says Billy Kyte, of Global Witness.

Few of the murderers are ever caught, and their crimes are becoming more brazen. In August 2013, three indigenous activists in one small community, Locomapa, in northern Honduras, were mowed down at a roadblock as they protested illegal mining and logging. A year later, Luis de Reyes MarcĂ­a, another activist in Locomapa, was found dead with stab wounds in the chest and neck. In May 2015, assailants gunned down MoisĂ©s DurĂłn SĂĄnchez, a COPINH organizerÌęworking on behalf of 25 indigenous families in the Santa BarbaraÌędepartment, one of Honduras’s 18 states. And in July 2016, the body of Lesbia Janeth UrquĂ­a, 49, yet another COPINH activist campaigning to stop hydroelectricÌęprojects in western Honduras, was found in a garbage dump. In perhaps the nation’s bloodiest corner, the Bajo AguĂĄn, a fertile Caribbean valley that was once the fiefdom of the United Fruit and Standard Fruit companies, more than 100 land activists—farmers, union leaders, a Catholic lay preacher—have been killed in the past five years in violence between campesinos and the , owned by Honduras’s wealthy FacussĂ© family, which has amassed 20,000 acres of the valley's arableÌęland to grow palm oil for margarine and food production. A Dinant spokesman says the idea that the company’s security guards or contractors “are killing huge numbers of local farmers” is “utterly absurd.” He also claims that 19 security guards have been killed since 2010 and that a Dinant field technician was tortured and assassinated.

Kyte, of Global Witness, blames the violence on a “collusion of state and corporate actors”—a tight-knit network of oligarchs, corrupt government officials, and high-level officers within the Honduran national police, military police, and army who hire gunmen to intimidate, abduct, and even murder those who stand in their way. Meanwhile, poorly funded, poorly trained, and corrupt public prosecutors fail to investigate the crimes.

Matters have grown considerably worse, Kyte and others say, since a 2009 coup ousted President Manuel Zelaya, a left-leaning populist and wealthy businessman. The three right-wing governments that followed have rolled back land-reform initiatives and pushed hard for the expansion of mining, agribusiness, and large-scale energy projects. These have been especiallyÌębeneficial to the few powerful Honduran families that control as much as 90 percent of the country’s resources.Ìę

Not every clash in Honduras is clear-cut, however. I spent a week traveling the country’s trail of blood, finding myself yo-yoed betweenÌęconflicting versions of reality. CĂĄceres and her indigenous colleagues, some said, were engaged in a heroic struggle to save their river. No, critics insisted, the activists had wildly exaggerated the dam’s environmental impact and bullied any locals who disagreed into submission.

“There are no good guys here,” one foreign diplomat assured me, requesting anonymity because of the political sensitivities of her job. Referring to the Bajo AguĂĄn murders, she explained that while landowners and security guards were killing peasants, much of the violence was being meted out by drug traffickers and other criminals who had infiltrated the land-rights movement to grab property for themselves: “They take over these groups. They have them scared to death. It’s peasant-on-peasant violence.”Ìę

Yet the government’s own human-rights watchdog disputed this view as whitewash. “Journalists, lawyers, and environmental activists are being killed, and you never find the reason for their killing,” says Linda Lizzie Rivera Lobo, an attorney with the country’s National Commission for Human Rights, which was created by the Honduran government two decades ago. “There is no credibility in the office of the public prosecutor. It’s total impunity.”

Perched a mile up in the hills of western Honduras, on the edge of Lenca country, La Esperanza (“the Hope”) is a tranquil town of cobblestone streets, pastel-colored adobe houses, and old Roman Catholic churches. When I arrived there on a Sunday afternoon two months after CĂĄceres’s death, the town had mostly returned to its normal rhythms following a spasm of angry protests. At the outdoor Sunday market, Lenca women in bright headscarfs called ±èČčñłÜ±đ±ôŽÇČő sold pottery and produce—bananas, blackberries, mangos, squashes, peppers—while tourists made their way to La Gruta, a cave on a hill overlooking town where, according to legend, the Lenca rebel leader Lempira took refuge from the Spanish conquistadores three decades after Christopher Columbus “discovered” the territory on his fourth New World voyage, in 1502. He named it for the deep waters off the Caribbean coast: honduras means “depths.”Ìę

La Esperanza’s calm facade belied an undercurrent of fear. I followed a rough asphalt road past red-tile-roofed farmhouses, toward the residential development on the town’s outskirts where Cáceres was killed. A motorcycle cop and a soldier guarded her concrete house and small garden, which was roped off with crime-scene tape marked POLICIA NACIONAL. I walked around to the rear and noticed a gaping frame where the back door had been; investigators had removed it to examine a muddy print made by a military boot. It was easy to imagine the killers creeping silently in the darkness across the open field behind her home. The development had been virtually deserted and the house unguarded when the assassins arrived.

CĂĄceres had purchased the property in Novem­ber 2015 with some of the $175,000 she received as part of the Goldman Environmental Prize. Three miles away, I found her older brother, Gustavo, at the family home in central La Esperanza, a single-story structure hidden from the street by a curtain of bamboo and palms and guarded by another motorcycle cop. Gustavo CĂĄceres told me that his sister had moved out of the family house without giving any notice. “She left to take danger away from us, especially from my mom,” he said. “But being here, surrounded by people, gave her some safety. It would have been harder for them to kill her.”Ìę

It was CĂĄceres’s mother, Austra Bertha Flores Lopez, Gustavo explained, who had drawn her daughter into humanitarian work. As a girl, Berta had accompanied her mother, a midwife who later became a Honduran congresswoman, into impoverished Lenca villages, helping deliver babies by candlelight. The experience strengthened her indigenous identity—her maternal grandmother was half Lenca—and spurred her into activism. In her early twenties, she and her future husband, Salvador ZĂșñiga, the father of her four grown children (they divorced a decade ago), founded COPINH—a grassroots organization that today consists of hundreds of salaried coordinators along with activist volunteers. Together they organized resistance to timber companies harvesting trees from Lenca forests near La Esperanza.

“She was very active, talking about how we had to stop these ‘monsters’ from exploiting the forest,” says Membreño. He remembers sneaking with her past armed guards and occupyingÌęa lumber mill in the 1990s, then joining her on a three-month protest in front of the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa that ended only when police tear-gassed the demonstrators. “I was amazed at her ease and confidence,” he says.Ìę

Beginning in 2011, CĂĄceres devoted herself nearly full-time to the cause that would eventually get her killed: the fight against the proposed Agua Zarca dam on the Gualcarque River, in a rugged, mountainous region about 70 miles west of La Esperanza. Backers, including high-ranking members of the Honduran government, promoted the project—one of about four-dozen dam concessions awarded by President Porfirio Lobo Sosa, who took office in 2010—as a model renewable-energy effort that would create hundreds of jobs in one of Honduras’s poorest regions. It would generate an average of 21.3 megawatts of electricity per hour, enough to power 120,500 rural households, with initial funding of $40 million.Ìę

In 2010, DESA, the hydroelectric engineering firm controlled by Honduras’s Atala family, won the dam concession. The project would be bankrolled by the Central American Bank for Economic Integration and constructed by the giant Chinese corporation .

Trouble began almost immediately. The region directly affected is RĂ­o Blanco, a collection of 12 communities totaling about 3,000 people along the Gualcarque River. DESA obtained the titles to riverside tracts from the mayor of the IntibucĂĄ department, of which RĂ­o Blanco is a part. DESA says that it obtained the titles legally; activists charge that the mayor fraudulently wrested them from local Lenca who’d possessed them for a century. Then, in 2011, Sinohydro moved in heavy equipment and built an access road to the river through Lenca fields. “When the people asked, ‘Why are you doing this?’ they lied,” Membreño claims. “They said nothing about the dam. They said, ‘We are just making a road to the river.’ ”

Lenca leaders argued that Agua Zarca would be an environmental disaster, flooding their crops and destroying one of the most picturesque corners of the country. “The Lenca are ancestral guardians of the rivers,” Cáceres proclaimed after COPINH took up the cause. The river, she said, served “the well-being of humanity and of this planet and should remain pristine.”

But the environmental impact would be minimal, the backers insisted. There would be no reservoir. No flooding. Fish species would be protected. Many people in RĂ­o Blanco, my diplomatic source told me, actually supported the dam because of the benefits it would bring, including irrigation projects, school supplies, and a microlending program. Critics of the movement say that the anti-dam activists relied heavily on intimidation, branding anyone in favor a stooge.

By 2012, tensions had escalated. According to complaints filed in local courts, DESA employees stampeded cattle through crop fields in a failed scheme to ruin them and force their owners to sell. The company’s guards fenced off a spring that one village depended on and rerouted the water to supply a construction camp. They began prohibiting the Lenca from using the river along a several-mile stretch.

In May 2013, hundreds of Lenca, mobilized by CĂĄceres, blocked the Sinohydro-built road to the construction site from the village of San Francisco de Ojuera. In an indication of the cozy relationship between the dam builders and the Honduran government, army units began acting as DESA’s enforcers. Between 15 and 20 soldiers, joined by police driving DESA vehicles, stopped CĂĄceres and Membreño, searched their car, and claimed they’d found a concealed pistol. CĂĄceres was charged with illegal weapons possession and released on “conditional freedom” until the beginning of her trial a month later. After she spent eight hours in court, the charges against her were dismissed for insufficient evidence.

That July brought the first death: TomĂĄs Garcia, a protest leader shot by soldiers at a demonstrationÌęoutside the DESA compound.Ìę

Still, the campaign seemed to be working. In August 2013, Sinohydro pulled out of what had become a highly controversial project, stalling construction.

The violence, however, continued. In March 2014, another COPINH activist, Maria Santos Dominguez, sister of the slain Tomás Garcia, was walking home from making school lunches when seven men with machetes attacked her. Her husband and 12-year-old ran to defend her, and they fractured her son’s skull and cut off half of his right ear. Santos Dominguez escaped with serious wounds to her hands and face. It was the second machete attack that her husband, Roque Dominguez, had survived in less than a year.

CĂĄceres had emerged as the single greatest threat to Agua Zarca—a feisty, combative spokeswoman and brilliant organizer who evinced no fear, at least publicly, and had a knack for attracting international attention. She traveled abroad, denouncing Agua Zarca at environmental conferences, and journeyed across Honduras taking up the cause of activists in places like Bajo AguĂĄn.Ìę

At the same time, her situation at home became more precarious. Two new backers, the Netherlands Development Finance Company (FMO) and the Finnish development bank FinnFund, had stepped in with $20 million in financing, givingÌęhope to DESA that it could resume the project.Ìę

CĂĄceres kept the protests and road blockages going. Tomas Membreño said that she was threatened repeatedly by DESA guards and officials and began receiving anonymous death threats. Between 2013 and 2015, Gustavo CĂĄceres said, his sister filed 32 reports with the public prosecutor’s office in La Esperanza. Late in 2013, the Honduran government agreed to provide her with a closed-circuit camera outside COPINH’s office, as well as occasional police escorts when she traveled to other parts of the country.Ìę

On March 2, 2016, CĂĄceres drew attention to the sinister links between Honduran securityÌęforces and big companies like DESA. “The government has all of these institutions at the service of these companies,” she told COPINH trainees, “because these businesses are capable of moving antiterrorism commandos—the military police, the national police, security guards, and hit men.” A few hours later she was dead.Ìę

Her assassination left her tight-knit circle bereft—and more fearful than ever. They call frequently to check up on each other, change their routines often, and rarely spend any time alone. On my second evening in La Esperanza, I joined four activists—two American expatriates, an Irishwoman, and a Honduran—for dinner at the town’s most popular restaurant, El Fogón, a two-story orange adobe house with a balcony overlooking an alley and walls covered with Lenca ceremonial masks.

CĂĄceres had eaten here on the night of her murder. “We figured that her enemies would do the proper political calculations to know that murdering Berta CĂĄceres would have a very high cost,” said Karen Spring, coordinator of the Honduras Solidarity Network, an informal group of North American human-rights organizations, who lives here in Honduras. Spring, who had been with CĂĄceres on the day she died, believes that they decided the move was worth it. “They sent a chilling message that if you speak out against the government, you will be killed. People are terrified.”Ìę

One day after CĂĄceres’s death, DESA issuedÌęa statement denying that it had anything to do with her murder. Her supporters filled the streets of Tegucigalpa and La Esperanza. The U.S. government—which has given $200 million in military and counter-narcotics aid to Honduras since 2009—called on President Juan Orlando HernĂĄndez, Lobo Sosa’s successor, to “conduct a prompt, thorough, and transparent investigation and to ensure those responsible are brought to justice.”Ìę

Two months later, a newly formed elite unit of the public prosecutor’s office, a kind of Honduran FBI created under U.S. pressure, arrested four suspects: the alleged triggermen, Edilson and Emerson Duarte, 25, twin brothers from the region around La Esperanza who had reportedly served in the Honduran military; Sergio RamĂłn Rodri­guez, a DESA engineer working on Agua Zarca; and former DESA security chief Douglas Geovanny Bustillo, a retired Honduran air-force lieutenant. Mobile-phone records had placed the twins around CĂĄceres’s house on the day she died, and all four men had allegedly engaged in coded phone conversations about the killing.Ìę

“Rodriguez and Bustillo were the ones saying to Berta, ‘You old witch, you won’t be coming through here anymore,’ ” Membreño told me. “On several occasions, Rodriguez warned me that I would be killed.” All four men are in prison awaiting trial.Ìę

It soon became apparent that the alleged conspiracy reached even higher. Shortly afterÌęthose arrests, the prosecutorial unit arrested an active army major, Mariano DĂ­az ChĂĄvez—who had reportedly graduated from a U.S. Ranger–supported Honduran special-forces course and had fought beside U.S. troops in Iraq—and charged him with hiring the hit-men brothers. He, like the others, is in custody awaiting trial. (A sixth man, RĂĄpalo Orellana, was arrested in September, while a seventh suspect remained at large.)

The picture got even murkier in June, when a former Honduran soldier, ex-first-sergeant Rodrigo Cruz, told The Guardian that Cáceres’s name had appeared on a hit list of dozens of environmental and land ­activists distributed to a U.S.-trained Honduran military-police unit months before her death. “I’m 100 percent certain that Berta Cáceres was killed by the army,” Cruz said. Cáceres herself told a reporter in December 2013, “The army has an assassination list of 18 wanted human rights fighters with my name at the top.”

The Honduran army has denied the allegation, but this would hardly mark the first time that the country’s security forces have been involved in high-level murders. Earlier this year, a Honduran newspaper published excerpts from a report by the inspector general’s office of the Security Ministry, which oversees the Honduran national police, exposing a death squad that had operated from deep inside the police force for several years. Acting on orders from a Caribbean drug baron, the killers had assassinated the country’s top antinarcotics chief in 2009 and his security adviser two years later.Ìę

Linda Rivera Lobo of the National Commission for Human Rights said that domestic and external pressure had forced the government to take action after the Cáceres murder. “But there is a limit to how far they will go,” she told me. The investigation “points to the material authors, but not the intellectual authors of the crime.”

Many thought that such a high-profile murder would drive other guns for hire to ground. But just two weeks later, in the town of Peña Blanca, 47 miles north of La Esperanza, another COPINH activist, Nelson García, a 39-year-old dental technician and scrap-metal recycler, was gunned down in broad daylight.

Peña Blanca is a sleepy town near 111-square-mile Yojoa Lake, Honduras’s largest, nestled amid jungled mountains in the heart of tourist country. For all its reputation as a homicidal hellhole, Honduras has long been a magnet for backpackers and other adventurers, drawn to natural treasures like Roatan Island, which sits on the second-longest barrier reef in the world, and archaeological sites like Copan, perhaps the greatest existing example of Maya civilization.

The shores of Yojoa Lake are dotted with low-budget gringo resorts. Not far away, a different reality presents itself: a sea of corrugated-metal and wood shacks filling a gully outside the town of RĂ­o Lindo. Shirtless campesinos sweat in the heat as they nail togetherÌęcrude wooden frames. Children wander around broken-down cars eating maize porridge cooked on portable gas stoves.Ìę

Five years ago, a prosperous fish farmer donated 15 acres of forest and farmland adjacent to this shantytown to the municipality of RĂ­o Lindo, on the condition that the property be turned over to 180 landless Lenca families. But the mayor allegedly claimed the land for himself. In 2014, Berta CĂĄceres and her COPINH activists arrived, and the Lenca occupied the ten-acre property, naming the new settlement RĂ­o Chiquito.

Nelson García was one of those recruited by Cáceres to join her in the field. He remained by the squatters’ side for two years, helping build dozens of neat rows of wooden homes and installing septic tanks and water pumps. “We were living ‘illegally,’ but we were encouraged by Berta’s strength,” the community’s spokesman, a lanky campesino in his forties named Jorge Alberto Ávila, told me. “Berta came here every couple of months. Nelson came every single day.”

“Nelson told me that he was afraid” after CĂĄceres’s death, his father, Santos Benedicto GarcĂ­a, explained to me as we sat beneath an inert ceiling fan in his airless house in Peña Blanca. GarcĂ­a’s aunt, MarĂ­a GarcĂ­a, said that Nelson had received death threats. “I told Nelson that he should take his family away, but he said no,” she insisted. “He wouldn’t go to the police, because he didn’t trust them.” GarcĂ­a didn’t go to Berta’s funeral; he was advised by fellow activists to stay away.Ìę

A few hours earlier, beneath a scorching sun, Ávila had led me up a hill to a field enclosed by barbed wire and dotted with the burned, bulldozed remains of houses—all that was left of the squatter settlement of Río Chiquito. On March 15, 2016, twelve days after Cáceres’s killing, 100 soldiers and policemen had moved in. “They gave us half an hour to leave,” Ávila told me. “Then they brought in a chainsaw and a bulldozer.” The 80 remaining Lenca families were now squatting on adjacent public land.

GarcĂ­a had spent that morning finding shelter for the evicted families. Then he returned home. At 11:30 a.m., he got into his truck to deliver a load of scrap to a nearbyÌęjunkyard. His wife noticed a red pickup with two men in it parked across the street. Moments later, as he pulled out of his driveway, the pickup blocked GarcĂ­a’s vehicle and a gunman opened fire. GarcĂ­a’s four-year-old son, who was playing outside, watched his father die.

Ordinarily, the killers would back off after taking down their chosen target, but this time the threats continued. “We came back from the burial, and that same day they called his wife and said, ‘Take care of yourself, walk on your toes, you will be the next victim,’ ” GarcĂ­a’s father told me. During the next week, he claimed, a nephew was shot at four times while staying with GarcĂ­a’s widow and four children, and an uncle had his horse shot out from under him—“right in the forehead”—while riding down a trail on his finca.Ìę

Two weeks after García’s killing, the Honduran national police arrested Didier Enrique “Electric” Ramirez, a member of a local gang, and charged him with murder. He too is awaiting trial.

GarcĂ­a’s family and friends claim that Ramirez was a hit man sent by higher-ups—municipal officials, they believe—with a message to land activists: help the poor against the country’s elite and you will die. But as with so many killings in Honduras, the true motive may never be known. The diplomat I talked to in Tegucigalpa told me the murder “was related to extortion”—GarcĂ­a had died for failing to pay a weekly “war tax” to the gang that ruled Peña Blanca. Again, this was a version of events that the National Commission for Human Rights discounted.Ìę

There was no public mourning for Nelson GarcĂ­a—as there was for CĂĄceres—and no offers to help take care of his family. Prosecutors moved them, for their safety, to a village in southern Honduras, where, according to GarcĂ­a’s father, they were now unprotected and destitute. “Nelson fought hard to put bread on the table, and now the family is in hiding, alone, without money,” he told me as darkness fell on Peña Blanca. “The kids are not in school. His wife will never come back here. She wants to leave the country, become a refugee. She will never return.”

The day after my visit to RĂ­o Lindo, I set out for the site of the Agua Zarca dam. The paved highway, running southwest, took us back in the direction of La Esperanza and then veered off into Lenca backcountry. After an hour, the road disintegrated into a rough dirt track, and we switchbacked for two hours through hills thick with pine and oak. In the wide valley far below, a mosaic of maize, bean, and coffee plots, broken by clusters of houses and groves of palms, extended toward the pale blue silhouettes of distant mountains.Ìę

I was traveling to the river for a long-­anticipated meeting that seemed likely to determine the future of the dam. In the wake of Cáceres’s murder, both of the project’s European backers, FMO and FinnFund, had temporarily suspended their loans. “We strongly believe that all concerns raised in the protests around the project have been met through a thorough design,” FinnFund declared in a statement. “We are, however, worried about the possibility of increased tensions in Honduras as a consequence of the murder.”

Now FMO was dispatching an investigative commission to San Francisco de Ojuera, the site of the access road to the river.

The meeting was just starting when I arrived. Four human rights and indigenous-land experts—two women and two men in their forties and fifties, including one Honduran and three others who’d flown in from Australia, Chile, and Great Britain—stood in the blazing sun before 100 people who had gathered on a steep hillside. The experts jotted in notebooks as one Lenca after another stepped forward to denounce what they called “the death project.” A grizzled septuagenarian described how DESA had bulldozed roads through farms. “They destroyedÌęour corn, our livelihoods,” he said. An elderly woman in black accused the company of murder. “DESA sent their people to kill our people. Bertita, our comrade, gave her life for us,” she said. A teacher in a New York Yankees cap insisted that the Lenca communities were united in their opposition to the dam: “Of 400 families in my village, only seven were in favor.”Ìę

“Who threatened you?” asked the Brit, a gangly man whose skin was turning lobster red in the sun. “The company people? People you didn’t know?”

“They were security guards,” a young man said. He named Douglas Bustillo, the DESA security chief, one of those arrested for the CĂĄceres killing, as the group’s ringleader. “The guards from that company take photos of us. They’ve gotten to know us very well.”Ìę

When the meeting broke up, I set out down the gravel road to the Gualcarque River. A Lenca grandmother in her sixties advised me not to go by myself. “You never know what can happen here,” she said, and offered to accompany me. During a February 2016 protest march along this road, she told me, DESA had sent up drones to monitor and photograph the participants.Ìę

We walked downhill past pine groves and pastures. She pointed to a compound of green-roofed wooden huts in a meadow, the road-construction camp that the Chinese had abandoned. Farther down the hill, we clambered over the debris from a landslide unleashed by the road construction and heard the thundering of the river a hundred feet below. Another turn brought the Gualcarque River into view: a foaming green ribbon cutting through a chasm. I heard the shouts of kids splashing in the water and then reached the riverbank. A few dozen yards upstream, whitewater cascaded over a course of boulders, then squeezed through a channel formed by two jagged outcroppings and widened into a shallow pool.Ìę

After the 2013 violence, DESA had retreated to the opposite side of the river; the company was waiting for tensions to ease so that it could resume construction. All through the past winter, two sharpshooters had stood watch from the top of the cliff with their rifles aimed at Lenca swimming in the river. Finally, COPINH activists stormed the plateau and set fire to the grass, driving out the snipers. Downstream I noticed a yellow hunk of machinery, six feet high by ten feet long, that resembled a giant oilcan. The activists had captured it during their assault of the sharpshooter post and rolled it down the slope. It now sat cockeyed in a pool of water, just before the river gained force again as it hurtled down a steep gradient.

I dove into the pool and took in the jungled hills rising sharply above the river, the white gravel banks, and the olive green water frothing through the gorge. This sublime place surely deserved to remain untouched, I thought. And it appeared likely that it would. Shortly after the investigative commission visited San Francisco de Ojuera, the Dutch bank announced that its engagement with DESA was over. “There is a need for FMO to seek a responsible and legal exit from the project,” a spokesman would tell me. The Finns were pulling out as well, leaving the project’s largest lender, the Central American Bank for Economic Integration, which had pledged $24 million to the $40 million project, standing alone. Pressure was now mounting on that institution as well, from international human rights organizations, the European Union, and other groups.Ìę

In the end, it seemed, the conspirators who had taken the life of Berta CĂĄceres had also assured the demise of the Agua Zarca dam. I climbed out of the river, dried myself in the sun, and then, trying to tamp down my nervousness, began the long climb along the deserted, Chinese-built road to my car.

Contributing editor Joshua Hammer () is the , including .

The post The Most Dangerous Place on Earth to Be an Environmentalist appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Three days after boarding the 131-foot rescue vessel MV Phoenix in Augusta, Sicily, I was standing on the ship’s top deck on a warm June dawn, watching the rotor blades of a blue-and-orange-striped Camcopter S-100 drone shudder into motion. We were a few miles southeast of the Bouri Offshore Field, a patch of deepwater oil wells and drilling platforms jointly owned by an Italian company and the Libyan government, in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea. Lit at night by natural-gas flares and heavily trafficked by naval ships, merchant vessels, and maintenance boats, the oil field has become a beacon for refugees fleeing by sea from war and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and Syria. Last year, 219,000 of them crossed the Mediterranean in rickety fishing boats and open dinghies, a massive flotilla organized by smugglers along the coast of lawless Libya. In their desperate attempt to reach European shores, refugees have drowned by the thousands.

The Phoenix had arrived in the vicinity of Bouri the previous night, after a 30-hour sail from the east coast of Sicily. Now we had entered a patrolling pattern. We were waiting for either a summons to action from the Maritime Rescue Coordination Center (MRCC) in Rome, run by the Italian coast guard, or for visual contact with a refugee-filled boat by one of the Phoenix’s drones. Because those vessels are often unseaworthy, and the conditions aboard are so wretched, the MRCC encourages ships equipped for rescues to intercept the migrants as soon as they exit Libyan waters and transport them to southern Italy, the closest country that will accept them. There, they’ll remain in detention centers while their applications for political asylum are processed.Ìę

“We consider a boat that is overcrowded to be in imminent danger,” the founder of this private rescue venture, a 34-year-old American entrepreneur named , had told me earlier. “When you have a boat that is equipped for ten fishermen and you have 400 people on board, including women and children, without life jackets, this boat needs to be rescued.”

Born and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the son of an oil and gas engineer, Catrambone started a war-zone insurance company, , that provides kidnapping, terrorism, and death and injury coverage to journalists and military contractors. Based on Malta, the Mediterranean’s only English-speaking country, it had $10 million in revenues last year. In 2013, Catrambone poured $8 million of his personal fortune into creating the (MOAS), the Malta-based NGO that deploys the Phoenix. He spent two months last year aboard the ship. During that time, the Phoenix participated in nine rescue operations and came to the aid of 3,000 migrants, carrying them to Italian ports or transferring them onto naval vessels. This spring, in its first 60 days of a six-month season, the Phoenix helped rescue 5,597 more people, and by August, the number had climbed to 8,696.Ìę

Catrambone, however, remained on Malta this year to run his insurance business, leaving shipboard operations in the hands of his wife and partner in the venture, 39-year-old Regina Egla Catrambone, a tireless, take-charge Italian who has thrown herself into the rescue effort. On this journey in early June, there were 23 of us aboard the refitted trawler, including a Spanish captain, Gonzalo Calderon, his six-person crew, and a three-man search and rescue team made up of former members of the Armed Forces of Malta. There were also six doctors, nurses, and logisticians from Doctors Without Borders, as well as two pilots and an engineer from the Austrian defense contractor Schiebel to operate the Phoenix’s two drones.Ìę

The S-100’s blades scythed the air as it rose and hovered above the landing pad. Banking left, it hurtled at 140 miles per hour toward the Libyan coast. In a cramped control room, the two young drone pilots and the engineer clustered around a monitor, receiving high-definition images from a sensor mounted beneath the aircraft’s nose. Around midmorning, the usual routine aboard the Phoenix—a game of Texas Hold ’Em on the lounge conference table and chef Simon Templer, an old friend of Catrambone’s from New Orleans, puttering around the galley preparing lunch—stopped suddenly as word spread through the ship: possible rescue. The drone had spotted a boat about 35 miles off the Libyan coast. The only question, Regina explained as the captain opened the throttle and sped south, was whether the MRCC would order an Italian naval vessel to handle the pickup or the Phoenix would be given the job.Ìę

“Last time,” said John Hamilton, a rangy, sunburned member of the Maltese rescue team, “the migrants had no food or water for 12 hours.” Simon Bryant, an Alberta physician on a six-month Doctors Without Borders contract, turned to David Johnston, a grizzled logistician from New Zealand. “Time to get changed,” he said, and the two men disappeared below.Ìę

This year is shaping up to be an unprecedentedly active one for “irregular migrants”—a description adopted by the United Nations to avoid stigmatizing them with the term illegal—journeying across the Mediterranean Sea. In 2009, , the EU’s border patrol, 11,000 people made the perilous journey from the beaches of North Africa to Italy and Malta. Two years later, the Arab Spring unleashed instability throughout the region, and the number of migrants crossing from Libya or neighboring Tunisia . Since then a devastating civil war in Syria, radical Islamic terror in Nigeria and Mali, forced military conscription in Eritrea, and the beginning of a third decade of chaos in Somalia have driven those numbers ever higher. Some refugees come from as far away as Bangladesh, driven by economic misery to make marathon odysseys by land and sea before arriving in North Africa. By the end of 2015, this year’s numbers could exceed 250,000 people.

The deepening woes of Libya, the main launching point for migrant ships, have facilitated the exodus. Operating in the anarchic country with impunity, human traffickers charge refugees between $500 and $2,000 for a journey that typically starts in Tripoli, where the migrants are warehoused for weeks and sometimes months before being trucked to beaches west of the capital. Some of these smugglers are astute businessmen who aspire to provide a safe service for their clients. (“I even heard about one smuggler who allows kids under five to ride for free,” Catrambone told me.) But the majority are unscrupulous operators who show migrants large and safe boats in Libyan ports, then pack them instead onto derelict fishing vessels or open inflatable dinghies with no safety equipment and no crew. The migrants are given a plastic bottle of water each and maybe a single compass for the two-day journey. There’s often no going back: dependent on rapid turnover and determined to prevent word from spreading about the bait and switch, the smugglers will typically force migrants to board the craft at gunpoint. The boats are piloted either by volunteers among the migrants or by a captain, hired by the smugglers, who avoids capture by leaving the boat in the middle of the journey and jumping to a smuggler mother ship. The boats are abandoned at sea and either recovered by fishermen and resold to smugglers or destroyed by EU naval forces.Ìę

The refugees have good reason for hesitation. The crossing from Africa to Italy is now, according to the UN, “,” with a record 3,419 migrants perishing in 2014, and another 2,000 by August 2015. On an icy February night, three of four inflatable rubber boats filled with migrants capsized in frigid, storm-tossed waters off the Libyan coast. , including 29 who died of hypothermia during the rescue of 106 survivors. Two months later, a 60-foot fishing boat full of migrants capsized when it at night and the passengers all rushed to one side. A Bangladeshi survivor that smugglers had locked hundreds of people, including dozens of women and children, in the hold. Twenty-eight refugees survived.

In October 2013, Italy launched a $10-million-per-month rescue operation called Mare Nostrum, the ancient Roman name for the Mediterranean. The Italian Navy deployed an amphibious assault carrier, two frigates, and two search and rescue vessels just beyond Libyan waters—and the first year. Like MOAS, Mare Nostrum operated under the assumption that every migrant journey is a dangerous one, and its rescues targeted not only foundering vessels but also those that seemed to be in no imminent peril.

But the program faced a backlash from conservative Italian politicians, who protested that Italy was unfairly shouldering the burden of the migration crisis. According to European Union policy, the country where a migrant first lands is obliged to handle his or her request for asylum; as a result, tens of thousands of refugees are awaiting processing in Italy. If their requests are rejected—as happened in 21 percent of the cases in 2013—the migrants are dispatched to expulsion centers to await deportation. Many refugees, of course, leave Italy long before that point, making it across Europe’s porous borders to Germany, Sweden, and other countries, where they either work as undocumented aliens or apply for asylum there.Ìę

Last October, Italy replaced Mare Nostrum with the far more modest . Overseen by Frontex, Triton is backed by European leaders like UK Foreign Office minister Joyce Anelay, who argued that Mare Nostrum’s ambitious sweep had that encouraged migrants to cross.Ìę

Triton costs less than a third of what Mare Nostrum did, and it mostly patrols an area 30 miles off Italy’s coast. But , the number of migrants has increased sharply. After the drowning deaths of those 300 migrants last February, Nils Muiznieks, commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe, , “The EU needs effective search and rescue. Triton does not meet this need.”

Into that multinational mess came the Catrambones. The couple first met in 2006 on a beach in Regina’s hometown of Reggio di Calabria, on the toe of Italy, where Chris had gone to seek out the birthplace of his great-grandfather, who immigrated to America in the late 19th century. They got married in 2010 and live in Malta with their teenage daughter, Maria Luisa.Ìę

In July 2013, the couple were cruising the Med on a rented yacht. The trip was, in part, Catrambone’s birthday gift to himself after a profitable year. “I love to take my family out and get away and enjoy life, and I convinced Regina, ‘Let’s go out and explore these waters around our home,’ ” he recalled.Ìę

One day near Lampedusa, an Italian island south of Malta that has become a purgatory for tens of thousands of migrants, Regina was sunning on the top deck when she noticed a winter jacket bobbing in the water. The Catrambones asked their yacht captain, Marco Cauchi, a search and rescue commander moonlighting from the Armed Forces of Malta, about the incongruous piece of clothing. It was, he replied, almost certainly the jacket of a refugee. Cauchi told them how, during one military rescue, he’d watched a migrant sink beneath the waves a few feet from him. “There were 29 people on this boat that capsized, and most could not swim,” he told them. “I saw those big eyes open, and I saw him go down so fast. I couldn’t reach him. It stayed with me always.”

Just a week before the couple’s cruise, Pope Francis had “a change of attitude toward migrants and refugees”—a shift away from fear toward building international cooperation. Regina, a devout Catholic, had taken the pope’s words to heart and has since enlisted the archbishop of Malta as a supporter. She has proved a vital ally as her husband developed a plan to buy a boat and ply the Mediterranean, doing the job that governments seemed reluctant to take on. “I’m basically the operations guy,” says Catrambone. “Regina brings in the humanitarian element.”Ìę

He recruited Cauchi as well. “I said to Marco, ‘If I do this, will you come on board with me?’ ” Catrambone told me. “And he said, ‘You’re crazy, but if you do it, I will.’ ”Ìę

Catrambone decided to bypass applying for grants or government aid and financed the venture out of his own pocket. “Christopher’s philosophy is carpe diem,” says Regina. “We both believed that something has to happen now, and that if you have the capability, the skills, and the money, why do you need to wait? In the meantime, how many more people will die?”

Just the night before we arrived, the ship steamed into Augusta, Sicily, packed with 372 refugees, the culmination of the largest rescue operation in MOAS’s short history. It began the morning of June 6, the 71st anniversary of D-Day, when the sea was calm after five days of dangerously high swells. Sure enough, as Ian Ruggier, another Maltese army vet who serves as chief of planning and operations, told me, the MRCC radioed early in the morning with a report of migrants in trouble and directed the ship to a GPS point 30 miles off Zuwara, a beach west of Tripoli that is the most popular launch point for smugglers. Soon, Ruggier spotted a two-deck fishing boat packed with nearly 600 people. Suddenly, a second vessel overloaded with refugees emerged out of the mist, then a third, listing badly, two bilge pumps furiously pumping out water. “If this one had gone over, it would have been a tragedy,” Ruggier told me. “You had 500 people in the hold, and they would have had to climb out of a single two-square-foot hatch.”Ìę

Ruggier jumped into one of the Phoenix’s rigid-hulled inflatable boats (RHIBs) and raced for the vessel in distress. He had just reached the stricken boat when a fourth emerged out of the fog, and a fifth. My God, he thought. There must be 2,000 migrants in an area the size of two soccer pitches.Ìę

Alerted by MRCC, support vessels began arriving. RHIBs from half a dozen ships darted among the refugee boats, distributing life jackets, taking on passengers, speeding across the water, off-loading them onto military ships and the private rescue craft. The Phoenix helped rescue 2,200 people, taking 372 aboard. By one o’clock, the Phoenix’s two decks were packed.Ìę

Ruggier has intercepted pirates in the dangerous waters of the Gulf of Aden, off the coast of Somalia, and run rescue operations in Maltese waters, but never on this scale. “It didn’t feel like a rescue,” he told me. “It was more like a military exercise.”

In late March, as the Catrambones were preparing for the six-month rescue season, I made my first trip to Malta, the densely packed island nation of 423,000 where they live. A bastion of Christianity during the Crusades and a vital Allied supply station in World War II, the former British colony has been reborn as a global financial center and a popular location for Hollywood filmmakers, who like its generous tax breaks and generically Middle Eastern look. It’s also smack in the middle of the European debate over migrants. As I taxied down to Marsa, the grimy commercial port, I passed a barracks surrounded by barbed wire and filled with sub-Saharan refugees. Malta’s government says it is sympathetic to the migrants’ plight, but after accepting about 19,000 in the past decade, it insists it has room for no more.Ìę

I found Catrambone on the aft deck of the Phoenix, surrounded by the sounds of drilling, hammering, and scraping. The hull was getting a new paint job, and the crew was blasting off the rust. “As soon as the boat came back in October, we started doing work. It’s a big steel boat, and every single structure needs to be in perfect shape for the season,” said Catrambone, a shambling man with tousled black hair, a Lincoln-esque black beard, and a trace of Louisiana drawl. Recently, after the venture began attracting media attention he hired Robert Young Pelton, the veteran war journalist and author of The World’s Most Dangerous Places, as a strategic adviser.Ìę

He led me up a staircase to the upper aft deck and pointed out two RHIBs mounted snugly on metal cradles. “Feel this!” he urged, running his hand along one of the double-hulled, 20-foot dinghies, each equipped with two 70-horsepower outboard engines. “It’s got foam filling, so even if you puncture it, it will still float.” Catrambone’s team had just moved the cradles to a lower position and installed two large pipes to guide the craft gently into the water. “Before, we were using a crane,” he said. “In Force 4 winds, it was highly dangerous.”

The last time Catrambone threw himself into the business of boat renovation, the circumstances were rather different. In 2005, he was working as a freelance insurance-claims investigator after earning a degree in criminology at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. “He had this Volkswagen Passat with tinted windows, and a video camera, and we’d go places and he’d videotape people through his window,” recalls Templer, the chef, who lived in the same apartment building in New Orleans. Catrambone was “kind of neurotic,” Templer remembers. “He was like Kramer from Seinfeld—this awkward, geeky type, but cool and laid-back at the same time.”

That September, Catrambone was on a job in the Bahamas when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. Homeless, he set up shop in a three-cabin boat in a marina on Saint Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and invited Templer and another dislocated friend to join him. With $20,000 in pooled compensation from FEMA, the trio leased a decrepit double-decker paddle-wheel boat and turned it into Cajun Mary’s Riverboat Lounge, a floating bar and restaurant. “It was, in our way, our mourning for and tribute to a city we loved so much,” said Catrambone.Ìę

Around that time, he got a call from G4S, a huge private security firm based in the U.S. It offered him a different sort of insurance-related assignment: locate medical treatment in Dubai for a U.S. contractor who had suffered a herniated disk there. That job led him within the year to northern Iraq, where insurance providers for big security companies were struggling to provide decent hospital care for contractors injured by roadside bombs. Catrambone assembled a network of secure hospitals in Iraqi Kurdistan, then did the same in Afghanistan. Soon he started his own war-zone insurance company, and Tangiers International, named for his favorite North African city, took off. By the time he was 26, he was a multimillionaire.Ìę

At the end of 2013, Catrambone left Tangiers in the hands of his subordinates and began combing through online catalogs searching for a ship broker.

“Christopher is like a hurricane,” says Regina. “Standing in the eye, it’s very calm for you, but for the people around you, he can be a disaster. He’s blowing around, people think he doesn’t have a plan, but he’s very disciplined when he needs to do something.”Ìę

He ultimately tracked down the Phoenix in Norfolk, Virginia. It was love at first sight. Built in 1973 and originally used as a fishing trawler, then later as a scientific-research vessel, the ship had a steel hull, a deep draft, and a propulsion system built by WĂ€rtsilĂ€, a Finnish company known for its icebreakers. “She was a badass little boat,” Catrambone says. He bought it on the spot for $1.6 million, spent $3.5 million more on a refit, and sailed it back across the Atlantic himself, with Cauchi at the helm and Templer in the galley. At one point the Phoenix struck something, possibly a container. “We heard a noise like boom-boom-boom, and then it stopped,” Cauchi recalled. He feared that the boat’s new $1 million propeller had been destroyed. In fact the collision did break off a chunk, but Catrambone wasn’t fazed. “He was a mad dog,” said Templer. “He was like, ‘Let’s go! Let’s go!’ ”

When the Phoenix launched in August 2014, European diplomats and journalists were dubious. “They did not give us a lot of respect,” Catrambone said. “They suspected we were rogue Greenpeace-type activists causing trouble.”

Catrambone’s doubts grew as well. “After five days at sea, we were frustrated,” he told me. “I was saying, ‘This is all a lie, the migrants are not even coming.’ ” Then, on day seven, the Phoenix carried out a double rescue of a fishing boat packed with about 300 Syrians and then an inflatable dinghy filled with sub-Saharan Africans. The MRCC took note and gave the Phoenix temporary command of three other vessels. MOAS had proved itself legit. By the time the mission ended in October, Catrambone said, “we didn’t want to leave.” They stopped only because the boat was in dire need of repairs—and because the effort was draining the Catrambones’ finances.Ìę

Indeed, last March, Catrambone doubted whether he’d be able to deploy the drones in 2015. Earlier the previous year, he had struck a deal with Hans Georg Schiebel, owner of the Austrian military contractor Schiebel, for the pair of Camcopter S-100’s, pilotless mini-choppers that can fly 380 miles without refueling and are used by navies around the world. Schiebel initially wanted to sell the drones to him for $5.5 million, but Catrambone persuaded him to lease them for last year’s abbreviated three-month rescue season at $400,000 per month. “I told Hans, ‘Show the world that this drone can be used for peaceful purposes,’ ” he recalled. “Hans said, ‘Deal.’” For this year’s season, Schiebel agreed to lower the monthly rate to $300,000 and kick in the last two months for free. But $1.2 million was still way too high for Catrambone’s budget.Ìę

Now, after burning through much of his fortune, Catrambone was looking for donations. Doctors Without Borders had given $1.6 million; Germany’s Oil and Gas Invest was paying for the boat’s fuel. But he was short the $1.8 million for the drones. “We’re going to have to crowdfund for it,” he said. “Organizations like Doctors Without Borders are just not into paying for drones.”Ìę
A few weeks later came good news: Avaaz, a global activist organization, had agreed to kick in $500,000 for the two S-100’s. Catrambone would raise the rest just in time for rescue season.Ìę

Now those S-100’s were proving to be critical assets. Hours after the drone launched from the Phoenix’s helipad, Regina and I stood on deck, scanning the southern horizon. The Nafus Mountains rose up before us, about 30 miles away, wrapped in a dun brown desert haze. Regina guessed that the swells hitting the beaches of Zuwara would be about 18 inches high—perfect conditions for smugglers to launch their vessels.Ìę

Approaching slowly across the water, a distant white speck came into our line of vision. Slowly, the dot took shape: a white inflatable dinghy, about 25 feet long, with a single outboard motor, packed with what looked like about 100 people.

The ship buzzed with anticipation. On the aft deck, Bryant, the doctor from Al-berta, zipped up his white protective suit and slipped on surgical gloves and rubber boots. The rest of the medical team, similarly attired, brought up 100 small blue bags from the hold, each containing socks, a towel, white coveralls, two bottles of water, and a package of protein bars. Cauchi, Ruggier, and three crewmen lowered an RHIB into the water and sped toward the tiny craft.

From several hundred yards away, I watched the rescue unfold: The RHIB approached the dinghy slowly, careful to avoid exciting those inside and causing the fragile craft to tip over. Cauchi, speaking English through a megaphone, reassured the migrants—all of them, it seemed from my vantage point, sub-Saharan. The team passed out orange life jackets, loaded small groups onto the RHIB, and ferried them to the Phoenix. One by one, the migrants bridged the narrow gap between the boats and unsteadily boarded the bigger ship. Four young Somali women in head scarves, the first to set foot on the Phoenix, collapsed on the deck and clasped their hands in prayer. Soon the deck was filled with refugees from Somalia, Nigeria, Eritrea, Mali, and other blighted corners of the continent, 77 men and ten women—weary, grateful-looking people whose ordeals over recent weeks and months could scarcely be imagined.Ìę

With a blue MOAS baseball cap pulled low over her brow, Regina moved confidently among the refugees, bending down to reassure a worried-looking 15-year-old Ethiopian boy traveling by himself, searching for a Nigerian who had been punched in the eye during his voyage. The Phoenix was waiting for communications from the MRCC, which would either order it to take the migrants to a port in Sicily or tell it to remain in the area on patrol. “We have such a small group, we would rather continue,” Regina told me. “But we are in their hands.”Ìę

It’s this work with the refugees that has been most fulfilling for Regina. In 2014, she shopped the markets of Malta for sacks of rice and vegetables and, working as Templer’s assistant, cooked hot meals in the ship’s cramped galley for hundreds of hungry people. “We were using the cover of an oil container like a tray, and I was going up and down with the tray covered with rice and tomatoes,” she said. This year she’s spent dozens of hours in the onboard clinic. “I remember this Somali lady, she was with her two-and-a-half-year-old son,” she told me. “They had been 12 hours in an open boat. We took him from the dinghy, and he was not responsive.” Regina carried the boy to a bed, where a doctor administered an IV. Soon he was smiling, active, and playing with a Scooby-Doo doll and a toy Ferrari.Ìę

As the crew awaited its orders, I fell into conversation with Abdisamat Mohammed Mahmoud, a 25-year-old Somali with a long, angular face who was leaning against the rail, staring into the sea. Born and raised in Mogadishu—“I cannot remember a moment of peace there,” he said—he had fled Somalia as a teenager and lived for six years in refugee camps in northern Kenya, where he taught himself English and Arabic. He and his wife had left to find work in South Sudan and, in April 2015, when the new country became too unstable, moved on to Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, with a plan to cross the sea to Europe. Smugglers packed them on a truck for the grueling weeklong journey through the desert to Libya. When they reached Tripoli, he was separated from his wife and held in a basement cell for 51 days while he waited for his family in Nairobi to wire $500 for the crossing.

“They came in two nights ago, and they said, ‘Let’s go,’ ” he told me. “They said, ‘You will go to Italy on a very nice boat. No problems.’ And they told us it would take about ten hours, but I knew they were lying.” The truck pulled up to the beach, and the migrants were ordered out, at gunpoint. “Most of the Somalis had never seen the water until that night. The women were crying,” he said. “When I saw the boat, I was shocked. I thought, ‘They have cheated us.’ ” Unlike on the big fishing vessels, which usually have experienced captains, migrants aboard dinghies are generally told to aim for the Bouri Offshore Field and left to their own devices.Ìę

The migrants, Mahmoud said, had pushed out to sea at around five o’clock that morning. They carried a compass, which turned out to be broken, and had a half-liter bottle of water each. People cried, moaned, and prayed. “Some really thought that this was the last day in the world. I was telling them that we will be rescued, and that we will eat our breakfast in Italy,” he said.

They’d been afloat for about eight hours when Malshak Adano, a 32-year-old Christian fleeing the violence in northeast Nigeria, saw the Phoenix in the distance and began shouting and waving. Then, as Adano himself told me, “a man with a megaphone said, ‘Don’t be afraid, we’re giving you life jackets, we’re going to protect you.’ I thought, God has answered my prayer.”

The next morning we passed Malta. The MRCC had dispatched orders to sail for Pozzalo, on Sicily’s southern coast, and off-load our 77 passengers. A dozen Somalis crowded the starboard rail, silently absorbing their first view of Europe. Soon Mahmoud began peppering me with questions. Was Sicily an island? How far was it from the mainland? How long would it take to reach Rome? His first mission, he told me, was to find his wife. Once reunited they would make their way to Finland, which has a large Somali community, crossing the European Union’s generally porous borders. “I’ve heard that they have jobs there,” Mahmoud said.Ìę

In fact, while Scandinavian countries have strong economies and have generally been more receptive than other nations to migrants seeking political asylum, a backlash is growing: in 2012, a parliamentary aide suggested on her blog that migrants wear armbands, and last May, a Helsinki city councillor called for the “forced sterilization” of African males.

We arrived in Pozzalo late in the afternoon. Mahmoud peered uneasily over the gangplank at the handful of Italian policemen milling around the port. Then, resigned to the uncertainty that awaited him, sure at any rate that the worst was behind him, he walked down the plank and was ushered to a medical screening tent. “We’re grateful to all of you!” Mahmoud shouted as he left the boat.Ìę

What happened to the migrants next would depend largely on their resourcefulness, Gabriele Casini, a communications officer for Doctors Without Borders, told me as we stood on deck, watching. The Italian government is obliged by EU rules to keep them in the country until their applications for asylum are approved or rejected. “But they are not strict,” Casini said. “They don’t always take fingerprints, so the migrants hope to slip through and reach Germany or the Scandinavian countries.” The two of us watched Mahmoud board a bus to a reception camp and gave him a final wave. “In these centers they are free,” Casini told me. “They can take off.”Ìę

Perhaps Mahmoud would get to Finland after all.

As this latest group of refugees confronted their new lives in Europe, Europe continued to dither over how to deal with them. In June, EU leaders hashed out a modest scheme to share 60,000 Syrian and Eritrean asylum seekers over the next two years, though the United Kingdom refused to go along. Italy has warned that without a fair deal, it would start issuing temporary visas for migrants to travel beyond its borders. Meanwhile, as word of the dangers of the Mediterranean crossing spreads, migrants from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are increasingly gravitating to an alternate route, traveling overland to Western Europe through Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans.Ìę

“How pathetic is it that one motivated family can change something and all these entities don’t?” Catrambone asked me one afternoon back in Sliema, Malta. The voyage was over, and he’d picked me up at my hotel in his black Range Rover. As Buena Vista Social Club blared on the stereo, Catrambone navigated through the sun-splashed streets of this densely populated Maltese tourist town on our way to lunch at the Malta Royal Golf Club, a British-built oasis that dates back to the 1880s. It was a strange choice for a man who lately has dedicated himself to the refugees of the world. But Catrambone doesn’t make any secret of his love of the finer things in life. “I’m a member, I think, but I just haven’t had time to play golf,” he said as he dug into his jeans pocket and fumbled for his ID card at the entrance gate.Ìę

Over cappuccinos on a terrace, we talked about the future of his rescue operation. With donations flowing to MOAS, the Catram-bones are ready to step back and pass on the operation to the crew. “We kickstarted it, and now with these guys on their own, the model is complete,” he told me. “We’re saying, Take it over.”Ìę

For the moment, Catrambone has returned to running Tangiers International—he recently purchased Malta’s biggest aviation insurance broker, making Tangiers the insurer of Air Malta and several other airlines. Business remains in his blood, it’s clear, but he isn’t ruling out another humanitarian project.Ìę

“There is a level of civic-mindedness among millennials,” said Catrambone, one of the oldest members of that post-Gen-X generation. “They want free rice and open borders for everybody. They are thinking about solutions that benefit society as a whole, not themselves.”Ìę

He stood up and stretched his long frame. “When you reach this point in your life, you realize what you’re good at,” he said, displaying his customary mix of charming guilelessness and brash self-confidence. “I realized that I was good at doing the impossible.”

Contributing Editor Joshua Hammer’s book will be published by Simon and Schuster in April 2016.

The post Can a Young American Entrepreneur Succeed Where Europe Has Failed? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

In his two years and eight months as a hostage in Somalia, Michael Scott Moore spent his days and his nights confined to small, stifling cells, often in handcuffs. His guards, terrified that U.S. Navy SEALs would try to rescue him, moved him to a different safe house every couple of weeks. A 45-year-old native Californian with dual German and American citizenship, Moore was a passionate surfer who wrote an acclaimed book about the sport called ; now he watched his body grow soft from lack of exercise. During his captivity, Moore encountered 30 other hostages from a variety of countries. He was allowed to speak with them, and to his guards, who spoke little English and spent their days chewing qat, the mildly stimulating leaf to which many Somalis are addicted. But as the months turned into years, Moore grew increasingly desperate.¹

Mixed in with the boredom and isolation would have been moments of terror. Before dawn on January 25, 2012, a week after Moore was abducted while conducting research for a book about piracy, Navy SEALs cordoned off the nearby town of Galkayo and set up a staging area at the airport. The commandos climbed into helicopters and swooped into the village of Hiimo Gaabo, where two Western expatriates working for the Danish Demining Group—the American Jessica Buchanan and the Dutchman Poul Hagen Thisted—were being held by pirates. The SEALs killed all nine of the Somali captors, andÌę unharmed. Planning for the raid had taken weeks, and the SEALs, operating out of Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, hadn’t had enough time to locate Moore, who was just a few dozen miles away. The operation sent his captors into a panic and the dead pirates’ brethren into a rage. They threatened to invade Harardhere, the coastal town where Moore was being held, and kill him. Moore’s captors, from a rival clan, strengthened their protection force, adding about fifty armed men, and began shuttling him around every few days. His captors were “scared all the time,” a source says.

Moore’s captors reportedly didn’t beat or torture him, but he did suffer psychologically. A shows a distressed Moore, surrounded by masked men aiming Kalashnikovs at his head, pleading for help. Moore claimed that he hadn’t eaten for two days. “My life is terrible,” he said, and he was “terrified.” Eight months later, French commandos botched an attempt to rescue an intelligence agent, a man using the pseudonym Denis Allex, from an Al Shabaab stronghold southeast of Mogadishu. Allex, two French soldiers, and 17 militants .

In the many months that Moore was held, the skies over the area were often filled with U.S. drones and warplanes monitoring pirate activity. There would be no rescue for Moore, but he would gain his freedom. The nightmare ended on Tuesday, September 23, when, according to the Associated Press, Somali clan intermediaries hand-delivered a ransom of $1.6 million to his captors—a variation from the typical procedure of air dropping the money in by Cessna. It remains unclear who paid the money—whether it was the German government, Moore’s family, kidnapping insurance, or some combination. One security expert with tangential knowledge of the negotiations believes that the bulk was raised by Moore’s 75-year-old mother, Marlis Saunders, of Redondo Beach, California, who “passed the hat” around to friends, family members, and supporters. Saunders, sources say, not only was forced to deal with pirates holding her son in the bush half a world away, but was also likely thrust into the middle of a diplomatic kerfuffle between the German and U.S. governments, who have diametrically opposed views on ransoming hostages. An impasse over paying the kidnappers may have extended Moore’s captivity by months, if not years.

In the end, the pirates got their money, and Moore was driven to the airport in Galkayo, the lawless and violent town near which he was kidnapped in January 2012, and flown to Mogadishu. From Mogadishu he flew on to Nairobi, where he stayed at a private residence under heavy guard. Then Moore returned to Berlin, his home for eight years prior to his kidnapping, and reunited with his mother. If his post-release period follows the usual pattern, he is undergoing extensive debriefings by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and German intelligence—trying to identify his captors from photographs, and pointing out all the places where he was held.

Moore was the latest and among the most prominent of thousands of foreigners seized in Somalia during the past decade, most of them crew members on merchant vessels captured by pirates in a wave of hijackings that reached its peak between 2008 and 2010. Hostages in Somalia have included Western aid workers, holidaymakers, and journalists. The Canadian reporter Amanda Lindhout and her Australian colleague Nigel Brennan were seized in April 2008, and ransomed fifteen months later for $600,000. (Lindhout later wrote a book, , about her ordeal.) In October 2009, pirates , Paul and Rachel Chandler, from their yacht off the Seychelles, held them on board a hijacked merchant ship, then transferred them to the coastal town of Ceel Huur, near Harardhere, where Moore was also kept for much of his captivity. The Chandlers were released on November 14, 2010, after the payment of a ransom—reportedly as high as $1 million and as low as several hundred thousand dollars—patched together from friends and relatives.

Sadly, since ISIS has stepped onto the scene, the pirates’ modus operandi has come to seem downright old-fashioned—take the money, release the hostage. As the West has become all too aware, after the grim beheadings of American freelance journalists and and British aid workers and at the hands of ISIS, Islamist groups, including Somalia’s Al Shabaab movement and affiliates of Al Qaeda, tend to be far more brutal than the pirate gangs. Half a dozen hostages have died while prisoners of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, founded in Algeria in 2006; an AQIM splinter group beheaded the French hiker Ìęin Algeria on September 24 of this year.ÌęThe Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has executed thousands of Iraqi and Syrian prisoners in addition to the four Westerners it killed this year. As dehumanizing, humiliating, and physically and psychologically punishing as Moore's imprisonment was, few, if any, hostages have been known to die while in pirate captivity.

Moore’s release has cast fresh scrutiny on the media blackouts that often follow the kidnapping of high-profile Western hostages—most of the press remained silent about Moore throughout his captivity. During the 1980s, when the first wave of kidnappings of foreigners began in Lebanon, the Associated Press’s chief Middle East correspondent, Terry Anderson, Anglican Church representative Terry Waite, and dozens of other hostages received extensive press coverage. But over the past ten years, kidnapping has turned into a big business, with ransom, not political statements, now the primary goal of terrorist groups and criminal gangs. The kidnapping boom has given rise to a cottage industry of hostage negotiators and kidnapping and ransom (K&R) insurance companies who have a vested interest in expediting talks and keeping prices down.Ìę

Colin Freeman, the chief foreign correspondent for London’s Sunday Telegraph, a former hostage in Somalia, and the author of the book , wrote in a “by convincing the kidnappers that they have a very high value prize, who should not be lightly released.” In addition, media publicity can bring out “dodgy” middlemen who claim to have ties to the kidnappers, as well as rival groups looking for a cut. “The whole thing can end up in chaos,” Freeman wrote, “with no clear channels of communication, and no clear idea of whom, if anyone, a deal can be struck with.”

Acting under the advice of its negotiating team, The New York Times pleaded with media colleagues not to write about reporter David Rohde, who was while researching a book in Afghanistan in 2008. After being held for eight months, with almost no news coverage, Rohde escaped from a house in a tribal area of Pakistan and made his way to safety. The parents of Steven Sotloff, kidnapped in Syria in August 2013, fearful that his captors would learn about his dual United States–Israeli citizenship and murder him, managed to keep his abduction out of the news for a year. Sotloff’s captivity was revealed to the world only when he appeared at the end of the video of James Foley’s execution. In the end, ISIS killed him too.

Two years ago, when I began researching a piece for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű about Moore’s abduction, the , which had given Moore a grant to report from Somalia, as well as the German newsweekly , which had employed Moore on its English-language website, asked us to stop pursuing the story. David Rohde, who had been in touch with Moore’s mother, also requested that we respect the blackout. “The family and both news organizations think publicity at this time will increase the captors’ expectations and complicate negotiations,” he explained via email. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű respected the family’s wishes and published nothing. In 2013, the Daily Beast assigned a freelance journalist to go to Somalia to investigate the Moore kidnapping, but the reporter backed off when he became aware of the family’s objections. Updates on Moore’s abduction did appear from time to time in , the , , and , and on surfing websites like and , but for the most part, the blackout held.

As Moore’s captivity dragged on, however, some close to him began to question the wisdom of the policy. “The American government needs a kick in the ass,” one journalist who knows Moore well told me about a year into his captivity. Frustrated at the pace of the negotiations, and suspicious that the U.S. was blocking efforts to pay a ransom, he believed that a magazine piece would increase pressure for a rescue mission or a deal. Moore’s mother wavered as well. “There were moments when she seriously considered lifting the press ban,” says a source close to the family. At one point, the source says, Saunders contemplated making a public cry for help—possibly a video addressed to her son’s kidnappers. The FBI, sources say, was camped out at her home, monitoring the negotiations between her—or, more likely, a private security contractor representing her—and a Somali negotiator hired by the pirate gang. Those close to the situation speculate that the FBI talked her out of going public.

The American journalist , author of The World’s Most Dangerous Places and the founder of Somalia Report, a nonprofit website compiled by a staff of Somali journalists, has been a strong advocate of transparency in the Moore case and other kidnappings. Pelton claims that the average time hostages have spent in captivity in Somalia has risen from thirty days in 2008 to six months in 2012. Pelton and other advocates of transparency—including the family of Alan Henning, the aid worker recently murdered by ISIS in Syria—argue that family publicity campaigns and media coverage can put additional pressure on governments to secure the hostages’ release. Reg Henning, Alan’s brother, told the press that he and his family were “gagged” by the British government, which opposes ransoms, and prevented from talking about the case in public. But as Freeman points out, by the time Henning was shown on an ISIS video with a knife against his throat, any publicity campaign would have been far too late.

Somalia Report was the first publication to reveal the details of Moore’s kidnapping; it and continued to cover developments in the case. This, says Pelton, prompted an angry response from Der Spiegel, which demanded via e-mail that Somalia Report cease coverage of his kidnapping. “They wanted to cover up their connection to Moore and limit their liability,” alleges Pelton, who says that the newsmagazine scrubbed all of Moore’s articles on Somalia from its Web site after he was kidnapped. “They just want to protect themselves.” Der Spiegel executives flatly deny this; since 2009, they say, Moore had been only an infrequent freelance contributor to the online publication. The only reason Der Spiegel discouraged media coverage, they say, was to facilitate any negotiations and speed up his release.

One factor that may muddy the waters is whether the hostage has a K&R policy. One of the first things that kidnappers do after seizing a hostage, the security expert familiar with this case says, is to “troll for all the links and connections of the prisoner,” to determine his market value. K&R insurers typically provide about $1 million in coverage for travel in Somalia. This, says Pelton, can actually raise an insured prisoner’s perceived value—and drag out negotiations—since the captors figure that the family won’t be footing the entire bill. Similarly, a hostage’s employer can come into play. “If Moore were working for a little San Diego Web site,” says the security expert, “that would look a lot less attractive than working for a giant German media house.” Der Spiegel executives, however, insist that it held no K&R policy for Moore because he wasn’t on assignment for them.

The , which had given Moore a grant to travel in Somalia, wouldn’t comment on whether it provided K&R coverage for his trip; the organization will often require its grant recipients to carry insurance for travel to hazardous areas; it may underwrite those costs, but sometimes leaves it to the recipient to obtain the policy. (Full disclosure: I received a Pulitzer Center grant in 2014 for travel to northern Mali, an area still subject to occasional abductions by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and was asked to purchase my own insurance with the promise of reimbursement.)

Moore’s release has also cast new light on the debate among Western governments about paying ransom to terrorists. Because Moore was a citizen of both the United States and Germany, his kidnapping drew the two governments into a rare and awkward collaboration. “It’s complicated enough when there’s one nation involved,” says a security specialist with some knowledge of the negotiations. “Getting two countries to coordinate their actions is a total nightmare.”

Especially when the two nations have maintained opposite policies toward paying ransoms. In 2003, in the first of many such cases, a German diplomat carried about $6 million cash in suitcases on a plane to Mali to who had been held for months by the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, a precursor to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. The German diplomat turned the cash over to a Malian hostage negotiator, who delivered it to the kidnappers in a German diplomatic vehicle. “They denied it at the time, but everybody knew they did it,” Vicki Huddleston, then the American ambassador to Mali, told me a few months back. The U.S. government, by contrast, has always maintained that it won’t make deals with terrorists. (There have been exceptions, however: last May, U.S. Army soldier Bowe Bergdahl was released by the Taliban in Afghanistan in exchange for the freeing of five prisoners held in Guantánamo.)

As the Moore case unfolded, the two governments were in regular communication; an FBI agent attached to the American embassy in Berlin would likely have attended meetings in a basement crisis room in the German Foreign Ministry, along with representatives from Germany’s intelligence services, the defense ministry, and the interior ministry. (U.S. Embassy officials wouldn’t comment on the presence of the FBI at the meetings.) The security expert I spoke with believes that the U.S. government may have pushed Germany to refuse the kidnappers’ demands, putting a far greater burden on Moore’s mother to scramble to raise money and thus drawing out the process.

State Department officials won’t comment on that allegation or anything regarding this case; they emphasize, however, that, while it’s impossible to prove, the no-ransom policy may have protected more Americans from being kidnapped abroad. “Our policy is clear: we make no concessions to individuals or groups holding our citizens hostage,” a State Department official told me. “The U.S. government condemns hostage taking and kidnapping under all circumstances and would caution that ransom payments made to any hostage taker or kidnapper encourage future instances of kidnapping for ransom.” However, as ISIS has proved, seizing Americans—and sometimes killing them—can have a shock value beyond, say, seizing a Dutchman or a German. While publicly denying that they pay ransoms, Germany and other European nations often quietly accede to terrorists’ demands, because they consider the alternative—allowing their citizens to be murdered, often brutally—to be far worse.

Moore, who may well know exactly who paid his ransom, has not spoken publicly about his ordeal, and he has asked his friends not to talk as well. “He is hoping to do his own version of what happened to him and I respect him in that,” says one of half a dozen friends reached by șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű who declined to talk further about Moore for this story.

So what was a surfing writer doing in Somalia in the first place? Moore certainly wasn’t drawn there by the waves: the shark-infested and lawless waters off the Somali coast have never qualified as a surfer’s paradise. “You find several beach breaks along the coast out of Mogadishu, but it’s not safe to go here at the moment,” with dry understatement. Rather, Moore was intrigued by a different coastal phenomenon—piracy. The subject was a natural for the peripatetic writer, who has long been drawn to gonzo adventures, bizarre subcultures, and, occasionally, breaking news. In the fall of 2009, when Moore first traveled to Africa to begin looking at Somali pirates in earnest, the story had never been hotter.

Moore was born on June 5, 1969, and spent his childhood and teenage years in Redondo Beach, where he attended Mira Costa High School. He later he moved to San Francisco, where he began his career as a writer, including a stint as a theater critic for the San Francisco Weekly. In 2003, he published a novel, . It was a semiautobiographical story, set in the 1980s in a fictitious Southern California beach town, about a restless teenager’s last months before his death at the hands of a friend. Two years later, he moved to Berlin to write. (Moore’s joint American-German citizenship was acquired through a relative.) He rented an apartment in Prenzlauer Berg, in the former East Berlin, at the time a shabby but gentrifying neighborhood popular among American expatriates. And he began translating and contributing freelance pieces to the English-language page of Der Spiegel's website, founded by three expatriate freelance journalists.

Moore also led an active social life. He played in a poker game with other Berlin-based American writers, and organized a Stammtisch—a “regular table”—each month at Osswald, a bar in Prenzlauer Berg with sturdy wooden tables, wurst-heavy German cuisine, and cheap beer and wine. The Stammtisch drew students, writers, and other expatriates and grew into something of a Berlin phenomenon. “Mike is a gregarious guy, and establishing a social network was important for him,” says an acquaintance. (On the night Moore was released, his Stammtisch regulars gathered at Osswald and raised a glass to him.) In 2006 he won a Fulbright journalism fellowship, awarded to promising Americans with a special interest in Germany. He started a blog called Radio Free Mike, in which he wrote about whatever captured his imagination: the Holocaust, Frank Zappa, Blackbeard the pirate, and Israel’s blockade of 23 surfboards donated to a Palestinian surf club by the U.S. nonprofit Gaza Surf Relief.Ìę

In July 2007, Moore traveled to Munich for Spiegel Online to cover the Surf Open, held on a tributary of the Isar River at the most popular river-surfing spot in Europe. “Except for the landlocked heat and the freshwater smells, the Munich Surf Open seemed no different from a small-surf competition in Malibu or Huntington Beach,” Moore .

“He had found these surfers in Munich who surf on the river, and it fascinated him,” says one Berlin acquaintance. Moore landed a book contract to roam the world—from the north coast of Germany to Cuba to Gaza—exploring the global surfing subculture. “He was really trying to dig into this thing,” says the acquaintance. “Surfing was something he deeply missed, living in Berlin.”

Sweetness and Blood came out in July 2010 to wide acclaim. “Moore and a robust wet suit have boldly gone where only serious and often seriously unhinged dudes have gone before, mapping out a fresh, unexpected cartography of the waves,” . The Washington Post “a lively global jaunt that will offer some surprises even for the heartiest of wave-riding experts.” Moore promoted his book with gentle humor: “Everybody join the Sweetness and Blood page! The book is #3 in Amazon’s ‘Water Sports’ category, which of course amuses me,” he wrote on Facebook just after publication. “Any urge to praise the book might be satisfied by leaving an enthusiastic five-star review on Amazon in advance of the Christmas season,” he wrote on his Facebook site in December 2010. “Any urge to criticize could be turned to good use with a private message indicating typos. There’s time to correct them in the next edition!”

By then, Moore was thinking ahead to his next book. in June 2010, he described a trip taken to East Africa the previous November, at the height of the piracy epidemic. Somali pirates captured 42 vessels in the Gulf of Aden in 2008, 35 in 2009, and about three dozen in 2010. In a single three-month period between April and June 2010, according to a report by the , a British security company, Somali pirates captured 317 foreign hostages—the most of any nation on earth. (According to the International Maritime Bureau, armed seizures dropped to just 14 in 2012—and fell to zero in 2013—after ships began traveling in protected convoys and carrying armed guards. Still, 37 foreigners from three previous merchant vessel kidnappings are believed to remain in captivity in Somalia). , Moore investigated the U.S. government’s deployment of naval vessels off the Somali coast, ostensibly to protect commercial shipping but also, he suggested, to fight the terrorist group Al Shabaab. The piracy project, Moore told the Times, “has the same appeal to me as the surf book—it has the same clash between hard fact and clichĂ©d mythology. It would also involve a great deal of travel.”

Moore became interested in the case of the , a German-flagged vessel that had been captured by ten Somali pirates in April 2010. After its captain issued an SOS, Dutch naval forces boarded the Taipan, captured the hijackers, and turned them over to German authorities. In November 2010, Moore covered the trial in Hamburg for Spiegel Online—the pirates were given two- to seven-year prison terms. There, he met a German translator who had lived in Somalia and who encouraged him to visit Galmudug, a lawless autonomous region in central Somalia. “It all started at the trial,” says a longtime acquaintance. Moore lined up a grant from the Pulitzer Center in Washington, D.C.ÌęČčČÔ»ć, around New Year’s 2012, flew to Nairobi.²

Mike Pflanz, an Africa correspondent for London’s Daily Telegraph, met Moore at a coffee shop in a Nairobi shopping mall during the first week of January. Pflanz had covered the kidnapping of Paul and Rachel Chandler, the British couple seized by pirates while cruising around the world on their yacht. “He struck me quickly as someone who was quite well-informed and keen,” Pflanz recalled. “He had done enough research, he could rattle off the names of pirates. He knew what he was talking about.” Moore also seemed aware of the risk. “He asked me whether I had experience moving with private security,” says Pflanz, who replied that he had traveled in Somalia only with United Nations escorts. “But he was not gung-ho, and seemed to be conscious of the dangers.” Pflanz put Moore in touch with Abdi Guled, his Mogadishu-based stringer. “He asked for my advice on his already planned trip to Galmudug and I strongly advised him against that decision by e-mail,” Guled, now the AP’s Mogadishu bureau chief, told me. Guled says that he warned Moore of the “high risk” of kidnapping. “But he said he’d still go. Then he discontinued our communication.”

Galkayo, a sunbaked commercial center of half a million people in central Somalia, is a divided city. The north belongs to Puntland, an autonomous region dominated by the Darod clan. South Galkayo is the capital of Galmudug, described by Pelton as “a snaky little faux republic,” populated by the Darod’s traditional clan rivals and sometime enemies, the Hawiye. “It’s a violent place, with political assassinations and random gunfights,” says Jay Bahadur, a Nairobi-based writer and consultant who traveled to the region five years ago to research a book about piracy. Moore and a fellow journalist hired a fixer in Berlin, a Somali expatriate who had arranged security for two similar trips to the region. The fixer, a Sa'ad from the south, accompanied the men as they conducted interviews with Galmudug officials and reformed pirates, and may have visited Hobyo, a coastal town and pirate enclave where plans were being hatched to build a port.³

It was on the Galkayo airport road that Moore was taken. Near the same spot where the Danish Demining Group team was kidnapped the year before, a reported fifteen men stopped Moore’s vehicle and pulled him from the car. According to Pelton, the kidnappers turned Moore over to a pirate commander named Ali Dulaaye, from the Hawiye’s Sa’ad clan, which, with its rival Saleebaan clan, dominates the hostage-taking business in Galmudug. (Saleebaan kidnappers had abducted Buchanan and Thisted.) Moore was taken to the coastal town of Hobyo. Less than one week later, Navy SEAL Team Six, which had killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011, rescued Buchanan and Thisted and killed their captors. The raid threw Moore’s guards into a panic that never subsided. “They were always afraid of an attack,” said a Somali source. “They were afraid of the Saleebaan clan and the U.S.” Along with the fear came anger. The kidnappers initially demanded a ransom of $20 million—an unprecedented sum for a single hostage—as compensation for the extra militiamen they were forced to hire to protect Moore. They threatened to turn Moore over to Al Shabaab if they didn’t get their money.

Through his Somali contacts, Pelton tried to persuade the kidnappers to lower their demands. “I said, ‘He’s not a big fish, he’s a freelance journalist. You’re not going to sell him to Al Shabaab, that’s bullshit, they don’t buy hostages, and besides there is no Al Shabaab in this corner of Somalia.’Ìę” (The Islamic rebels are concentrated around Mogadishu and the south.) Moore was shuttled to a series of huts along the coast, then moved forty miles inland, to a desolate, heat-blasted region of scrub populated by desert nomads and outlaws. Pelton stayed in touch with the kidnappers. “For a while they said, ‘He’s in a hole, being kept away from the drones’ . . . He was not being treated like a normal hostage.”⁴

Meanwhile, negotiations for Moore’s release crept along. According to the security consultant with knowledge of the case, all talks with the Somali pirates went through a single channel. If Moore had been covered by a K&R policy, a “response team” from the insurance company would have handled the negotiations. But this was not the case, the consultant says. Moore’s mother was guided by private security experts— evidence, he believes, that Moore was not carrying insurance. Those expert negotiators would have kept Saunders “front and center” with the pirates, emphasizing the message that the pirates were bankrupting an old woman with little funds.

“I think she did quite a bit of this,” says the consultant. “I know that she took a leading role.” If the process fit the usual pattern, the FBI would have provided her with a regular flow of information, including medical updates, “proof of life” videos, and intelligence gleaned about Moore’s movements. Both the feds and the hostage negotiations would likely have warned her to deflect all media attention and keep his abduction a secret.

“Hey folks 
 spoke to someone in the know, and the ‘be quiet’ thing is real and useful,” a friend of Moore’s posted on his Facebook page in late 2012. “Please, to protect our friend’s safety, do not mention his name or personal info online—here, Twitter, you-name-it. I have it on good authority that there are knowledgeable people working feverishly to bring him safely home, and there is concern that too much buzz will interfere with that. If you’ve posted about him, please consider deleting or editing your posts to remove information that would identify him.” Some of Moore’s friends took issue with the enforced silence. “Guys, do you think it still makes sense to stay quiet?” challenged one. “I mean, it’s been ten months.” The other responded: “We’re looking to his mom for guidance. She says please stay quiet. That’s what I’m doing.”

Though the details of the talks are still not known, Pelton says that, last year, the ransom price was whittled down to between $3 million and $5 million. Talks then stalled, and Moore’s conduit made almost no contact with the pirates. Pelton says that he had his last conversation with the pirates in June 2014. “I asked them, ‘Why are you still holding Moore?’ They were very angry with everybody—his mother, the ransom negotiator. They said they had been lied to, and that they were done ‘playing the fucking game.’Ìę” Pelton asked if he could speak to Moore. “They said ‘No, we want money. We want the goddamn money. We’ve been holding him too long.’Ìę”

By late summer, the Somalis had allegedly tired of Moore and remained on edge about a rescue attempt. In September, they settled on a ransom of $1.6 million, less than a tenth of their original asking price. “I don’t think they’d be happy with that after two and a half years,” says Jay Bahadur, the author and consultant. The pirates had been paying usurious rates to borrow money to supply themselves with qat and to pay those extra guards, and they also would have owed their negotiator either a percentage of the ransom or a flat fee—usually between $30,000 and $40,000. Divided among a dozen or more members of the gang, says Bahadur, the $1.6 million payoff “was an extremely poor result.”

Moore’s Facebook page lit up with greetings and expressions of concern from friends around the world. “How did you stay sane? How did you keep hope? How did you cope?” asked one. “Too many of us with too many questions—I guess a book is in order—so glad you are back.”

Moore responded with gratitude, making it clear that he would answer all those questions in good time. “You’re all wonderful. I’m overwhelmed and still bewildered,” he wrote. “My friends here also know better than to talk with journalists. There are a lot of rumors circulating, but I can tell the story myself.” Almost immediately after his release he issued a public statement requesting privacy: “Right now I have to recover my wits and spend time with family and friends. I hope journalists will respect that. The support from everyone has been terrific and I knew nothing about it in Somalia.” șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű sought comment from Moore via Facebook and through several friends, but he declined to respond. (His corrections, sent to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű in March 2015, are reflected in this version of the story.)

His captors, meanwhile, were in less of a mood to celebrate. Two days after his release, the pirate gang that seized him got into an argument about the ransom. , one faction accused the other of cutting a private deal with the negotiator and collecting more than its fair share. A gunfight broke out, and three pirates, including the commander, were shot dead. Given the horror that they inflicted on Moore for nearly a thousand days, few would be surprised if he regarded the killings as poetic justice.

Notes

1. Moore told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű that he did not spend almost all his time in silence. Over the course of his captivity, he encountered 30 other hostages, from various countries, in various settings. He was allowed to speak with them, and to his guards.
2. Moore maintains that he did not end his freelance association with Spiegel Online in 2012, as this story originally reported.
3. Moore arranged a fixer in advance, not after he arrived in Somalia, as this article had stated. He and a fellow journalist, who traveled with him, hired a Somali expatriate in Berlin who had arranged security for two similar trips to the same region. The fixer was not a Darod from Somalia's north, but a Sa'ad from the south. He had never lived in North America.
4. Moore was not held in handcuffs, as originally reported, except for photos and videos sent out by the pirates.

The post The Long Captivity of Michael Scott Moore appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

THE GENTLY CURVING COAST of False Bay, just south of Cape Town, is one of South Africa’s most

South Africa's False Bay

South Africa’s False Bay

Craig Bovim's mangled hand after the attack

Craig Bovim’s mangled hand after the attack

Bovim today on his sailboat, Synove

Bovim today on his sailboat, Synove

Map of False Bay

Map of False Bay

endangered sharks

The creatures in peril are not us the sharks themselves; biologists think populations have declined between 60 and 90 percent in the past 50 years.

popular tourist destinations, a 24-mile sweep of sandy beaches framed by the aquamarine Indian Ocean and high, ­verdant cliffs that extend all the way south to the Cape of Good Hope. Long, rolling ­breakers and temperate water attract an abundance of surfers, snorkelers, and swimmers, especially on summer weekends. False Bay also draws a population of several hundred great white sharks, Carcharadon carcharias, which ­during the southern winter congregate around Seal Island, three and a half miles offshore, to feed on seal pups. In summer, when the water ­temp­erature rises to near 70 and the bay fills with migrating yellow­tail, cod, and ­smaller species of shark, the predators gravitate ­toward the beaches to eat.

For years, swimmers and sharks shared the water with few incidents. But over the past decade, a series of attacks around the bay has upset that equilibrium. In 2004, community leaders responded by setting up the Shark Spotters Program, an early-warning system intended to give swimmers time to escape from the giant predators. Despite their ­efforts, 2010 proved to be a deadly year.

On a cloudless afternoon last October, I joined spotter Agnes Murema at her perch in the lush hills several hundred feet above Muizenberg beach, a popular surfing spot in the northwestern corner of False Bay. A stocky black woman in her mid-thirties, she was wearing a pale blue T-shirt, a windbreaker, and jeans. “When I started four years ago, I used to see one shark in five months,” she told me as she peered through polarized sunglasses from a tin-roofed booth. “But last season, I’d see four in my morning shift.”

Down below, black flags were flying at a stretch of beach called Surfers Corner—an ­indication that the water was too murky for decent spotting. Green flags indicate clear water; white flags bearing an image of a shark are raised and a siren goes off after one has been sighted. Murema said black flags were also flying on January 12, 2010, when Lloyd Skinner, a Zimbabwean businessman on holiday, stood adjusting his goggles in the chest-high surf about 100 yards off Fish Hoek beach, a few miles southwest of Muizenberg. One eyewitness would later describe seeing “a ­giant shadow the size of a dinosaur” darken the water. Then the shadow turned corporeal and slammed into Skinner from behind.

“It had the man’s body in its mouth, and his arm was in the air,” beachgoer Phyllis Mc­Cartain told the Cape Times newspaper. “Then the sea was full of blood.” Four rescue boats and a helicopter searched for Skinner for two days but turned up only his goggles. The spotter at Fish Hoek had missed the shark in the murky waters. “He saw the blood in the water, then realized something had happened,” Murema told me. “Suddenly, there was nobody in the water, and he thought, What’s going on?” That spotter isn’t working anymore, she said. He couldn’t bear the possibility of something happening again.

Something did happen again eight months later, 80 miles to the southeast in Shark ­Alley, an area of dense shark populations just off Dyer Island. A barren, guano-covered rock five miles off the mainland, Dyer is home to a population of 60,000 Cape fur seals that draw hundreds of great white sharks every winter. On September 21, Khanyisile ­Momoza, a 29-year-old fisherman, was harvesting abalone illegally with a dozen friends. He’d been poaching near Dyer for years, but on this morning a great white seized him. “There was screaming and crying,” one poacher later said. “We just swam. We didn’t look back.”

Three other people were victims of sharks in the area last year, including a 21-year-old woman snorkeling in Sodwana Bay, south of Mozambique; a 35-year-old surfer whose feet and legs were bitten near Durban; and a young bodyboarder in Strand, in the northeast corner of False Bay, who was nipped on the leg in waist-deep water. This past January, at Second Beach, on South Africa’s Wild Coast, a tiger shark took a chunk out of 16-year-old competitive surfer Zama Ndamase’s leg. He tried to ride a wave back to shore but bled to death before he could be rescued.

Several of these attacks, spotters such as Murema point out, have one thing in common: their proximity to sites where shark-cage diving occurs. Operators of diving boats around both Seal Island and Dyer Island use chum—mashed sardines and fish oil, minced tuna, and shark liver—and bait, including fish chunks or shark heads, to lure great whites into eyeball-to-eyeball encounters with tourists, who are lowered in protective steel cages into the bloody melee.

There’s no proven link between shark diving, chumming, and attacks, and the available statistics can be as murky as the ­waters of False Bay. But even as the number of attacks has declined in South Africa over the past two decades—51 people bitten between 1990 and 1999 (seven fatally), and only 34 the following decade (six fatally), attacks in some of the regions where cage diving takes place have gone up. On the Cape Peninsula, especially in False Bay, and near Dyer Island, attacks have doubled, from six in the 1990s, when the business was getting started, to 12 in the 2000s. Murema isn’t the only one to posit a connection between blood and guts being tossed overboard and the behavior of the sharks off Western Cape’s shores.

“If you’re jumping into the water next to meat that’s being dumped,” says George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File, a research group at the Florida Museum of Natural History, “you’d be hard-pressed not to fear for your life.”

IN GENERAL, 2010 was a scary year to be in the water. According to the ISAF, 79 attacks occurred worldwide last year—the highest number in a decade, up 25 percent from 2009’s 63 attacks, which is also the yearly average over the past decade. As with previous years, the greatest number—32—took place right here in North America, with Florida leading the way. The state’s Volusia County—whose year-round concentrations of surfers and swimmers and its proximity to the baitfish-laden Ponce de Leon Inlet have made it the world’s shark-bite capital—held on to its title, with six people bitten, mostly by smaller sharks.

Burgess, a leading shark biologist, is quick to point out that this highly publicized jump may have no significance. “The rate of ­attacks is not necessarily going up,” he says. Rather, the human population is growing, as is the number of people who engage in aquatic sports. You’ve still got a much higher chance of getting stung by a jellyfish or injured by your own surfboard than you do of being bitten by a shark.

What did spike the numbers in 2010 were attacks in two places: From January to May, six people were bitten by an unknown ­species of shark off Vietnam’s Quy Nhon beach, a ­series of incidents whose causes remain a mystery. And last December, a terrifying cluster of strikes rocked the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, on the Red Sea. Cluster attacks are phenomena in which sharks seem to go berserk, striking repeatedly over a period of days. Such attacks aren’t new: the first reported incident, which inspired Peter Benchley’s 1974 book, Jaws, occurred in July 1916 on the Jersey Shore, where great whites killed four people and wounded another over a 12-day period.

The Sharm el-Sheikh attacks began on December 1, when ocean whitetip sharks mauled four Russian and Ukrainian tourists in a single afternoon. Four days later, sharks tore the arm and leg off a 70-year-old German woman, who quickly bled to death. Egyptian authorities closed a 30-mile stretch of Red Sea coast to swimmers, and shark researchers, including Burgess, converged on the scene. “It was probably the most unusual shark incident of my career,” he said. “Five attacks occurring in four, five days in almost the same location is really rare. It means that something is up.”

As the investigators interviewed witnesses, they pinpointed some obvious factors. Area fishermen had noted an absence of tuna last year, which may have left the sharks hungry. And the close proximity of the Red Sea’s deep water and its beaches means that sharks and tourists swim near each other. But biologists also found that a cargo vessel from New Zealand had been illegally dumping sheep carcasses throughout November, livestock that had died in transport to Egypt for the Islamic festival of Eid al-Adha. The flesh would have drawn more sharks from the open ocean.

Incidents like this—as well as a spate of attacks in the early 2000s in Recife, Brazil, in which bull sharks bit surfers near the outflow of a chicken-processing plant—raise the issue of whether food in the water makes swimmers more likely to become a meal. When sharks attack with more frequency in a certain area, it most often has to do with changes in oceanographic conditions—increased salinity, warmer water, or loss of food sources—that push them into closer contact with people. Humans are not natural prey for sharks, and neither are sheep or cattle. But if there’s meat in the water, and you’re there too, it’s a bad combination. “There is no question,” says Burgess, “that continual feeding at a site will condition sharks, and then what you have is a nonnatural situation, not only in levels of abundance but in behavior.”

At the center of this question is the shark-cage-diving industry. It originated in South Africa in the early 1990s when commercial fishermen in Gansbaai, a mostly Afrikaans-speaking town 80 miles east of Cape Town, decided there was more money to be made from observing great whites than from killing them. (They borrowed the technique from the 1971 documentary Blue Water, White Death, whose makers, including author Peter Matthiessen, pioneered the use of shark-viewing cages.) Two decades later, ticket sales bring an annual 300 million rand—about $43 million—to Gansbaai and nearby Kleinbaai.

Now it’s a popular activity around the world. You can go cage diving in the Bahamas; off Isla Guadalupe, Mexico, 160 miles from the west coast of Baja California; and off the North Shore of Oahu. You can go in Australia, where 25 percent of tourist dollars spent around Cairns flow to the $16 million industry. But cage diving’s spread has also caused a backlash against the use of chum and bait. Florida banned chumming in 2001. Northern California’s Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, 27 miles west of San Francisco, outlawed it seven years later. Off Isla Guadalupe, a 2008 ban on chumming led some operators to sink their cages deeper to place them closer to the sharks; air is supplied through hoses, and neither scuba gear nor dive certification is required.

In May 2010, the backlash spread to Maunalua Bay in Oahu, where 300 angry people showed up at a town-hall meeting to protest plans to start a cage-diving business there. Chumming has been illegal in state waters—which extend three miles offshore—since 2009, but activists say that enforcement has been lax, and they want the laws tightened. They’ve collected YouTube videos showing outfitters putting “big hunks of meat into the sharks’ mouths,” says Gene Ward, the district representative to Hawaii’s state legislature.

Still, nobody can answer the key question: Does chum turn sharks into man-eaters?

NOWHERE IS THE CONFLATION of sharks, food, and people under greater scrutiny than in cage diving’s birthplace. Sharks are an obsession in watersports-crazed South Africa, and attack tales are ingrained in people’s minds.

“Every beachgoer in Cape Town knows somebody who’s been attacked,” says Lewis Gordon Pugh, a long-distance swimmer who was the first person to swim around the Cape of Good Hope, in 2004. Pugh has observed a “dramatic increase in shark sightings” off the Cape Peninsula since he worked as a lifeguard there in the 1990s. During his Good Hope swim, he says, “this enormous beast swam beneath me. I’ve never seen anything move as quickly.” Days later, a teenager lost his leg at the hip to a great white off Muizenberg beach. Two years after that, one of Pugh’s closest friends, Achmat Hassiem, also lost his leg to a great white, off Sunrise Beach, also in Muizenberg. After that, says Pugh, “I stopped swimming around Cape Town.”

Pugh says he’s not qualified to judge whether chumming has led to more attacks, but the practice makes him queasy. “We must respect an animal that has been here since the dinosaurs, an animal vital to the health of the ecosystem,” he says. “You would not go to the Serengeti and throw meat out of a Land Rover to get leopards and lions to come closer.”

That’s exactly what they do with sharks in South Africa, as I saw for myself in late October. For 1,100 rand, or about $170, I booked a dive tour with White Shark Projects, one of half a dozen operators based in Kleinbaai, a booming mainland community within sight of Dyer Island and Shark Alley.

My choice wasn’t random. I had heard stories that a lack of regulation pervades the business, and White Shark was at the center of the controversy. In April 2008, Shark Team, the company’s 35-foot catamaran—a boat I’d been out on once before, for a short news­paper travel piece—had been involved in a fatal accident in which three tourists, including a 33-year-old American newlywed named Chris Tallman, drowned in frigid ­waters off Dyer when a giant wave hit the boat. Prosecutors are expected to decide this summer whether to charge Shark Team’s captain, Grant Tuckett, with culpable homi­cide, the equivalent of manslaughter. But Shark Team was still in operation, taking hundreds of tourists a week to the spot where the three men had died.

The morning started with a short briefing about great whites, the dominant species off Dyer. Ranging in three distinct populations—one in the northern Pacific, another around Australia and New Zealand, and a third off the coast of South Africa—Carcharadon carcharias is uniquely designed for stalking and killing prey, with an acute sense of smell, sharp eyesight, and electromagnetic sensory cells that allow it to detect the faint electrical charges produced by all animals. Its 3,000 teeth—lower ones for grasping, upper for cutting—and detachable upper mandible give it unequaled biting power. And its high metabolism makes it an insatiable feeder: one researcher in False Bay watched a great white devour three Cape fur seals in a single night, though studies have also shown that it can survive for a month without eating.
The sky was overcast and the air a brisk 55 degrees as a hydraulic lift lowered Shark Team into the harbor. Three other boats were preparing to go out, and two dozen tourists were shivering as they disembarked from vessels that had just returned from a dawn trip.

As we motored past Danger Point peninsula and into the open Atlantic, three crew members tossed bucketfuls of shark livers and blood into the boat’s wake, producing an odoriferous slick that would, they hoped, lure predators to Shark Team. The crew insisted that this wasn’t food but merely a stimulant for the sharks’ sense of smell.

The waves were rough, the boat was tossed violently, and most of the passengers—about a dozen Britons, Swiss Germans, Indians, and Spaniards—got seasick. Still, we were all ­excited as the crew lay anchor off Dyer Island in a stiff, salty breeze and began securing the shark cage—a rectangular contraption with compartments for five divers—to the starboard aft of the boat.

As I changed into my wetsuit, I thought back to my conversation with Sarah Tallman, the widow of Chris Tallman, who had phoned her in San Francisco the night before his death. “Chris was so excited about diving that he didn’t know if he could fall asleep,” she’d said. On the morning of April 13, Tallman and Casey LaJeunesse, his best man, had just finished cage diving and were changing out of their wetsuits when a 30-foot wave crashed off Shark Team’s bow. The boat flipped, trapping both men underneath the vessel. Nobody noticed until rescue boats got the passengers back to shore that Tallman and LaJeunesse were missing. A young Norwegian man also drowned.

White Shark Projects’ owner and director, Charmaine Beukes, insisted that “all safety measures” had been in place when the ship went over. But the South African Maritime Safety Authority released an accident report that charged Tuckett—whose certificate of competence had expired five months earlier—with “poor judgment” for ignoring inclement weather and picking an anchorage spot notorious for heavy swells. Nobody in the crew had undergone rescue training, none of the passengers were wearing life vests, and the company never compiled a manifest. Sarah Tallman filed a multimillion-dollar negligence lawsuit, which has been dragged out in legal procedures. No court date has been set.

The deaths of Tallman and LaJeunesse were on my mind as I prepared for the dive, but they vanished soon enough as I got ready to go face-to-face with a great white. I climbed into the submerged cage, wincing in the frigid water. Then I pulled the mask over my face and waited, head above water and knees thrust up awkwardly onto a platform three feet below the surface.

Minutes later, I heard a cry from the deck: “Down!” Thrilled, I ducked beneath the water. Through the murk I could see the bullet head of a great white, about eight feet long, swimming directly toward me. I instinctively hurled myself against the back of the cage, even though I’d been assured that the steel bars would protect me. The shark clamped its jaws around a large tuna head dangling from a rope, only to have it yanked away. It lunged; again the bait was snatched away. Then it disappeared and all went quiet. Soon came another shout from the deck: “Down!” The shark reappeared, lunging again for the bait.

This game continued for a half-hour before the shark gave up and vanished. I stayed in the water another 15 minutes, freezing but thoroughly exhilarated. As we bobbed in the turbulent swells, I counted five other shark-diving boats in the vicinity. The water was slick with chum.

THE CAVE-DIVING EXCURSION gave me more than my share of excitement, but questions nagged. Was it worth it? Or was I setting someone up for a munching next week?

In South Africa, the leading campaigner against cage diving is Craig Bovim, a sailor and surfer from the Cape Peninsula who owns a maintenance company. He met me for lunch at the False Bay Yacht Club in Simon’s Town, where his 31-foot sloop, Synove, was dry-docked for seasonal repairs. A rugged man in his early forties, rakishly decked out in a Crocodile Dundee–style bush hat, Bovim seems to bear no signs of the attack that almost killed him—that is, until you notice the reddish scars curving up both of his arms. The shark took out the main artery in his right wrist, destroyed the tendons, and left him with a virtually useless right arm. We sat in an outdoor cafĂ© in front of the clubhouse, and as we began to talk, an obviously inebriated eavesdropper looked up from his beer.

“Tell me,” he said. “Were you taken by a shark?”

“Yeah,” Bovim responded. He knew what was coming.

“What’s it like?”

“It’s recommendable.”

“Is it a thrilling experience?”

“Not in the moment, but you’d be surprised how much better you feel afterward.”

On Christmas Eve, 2002, Bovim had been diving for lobsters off Scarborough Beach, on the Atlantic side of the Cape Peninsula. He noticed a dark form hovering above him. “A massive moving slab,” he said. The shark, a great white that looked to be about 13 feet long, followed him, then disappeared.

Bovim was relieved—but only for a few moments. “I stuck my head out of the water and saw this fin bearing down on me from 30 yards away,” he said. “I saw this pink mouth coming at me at speed over the top of the water.” Bovim screamed as the shark slammed into him, taking his arms in its jaws. He could hear the crunching of his bones as ribbons of blood flowed from its mouth. “He was dragging me, I was underneath,” Bovim recalled. “It was incredibly intimate. I gave in to the sensation, feeling my life draining from me.”

Then Bovim thought of his four-year-old son and was filled with an intense ­desire to live. He butted the shark’s nose with his mask, wrenched his shredded right arm from its mouth, and freed his left one. The shark swam off, leaving Bovim—weighed down by a diving belt—to sink to the ocean floor. Managing to undo the belt’s buckle with the exposed bone of his right hand, he clawed his way to the surface, where a breaker washed him up on the beach. Surfers summoned a doctor, who shot him up with morphine and had him airlifted to a trauma center. He’d lost five pints of blood, and he ­ultimately underwent 14 operations to reattach nerves, muscles, and tendons. Nine months later, he was back on his board.

Over the next two years, Bovim noticed an upswing in attacks in False Bay. In September 2003, a huge great white killed a 19-year-old surfer at the Dunes, a popular surf area. The next April, in the same Muizenberg beach attack that Pugh mentioned, a shark bit off the leg of a young surfing buddy of Bovim’s; the 16-year-old went into cardiac arrest but was revived after 20 minutes. (His severed leg was found a day later, still attached to the surfboard leash.) Seven months later, a 78-year-old woman was doing her morning backstroke 20 yards off Fish Hoek beach when a 20-foot great white devoured her. Only her red swim cap was recovered.

Bovim was alarmed. Though attacks in South Africa were down, the most recent were concentrated around Seal Island, where cage-diving operations were in full swing. “I thought there might be some connection,” Bovim says. He consulted biologists and studied the research of the late University of Stellenbosch professor Deon Sadie, who suspected that shark diving was conditioning sharks to associate humans with food. Sadie had examined footage taken by film crews around Dyer and Seal islands, which included close-ups of great whites with their jaws wide open. Frequently, he’d learned, boat operators helped film crews obtain these shots—used for ads, movies, and documentaries—by feeding the predators raw meat.

“The bait gets taken, and there’s nobody from the government policing it,” Bovim says. “You’ve got a dangerous animal, yet you disobey common sense. All this is overlooked because there are big bucks attached.”

In June 2005, Bovim sent a letter to the minister of environmental affairs and tourism—signed by Olympic yachtsmen, surfing champions, marine biologists, and other prominent South Africans—calling for a ban on chumming. “These practices are unnecessary and have ecological implications that are largely unknown,” the letter stated. When no action was taken, he formed an anti-cage-diving organization, Shark Concern Group. Zolile Nqayi, director of communications for the Department of Environmental Affairs’ oceans and coasts division, told me via e-mail that the government doesn’t consider chumming to be feeding and insists that “it is very important for us to ensure as far as possible that sharks are not fed.”

Meanwhile the attacks continued. Earlier in 2005, in March, a British surfer had been mauled by a great white near Noordhoek, on the Atlantic coast. That May, a spearfisherman had been eaten by a great white at Miller’s Point, at the southern end of False Bay. Two months later, off Dyer Island, a great white lunged from the water and nearly grabbed a British tourist as he was climbing into a shark cage. There were also two near misses in False Bay; a surfer was rammed by a great white, and a diver drove off another one with a spear.

Two years ago, Bovim applied for a permit from South Africa’s Department of Marine and Coastal Management to run eco-friendly shark tours around Seal Island from his sailboat—without the use of chum or engines. The department rejected his request on the grounds that no such permits exist, suggesting he reapply as a cage-diving operator. (As Zqavi explained, the government wants to “avoid a situation where shark-diving operations could be crowded around with onlookers.”) Still, Bovim continues to sail friends out to the island at dawn to observe shark attacks on seals. The visits occasionally lead to tense encounters with cage-diving operators. “They seem to regard it as their turf,” Bovim says. “But I’m not going to give up.”
Ìę
WHEN YOU TALK TO industry critics like Bovim, it’s easy to equate blood in the ­water with shark attacks. But so far very few studies have investigated chumming. Partly, that’s because scientists are busy addressing the more important point: the real creatures in peril are not us but the sharks themselves. Global populations have dropped anywhere from 60 to 90 percent over the past 50 years, biologists believe, thanks in part to the unregulated business known as finning—netting sharks, stripping them of their fins, and then dumping the animals back in the ocean to die. The practice goes to feed the insatiable Asian demand for shark-fin soup, and it kills roughly 73 million sharks a year. Scientists now estimate there may be fewer than 3,500 great whites left—“less than the number of tigers,” according to Ronald O’Dor, a senior scientist at the Washington, D.C.–based Census of Marine Life.

One of the few people who has studied chumming is Alison Kock, a marine biologist who directs great white research for the conservation group Save Our Seas and is a leading defender of cage diving. Her office is in a modest bungalow in Kalk Bay, a gentrifying fishing village midway between Muizen­berg and Fish Hoek. I headed there one after­noon, driving from Cape Town over Ou Kaapse Weg, a heartstopping mountain road that twists through fields of fynbos, the pale green shrubbery indigenous to the Cape Peninsula. Kock, a Ph.D. candidate in her thirties, admitted right away that she has close ties to the industry: her husband’s family owns one of the eight concessions in Gansbaai. But she insisted that the connection hasn’t prevented her from looking at the industry objectively.

“Sharks don’t see people as natural prey,” she told me. It’s only been in the past century, as more humans enter the water for recreation, that sharks have begun biting them. Some of these attacks are mere “investigations of something new,” she said. In rare ­occurrences, like the killing of Lloyd Skinner in 2010, the fish turn predatory. “I’m amazed that there aren’t more attacks,” said Kock. “For the most part, they are ignoring us.”

In 2007, Kock coauthored a study, “Effect of Provisioning Ecotourism Activity on the Behavior of White Sharks.” Between May and October 2004, researchers from the University of Cape Town and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver tagged 17 great whites around Seal Island with acoustic transmitters. They compared the sharks’ behavior when no chum was present to their actions when meat, blood, and oil was poured into the water. Although some sharks maintained close contact with the chumming boats, the study noted that “the vast majority of sharks only passed by briefly, and demonstrated very little response to the food incentive.”

Contrary to expectations, Kock maintains, even sharks that initially followed the boats lost interest after a few visits. “I had thought, if you chum, you get sharks,” she said. “But when cage diving is done at a moderate level, where sharks only sometimes get the bait, they demonstrate an ability to ignore chumming.” Nor did chumming disrupt the sharks’ feeding on seals around Seal Island, Kock found. The report concluded that “moderate levels of ecotourism probably only have a minor impact on the behavior of white sharks.”

Some researchers, including George Burgess, call Kock’s study inconclusive, pointing out that its narrow focus cannot be extrapolated to shark populations worldwide. One of the only other studies, conducted by the University of Hawaii in 2009 at the behest of the local cage-diving industry, also supported Kock’s findings—though it, too, was viewed skeptically by critics who doubted its objectivity. The study followed two operators who ran up to six cage-diving trips per day just outside state waters off Oahu’s North Shore. Though the boats used ample amounts of chum, researchers found “no evidence” that the rate of shark attacks—five during the 1990s and five between 2000 and 2008—had increased on the North Shore since cage ­diving began in 2001. “Current Hawaii shark diving operations,” their report stated, “pose little risk to public safety.”

In the absence of definitive findings, many biologists would like to stop the activity for environmental reasons. In the Farallon ­Islands, marine biologists Peter Pyle and Scot Anderson from PRBO Conservation Science (founded as the Point Reyes Bird Observatory) succeeded in doing so. In a 2007 paper, they expressed concern about “the dumping of chum and other chemicals to attract sharks 
 and the close approach of large tourist boats to feeding sharks.” In contrast to Kock’s findings, the conservationists ­determined that the activities were interrupting the sharks’ feeding cycle and resulting in “the permanent displacement of the sharks from their prey.” Two operators now run chumless dive trips in the Farallons, putting tourists in cages and submerging them in rough, cold seas filled with plankton blooms. The shark viewing is sporadic but adventurous.

So what’s the bottom line? I asked Burgess whether the absence of research vindicated those who say chumming isn’t harmful. “Managing wildlife is always built on using the best data available,” he said. “We don’t have definitive data, but we shouldn’t throw up our hands and say, ‘Until we can prove otherwise, we’ll go with feeding.’

“The record of how we deal with land predators is uniform,” he continued. “You don’t feed bears or raccoons or tigers. In fact, here in the U.S. you can’t get close to predators. All over the world, the scientific community says it’s best not to feed them. Why? Because of concern over safety, concern over ecology, and concern over the health of the animals. Why would we, when dealing with the fiercest predator in the ocean, want to act contrary to the standard set time and time again?”

I thought of his words as I headed down to Surfers Corner for a swim. It was a windy, clear afternoon, the sea was rough, and dozens of surfers were riding the waves. I waded into the chilly water, progressing up to my knees. Black flags flapped in the gusts, and a spotter watched the action from a yellow cabana a few yards from the water’s edge.

“Don’t worry,” she’d assured me. “A siren will go off if a great white comes close.”

I scanned the bay nervously, looking for a long shadow, but the water was too murky to see much. Then my mind was bombarded by images from Jaws—specifically, the scene in which the great white attacks a little boy in a red bathing suit as he paddles around on his yellow raft. Finally I couldn't stand it any longer. I got out and headed for my car.

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR JOSHUA HAMMER IS THE FORMER AFRICA BUREAU CHIEF FOR NEWSWEEK.

The post Shark Bait appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

THE VILLAGE OF AHMED AWA—a single street of ramshackle shops and restaurants—sits inside a mountain gorge just above the fertile plains of Iraqi Kurdi­stan, about ten miles west of the Iranian border. Beyond the village, a dirt parking lot marks the start of the trail to the Ahmed Awa waterfall, one of Iraq’s most popular nature spots. The morning that I visited, in January, was clear and warm, but it was still unmistakably winter. The wild pomegranate, walnut, and fig trees that cover the slopes along the river leading to the cataract were bare, and I could see the torrent rushing by through a skein of skeletal branches. A cold rain had fallen during the night, and as I set off on my hike, joined by a Kurdish interpreter and the driver of our taxi, I had to keep to the edge of the trail, close to the drop-off, to avoid sinking into pools of mud.

The Iran-Iraq border

The Iran-Iraq border

Shane Bauer

Shane Bauer

Sarah Shourd

Sarah Shourd

Josh Fattal

Josh Fattal

Shon Meckfessel

Shon Meckfessel

As we hiked into the Zagros Mountains, which rise to nearly 12,000 feet along the border between Iraq and Iran, the driver grew nervous. “We’re going to have lunch in Tehran,” he said with a tense laugh. He had reason for his gallows humor: Six months earlier, three Americans—Shane Bauer, 27; his girlfriend, Sarah Shourd, 31; and Josh Fattal, 27, Bauer’s former housemate from the University of California at Berkeley—had walked along this same trail, with disastrous results. The hikers had—accidentally, it seems—strayed across the unmarked border into Iran, been seized by border guards, accused of being U.S. spies, and transported to the notorious Evin Prison, in Tehran, where they remained as this story went to press, in March. Bauer, Shourd, and Fattal are experienced globetrotters who’ve traveled to such hot spots as Yemen, Kosovo, and Lebanon; two of the three speak Arabic. Yet somehow—through lack of preparation, cultural misunderstanding, ignorance, or a combination of all three—these sophisticated nomads had wandered into one of the worst places on earth to be an American. Now I was retracing their footsteps, trying to understand how they’d made such a catastrophic error.

The path was deserted; when the American hikers were here, at the height of summer, it would have been crowded with families of Iraqi Kurds. The trees along the river would have been leafy and bountiful with fruit, and wildflowers would have speckled the now monochromatic pale green slopes. Ahead of us, a sign in Kurdish script identified the settlement of Zorm, a cluster of stone-and-mud huts perched on an outcropping. We slid down a muddy slope to talk to a farmer drying pomegranate rinds on the roof of his house. He remembered seeing the Americans when they stopped for tea before continuing to the waterfall. Two mornings later, he said, police and intelligence officers swarmed the village, informing locals that “the Americans have been arrested in Iran.” The farmer suspected that their transgression had been deliberate, though there are no signs to announce the border. “Nobody has ever made that mistake before,” he said. “Who knows? Maybe it was their secret task to go.”

The trail became steeper, and the gorge narrowed. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky, burning off the mist that had shrouded the jagged, snow-dappled peaks ahead of us, in Iran. Fifteen minutes later, we reached a thundering 60-foot cascade that turned the turbines in an adjacent hydroelectric power station. There we met another local, a former peshmerga—a Kurdish freedom fighter—who’d battled the Iraqi army in these mountains in the eighties and now owned walnut orchards here. Over the water’s roar, he told us that the border was a two-hour walk east into the mountains. Almost all hikers come to look at the waterfall and then turn back, he said. But somehow the Americans had kept walking. From what he’d learned, they’d slept outside and crossed the border in the early morning, when the trail was empty.

“Nobody could warn them,” he said.

THE THREE HIKERS could hardly have picked a worse time to fall into Iranian hands. Hostility between the United States and the Islamist regime has reached a level not seen since the 1979 hostage crisis, when a gang of students and militants seized 66 Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held the majority of them for 444 days. Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denials and anti-Israel diatribes, the surging power of Iran’s anti-Western Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the regime’s suppression of the country’s pro-democracy movement have driven rhetoric to new heights of acrimony.

Several U.S. citizens have been seized or allegedly seized by Iran’s government in the past three years. These include Roxana Saberi, a former Miss North Dakota and Iranian-American journalist for National Public Radio, who was jailed for four months in 2009 on spying charges; Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent and private detective who disappeared in March 2007 while apparently investigating a cigarette-smuggling case for an unnamed client in the Persian Gulf; and Ali Shakeri, an Iranian-born mortgage banker and peace activist from California, who spent 140 days in Evin after he was arrested in 2007 while visiting his ailing mother in Tehran. According to Alireza Nader, an Iran specialist for the RAND Corporation, a California-based think tank, these arrests have become standard procedure, a situation that’s not likely to change. “It has been [the government’s] modus operandi since the 1979 revolution,” Nader says.

When a civilian is jailed in Iran, the U.S. government is dealt a hopeless hand. The State Department has had no diplomatic relations with Iran since 1979 and must rely on the Swiss Embassy’s Foreign Interests Section to help negotiate any release. In typical fashion, State’s diplomats have been extremely cautious about what they will say regarding the three jailed hikers. Philip Frayne, the U.S. Embassy spokesman in Baghdad, will only confirm that they have been reaching out to regional allies like Syria and Turkey. “We’ve asked everyone who has relations with the Iranians to put in a request with the Iranian government to release the three,” he says. One top official in the Kurdish regional government, former freedom fighter Sadi Ahmed Pire, maintains that Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, whose warm relations with Iran date back to the eighties, has appealed personally to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to free the Americans on humanitarian grounds. “The president [is making the case] that it’s a matter of fairness to make their stay in prison very short,” he says.

That’s certainly what their families hope. The hikers’ parents—Shane’s mother, Cindy Hickey, and her husband, Jim, in Pine City, Minnesota; Shane’s dad, Al Bauer, two hours south in Prior Lake; Nora Shourd, in Los Angeles; and Laura and Jacob Fattal, in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania—have reached out to the regime, sending letters to Ahmadinejad and appealing via video to Ayatollah Kha­menei. They’ve also called on public figures in the U.S. and abroad to lend their voices to the free-the-hikers campaign.

The silence was finally broken on March 9, when Iranian authorities permitted each of the hikers to call home. Reliable reports had indicated that Bauer, Shourd, and Fattal had been treated with particular severity inside Evin: locked in solitary confinement, subjected to frequent interrogations, and, with the exception of a few letters from home and two visits from Swiss diplomats, denied contact with the outside world. But in the short phone calls—which lasted only several minutes each and were likely monitored by Iranian guards—the Americans said their treatment had been humane. Bauer and Fattal share a cell, they told their parents, and Shourd is permitted daily one-hour visits with her friends. The three said they were getting exercise, eating reasonably well, and even being permitted glances at state-run Iranian TV. But they were still in prison.

For all the hikers have endured, the stateside response has been muted compared with the attention lavished last year on Roxana Saberi, or on Current TV journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee—who strayed across North Korea’s border from China in March 2009 and were sentenced to 12 years’ hard labor before being granted amnesty two months later. Few people buy the Iranians’ claim that the hikers were working for the CIA. But they lack powerful media sponsors, and they suffer from a widespread perception that their predicament is their own fault.

“‘Hiking’ between two countries which are in the news every day, and then calling it ‘outrageous’ when they are arrested is…completely ridiculous,” commented one reader on the Web site of the progressive magazine Mother Jones, to which Bauer has contributed occasional freelance stories. “These morons…deserved to be detained.” Many people I talked to about the case expressed bewilderment, even a hint of scorn, at how they could have been so clueless.

For the hikers’ families, the calls seemed a hopeful sign that their children might be released within weeks. But, whenever their ordeal ends, it serves as a frightening reminder of the political fault lines that often run along the world’s geographical boundaries. The trio’s imprisonment has drawn new attention to the dangers of adventure travel in an era when conflict zones can turn overnight into trendy destinations, guidebook writers can’t keep up with expanding appetites for edge-of-the-world experiences, and gung-ho vagabonds venture into places where having a U.S. passport can put you at risk.

As I discovered in my own travels through the region, Bauer, Shourd, and Fattal are indeed partly to blame; they went into Kurdi­stan with a shocking lack of preparation. Even so, they were not well served by those they turned to for advice, and they fell victim to a sequence of small mistakes and misunderstandings that snowballed into a catastrophe—and turned them from innocent backpackers into pawns in a high-stakes face-off between implacable enemies.

MOST OF WHAT the country has heard about the Americans’ capture has come from the so-called fourth hiker, Shon Meckfessel. A 37-year-old writer, musician, and student of Serbo-Croatian and Arabic now getting his Ph.D. in language theory at the University of Washington, Meckfessel traveled with Bauer, Shourd, and Fattal as far as the regional hub of Sulaymaniyah, a bustling town about 30 miles west of the Zagros Mountains. The night before their camping trip, he came down with a fever and stayed back at the hotel. He last saw his friends on Thursday evening, July 30, as they piled into a taxi for the 90-minute drive up to Ahmed Awa.

Meckfessel and his friends represent an idealistic breed of young American: cosmopolitan, curious, and engaged with the world. Each is the kind of expat—journalist, teacher, activist—who is devoted to bridging the gap between the U.S. and less developed countries, even in unstable areas where anti-American feeling may be rife. These travelers are in many ways the opposite of the ugly American—learning the local language, engaging with people, and debating their country’s policies in the bistros of Eastern Europe or the refugee camps of the Middle East. As Meckfessel says, “I’m interested in cultures that people in the U.S. misunderstand.”

The four converged in the Middle East through activist circles in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bauer, who grew up north of Minneapolis, and Fattal, who’s from the Philadelphia suburbs, met at Berkeley. After graduation, in 2004, Fattal became a staffer at Aprovecho, a nonprofit outside Eugene, Oregon, that designs low-impact stoves for the developing world. Bauer stayed in the Bay Area, trying to get a career as a journalist off the ground. He traveled in the Balkans and the Middle East and protested against the Iraq war.

Around 2005, Bauer met Sarah Shourd, a Berkeley grad from Los Angeles who was teaching English to newly arrived immigrants. The couple soon began living together in Oakland. They also found they had a mutual friend: Shon Meckfessel, another Bay Area resident whom Shourd had met on a relief trip to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and who knew Bauer from local music clubs and the activist scene.

In August 2008, the couple moved to Damascus, Syria, for a year. The capital of a Baathist police state, Damascus is none­theless a seductive city with a secular atmosphere. Shourd studied Arabic and taught English at a language academy and to Iraqi refugees. Bauer freelanced for Mother Jones and The Nation. They fell easily into the thriving expat scene that revolves around the bars and cafés of the Old City.

Overall, they struck other Damascus expats as friendly and well-intentioned: Bauer is slight and energetic, while Shourd exudes a sweet, homey vibe that can belie her countercultural ideas. “They were very idealistic—a nice couple of kids,” says British freelance correspondent Kate Clark. “They wanted to make the world a better place.”

Last summer, Fattal and Meckfessel caught up with Bauer and Shourd. Fattal had just finished a semester as a teaching fellow at the International Honors Program, traveling around the world with 33 undergraduates. Meckfessel was spending the summer in Damascus after studying Arabic throughout the region. The four began planning a ten-day trip to coincide with Shourd’s summer break. They’d already seen Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan and were looking for a new adventure; after talking to a number of other expatriates, they settled on Iraqi Kurdistan.

“Friends told us they’d been to Sulaymaniyah, to the mountains,” Meckfessel says. “One said it was the most beautiful nature he’d ever seen in his life.” Known by travel-savvy Westerners as the “safe Iraq,” Kurdistan has been pro-American since George H. W. Bush sided with the Kurds in their uprising against Saddam Hussein after the Gulf war of 1991. There hasn’t been a significant terrorist attack there since 2004.

But getting precise travel information proved difficult. The Americans had loaned their Middle East Lonely Planet guide to a friend and resorted to a poorly detailed map printed from the Web. “We didn’t feel we had to do real in-depth preparation,” Meckfessel admits.

FOR DECADES, the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan was one of the most violent corners of the Middle East. The center of an ethnic Kurdish belt that extends from eastern Turkey to western Iran, it was targeted in the eighties by Saddam Hussein, who—in an effort to stamp out a series of rebellions—razed 4,000 Kurdish villages, slaughtering at least 50,000 civilians. In April 1991, Saddam’s forces drove hundreds of thousands of Kurds across the mountains into Turkey. The first President Bush demanded the withdrawal of Iraq’s troops, which helped the Kurds run an autonomous government. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the Kurds began to develop their economy and open up to foreign tourists.

Many of these are European, but over the past two years a steady trickle of Americans—low-budget travelers who work in the region and retirees on package tours—have made their way here, drawn by the snowy mountains and green valleys, the culture, or simply the thrill of visiting Iraq. The standard route is overland across the Turkish border, or by Atlasjet flights from Istanbul to the Kurdish capital of Erbil. Still, Rebwar Daoud, who runs Babel Tours, in Erbil, told me that drumming up business isn’t easy. “We are trying to create a good image of Kurdistan,” he said, “but many people of Europe and America think, ‘You are going to Iraq? Oh, no, you are crazy.’ “

To get a sense of the hikers’ overland journey, I flew to Diyarbakir, in the Kurdish region of Turkey. I spent a night in a 16th-century converted caravansary, then hired a taxi to take me 175 miles east to the border at Silopi, where the four had crossed into Iraq. Darkness fell and, as the lights of the Iraqi border town of Zakho shone on the horizon, we rumbled across a suspension bridge over the Khabur River. At the border post—flying only a Kurdish flag, not an Iraqi one—a smiling official served me tea and stamped my U.S. passport after a cursory scan. There, I met my translator—an Iranian Kurd named Jamshid—and hired a driver before heading on in the morning to Sulaymaniyah, six hours southeast.

The road twisted and turned through treeless mountains and fertile plains, past villages rebuilt after being bulldozed by Saddam. We reached Sulaymaniyah around nightfall and retraced the hikers’ path to the Miwan Hotel, a second-floor hole-in-the-wall a few doors down from a pirated-DVD shop.

“They were polite, no trouble; they didn’t even ask to take a shower,” said Muzafad Mohammed Zeli, the proprietor, a mustachioed 55-year-old wearing traditional baggy cotton pants. On the wall of the reception area, I noticed three photos of the Ahmed Awa waterfall. These pictures, Meckfessel recalls, were part of what had piqued the hikers’ interest in the first place. “All of us asked the owner where we should go to see the mountains,” he says, “and he pointed at the photos.”

Zeli, Meckfessel says, was one of ten people in Kurdistan who recommended they visit Ahmed Awa, but none of them mentioned that it was anywhere near the border. Zeli, however, insisted that he’d never discussed Ahmed Awa with the four. “If I had known,” he told me, “I would have warned them not to go.”

Ahmed Awa wasn’t on the Americans’ map, but they decided that it must lie in a mountain range near Dukhan, north of Sulaymaniyah and about 30 miles west of the border. They imagined following a hiking circuit through the mountains, camping under the stars. “For the Kurds, Ahmed Awa is a two-hour trip,” Meckfessel says. “We were thinking in terms of Yosemite—several days.”

The friends settled into a brightly painted room with four beds, for which they paid 40,000 Iraqi dinars (about $35). The next day they toured the city, stocked up on provisions for their trip, and e-mailed home. “Hey sweetness,” Shourd wrote her mother. “So, we’re traveling. Actually, we’re in N. Iraq! It’s totally safe. The Kurds in this area have been pro-American since 1991. …So, don’t worry. Tonight we’re going camping. I love you.”

On the walk back to the hotel, Meckfessel began to feel feverish. He stayed behind as the other three set off in a taxi for the mountains at about 6:30 P.M. The plan was to meet on the trail the next day. Early in the morning, Friday, July 31, he got a cell-phone call from Bauer, who urged him to hurry and join them. “You totally could have slept here,” Bauer told him. “The weather was warm all night. It was really comfortable.” The hikers had camped under blankets in a clearing beyond the waterfall, Bauer said, then gotten up at 4 A.M. and started hiking again in the dawn light.

Astonishingly, Bauer and the others still didn’t realize they were anywhere near Iran; armed only with their Web map, they continued east, oblivious to their true location. Later, local newspapers would report that the three Americans were indeed warned—by a soldier at the last checkpoint before Ahmed Awa. “Be careful,” he allegedly told them. “There are no signs about the Iranian border.” If he did tell them, the message didn’t sink in. But six months later, when I passed through the same checkpoint, two guards inspected my passport carefully and demanded that Jamshid, my interpreter, leave his own identification card behind.

“If you are arrested in Iran,” one of them affably explained, “we can find the clues more easily.”

Even if the hikers had known the border was nearby, they still could have missed it. According to retired U.S. colonel Harry Schute, who runs tourism and security businesses in Erbil, “you would think that it would be a readily identifiable feature like the top of hill or a river, but it’s just the middle of a slope, with some blocks on the ground. And if you don’t know what that rock means, you can cross without realizing it.” There’s a huge smuggling industry on the border, Schute says, and the hikers—who speak no Farsi or Kurdish—could’ve been reassured by the movement back and forth. “There’s a lot of traffic. Watching these folks, you might think you’re OK, and next thing you know…”

Shortly after noon that Friday, Meckfessel sent Bauer two text messages saying he was on his way. Both went unanswered. “Then, at 1:13 P.M., I saw Shane was calling,” Meckfessel recalls. “I said, ‘How are you doing?’ and he said, ‘We’re in trouble.’ He was really serious. Worried, but not panicked.”

Bauer was inside a vehicle. “We were hiking and suddenly we had Iranian guards around us,” Meckfessel remembers him saying. “We had hiked up to the border and we didn’t realize it. We’ve been taken into custody, and they’re taking us somewhere.”

“When he said ‘Iran,’ ” Meckfessel tells me, “it was like saying he’d just landed in Vanuatu. It was the most shocking thing I’d ever heard.”

CINDY HICKEY was working at her Pine City, Minnesota, animal-training-and-nutrition business on a sweltering July morning when she received an overseas call. Through a crackling connection, a consular officer from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad informed her that her son, Shane, had apparently been arrested by “authorities” inside Iran. At that point, the embassy’s only information came from Meckfessel, who, after reaching a duty officer at the embassy by cell phone from Sulaymaniyah, had been flown to Baghdad and debriefed. Twenty minutes later, Hickey got a second call from the State Department, joined by the FBI. “They had no more details,” she says. “They said, ‘As soon as we find out anything, we’ll call you.’ “

Several days passed before both Iran and the U.S. confirmed the hikers were in custody. For their families, this set off an all-consuming campaign of vigils, letters to Ahmadinejad and other Iranians, and meetings with U.S. public officials, including senators Al Franken and Arlen Specter and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

At first daily, and now “regularly,” Hickey says, the families check in with a State Department contact who keeps them apprised—up to a point—about the government’s efforts. “I feel like they are doing the best job they can, considering the relations between the U.S. and Iran,” she told me in early February. “There are a lot of things they can’t tell us.”

Through the State Department, they received sketchy accounts of visits made by two Swiss diplomats to Evin Prison on September 29 and October 29. Each hiker, Hickey says, “passed a private message to the Swiss, four or five sentences. Shane said, ‘I love you, I miss you,’ he talked about his sisters, and said he was able to get some of our letters. He said, ‘I’m physically OK, I’m strong, but lonely.’ “

In addition to the State meetings, the families began conferring on their own. “We brainstorm, we put things on the table, we weigh and balance things,” Hickey says. In the early days, they wrestled with the question of how they should handle the media—whether to keep a low profile and let State work its back channels or to make as much noise as possible. Hickey initially contacted șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű about her son’s plight. But last December, when I reached out to the families, she responded with a brief e-mail thanking me for my interest but letting me know that they weren’t granting any interviews. Weeks later, they changed their minds and have since made themselves available to the press.

They’ve also worked to keep their children from being forgotten: Laura and Jacob Fattal have organized vigils in their Cheltenham, Pennsylvania, hometown, as well as a public appeal on the families’ Web site, . In December, Nora Shourd donned a chador, the floor-length garment worn by women in Iran, and released a video addressed to Ayatollah Khamenei. “Your Excellency,” she said. “They are good people. They did not mean to enter Iran. They meant no harm to the Islamic Republic…and have a deep respect for your ancient and noble civilization. If they entered Iran, it was an innocent mistake.”

For a long time, their appeals were met with silence. Iran refused the Swiss Embassy’s requests for further prison visits, and information dried up. Iranian lawyer Masoud Shafie—whom the family hired last fall, anticipating espionage charges—has continued to demand that the judiciary allow him to meet his clients. Reached by phone in Tehran in January, the attorney told me he’d gotten nowhere. “They don’t allow me to see them, and it is not according to the rule,” he said. “I told the judge that they must charge them after four months. Already six months have passed. They say, ‘Wait, wait, wait.’ “

In February, the door cracked: Iran’s top human-rights official, Mohammad Javad Larijani, told journalists in Geneva that he’d recommended to Iran’s judiciary and security forces that the mothers be allowed to visit their children. They immediately sent a letter to Ahmadinejad urging him to grant them visas. And then came the day in March.

“We got no warning, and neither did they,” Nora Shourd says. That morning, she noticed an unknown caller ID on her cell phone and let the call go to voice mail. When she played back the message, she was astonished to hear her daughter’s voice: “Hi, Mom,” Sarah said, “it’s me. They’re giving me the chance to call from prison. I’m ok and I’m coping.” Shourd was overwhelmed with emotion—and regret that she’d missed the call. But Sarah phoned back 20 minutes later, and the mother and daughter spoke for three rushed minutes. Sarah quickly sketched in prison life—she was reading the GRE preparation guide Nora had sent (before her capture, she’d planned to return to the States to study women’s issues) and was able to see Bauer and Fattal. “The big fear,” Nora says, “was whether or not they were OK, and that big fear was lifted. It feels like things are moving a little. It could be that they just threw us a crumb, but the kids are hopeful.”

According to Alireza Nader of the RAND Corporation, the calls are indeed a positive sign, but they don’t necessarily presage the hikers’ release. The regime, he says, “ramps up repression when it feels threatened, but it’s been feeling less threatened lately, so they could be more relaxed.” Despite this goodwill gesture, Nader says, a real breakthrough may still require backroom negotiations.

“These innocent people have become bargaining chips,” agrees Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University, who spent a month in solitary confinement at Evin during the reign of the last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Iran wants the U.S. to ease pressure for reform and to lift economic sanctions, Milani believes; more specifically, it is seeking the release of 11 Iranian nationals, reportedly including intelligence officers and Revolutionary Guards, held by the U.S. military in Baghdad jails.

There may be a precedent for such a swap. Two months after Roxana Saberi’s release in May 2009, the U.S. military freed five Iranian prisoners in Baghdad. Embassy spokesman Philip Frayne insists that “there was no deal on Saberi, despite how it may look.” Regardless, in early February, Ahmadinejad publicly raised the possibility of a prisoner exchange in an interview with Iranian state television. Secretary of State Clinton immediately rejected the idea and again called for Iran to release the three “on humanitarian grounds.”

While some experts had cautioned that, given the depth of animosity between the U.S. and Iran, the Americans could be in for a longer stay, Milani can envision an eventual pardon by Ahmadinejad. Or the case might follow the Saberi model: She was sentenced to eight years for espionage, but an appeals court knocked the charge down to possession of classified information and gave her a two-year suspended sentence.

“I think Iran has realized there isn’t much wiggle room there,” he says, “and gradually they will step down. I would not be surprised if, a year from now, these young people are writing their memoirs at home.”

IT IS A ROUGH eight-hour drive east from the border near Ahmed Awa to Evin Prison, built at the foot of the Elburz Mountains in northern Tehran. A pale-blue metal gate in the dull-red brick facade leads to cell blocks, solitary-confinement and interrogation wards, a courtroom, and an execution yard—where 29 convicted murderers, rapists, armed robbers, and drug traffickers were hanged on a single day in July 2008. In recent years, the prison has also become the destination for opponents of the Islamist regime.

In March, the hikers described a tolerable existence inside Evin. But the calls were short, and Nora Shourd says that she could hear what sounded like an Iranian male voice speaking English in the background, indicating that they were being closely monitored.

From accounts of others who’ve spent time inside Evin, including Roxana Saberi, a picture has emerged of what the Americans may have gone through. Prison officials likely separated them upon arrival. The three would have received uniforms—beige synthetic sweats for all three, and, for Shourd, a chador. Then they would have been placed in single-person interrogation rooms, isolated from the other prisoners—about 2,600 men and 400 women in 2006, the last time the international press had access.

Saberi, who spent 18 days in solitary last winter, says that, as high-value prisoners, the Americans were likely settled either in Ward 209—run by the Intelligence Ministry—or Ward 240, administered by the Revolutionary Guards. Each ward consists of several corridors painted antiseptic white, each lined with four or five cells, with a thin carpet and a tiny window covered by a wire-mesh screen that lets in a trickle of daylight. In the first weeks of their captivity, they may have been kept blindfolded and interrogated for hours a day, an experience that Saberi describes as disorienting and often terrifying.

“You don’t know how many people are in the room with you,” says Saberi, who chronicled her experiences in Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran, which was published in March. “They claim you are guilty [of spying], and you believe they believe it. They threaten you with a long time in prison unless you confess.”

Saberi’s quarters were a spare cell; she slept on the floor beneath a blanket, with a bare bulb kept on 24 hours a day and a small heater that never seemed to generate enough warmth. Her only contact came when the guards delivered meals: white bread and a cheese slice for breakfast, rice and stew for lunch, canned food for dinner. “Time passes so slowly, especially when you’re in solitary,” she says. “They are wondering every day, when will they get out of there?”

Halfway across the world, the hikers’ friends and families wait with them. In Washington State, Shon Meckfessel can’t keep his mind on his studies; he admits he’s dealing with a form of survivor’s guilt. “I’ve struggled,” he says. “I know my friends wouldn’t want my life to fall apart, and when they get out I don’t want them to see everything in shambles. Sometimes I think they’re going to get out soon, then I read something and I think they’ll be there forever. It’s horrible, unimaginable stress.”

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, Cindy Hickey was relieved to find out that her son was not languishing in solitary and clings to the belief that the Iranians’ attitudes are softening. “I know my son,” she says. “I know how responsible he is, and I can’t believe he’d put anyone in harm’s way. We are both hikers,” she says. “It’s beautiful, there’s a trail, and you want to know what’s around the next corner.”

The post A Mountain of Trouble appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Refugees in Chad

Newly arrived refugees wait outside the UN's Oure Cassoni camp, near Bahai, Chad

Chad, Sudan

School, Oure Cassoni Camp

Classes at Oure Cassoni

JEM rebel soldiers

Young JEM rebel soldiers on the Chad side of the border

School, Oure Cassoni Camp

Sudanese refugees attend school in the nearby Oure Cassoni camp

Bahai Mosque

Muslims in Bahai gather around the settlement's biggest mosque

Ìę

The road to hell begins in N'djamena, a Third World backwater that seems to cram all of Africa's problems corruption, neglect, war, stagnation, tribal rivalry, disease into a few dusty, desperate square miles. The temperature pushed 120 on a June afternoon as photographer Marco Di Lauro and I weaved through the streets of Chad's capital, following Idriss, a jellabiya-clad rebel from the Justice and Equality Movement, the biggest of at least half a dozen factions waging war with government forces across the border in the Sudanese province of Darfur.

We were on our way to an interview with JEM's head of intelligence, who happened to be in town that week. After leaving the Pekin Hotel, our Chinese-run bed-and-breakfast, we skirted the Chari River, a murky stream populated by hippopotami and by smugglers who wade across the shallow water from neighboring Cameroon, delivering electronics and other goods to far more impoverished Chad. Blocks from the river, red-bereted members of the Presidential Guard patrolled grim-faced in front of the concrete Palais Rose, the official residence of unofficial president-for-life Idriss DĂ©by Itno. Next to the palace stood Chad's national museum, scarred by a February 2008 rebel attack that left gaping holes in the roof and the bones of an elephant visible through a perforated wall. Vendors loitered on sidewalks in front of pastel-painted, arched colonial buildings, hawking Viagra, fake Swiss Army knives, and Celtel mobile-phone cards. This forlorn center of N'Djamena's commercial life consisted of two banks, a French bakery, the Air France and Ethiopian Airlines ticket offices, and a handful of expat-friendly restaurants.

N'Djamena was never going to be one of the great capitals of the world; its location in the heart of Africa's bleakest, most resource-starved region guaranteed that. But the place has fallen upon especially hard times of late, thanks largely to its neighbor, Sudan. The intractable war that has dragged on since 2003 in the Darfur region, pitting rebels against the Islamist government of indicted war criminal President Omar al-Bashir, has deepened Chad's isolation and instability. It has stirred up an indigenous Chadian rebel movement, plunged much of the country into lawlessness, and made life increasingly difficult for the thousands of international aid workers who've descended on the area to try to help Darfur's refugees.

Ìę

That's what drew Marco and me to Chad in the first place: to see if the biggest aid effort since the Rwandan genocide of 1994 is accomplishing anything. The roughly 2.7 million “internally displaced” within Darfur are scattered among more than 100 camps staffed largely by Sudanese workers, and access to them is difficult because of the ongoing conflict and the Sudanese government's hostility toward the West. But some 330,000 refugees have spilled into Chad, and much of the international aid effort is concentrated in 13 camps strung along its eastern border. Chad has been almost totally subsumed into its neighbor's chaos; it's been pulled so far into Darfur, it has almost become Darfur. We wanted to see what happens to a country already rife with instability when it gets plunged into a conflict that the rest of the world would rather ignore.

N'Djamena is the gateway to the Darfur madness, an alternate universe where power cuts can last six hours a day. A drive through the capital at night feels like a trip through the pre-industrial age, the pitch black of the streets broken only by the occasional glow of a battery-powered shop light. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű of town, the roads are filled with bandits. Moving around by air can be an even bigger challenge. Last spring, all domestic flights were canceled for days the country's jet fuel had been, as the capital rumor mill had it, handed over to the air force to bomb Chadian rebel bases inside Sudan. In my first five days in N'Djamena, a sandstorm blew in, followed by a torrent of muddy hail, paralyzing the city for hours; my attempt to get a government travel permit was delayed “indefinitely” because the functionary responsible had been stung by a scorpion; and I contracted a wretched sinus infection that forced me to wander the streets at midnight looking for a Western medical clinic. Celeste Hicks, a BBC reporter who's lived in N'Djamena for nearly a year, calls it “the worst place I have ever experienced.”

Still, the relief workers keep coming. Never mind that the work is dangerous and often seems futile. Never mind that the camps function as recruiting grounds for the rebels and may be creating a dependency among the refugees that will be hard to break. For many, Chad offers the biggest adventure in aid work: the allure of danger, the satisfaction of restoring broken lives, and the end-of-the-world beauty of red sand, swaying acacias, and infinite skies. “It's a constant rush,” said one veteran aid worker, an Italian stationed in the eastern-Chad outpost of AbĂ©chĂ©, one of the hubs of the relief effort.

That's where Marco and I were headed. The rebel intelligence chief we met through Idriss told us that traveling inside Darfur with JEM was impossible too dangerous, too open-ended. Instead, six days after our arrival in Chad, we stood at the check-in counter for the early-morning World Food Program flight to Abéché. In front of us was a rugged, red-bearded water engineer named Erik, who worked for the Swedish government in partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Erik was in his mid-forties, an aid veteran with a fondness for dispensing wisdom about surviving in one of the most exasperating countries on the continent.

“Murphy's Law is the only law in Chad,” Erik said, nudging his duffel bag toward the front of the line. He was traveling with another Swede, Liv, a 32-year-old who'd left her job as a consultant in Stockholm to come dig bore-holes in the UNHCR camps. She cited a failed relationship, boredom with comfortable Scandinavian life, and “the desire to do something good in the world” as the motivations for taking a yearlong contract with the UN. Liv had arrived the previous evening. It was her first trip to Africa.

Moments later, the World Food Program manager in charge of the flight delivered bad news: Fuel supplies in Chad had been “contaminated,” and all flights were grounded. This was a regular occurrence, Erik said; corrupt officials often mix locally refined fuel with water, turning a profit by selling off the diluted product.

“It could be a week,” Erik said as the four of us piled into a battered taxi headed back to the hotel. “Here, you don't just need a plan; you need a backup plan to your backup plan.”

N'DJAMENA IS BAD enough, but there's always fresh chaos awaiting the relief workers in the desert. Back in February, Oxfam estimated that every month 25 attacks occur on NGOs operating in eastern Chad. The most alarming happened in May 2008, when Pascal Marlinge, a 49-year-old French humanitarian aid worker for Save the Children UK, was executed with a pistol shot to the head. In March, bandits seized three workers from Doctors Without Borders and held them for several days. The 5,000-man UN security force promised last year to stabilize the border has deployed just 2,800 men and can't stop the rising violence. “It's total impunity out there,” says MĂ„ns Nyberg, a UNHCR official in N'Djamena.

Even before war erupted in Sudan, the former French colony of Chad was hardly an island of stability. Since its independence, in 1960, the country has been ruled by a string of dictators, buffeted by coups, rebel invasions, and meddling from foreign powers like Libya, which briefly annexed Chad in the eighties. President Déby, a former military officer and a Zaghawa tribesman, came to power in 1990 after leading a guerrilla army across the Sahara and, with Libya's help, ousting dictator HissÚne Habré. The first ten years of Déby's tenure were relatively stable; the country began pumping crude from around Lake Chad in 2003 and now earns more than $1 billion a year in oil revenues. But the war in Darfur sent everything south.

Most of us know the basics of that conflict: the Arab militias-on-horseback known as the janjaweed, the allegations of genocide, the parade of celebrities George Clooney and Don Cheadle and Ange­lina Jolie visiting the refugee camps and condemning the systematic rapes and killings. But many people tuned out long ago, bewildered by the conflict's political complexities, its remoteness, its seeming intractability.

So here's the compressed version: Darfur is a Texas-size province of six and a half million Sudanese, virtually all of them Muslim, spread over an advancing desert with a few ribbons of green. The region has long been afflicted with a scarcity of resources, an easy flow of weapons, and a combustible mix of Arab and African ethnic groups. But it began to spiral downward in the eighties, when Arab nomads in the north pushed south as a result of diminishing grazing land. The conflict was stirred up by the 1989 military coup in Sudan that brought then-General al-Bashir's National Islamic Front to power, transporting Arab-supremacist doctrine to the restive province.

Then, in early 2003, an African rebel group, the Sudan Liberation Army, launched attacks on army garrisons, calling for a greater share of resources and local autonomy. Al-Bashir turned to the police, the army, and the janjaweed militias to suppress the rebellion. One year later, janjaweed leader Musa Hilal issued a directive to “change the demography of Darfur and empty it of African tribes,” which he and the Sudanese army have carried out with terrifying efficiency. Estimates on the number of dead range from 200,000 to 400,000 if you count starvation and disease. Close to three million people have lost their homes.

Meanwhile, the conflict bleeds back and forth across a 700-mile-long open fron­tier. Sudanese rebels many from Déby's tribe, the Zaghawa have used Chad's eastern desert as a base from which to launch attacks inside Darfur. Chadian rebel groups have also gotten into the game. Al-Bashir has been giving money and weapons to an anti­government coalition led by Déby's own nephew, who is said to be angry about his uncle's hoarding of oil revenue. Indeed, the increasingly paranoid and reclusive Déby has used almost all of the oil money to buy arms to fight these Chadian rebels.

The West has been sounding the alarm about Darfur for years, but nobody has any clear idea how to end the conflict. In 2004, Congress voted to label the war a genocide, despite the UN's hesitancy to do so. Journalists like New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof have reported tirelessly on the atrocities, and the coalition Save Darfur has staged protests. The Bush administration toughened the sanctions that President Clinton had imposed on al-Bashir's regime and backed the creation of an African Union peacekeeping force. But the ill-equipped African peacekeepers could not protect Darfur's civilians, and in early 2008 an expanded UN force was sent in, also to little avail.

The war took a new turn in May 2008, with the rebels' boldest assault yet: Operation Long Arm, in which hundreds of JEM soldiers drove four days across the desert to surprise Sudanese forces in Khartoum, the capital, and the city of Omdurman. The al-Bashir government, blaming DĂ©by, severed relations with Chad immediately. Sudan's relations with the West have deteriorated as well: In March, the U.S. supported the International Criminal Court's indictment of al-Bashir for war crimes; in response, he kicked 13 international aid agencies out of Darfur and vowed that he would never surrender, making him a hero to some in the radical-Islamist world.

So far, the West's only option has been to minister to the refugees, hoping to maintain some semblance of civilization in the barbarous desert. The do-gooders have arrived with food, water, and medicine. Some have come armed with expertise in engineering, construction, and education and some with only their good intentions.

In the latter group are people like Linda, a 32-year-old French Canadian of Egyptian descent, who was on her way to work for Chad Solaire, a Dutch NGO trying to introduce “solar cookers” strips of aluminum foil glued to pieces of cardboard to refugee women along the border. The idea is to wean them off collecting firewood, a practice that has been devastating the fragile semi-desert and causing violent confrontations between refugees and locals. Linda had been inspired by a documentary about aid workers in Africa and had volunteered to live in Bahai, the most desolate UN outpost in the most dangerous corner of northeastern Chad.

“You should come out and visit,” she told Marco and me as we dined together in N'Djamena one sweltering evening. It was an offer we found impossible to resist.

“BIENVENUE À BAHAI,” said the sous-prĂ©fet, a wizened man with a white goatee, who reclined on a foam-rubber pillow at the decrepit district headquarters. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, the red-blue-and-yellow flag of Chad flapped madly in a gathering sandstorm, and the acacia trees in the nearby wadi, the dry riverbed marking the border between Chad and Sudan, bent low in the gusts. Robed figures drifted like ghosts through a maze of mud-walled compounds, past a blue concrete mosque and a forlorn market selling desiccated dates. The sous-prĂ©fet put on his spectacles and perused our accreditation papers.

“Vous ĂȘtes Americains?” he asked.

“Oui,” I said.

With a flourish, he stamped the papers and handed them back to us. “Barack Obama, il est magnifique,” he said. “When you go home, give our regards to Number 44.”

The UN compound was at the edge of the seminomadic settlement: a football-field-size encampment surrounded by a concrete wall and razor wire. A dozen security guards stood around the metal gate, huddled together trying to light cigarettes in the wind. A Chadian UN functionary escorted us across the courtyard to our guest quarters. I turned the key in the flimsy lock on one of the bedrooms and pushed open the door. Cockroaches big, brown, armored skittered across the floor.

“For Christ's sake!” I exclaimed, squashing two with a boot. The guest quarters' chef came running from the kitchen next door.

He shrugged. “Mais, c'est normale.”

As remote as Bahai was, the settlement was just the beginning of our journey. Oure Cassoni, the most remote refugee camp along the Sudanese border, lay 18 miles farther north along a sand track that passed through the heart of bandit territory. Oure Cassoni had come into being in the spring of 2004, at the height of the janjaweed killing spree, after 28,000 refugees from around the market town of Kutum fled into Chad en masse.

Relief officials moved them into a temporary location near a saline lake, then set up administrative headquarters here in Bahai, which was deemed to be somewhat safer for aid workers. (Indeed, 12 days before we arrived, a Sudanese Antonov bomber searching for rebels had dropped its payload just outside Oure Cassoni, killing several Chadian shepherds and hundreds of their animals.) The majority of staff in the camps are local hires; in fact, there were only about 15 international aid workers living in Bahai, from the International Rescue Committee, UNHCR, Doctors Without Borders, and a few smaller NGOs. All the relief workers commuted to the camp five days a week a trip of about 45 minutes in a convoy guarded by Chadian and UN police.

The relief convoys weren't running on the weekends, however. So, the morning after our arrival, a Saturday, Marco and I rented a Toyota Land Cruiser for $200 a day and hired a local translator, Mahmadou, and a driver, Ali. Ali kept his fists clenched around the steering wheel, Sudanese music blaring from the cassette deck, bouncing down rutted tracks at 40 miles per hour. An hour later, we were walking through the sandy warrens of Oure Cassoni's Zone C, one of the camp's three divisions. Originally a sea of tents, the place now had an air of permanence, with solidly built, mud-walled residential compounds; a network of canals and pipes to bring water from the distant lake; UNICEF elementary schools; medical clinics; gas stations and auto-repair shops; and a vast bazaar selling used clothing from the U.S., biscuits from Nigeria, and orange drinks from Jordan. The inhabitants appeared to be far better off than the indigenous Chadian population, a fact that has caused tensions between refugees and locals.

In some ways, Oure Cassoni mirrored the larger conflict. The inhabitants of zones A and C stood behind the Justice and Equality Movement; Zone B's population, from central Darfur, supported the Sudan Liberation Army, which signed a peace deal with the al-Bashir regime in 2006. The factions generally steered clear of each other, but sometimes clashes broke out and UN officials were forced to intervene.

Abu Jabbar, the leader of Zone C, a gaunt, imposing man who speaks English and has played host to virtually every visiting celebrity, greeted us outside his compound. Despite the primitive surroundings, Jabbar kept on top of world events via the BBC and occasional articles that his journalist friends sent him. “Do you know Samantha Power?” he asked as we sat in his courtyard, sheltered from a strengthening wind, eating from a communal tray of sorghum and gravy, sweet macaroni and rice. “She is now working for Obama, we have heard.”

When we left the camp after lunch, the wind had intensified into a raging sandstorm, and I could just make out figures camped underneath a withered acacia tree. Marco, Mahmadou, and I left the car and walked toward them. Six small children, their faces smeared with sand, grit, and mucus, were hunched against the howling wind, crying as sand flew in their faces. Four jerry cans of water and two cooking pots lay on the ground; plastic bags filled with clothing swung from the branches.

“We've been out here for 15 days,” said one of the mothers. They'd fled a Sudanese-army bombing raid on a village in southern Darfur, she claimed, and walked for six days to Oure Cassoni. Now they were stranded, unable to settle in the camp because they hadn't been interviewed yet by the UNHCR team and given ration cards. “They sent people to talk to us last week,” she said, “but they haven't come back.” Refugees inside the camp were allowing them to draw water and giving them food. There were hundreds of others nearby, all hunkered down in the driving sand.

“My God,” said Marco, “there are people under every tree.”

Frederic Cussigh, the worn-down Frenchman who headed the UNHCR field office in Bahai, later told us that long waits were customary for newcomers; the “refugees” could in fact be Chadian locals willing to put up with weeks in the brutal sun for the chance to take advantage of the camp's free food, shelter, and medical care. But one UNICEF official I later met in AbĂ©chĂ© sharply criticized the UN screenings: Even if some of the people were Chadians posing as Darfurians, the official said, the UN's treatment was heartless. “By the accident of being born on the wrong side of a wadi [in Chad], these people get none of the benefits. Yet their lives are every bit as fragile.”

It was impossible to tell what the truth was.

UNDER A CANOPY OF STARS, at the UN compound in Bahai, two American women in their twenties, unwashed hair tucked haphazardly beneath headscarves, sat with their laptops at a rickety table in a courtyard, smoking and catching up on e-mail. Both worked for the International Rescue Committee. “This is what passes for social life in Bahai,” one of them told me. There was also a bar patronized by both Westerners and locals a handful of stools under a straw roof, with warm beer and Sudanese music but it was hard to find one's way there in the darkness.

Cussigh, the UNHCR director, passed by a moment later; he'd been working late in his office. I asked him whether it was true, as had been frequently reported, that the Justice and Equality Movement has been recruiting child soldiers inside the camps. Although JEM and civilian refugees have always denied the allegations, one UNHCR official in N'Djamena told me that “there's absolutely no question” that the camps have become militarized. Last May, Sudanese government forces in Khartoum took 89 alleged child soldiers into custody in the wake of JEM's Operation Long Arm, and soon after, a London-based human-rights group, Waging Peace, charged that refugees as young as nine were being sold to JEM.

Cussigh shrugged. “We're not in the camps much of the time,” he replied, “so what happens when we're gone is hard to say.” I'd obviously touched a nerve, and the UN later insisted that field staff are in the camps every day. But it's a thorny issue. One aid official in N'Djamena told me that the camps are in some ways fueling the conflict, by serving as a kind of “one-stop shopping mall” for Darfur rebels. Here, JEM and other factions can repair their vehicles, rest up, and find a supply of well-nourished, ideologically primed young recruits. The UNHCR has been powerless to confront the armed men.

Some critics of the relief system argue that the camps are helping to sustain the conflict in less tangible ways. They make it more difficult to find a long-term solution, giving world leaders an excuse to avoid the hard business of negotiating for peace, applying “humanitarian Band-Aids to gaping human-rights wounds,” as actor Don Cheadle and aid expert John Prendergast wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2005.

Emergency aid has also become, in effect, big business. Caring for 330,000 destitute refugees in Chad not to mention the millions displaced inside Darfur requires outlays of more than a billion dollars a year. “So many livelihoods UN agencies, NGOs, private companies, relief workers, contractors depend on the conflict,” says Clare Lockhart, founder of the Institute for State Effectiveness, which promotes strengthening local institutions as an alternative to long-term relief. “Individuals may have the best possible motives, and they're performing dangerous, important work, but one of the unintended consequences is creating a whole set of actors who need the situation to continue.”

In a place like Darfur, where fear and violence have caused huge population displacements, long-term emergency relief may be unavoidable. Still, says Lockhart, it's essential to have an exit strategy. “You have to make the right judgment call about when the moment is right for resettlement,” she says. “In Afghanistan, an early rush to send people back so quickly put stress on the situation.” When the time does come, she said, foreigners should fade from the picture and empower local communities improving courts, training anticorruption units, setting up self-sustaining business enterprises. “In places like southern Sudan or Afghanistan, the key issue is building up the country's capability to sustain itself,” Lockhart says.

But knowing when a country can stand on its own is tricky. In October the Obama administration, already knee-deep in Afghan­istan, announced a new policy toward Darfur. After months of stark divisions about how to approach the al-Bashir government, the administration decided on a strategy of “incentives and pressure” aimed at nudging him toward a permanent peace deal with the rebels. The new moderate course reflects the views of Obama's special envoy, Major General Scott Gration, a former Air Force officer who grew up in East Africa. While some in the administration have stuck to the line that Darfur is an ongoing genocide, Gration has argued all along that the situation is more accurately the “remnants” of genocide and has commended al-Bashir for allowing some of the expelled aid groups back into Darfur. “We see that there is a spirit of cooperation and an attitude of wanting to help,” he recently said.

The Sudanese government has welcomed the new approach. Gration is “creating a healthy environment, rather than poisoning it,” said Sudan's state minister for foreign affairs, Samani Wasila, “which will lead us to a place where people can sit and talk.”

This kind of language is encouraging. And some observers, including the departing commander of the UN peacekeeping force, have pointed to a drop-off in violence over the past year (a sharp fall in combat deaths, fewer attacks by the janjaweed) as a sign of progress. Others cynics or realists, take your pick say the reason for that is simple: The refugee camps have drawn off most of Darfur's population, leaving fewer villages to destroy. Edmond Mulet, the assistant UN secretary-general for peacekeeping, pointed out that, though the level of fighting has diminished, 140,000 people sought refuge in camps in both Darfur and Chad from January to May.

As he told The New York Times in July, “it is still far from peaceful.”

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, we hopped in the truck and sped down a wide sand track along the Sudan border, with Zone C leader Jabbar in the backseat. Lone acacias, standing like sentries amid a sea of reddish sand, swayed in the haze. Jabbar held my Thuraya sat phone out the window, searching for a signal. “They're supposed to meet us around this place,” he said.

Marco and I had been trying to connect with the rebels in the field, to get a bead on where the conflict actually stood. They'd turned out to be a surprisingly accommodating and media-savvy group. JEM's London-based representative had unfailingly answered my e-mails and put me in touch with Idriss in N'Djamena. Thanks to a morning satellite call from Jabbar to his JEM contacts inside Darfur, a group of fighters were now driving 70 miles from their Darfur base for a mid-desert press conference.

Suddenly, a Toyota pickup emerged out of the haze and roared alongside us. Eight JEM rebels in desert camouflage stood in the bed, draped in bandoliers and carrying Kalashnikov rifles. A 50-caliber machine gun was mounted on the truck, and a dozen grenade launchers hung from the side. We pulled over and the rebels a couple of them teenagers leapt to the ground. Handshakes all around.

“Salaam aleikum,” said the commander, a slim, goateed man wearing a green turban. In halting English, he introduced himself as Arku Tugud, the deputy head of JEM intelligence. Tugud looked at the road nervously, then at the sky. “Not a good place for us to stay,” he said. “They can spot us too easily.”

We veered off the main road and parked in a grove of thorn bushes. Tugud sat cross-legged in the sand. It was he, he made it clear, who would begin the questioning. Tugud wasn't comfortable in English, so Jabbar translated.

“What is șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű magazine?” he asked. “How many readers do you have?”

I explained a bit. He nodded. “And do you have a business card?”

“Business card?” I asked, incredulous. Tugud nodded again and waited expectantly. “Regrettably, I haven't carried mine with me,” I said.

Tugud looked annoyed. “No cards?”

Marco stepped up and handed him his own card. “I can vouch for him,” he said.

Tugud seemed to relax and began to talk. The group's momentum was unstoppable, he insisted. “JEM surprised everybody when they went all the way to Khartoum, across the desert,” he said, “and showed they could fight not only in Darfur but in the heartland of the Sudan government.” Operation Long Arm, Tugud said, with some exaggeration, “caused an effect in all the world. As you know, JEM was very small before, but afterward everybody knew that JEM was good in its objective, and all the groups of the rebels are joining JEM, and as a result it is becoming strong.”

How much support was the DĂ©by regime giving JEM? Weapons? Money?

He smiled and answered cagily. “The Chad government doesn't want us here. We cross the border without permission, and the police often chase us back.”

I asked Tugud whether he saw signs of progress at the negotiating table. I'd heard that recent talks in Doha, the capital of Qatar, had gone nowhere. Tugud agreed but put the blame on the government. “We came with proposals a month ago to Qatar,” he said. “If Bashir moved forward on this, it would be a sign of good faith. We wanted him to stop the bombing by the Antonovs, stop the attacks of the janjaweed. But nothing has changed.” According to one U.S. diplomatic source I talked with, however, the fault lay equally with JEM, whose leaders had made concessions and then rescinded them.

As our interview drew to a close, we heard a humming high above our heads. Looking up, we could see a large white airplane moving slowly across the clearing sky.

“Antonov,” said Tugud.

“Can they see us?” asked Marco.

“It is possible,” he replied. “They can for sure see our vehicles.”

Nobody moved. The rebels' eyes tracked the plane as it headed southeast, in the direction of Sudan. Everyone knew that if the pilots decided to drop their bombs, we'd have nowhere to take cover.

And then it was gone. Tugud, relieved, stood up and shook hands. He gave us his sat-phone number and told us we were welcome to rendezvous with him in Darfur anytime. The commander and his rebel band climbed back into their truck. “In Darfur, you know, the Antonovs search for us every day,” Tugud said. Then he sped off in a cloud of dust.

FOR ALL OF THE JEM fighter's confidence, the rebels and the Sudanese government appear locked in a standoff a low-level conflict that could drag on for years. And in a region with scant resources and deep-seated tribal rivalries, negotiations and politics sometimes only just scratch the surface. To some experts, the war in Darfur is really about a destitute, hungry population trapped in a dog-eat-dog competition for diminishing land and sustenance. In a world of global warming and advancing deserts, of growing populations and shrinking food supplies, lasting solutions become less and less possible. The U.S. military has predicted that global warming will intensify food shortages and water crises all over the world, nowhere worse than in sub-Saharan Africa, which could see far less rainfall and a rise in median temperature of up to nine degrees Fahrenheit by 2050.

Indeed, it's tempting to give up entirely on this sinkhole, to write the whole region off as an unmitigated, unsolvable disaster. Driving the dusty streets of N'Djamena, with Chad's rapacious president sealed inside his palace while his citizens swelter in their electricityless shacks, interviewing stranded Darfurian refugees (or Chadian imposters) huddled in a sandstorm, I sometimes felt overwhelmed by hopelessness.

But I also spoke to several experts in nation building who aren't so downhearted. In 2001, Clare Lockhart set up a series of institution-building projects, including the National Solidarity Program, which provided grants of between $20,000 and $60,000 to 23,000 Afghan villages. The program eliminated foreign NGOs and their overhead costs, placed the cash in village trust funds, and required the establishment of democratic councils to determine how the money would be spent. “The villagers own the solutions,” Lockhart says. “They're the ones doing the labor.”

Yet for all of the project's success, it is surrounded by failures of a huge scale. Over the past three years, the Taliban has extended its control over large swaths of Afghanistan. The government is corrupt and inefficient, and the country has become so dangerous that most of the several thousand foreign aid workers in the country can't travel outside Kabul. Clearly, in terms of turning these wrecked countries into functioning nations, we have a long way to go.

Until that happens, it will be left to the army of international relief workers dedicated, courageous, sometimes naive to apply their “humanitarian Band-Aids.” On our last day in Bahai, Marco and I found Linda, the aid worker from Quebec, in the earthen compound she shared with a Chadian colleague. Delighted to see us, she led us into a tiny asphalt courtyard, to a rickety table on the veranda outside her bare room. Nibbling on soft licorice candies she'd brought from home, Linda produced a Chad Solaire cooker and propped up the flimsy aluminum-foil-and-cardboard contraption in the searingly hot courtyard. She had spent the past four days taking her devices through Oure Cassoni, giving demonstrations to skeptical Darfurian women. “Of course, it's not as efficient as firewood,” she admitted, wrapping a plastic bag around a black metal pot and sticking it beneath the jury-rigged solar panels. Linda said it took two hours to cook a pot of rice and three hours to boil a piece of meat, and the device had to be rotated constantly as the sun moved across the sky. “The idea is to turn cooking into a social event,” she explained.

There was something both infectious and poignant about Linda's enthusiasm. Earlier we had asked Abu Jabbar whether the refugees would accept the solar cookers, and he'd shaken his head. “Maybe to heat a pot of tea,” he said, “but that is all. She is just wasting her time.” For Linda, through, the refugees' recalcitrance seemed beside the point; in this blasted desert at the end of the earth, where rebels roam and Antonovs drop bombs from cobalt skies, she'd found a sense of purpose.

We left Linda standing at the entrance to her compound, a fragile figure with an expression that radiated joy, squinting into the harsh sunlight. “I really couldn't imagine being anywhere else,” she said.

The post Heartbreak. Chaos. Mayhem. Hope? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

The curious thing is that Baker, a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism and perhaps the most prominent figure in the Nepalese capital’s thriving expat community, has openly displayed this stuff in his home for years. The raid supposedly was spurred by an anonymous tip, but it came just 11 days before a new, democratically elected Maoist government took power, abolished the monarchy, and forced King Gyanendra to vacate the Kathmandu palace.

Something strange is happening to Carlos Villalon’s trousers. We’re trekking through a drenching rainstorm in the Chapare region of central Bolivia—a waterlogged sliver of primeval jungles and chocolate rivers that spill over their banks each winter with terrifying predictability. Eight policemen from Bolivia’s special antidrug squad, the Leopards, are leading the way through the rainforest. They’re looking for a primitive laboratory, often no more than a pit dug into the earth, lined with plastic, and covered by a thatch roof, where narcotraficantes turn coca leaf into coca paste, the first step in making cocaine. Half an hour into the hike, we notice the weird phenomenon taking place below Villalon’s waist.

Bolivia

A coca growers' mural

Bolivia

Bolivian forces on the march to eradicate coca in the Chapare region

Bolivia

Packing 50-pound bags of coca leaf

Bolivia

Weighing the spoils near La Paz

Bolivia

Drying coca leaves in a village in the Chapare region

“Holy shit!” cries Evan Abramson, a 29-year-old Long Island–born expat whom I’ve hired as a fixer. “Hey, Carlos, man, check out your pants!” Villalon, our 41-year-old Chilean photographer, looks down. His once-green cargo pants have turned white, and they’re brimming over with soap suds. “What the fuck?” he exclaims, running his hands over the foaming mess.

He lets loose a torrent of Spanish obscenities, and the troops cackle in amusement. It seems that during a recent power failure at his home in BogotĂĄ, Villalon’s laundress never put the trousers through the rinse cycle, hanging them up to dry instead, with the detergent suffusing every fiber, then stashing them back in his closet. Now the heavy rain—which has soaked through our ponchos, fogged our glasses, ruined our notebooks, short-circuited our cameras, and dissolved our cigarettes into wet shreds of tobacco and disgusting brown-stained scraps of paper—is performing the rinse cycle for him.

“When I get back to BogotĂĄ, I’m gonna fire that fucking washerwoman,” he says.

We press on through a tangle of giant ferns, spine-covered palms with roots that divide like octopus tentacles high above the ground, and wild papaya trees. Fire ants attack every exposed bit of flesh, leaving red welts. The soldiers curse but plod on, repeatedly sniffing the air like bloodhounds for the telltale chemical smell of a “maceration pit”—where coca is stomped into liquefied mash and the alkaloid is separated with a mix of gasoline, lime, and sulfuric acid. On top of all the other unpleasantness, the Leopards have only one machete among them, which makes hacking through the jungle next to impossible. At one point we find ourselves caught in thick brush with no apparent way out.

Up strides Armando Azturicaga, the lean-faced, no-nonsense officer who commands this unit. He’s trained with the Green Berets at the School of the Americas, in Fort Benning, Georgia, then in Washington, D.C., with the Drug Enforcement Administration. He stares at Carlos’s frothing trousers with an air of contempt. “This is bullshit,” he says. “Let’s get moving.”

Azturicaga has been running drug interdictions in the Chapare for the past year and a half, and if he seems impatient with the way things are going, it’s understandable. For two decades, the U.S. and Bolivian governments have worked closely together on an antidrug program (this year the budget is $34 million) that combines aerial surveys, on-the-ground destruction of coca plantations, raids on labs, and arrests of cocaine smugglers. But since Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian and the charismatic leader of a coca growers’ union, became Bolivia’s president, in January 2006, the jungle has exploded with coca leaf. Morales, 48, proposed a law that would almost double legal coca growing, ostensibly to promote the leaf’s traditional use in Andean culture. At the same time, he’s permitted the raids on cocaine laboratories and drug traffickers to go on unabated.

It’s a strange paradox: The Leopards are working harder than ever, bushwhacking through the jungle seven days a week, taking down coke labs almost every day. Last year, the Leopards discovered more than 4,070 crude drug labs in the Chapare, an area roughly the size of New Jersey, as compared to 2,619 in 2005. Meanwhile, the cocaleros, the growers, are planting more and more of the leaf, with the government’s encouragement. “It just keeps growing,” Azturicaga says. Villalon, Abramson, and I look at one another, and the absurdity of the whole situation seems to hit us at the same moment. How the hell do you fight a war against coca, we wonder, when the cocalero in chief is running the country?

“COCA IS MORE THAN A PLANT, more than an herb,” Gaston Ugalde told us as we sat in his studio in La Paz’s bohemian Sopocachi neighborhood on my first evening in the 13,000-foot-high capital. Ugalde, Bolivia’s most popular artist, is a wild-looking man in his early sixties, with shoulder-length gray hair and a thick beard and mustache that suggest Jesus Christ by way of an aging Jim Morrison. “Coca leaf brings people together. It’s a means of communication,” he went on in painstaking but near-flawless English, which he’d picked up as an art student in Vancouver decades ago. “You chew, you drink, you talk. It is great for your health, your stomach, your teeth—it has a lot of positive aspects to it.”

Ìę

It was one week before our soggy hike through the jungles of Chapare, and Abramson, who has lived in Bolivia for two and a half years, led me to Ugalde, the shaggy prophet of the coca °ù±đ±čŽÇ±ôłÜłŠŸ±ĂłČÔ. Born and raised in La Paz, Ugalde has been billed as Bolivia’s Andy Warhol, churning out playful, pop-arty collages, sculptures, and paintings filled with references to the country’s indigenous culture. Ugalde has been a devotee of coca since he was in his twenties, and over in the corner was the reason we’d chased him down: a series of collage portraits—Aymara Indians, obscure Bolivian leftists—done entirely with coca leaves. Early in his career he studied with William E. Carter, a U.S. anthropologist who spent several years in Bolivia in the sixties and seventies, observing the effects of coca chewing on Andean Indians, who’ve been using the leaf, a stimulant akin to a powerful energy drink, since well before the rise of the Inca empire. One study’s results showed that regular chewers ate more food than non-chewers, which contradicts the view of coca as an appetite suppressant. Ugalde made his first coca-leaf portrait in 1988, to celebrate the beneficial effects. In 2002 he displayed a series of coca portraits in a New York City gallery. Then, last year, Ugalde’s artistic passion collided auspiciously with the Bolivian zeitgeist. Shortly after his inauguration, Morales summoned Ugalde to the palace, a grandiose colonial edifice on the Plaza Murillo, in the heart of La Paz, and asked him to make the official presidential portrait—using coca leaf. Coca portraits of SimĂłn BolĂ­var and Che Guevara followed (all hang prominently in the palace), as did posters that appear on highway signs and in other strategic locations, showing Aymara peasants and a single word: COCA.

To the U.S. government, Ugalde epitomizes everything that’s gone wrong with Bolivia since Morales came to power. The country, they say, has become intoxicated with coca. Morales and his cocalero cronies in the government (a coca farmer heads up the anti-narcotics effort) have relentlessly driven home the message that the leaf is a wholesome symbol of Bolivian identity. According to local sources in the Chapare, bands of cocaleros recently raided a U.S.-funded institute promoting alternative-crop development, sent the American scientists and researchers packing, and reopened the place as a college for traditional coca use, run by Cubans and Venezuelans. The Chapare town of Shinahota, epicenter of Bolivia’s cocaine trade in the seventies and early eighties, has reportedly been selected as the site of a factory to produce coca flour (used to make bread), set to open later this year, that locals say is being financed by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.

Problem is, even with the new flour business, the numbers don’t add up. According to surveys, Bolivians need roughly 30,000 acres of coca for “traditional uses,” including chewing and consumption of mate de coca (a kind of tea). That amount of coca leaf has long been legally provided by growers in the Yungas region of northern Bolivia. Yet the law that Morales proposed last year would raise the legal cultivation limit of coca in Bolivia to roughly 50,000 acres, and a 2006 United Nations survey states the total acreage as significantly higher—close to 68,000. Some 75 percent of the coca leaf, U.S. officials estimate, is distilled into cocaine base and exported to Brazil and Argentina, as well as Europe and, in small amounts, the United States. “Bolivia is heading back to becoming a major supplier of cocaine in the international drug trade,” I was told by one American official in the Chapare. “It’s now going to be right up there with Peru and Colombia.”

Why would Morales promote a crop whose principal end product is cocaine? After all, angering the United States government may be fine if you’re Hugo Chavez, the swaggering president of oil-rich Venezuela (and Morales’s close friend in the region, which has lately seen left-leaning presidents come to power in Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, and Nicaragua). But if you’re the leader of Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, making an enemy of George Bush may not be the wisest strategy. U.S. officials speculate that Morales believes he’s merely making de jure what was a de facto situation: that farmers in the Chapare were already growing about 20,000 acres of the crop illicitly, despite decades of anti-coca policies. A top American official in the Chapare says that Morales has found himself in an impossible position: He owes his presidential victory to the support of the cocaleros, from whose ranks he rose. At the same time, Morales knows that it would be foolish to prevent the Bolivian army and police from taking out cocaine labs and smugglers. His position is that there will be no zero coca, just zero cocaine. His constituency is the growers, after all, not the narcotraficantes. A Western diplomat in La Paz describes Morales’s mind-set this way: “His whole history is that of a coca-growing leader. Now combine that fact with his need to feed his political base and the fact that he doesn’t see [coca] as particularly harmful. They tell you that ‘We’re just producing the bullets; you have got to get the gun’. But it’s not an intellectually satisfying argument.”

I ran into Gaston Ugalde the following evening at Le ComĂ©die, the best French restaurant in La Paz. The artist laureate was holding court at a center table, surrounded by half a dozen beautiful young women. Around town Ugalde is known as a party animal, and his celebrity has grown since he became the official court painter. He spotted me walking in with a friend and flashed a small smile. I told him that before dawn we’d be flying down to Cochabamba, in the Andes, and from there we’d drive to the Chapare, where coca is king. He had a dreamy look in his eyes. “Buen viaje,” he said.

NEARLY 7,000 FEET BELOW COCHABAMBA, reached by a rutted switchback highway that plunges through jungled canyons, lies Villa Tunari, the biggest town in the Chapare. Villa Tunari has been billed as the epicenter of the country’s “eco-adventure-tourism industry,” offering activities ranging from river rafting to birdwatching. But it’s hard to promote ecotourism when the jungles are riddled with cocaine laboratories and the whole region has for years been the site of a bloody battle between coca growers and the U.S.-backed Bolivian antidrug forces.

A dozen or so near-empty eco-lodges littered the roadside, remnants of a tourist mecca that never fully realized its potential. Half a dozen bedraggled backpackers, both Europeans and Americans, wandered along the muddy main road or sat in ramshackle cafés sipping Coke Zero, a new diet soft drink that provides an inadvertent pun on the brutal Bolivian and U.S. coca-eradication policy that ended in 2002.

Ìę

We stopped for lunch at an outdoor restaurant in the center of town. There were four of us now: Villalon, Abramson, me, and Fernando Salazar, a pudgy, affable social scientist from Cochabamba whom we hired as our translator and assistant. The place was deserted. Large, dusty jars filled with boa constrictors pickled in formaldehyde lined the counter in front, along with preserved wild-pig fetuses, lizards, and other rainforest oddities. “Charming,” said Abramson. “Just the thing you want to look at over lunch.” A young waiter shuffled over and slapped down a few grease-stained menus: The choices were wild pig, antelope, or some large river-bottom feeder grilled with clarified butter. No boa constrictor? I asked. He stared back, uncomprehending.

The grainy black-and-white television in the back of the cafĂ© blared the local news. Teachers were on strike. Miners were threatening a strike. In La Paz, long lines of people waited through the night for cooking gas. The big story of the week was the hunger strike that passengers called after Bolivia’s biggest airline, Lloyd Aereo Boliviano, allegedly went belly-up, leaving hundreds stranded at the country’s airports. The camera panned across haggard families sleeping in front of abandoned check-in counters, surrounded by placards demanding intervention: COMPANERO EVO MORALES DOESN’T DEFEND US, one declared. HE IS ONLY FOR THE COCALEROS, BUT WE ARE ALSO BOLIVIANS!

About the only place in that somnolent burg where we found any activity was the soccer field, which Salazar took us to after lunch. We were looking for Rolando Pacheco, head of field operations for the Economic and Social Development Office in the Tropic of Cochabamba—the man responsible, at least before Morales came along, for locating and destroying coca plantations in the Chapare jungles. We found him—a chain-smoking tecnico, or coca eradicator, who looked to be in his early fifties—cheering on a bench at one end of the field, where two dozen mud-splattered young tecnicos were playing one of the most furious matches I’ve ever seen. I shook Pacheco’s hand and jokingly asked him whether the tecnicos ever played teams of narcotraficantes or cocaleros. He cracked a sad-eyed smile.

Pacheco remembers the dark days after the 1980 military coup. Under that corrupt dictatorship, cocaine base was sold openly in town markets. One of the country’s most powerful drug traffickers, Roberto Suarez, hired Klaus Barbie—former Gestapo chief of Lyon, who’d taken refuge in Bolivia after World War II—as his security consultant. They used soldiers and mercenaries such as Los Pajaros Negros (“the Blackbirds”) and Los Novios de la Muerte (“the FiancĂ©s of Death”) to guard plantations and eliminate would-be competitors. “The army became filthy rich,” I was told by one expert.

Then, in 1982, Bolivia flip-flopped. Massive street protests against the military resulted in the establishment of a civilian-led democratic government. The following year the U.S. helped to create UMOPAR (“Mobile Units for the Patrolling of Rural Areas”), a special police unit responsible for cocaine interdiction. In 1998, American-trained antidrug forces launched Plan Dignidad, otherwise known as “Coca Zero,” which, by 2000, brought the country’s total coca acreage down to about 36,000. The sweeps unified the coca federations in resistance, helping propel Morales to power.

In 2004, as the chief of the cocaleros‘ union, Morales forced President Carlos Mesa—who was unwilling to provoke further violence between the government and the cocaleros—to sign an agreement to allow roughly 8,000 acres for coca cultivation in the Chapare. The agreement also gave farming families in the region the right to own a cato, or a little less than half an acre, of the crop. Then, in his 2006 proposed law, Morales not only sought to up the legal acreage but to grant individual proprietors the right to divide their farms among immediate family members over age 18, each of whom could also grow a cato. After 25 years and hundreds of millions spent on eradication and alternative development, Salazar told me, “the U.S. managed to reduce the coca crop from 110,000 to 60,000 acres. In the end, the cocaleros won the fight.”

After a few minutes of watching soccer, Pacheco led us into a back room in the tecnicos‘ compound down the road from the soccer field. Times have changed, said Pacheco: The powerful local federaciones—which dole out land to peasant farmers, collect taxes, market coca, and build schools—are supposed to make sure that everybody keeps to his legal limit. The new buzz phrase in Bolivia is “social control.” But there’s no way to guarantee that the farmers and federation leaders are behaving honestly. Pacheco pulled out a recent satellite map of the Department of Cochabamba, the province that includes the Chapare. It was covered with tiny green circles, each one representing a field of coca; there must’ve been thousands of them. “There is no control,” Pacheco admitted. Earlier, Salazar had told us that Pacheco was depressed. He was watching his life’s work go to hell. The sad-sack tecnico boss had been, in his day, one of the hardest anti-cocalero ideologues in the Chapare. Pacheco keeps his cards close to his vest, however. When I asked him how he felt about the coca reforms, he shrugged and replied, “It’s not my place to get into politics.”

PACHECO WAS EAGER to take us out to see how the new policy is playing on the ground, but it wasn’t simple to arrange. We had to get written permission from myriad generals and police commanders, and it wasn’t clear who had to sign the paperwork. One morning we were summoned to a meeting with an army colonel at the base in Chimore, a ramshackle assemblage of stucco buildings and Vietnam-era U.S. attack helicopters moldering in the heat. When the colonel, friendly but ramrod straight, told us that an expected fax from a general in La Paz still hadn’t arrived, Abramson, who displayed an impulsive streak that threatened to get us into trouble, blurted out “What the fuck?!” The colonel flinched, and Salazar gave Abramson a look from hell.

Abramson had been chewing coca almost nonstop: He’d bought two pounds of leaf for about US$6 in a La Paz market just before starting our journey, and he carried the bag with him everywhere. Every 15 minutes he fished out a fistful, rolled it into a wad around a small chunk of lagia, a hashish-textured chunk of ash and banana peel that helps bring out the alkaloid-rich juices, and shoved it between his gum and his lower cheek. I’d started chewing the leaf myself to keep me going on the grueling, six-hour road trip from Cochabamba to Chapare, and I was becoming as much of an addict as Abramson. I found myself shoving ever-larger wads of the stuff into my mouth, and soon my lips had turned black and my teeth were speckled with bits of leaf.

@#95;box photo=image_2 alt=image_2_alt@#95;box

One evening in a steady drizzle, I was driving us back from another visit to the army base. The Land Cruiser’s weak headlights barely registered on the fog-shrouded highway. Eighteen-wheelers and battered buses bound for Santa Cruz and Brazil rumbled by in the opposite direction with their brights on, blinding me.

“I can’t see a goddamn thing,” I said.

“Slow down to 15 miles an hour, man, if you have to,” said Villalon. “Just get us back to Villa Tunari in one fucking piece.”

Abramson was on the phone with Salazar, who’d spent the whole day back in La Paz pleading with the vice minister of coca, an old friend, to help obtain permissions from the cops and the army. But he’d been told, “These authorizations take time.”

I slammed my hand against the steering wheel. What the fuck?

“I’m just the messenger,” Abramson said with a shrug, stuffing another wad of leaf in his mouth.

Suddenly Villalon grabbed my arm. “Jesus Christ!” he screamed. The Toyota’s headlights illuminated a pair of bicyclists on the shoulder of the highway. I swerved sharply to avoid them, missing by inches. I was shaken. I pulled over to the shoulder, breathing hard.

“I could have killed them,” I said.

“I know, man,” Villalon said. “Go easy on the leaf.”

The next morning, still waiting for permits, we decided to pay a visit to the Chapare backwater where Morales and his parents settled in the early eighties and began cultivating coca leaf after moving there from the Altiplano. The Morales family had herded llamas on the bleak, windswept plateau but, like thousands of their fellow Aymaras, found life untenable there after years of crippling drought. Anti-American feeling is especially strong in Morales’s rural stronghold, and Villa Tunari’s mayor arranged for us to bring along an escort for protection. We picked him up, a cocalero union leader named Jorge, at Villa Tunari’s town hall, a crumbling colonial-era villa on the main square. Jorge sat silently in the passenger seat as we drove deep into the jungle, working his way through a box of banana-cream wafers I’d bought for the entire group.

“Why did the gringos invade Iraq?” he asked me sharply.

“For a lot of reasons,” I said, annoyed.

“It was all about the oil, right?”

“Maybe that was part of it.” I began to rattle off a list of motivations—WMDs, Israel, Bush’s personal vendetta, Cheney’s paranoid obsessions.

“No,” said Jorge. “It was oil.”

“If you say so,” I said.

After an hour we arrived in the village, bouncing down a cobblestone street past an unkempt soccer field lined with palms and banana plants. We parked in front of the coca market, a small cement-block building with a corrugated-metal roof—one of 16 collection points in the Chapare where cocaleros are obligated to bring their crop for transport to the state market in Cochabamba. One U.S. official I’d talked to earlier told me that these markets function as “one-stop shopping” for the cocaine traffickers—much of what’s delivered here, he said, never ends up in the state market. The jungle heat was stultifying.

“Take off your sunglasses,” Salazar warned me.

“Why?” I asked.

“You look like a DEA agent.”

Inside the market stood the largest pile of coca leaves I’d yet seen, ten feet high and 15 feet long—a Mount Illimani of coca leaf. A shirtless cocalero stood thigh deep in the massive mound, running his hands through the leaves, many of which had stuck together in the humidity. The walls were covered with lurid murals that conjure up the brutal war between the cocaleros and antidrug forces: One showed an Aymara woman with a face straight out of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, hands plaintively outstretched, standing in front of burning coca fields and a line of black helicopters. UNITED WE CAN NEVER BE DEFEATED, proclaimed the slogan above the hellish scene. The cocalero stopped his toil when he saw us walk in.

“Who are the gringos?” the man asked Jorge, suspiciously.

“Periodistas,” he explained. The cocalero relaxed. He wandered over and stuffed a fistful of coca in his mouth. It was time for his pijcho, or coca break, a high point of the day for many cocaleros. He sat on a sack and offered me a wad. I wrapped it around a chunk of lagia and placed it between my gum and cheek. After a few minutes of mastication I felt the warm tingle as the alkaloid-rich juices entered my bloodstream.

“Te gusta?” he asked me.

“Mucho,” I said, and he and Jorge laughed heartily.

The cocalero turned serious. “During Coca Zero, the people suffered a lot here,” he told us. “The Yanquis tried to convince us to plant alternative crops, but it was all a lie. The soil was bad, and most of the crops died. Many people had to move away. For a while the cocaleros were divided over the issue. But now we’ve all turned back to coca.” He grinned.

Just the other day, he told us, Morales had come back to visit. He’d stayed for an hour or so, eating a plate of river fish and kicking a soccer ball around on the muddy field. “We used to call him ‘El Pelotero’ when he was younger,” the cocalero said. A fine athlete, Morales had parlayed his skill into a job as sports director of the local coca growers’ syndicate—the position that helped speed his political rise.

The cocalero’s face lit up in amazement. “Nobody expected that we’d be so happy,” he said. “Nobody expected that Evo would become the president. It is like a dream.”

AFTER SIX DAYS and countless phone calls, our authorizations have come through, and the coca-lab interdiction mission with Azturicaga takes place without a hitch, though it leaves Abramson with a painful crotch rash that makes it almost impossible for him to walk. He bows out of the second mission the next day, an “eradication trip” with a joint task force of soldiers, police, and tecnicos. That evening, Salazar, Villalon, and I find ourselves in a military camp deep in the jungle, frantically rubbing deet into our arms, necks, and faces as mosquitoes begin to circle.

Captain Franz Ordoñez Menacho, our escort, tosses us three U.S.-military-issue meals ready to eat. Salazar has never seen an MRE before. He rips open the thick plastic bag and examines the contents with fascination. “Cajun shrimp,” he reads aloud. “Pound cake… vanilla milk shake. Skittles.” I slip his shrimp dinner into the heating pouch, add water, and hand him back the warmed-up meal five minutes later. He shakes his head in wonder. “Los gringos,” he says with admiration.

The next morning we rise from our tents before dawn and jump aboard the first in a convoy of trucks bound for the eradication mission. The dirt road peters out before a cliff, and Ordoñez, a handsome, bronze-skinned man in his mid-thirties, leads us, along with 89 soldiers and policemen in camouflage fatigues, down a narrow trail that plunges toward the river, 300 feet below. Two days of heavy rain have turned the path into a slippery mess; a single misstep would send a man tumbling to near-certain death over a vertical cliff face. Villalon, Salazar, and I inch across in terror. The troops navigate the trail with practiced ease, loping down toward the wide, brown river, the cops with M-16’s slung over their shoulders.

We wade knee-deep across streams, clamber over a field of boulders along the riverbank, trudge down muddy trails hemmed in by primeval flora. After a 90-minute hike, we arrive at a weathered wooden hut in a clearing littered with cooking pots, empty tin cans, corncobs, and soiled clothing. Just beyond it, we come to a chaco, or agricultural plot, covered with eight-foot-high plants: coca. In the old days, the police would have swarmed the field, hacked down the plants with machetes, and burned what was left; an ambush by angry and desperate cocaleros might happen on the way in or out. But now everything proceeds as decorously as a cricket match. Ordoñez hands an inspection order to the ŽÚ±đ»ć±đ°ùČ賊Ÿ±ĂłČÔ representative, who was alerted about this visit three days ago. Wilmer Avendano, the slightly built 17-year-old son of the chaco’s registered owner, Paulina Avendano, presents his Bolivian identification card. Then, as the police form a cordon around the area, a team of tecnicos in khaki uniforms fans out across the field with tape measures, calling out numbers to a team leader who tabulates the acreage: “20 meters!” “33 meters!” “15 meters!”

The field measures about 1,400 square meters, and a tiny plot just off the jungle trail, also belonging to the Avendano family, brings the total size of the cato to the permitted 1,600 square meters. Then, just as we are about to leave, a soldier shouts from a nearby thicket. He’s discovered hundreds of illicit plants hidden in the jungle—a typical cocalero tactic. The soldiers whip out their machetes and begin chopping through the roots to prevent the coca from growing back. But even this vestige of Bolivia’s Coca Zero days proceeds with untroubled efficiency. Wilmer Avendano watches the operation and smiles. “We grew this as a ‘protest crop’ a few years ago,” he tells me. “But we’re working with the government now, and we’re fine with [the arrangement].”

Everything has gone smoothly. But I can’t avoid the impression that this choreographed “eradication” is all for show. Indeed, Ordoñez tells me that many federations are engaging in fraud—inflating the number of their members, for instance, or simply not reporting coca fields hidden deep in the jungle. The captain shrugs. “A social experiment is going on here,” Ordoñez says. “Who knows where it’s going to lead?”

Salazar thinks he’s got a pretty clear idea. Later that afternoon, relaxing poolside at Los Tucanes resort, in Villa Tunari, before we head back up to Cochabamba, he tells me that almost everybody in Bolivia expects both coca and cocaine production to soar in the coming months. “By next year Morales will probably increase the allowance from one cato to two catos per farmer,” he says. “The cocaleros are happy. The army is happy, too, because they are receiving these extra salaries from the United States.” He takes a swig from a bottle of Coke Zero and flashes a wry smile. “Working with coca,” he says, “is good business for everybody.”

The post Coca Is It! appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

THE VILLAGE OF KIONGURURIA, in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, is a hardscrabble place, with mud huts scattered among green hills and a forlorn collection of businesses—a maize-meal store, a bar, a phone exchange—strung along a potholed highway. When I stopped there on an overcast morning in late July looking for friends and family of 37-year-old Robert Njoya, whose death earlier this year has riveted Kenya, a drunken man wearing a Green Bay Packers cap staggered up and shoved his hand in my face, demanding money. Three friends sitting on a stoop burst out laughing. I gave the man 50 Kenyan shillings—about 70 cents—and he stumbled away.

Cholmondeley Trial, Kenya

Seenoi, widow of Samson ole Sisina, a Masai who was a ranger with the Kenya Wildlife Service

Cholmondeley Trial, Kenya

Mike Reagan

Cholmondeley Trial, Kenya

Peter Gichuhi Njuguna,left,who was with Robert Njoya on the evening he was killed, testified at Cholmondeley's trial in September.

Cholmondeley Trial, Kenya

Newspaper coverage after Cholmondeley's second arrest

A minute later I ran into Daniel Losut, a gaunt man who told me he’d been a neighbor of the victim. He offered to take me to meet Njoya’s widow, Serah, and together we drove up a rutted path to a hut surrounded by a fence of roped branches. Just beyond an adjacent plot of corn, an unkempt hedge marked the boundary of 50,000-acre Soysambu Ranch, founded a hundred years ago by the third Lord Delamere—the legendary big-game hunter and cattle baron who moved to Kenya from Britain at the turn of the last century. Since no one was home, Losut borrowed my cell phone to try to track Serah down, but he couldn’t reach her. As we waited, on the off chance that she’d show up, I asked Losut whether reports about the dead man—who’d been described in the Kenyan newspapers as a schoolteacher, a stonemason, and a day laborer—were true. He laughed and said that while Njoya sometimes did manual labor in the village, “he didn’t have a lot of work. Robert was a poacher. He liked to shoot everything—gazelles, warthogs, even buffaloes.”

Late on the afternoon of May 10, 2006, as the equatorial sun sank low in the sky, Njoya, with four local men and six dogs, apparently clambered over the hedge beside his house and illegally entered the Delamere estate. At the same time, Thomas Cholmondeley, the third Lord Delamere’s 38-year-old great-grandson, set out for a walk with a friend from his colonial-era home, Jersey Hall, a five-bedroom converted cattle barn on the family’s ranch.

Just before dusk, Kenya’s two social extremes collided. The five black men emerged from a thicket, carrying bows and arrows and, over one man’s shoulders, a skinned impala. What happened next is a matter of dispute. In Cholmondeley’s telling (which has been backed up by his walking companion that afternoon, another white Kenyan named Carl Tundo), the poachers set their dogs on him and he fired four shots in self-defense from his .303 Lee Enfield rifle—killing two of the animals and accidentally hitting Njoya, who was hiding behind a hedge, in the groin. Those who were with Njoya say that Cholmondeley opened fire without warning as they were carrying the dead impala toward a nearby tree. They heard several shots and fled; Njoya never made it back to his hut. Tundo says Cholmondeley bandaged the injured man with a handkerchief, yelled for a car, and told the driver to take Njoya to the nearest hospital. By the time the vehicle arrived at the hospital, Njoya had bled to death.

Losut and I waited for half an hour in front of the hut, then we got back in the car and set off in search of Njoya’s older brother James, who owns a butcher shop just off the highway. There had been rumors that this was where Njoya often took his poached animals to be butchered. When we arrived at the dank, tin-roofed shack, I found James huddled in a back room, surrounded by hanging meat and rifling through a wad of account slips. He looked at me suspiciously.

“A lot of foreign journalists have stopped here asking me questions about my brother,” he said. “Then they print lies.” I told James I was interested in hearing about Cholmondeley’s reputation among the locals—there were allegations that he had treated the people of Kiongururia harshly when he found them trespassing on his land. He said he needed to confer with the rest of the family. He asked for my cell-phone number and promised to call later that evening. I never heard back from him.

HAD THE KILLING OF ROBERT NJOYA been an isolated incident, it would probably have rated only a few lines in local newspapers. But one year earlier, on April 19, 2005, Thomas Cholmondeley (pronounced CHUM-lee) had been involved in a strikingly similar confrontation. In that incident, Samson ole Sisina, a 45-year-old ranger for the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), was dispatched to Soysambu with two KWS corporals on an undercover mission. The three government officers were investigating whether members of the Soysambu staff were illegally shooting wild animals on the property and selling the meat. With ole Sisina at the wheel, the team arrived at the ranch in an unmarked Toyota Corolla station wagon with fake license plates. Posing as meat buyers from Nairobi, they talked their way past the security man inside the guardhouse, signed a register using false names, then drove ten minutes down a gravel road to the slaughterhouse, a low, white-painted stone building with a tin roof. Ole Sisina’s two colleagues entered, asked about buying game meat, were told that none was being sold at the ranch, then left without finding incriminating evidence.

As the KWS employees were leaving Soysambu, however, they passed a Land Rover heading into the ranch carrying a buffalo that had been shot a few hours earlier. (Cholmondeley later explained that the buffalo was a “problem animal” that had been endangering his employees and insisted that the ranch staff had the right to kill it under Kenyan law; the KWS disputes that claim.) Ole Sisina turned the Toyota around and followed the Land Rover back to the slaughterhouse. Then, while he stood by an entrance, the corporals drew their weapons, burst inside, and made all 16 workers—several of whom were in the process of skinning the buffalo—move into one corner of the building.

A few moments later, according to a police report, a Soysambu driver appeared at the nearby house of Christopher Chirchir, the ranch’s managing director. Chirchir was told that “people with guns . . . who looked like robbers” had invaded the property and taken the slaughterhouse staff hostage. Chirchir then phoned Cholmondeley at his home 100 yards away. A crack shot, Cholmondeley picked up his .357 Luger pistol and hurried down a path. As he approached the slaughterhouse, he later told police, ole Sisina appeared around a corner. In unclear circumstances, Cholmondeley fired four shots, instantly killing him with a bullet in the neck.

Immediately after the shooting, Rift Valley police confiscated Cholmondeley’s weapon and took him into custody. The next day, 50 members of ole Sisina’s family, from the Masai tribe, stormed the nearby Naivasha police station, where Cholmondeley was being held, but were driven off; hundreds of Masai also demonstrated on the highway in front of the ranch. Cholmondeley spent the next month in a filthy jail cell before Kenya’s director of public prosecution, Philip Murgor, to widespread public dismay, ordered him released, citing a lack of evidence to sustain a murder charge.

After the death of Robert Njoya, Cholmondeley was not as fortunate. Arrested hours after Njoya’s death, he was charged with murder 14 days later and dispatched to Kamiti prison, a maximum-security, British-built fortress outside Nairobi. Friends and family have closed ranks around him, forbidding the media from seeing him in prison, visiting the ranch, and talking to Chirchir, Carl Tundo, or those closest to him. If convicted, he could be hanged.

Cholmondeley’s trial began on September 25 with a four-day round of opening arguments and testimony; some observers are predicting it could last a year or more. But even before that, Kenyan bloggers were calling the courtroom drama “Kenya’s version of the O.J. Simpson trial,” both because of the voluminous amount of media coverage the case has generated and because of the starkly different views of Cholmondeley held by blacks and whites. Black Kenyans tend to believe that Cholmondeley is guilty of murder, defined by Kenyan law as homicide carried out with malice aforethought. In recent months, stories have surfaced about Cholmondeley’s alleged mistreatment of trespassers.

A September article in The New York Times named a woman who claims Cholmondeley slapped her after he caught her collecting firewood on the property. Nick Maes, a British journalist who spent a social week with Cholmondeley at Soysambu, described, in an article in the Sunday Times of London last June, “a moment of intense drama and fury” between the rancher and a Masai herdsman who had trespassed on the ranch to graze his cattle—a disturbing foreshadowing of the Njoya killing. “Tom hit the brakes and leapt out of the car, yelling: ‘Get these fucking things off my land!'” Maes wrote. “He snatched a Masai cudgel from the trespasser and wielded it above his head.” The incident ended, according to the article, when Cholmondeley threw the weapon in his pickup truck and drove off.

Cholmondeley’s friends, most of them white, have proclaimed his innocence, arguing that he was defending himself in two potentially deadly confrontations in the middle of a crime wave. In the past several years, the Rift Valley has experienced a spike in violence, attributed to an influx of the poor from across rural Kenya searching for work in the booming flower industry around Lake Naivasha. Five whites have been shot dead in the past two years, most notably Joan Root, a wildlife documentary filmmaker, murdered in the bedroom of her cottage on Lake Naivasha in January 2006 by three killers wielding AK-47’s, possibly in revenge for her crusade against poaching. That same month, thieves invaded Soysambu and shot the ranch’s managing director, Chirchir, a black man, in the stomach with a Kalashnikov, seriously wounding him. Weeks before that, robbers had held up the ranch’s dairy manager, an Indian-Kenyan, at gunpoint.

“Tom is not a mad, gun-toting idiot,” I was told by one of his closest friends, who insisted on anonymity. “[The two fatal shootings were] just a terrible, terrible coincidence.”

The Cholmondeley case has provided endless fodder for the tabloids—the Delamere heir has emerged as the man whom black Kenyans love to hate—but it has also raised larger questions about race, economic injustice, white privilege, and land distribution. The Delameres are the most prominent members of an elite group of white landowning families that profited from treaties forced on indigenous tribes by the British colonial government at the turn of the 20th century. Although many whites sold their land to black Kenyans decades ago, the few hundred big land owners who remain continue to live in a bubble of wealth and privilege, even as the vast majority of Kenya’s indigenous population is mired in poverty.

“The Delamere family owns 50,000 acres in the Rift Valley, in a country where people fight for a quarter of an acre,” I was told by Parselelo Kantai, a black Kenyan journalist who writes frequently about Rift Valley politics. “Their lives are a 1920s fantasy.”

SOYSAMBU, A MASAI NAME meaning “striped stone,” lies on the eastern shore of Lake Elementeita, one of the smallest of a dozen alkaline lakes that extend in a chain through Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, a giant seam in the earth created by a shift of tectonic plates 20 million years ago. When I drove past the lake on a late-summer morning, thousands of flamingos were basking in the shallow water—a pink haze dusting Elementeita’s silver surface. A vast sweep of savanna, speckled with yellow-barked fever trees, rose gently from the lake: the Delamere ranch. Strange volcanic forms loomed along the shoreline, including a proboscis-like outcropping known as Delamere’s Nose. I turned off the highway and followed a dirt path through the bush to a metal gate and, behind it, a ramshackle guard booth. DELAMERE ESTATES, read a crude handpainted sign. NO ENTRY WITHOUT A VOUCHER. It was as far as I could go.

Until about a hundred years ago, the land I was driving through belonged to the Masai, nomadic herders whose territory extended from northeast Kenya across the Rift Valley to the Tanzania border, in the country’s southwest corner. At the turn of the last century, however, Hugh Cholmondeley, the third Lord Delamere, cast his eye on the rich grazing land on the shore of the lake. Largely to accommodate Cholmondeley and a handful of other white settlers, the British colonial government in 1904 forced Masai elders to put their thumbprints on a treaty that stripped the tribe of their ownership of the Rift Valley. The nomads were left with a divided territory, one zone south of Nairobi and the other in the highlands of Laikipia, northwest of Mount Kenya, which was taken away in 1911. In 1906, Cholmondeley purchased much of the confiscated Masai land around Lake Elementeita for little more than administrative and land-surveying costs. Even now, the property is contested. Michael Tiampati, of the Maa Civil Society Forum, a Masai activist group, insists that “the process in which the land was acquired by Delamere was fraudulent, and they are illegally there.”

Hugh Cholmondeley, Thomas’s great-grandfather, was known as a practical joker who liked to ride his horse into the lobby of the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, a favorite watering hole for white Kenyan ranchers, and shoot out the lightbulbs in the bar. But he was also a serious rancher, committed to “the political and agricultural future of British East Africa,” as Beryl Markham wrote in West with the Night. He built Soysambu into one of the most successful cattle ranches in the region. His son, Thomas, spent most of his adult life in advertising in London, but his grandson, Hugh (the accused Cholmondeley’s father), continues the ranching tradition. The fifth Lord Delamere, now in his seventies, has amassed 10,000 head of cattle and set up a countrywide distribution system; Delamere dairy products and beef are sold all across Kenya. Soysambu also sustains a thriving wild-animal population—about 10,000 warthogs, impalas, buffalo, zebras, giraffes, cheetahs, and lions—and for several years the family owned a safari lodge on the shores of Lake Elementeita, called Delamere Camp, which was managed by a Kenyan hotel company.

It was here, in the wealthy enclave dubbed Happy Valley, cocooned in a world of black servants, shooting lessons, and ambles through the game-rich savanna, that Thomas Patrick Gilbert Cholmondeley came of age. Hugh Simpson, a neighbor, remembers him as “a nice boy, with a formal English upbringing, always polite, an open chap.” As a young teenager, Cholmondeley was sent by his parents—his mother, Lady Ann Delamere, is the daughter of one of Kenya’s last colonial governors—to Eton, the elite public school in southern England, and then the Royal Agriculture College, in Gloucestershire. Back in Kenya, Cholmondeley established himself as a flamboyant presence on the white Kenyan social circuit that revolves around Rift Valley ranches and the leafy Nairobi suburb of Karen, named for one of its first denizens, Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa. Six foot four, blandly handsome, with a fringe of blond hair framing a balding pate, Cholmondeley attracted a wide circle of people like himself: wealthy white Kenyans and British expatriates who were drawn to the romance of East Africa. A friend recalls him showing up at a Nairobi wedding wearing a purple velvet suit, towering above the crowd, holding court about a walking safari he’d just taken with friends in the bush. With a large amount of cash, a fondness for women, and a taste for adventure, he struck some people as a dilettante, an overgrown teenager with a short attention span.

“He’s fun to have a drink with, but he’s not a serious person,” one acquaintance told me. “He’d say, ‘I’m going to buy a plane and fly around Africa,’ and he’d go out and get himself a single-engine Piper.”

As was the case with his great-grandfather, who was once severely mauled by a lion while hunting in the East African bush, Cholmondeley’s enthusiasms could get him into trouble. 1n 1991, according to London’s Evening Standard, during a charity motor rally, Cholmondeley’s car caught fire 50 miles from Monte Carlo, destroying part of the road and an adjacent farm, but he emerged from the accident without serious injury. Six years later, while he was hiking in the Masai Mara, a buffalo charged from the bush and attacked him. “The horn went into the back of his thigh and ripped through the back of his knee and came out his ankle,” Simon Cox, a longtime friend, told me. “But it didn’t wreck any arteries; he just lost a lot of flesh.” Cholmondeley’s injury did bring him one life-changing benefit: Cox introduced him in the hospital to Sally Brewerton, a British physician then working for Doctors Without Borders in Sudan. The couple, who married in 1998 but separated shortly before the ole Sisina killing, have two young sons, Hugh and Henry.

Cholmondeley works under his father and Chirchir as the ranch’s financial manager. His parents also live at Soysambu, in a four-bedroom house about a 15-minute drive from his. By all accounts, Cholmondeley seems to share his father and great-grandfather’s passion for the land and is fiercely protective of the property. Lord Delamere granted the producers of the 2001 film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider permission to shoot a scene at Lake Elementeita, but, at Cholmondeley’s insistence, strict rules were set about the use of vehicles along the fragile shoreline, and he monitored the filming every step of the way.

Cholmondeley’s protectiveness of the ranch also led him into an ongoing conflict with the Kenya Wildlife Service. In November 2003, the KWS banned the practice of animal culling on the country’s private ranches, claiming that the existing program—in which ranchers were permitted to shoot a small amount of their wildlife each year, to prevent overgrazing and other environmental damage—was poorly controlled and that many ranchers were cheating. Connie Maina, the KWS spokesperson, told me, “The system was being abused, and the numbers of zebra, gazelles, and buffalo were dropping fast.” Cholmondeley allegedly ignored the KWS prohibitions, claiming they were hurting the ranch’s cattle. Nick Maes even joined Cholmondeley on a hunt at Soysambu, and his Sunday Times article describes the rancher bringing down a gazelle with a single shot. Cholmondeley had been appointed an honorary game warden by the KWS in the nineties, and he and fellow ranchers claimed that he had the right to shoot wild animals that he deemed a threat to his property, his cattle, or his staff.

“All the wildlife in the country belongs to the government, and KWS is the custodian,” Maina said. “You have to go with what is the law, but Tom Cholmondeley made his own rules.”

AS I TRAVELED THROUGH the verdant suburbs and gritty shanty towns of Nairobi, I was struck by the vehement antipathy among blacks toward the Delamere heir. “Tom should get the death penalty,” said my driver, Ben, a Kikuyu from central Kenya. “Nobody can shoot two people dead in one year and claim that it was self-defense. He is a killer.” Several people I talked to—a taxi driver, a journalist for The Daily Nation, Kenya’s largest newspaper, a bellboy at the Norfolk Hotel—referred to Cholmondeley as a “Kenyan cowboy,” a term used to describe a particular breed of macho white Kenyan who manifests the same racially superior attitude as his colonial-era ancestors.

To some black Kenyans, however, Cholmondeley has been the victim of a rush to judgment. Philip Murgor, the chief prosecutor who dismissed Cholmondeley’s first murder charge, believes that jealousy, greed, and reverse racism all contributed to an unfair target=ing of the white rancher. After overruling the police and ordering Cholmondeley freed from jail on May 18, 2005, Murgor provoked outrage across Kenya; for that and other reasons, he says, he was fired by President Mwai Kibaki a week later. A trim, light-skinned black man, Murgor, 45, says he got involved about a week after ole Sisina was killed, when he learned that Simon Kiragu, the Rift Valley senior police officer handling the investigation, announced that he was planning to charge Cholmondeley with murder.”It was a premature statement,” Murgor told me. “Besides that, it wasn’t even his decision to make—it was the attorney general’s. He was completely out of line. The police were trying to tie our hands.” Nine days after the shooting—and five days shy of the normal 14-day waiting period for filing charges against an accused killer—the Naivasha police formally charged Cholmondeley with murder. With that, Murgor told me, “alarm bells went off,” and he began looking into the case file personally.

As I sat in his cramped office in downtown Nairobi, Murgor handed me a copy of the official report filed by the Rift Valley Criminal Investigations Division (CID) shortly after the ole Sisina killing. In stilted English, the report states that the KWS ranger “ran for his dear life,” while Cholmondeley “chased him for about 61 [yards] where he eventually shot him in the neck and killed him instantly.” Cholmondeley had given the police a drastically different version of the incident, claiming that he fired at ole Sisina from some distance only after the ranger took the first shot. “I shot the man in the firm belief that he was a robber with intent to cause harm to myself and my staff,” Cholmondeley said in a statement to police. “There was no indication that he was a KWS ranger and I am most bitterly remorseful at the enormity of my mistake. I beg the authorities for leniency.”

Murgor says he learned that the police had ignored key evidence, such as the fact that several employees inside the slaughterhouse insisted that they’d heard ole Sisina’s small-caliber revolver go off before Cholmondeley fired his Luger. The deeper Murgor probed, the more convinced he became that Cholmondeley was being railroaded: He told me that he suspects that powerful politicians put “intense pressure” on the police to rush through a murder charge. “This is all about land,” Murgor told me. “The Delamere ranch is the [biggest tract of land] in the Rift Valley, and a lot of people want it.”

At the time of Kenya’s independence from Great Britain in 1963, the country’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, guaranteed to respect the titles of the country’s white landowners, who then numbered about 3,500. Only an act of Kenya’s parliament could undo Kenyatta’s guarantee, a step that almost every political figure and lawyer I spoke to in Kenya said was highly unlikely. But, according to Murgor, some Kenyan political figures believe that prosecuting Cholmondeley on a capital-murder charge could force the family out of Kenya or oblige them to divest their land in the hope of getting more lenient treatment.

Immediately after Murgor ordered Cholmondeley released, the former prosecutor charges, the media and some politicians engaged in an orchestrated campaign to whip up a furor. OUTRAGE AS DELA MERE IS FREED OVER KILLING, declared the front page of The Daily Nation—a headline that, Murgor says, was as much intended to create a stir as to report on one. In the story, ole Sisina’s brothers called the dropping of the charges a travesty of justice and insisted that “our brother’s life has been treated like that of a dog,” while Edward Nkoiboni, the councilman for the Ntulele ward, where ole Sisina lived, said, “The government has clearly demonstrated that it has two sets of laws: one for the poor and the other for the rich.”

But Cholmondeley’s own behavior, as much as the comments of politicians and the press, contributed to the heated atmosphere. The morning after his release from jail, a photograph ran on The Daily Nation‘s front page showing him sitting in the back of a police vehicle, flanked by officers, smiling jubilantly and flashing two thumbs up. His friends believe he was set up by the media to look bad. “Do you know what the Kenyan press did?” one close friend of Cholmondeley asked me. “They screamed, ‘Tom, show us your hands are free.’ So he gave them the thumbs up, and it came across as ‘Yahoo, I got away with murder.’ ” Cholmondeley reportedly also went back to his standard practice of carrying weapons around his property, despite warnings that he was under police and media scrutiny.

“Everybody who knew Tom thought he was making a mistake by carrying guns,” one friend told me.

When news broke of the Njoya shooting, it created a predictable uproar. OH NO, NOT AGAIN, screamed The Standard, Kenya’s daily tabloid. This time, according to news reports, the Rift Valley police confiscated all firearms from Cholmondeley, and politicians warned prosecutors that the consequences of another release would be disastrous. “The government goofed the last time . . . and it should be reminded that people . . . will not take things lying down this time,” former cabinet minister Anyang’ Nyong’o told The Daily Nation. At Njoya’s funeral, in May, Koigi wa Wamwere, a deputy minister of information and member of Kenya’s parliament from the town of Nakuru, urged the crowd to “take [the law] into your own hands” if Cholmondeley were released from prison.

I went to see Wamwere at his tenth-floor office in downtown Nairobi during a break from a legislative session. It was two and a half months after the Njoya shooting, and Wamwere, who had championed democracy and human rights during the repressive era of Daniel arap Moi, was still making incendiary comments about the case.

“We have a problem in Kenya,” he told me, peering through wire-rim spectacles. “These white Kenyans think that they remain the masters, and we blacks are the servants. They don’t see why they should treat blacks differently from colonial times.” A small, wiry man clad in a black Nehru jacket and black cotton pants, Wamwere shook his head when I brought up Cholmondeley’s contention that he had killed both of his victims in self-defense. “That is ridiculous,” Wamwere told me. “This man is a Kenyan cowboy and he’s not alone. Go to the flower farms in the Rift Valley and look at them—carrying pistols, swaggering around like the cowboys in Texas. That mentality has not left the white landowners. They are running around, thinking they can shoot a black as easily as they shoot a wild animal.”

Sipping from a cup of sweet milk tea, he flashed an incongruous smile. “If he were set free and people took the law into their own hands, who would blame them?” he said. “I don’t want to see that happen, but, believe me, people will be very angry. Tom Cholmondeley will be a marked man.”

HUGH SIMPSON drew on an Embassy cigarette and glanced over a curry-stained menu in an outdoor Indian restaurant just down the road from Lake Naivasha. A rugged, sunburned sculptor and outdoorsman, Simpson is a third-generation Kenyan whose Irish grandfather settled on Lake Naivasha at the turn of the last century. Ten years older than Cholmondeley, he was something of a mentor to him in his youth, later hunted with him around Kenya, and was a frequent visitor to Jersey Hall. “I’ve known Tom since he was 12 years old,” he said. “I’ve seen him close at hand, played sports with him. The image of him as a ‘Kenyan cowboy’ couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

Simpson looked me in the eye. “I don’t care what people say,” he said. “There’s no racialism in Tom at all. He’s considerate to others. He’s the right sort of person for this country. When you compare Kenya to places like Zimbabwe, we [whites] have had a very happy passage, and people such as Tom are responsible for that. He’s just been terribly unlucky.”

My meeting with Simpson had come about after days of frustration. Cholmondeley’s girlfriend, Sally Dudmesh, a British expatriate, socialite, and jewelry designer who lives in Karen at the Ngong Dairy Farm, a colonial villa featured in the film Out of Africa, had recently sent out a letter asking Cholmondeley’s circle not to talk to the media. Access to Cholmondeley’s friends had shut down almost totally, and only after pleading with intermediaries was I allowed a brief on-the-record encounter with the sculptor.

We hooked up at the Delamere Shopping Center on the Naivasha-Nakuru highway, a ramshackle collection of fast-food shops, produce stands, and a gas station that Cholmondeley started up about five years ago. It’s a bustling place that attracts truckers, local white ranchers, tourists, and workers on the flower farms. Simpson told me that the shopping center was one of half a dozen innovations that Cholmondeley had brought to Soysambu. Another big improvement, he said, was his introduction of a pivot irrigation system, and he’d also encouraged his father to grow sweet baby corn, which the family now exports in large quantities toEurope, and to produce yogurt, one of Soysambu’s most popular products. “Tom is a progressive thinker,” Simpson told me. “He was always pushing to make the business more versatile.”

Despite these innovations, Soysambu has had a troubled recent history. Delamere Camp shut down in 2002, partly as a result ofthe wider, temporary collapse of the tourism industry in Kenya following the 9/11 terror attacks. The ranch is reportedly not robust, either. After ole Sisina’s death, Kenyan human-rights groups and other organizations called for a boycott of Delamere products, and revenues dropped by 50 percent between April and June 2005, according to The Daily Nation. Simon Cox insisted that the ranch is “profitable, but not easily profitable.”

I asked Simpson to comment on Cholmondeley’s behavior after his release from jail. One friend of Cholmondeley’s had told me that the Delamere heir had quickly picked up his life again. “If I had just shot a man dead, I’d disappear into a Buddhist monastery in Nepal, but not Tom,” he had told me. Another acquaintance said, “I met him at this party full of white Kenyans and he was completely the old Tom, well dressed, well spoken, abrasive, on the verge of arrogance. He said he was in touch every day with the Naivasha police, and he was happy with the way they were handling trespassers and poachers.” This acquaintance was struck by his seeming obliviousness to the animosity the killing had stirred up. “I said, ‘Don’t you think some people want your land?’ He acted like it had never crossed his mind. Finally, he said, ‘Oh, maybe I should look into that.’ He’s protected by all that money he has. He lives in a bubble; he’s a bit naive.”

Simpson insisted that, deep down, he is a generous and compassionate man. “Look, we wouldn’t be here in Kenya if we weren’t all eccentrics,” he said. “Everyone here is more flamboyant than the average person you’ll meet on the streets of London. But we’re all aware of our social responsibilities. I’ve sat here with Tom in this Indian restaurant, with black Kenyans, Indians, shooting the breeze, and he’s totally comfortable with them. He is a believer in Kenya.”

ON THE MORNING of Monday, September 25, at the sand-colored Kenyan High Court in downtown Nairobi, two dozen camouflaged soldiers leaped from the rear of a green truck and escorted Cholmondeley inside the building, along with dozens of other prisoners facing hearings that day. Dressed in a khaki linen suit and tie, Cholmondeley entered the courtroom in handcuffs and sat cross-legged on a scuffed wooden bench, blue socks protruding from brown leather boots. His face was expressionless; the only sign of stress was his hand clenched around one opened handcuff. His lean, towering father sat in the row just behind the lawyers; he was joined by Cholmondeley’s girlfriend, Dudmesh, and several friends. In the back row, arms folded on the edge of a wooden railing, sat Njoya’s widow, Serah.

A single judge, Muga Apondi, wearing a white powdered wig and red-and-black robes, listened to a half-dozen other cases before Cholmondeley’s. (In accordance with British jurisprudence, which Kenya’s legal system is based on, this judge will determine the defendant’s guilt or innocence, without using a jury.) Then Kenya’s director of public prosecution, Keriako Tobiko, declared, to a hushed courtroom, in both English and Swahili, “On the tenth of May 2006 at the Soy sambu farm… [Thomas Cholmondeley] murdered one Robert Njoya … We shall prove that the deceased was running away when shot by the accused. We shall also prove that in an attempt to conceal his crime . . . the accused tampered with the scene after shooting the deceased and two dogs. We shall prove the accused was not under any attack … We shall prove the accused attacked the deceased and his companions as a retaliation or revenge for trespassing or poaching on his land.”

For the next four days, the prosecutor and Cholmondeley’s defense attorneys grilled half a dozen witnesses. Peter Gichuhi Njuguna, 28, who was with Njoya when he was shot, testified that the men “were carrying the carcass [of an impala] to a nearby tree” when gunfire erupted without warning. “We heard a loud bang. The sound was coming from our right. When we heard the gunshots we started to run . . . We waited for a while, but we never saw [Njoya].” Carl Tundo said that, after relieving himself in the bush, he emerged to find Cholmondeley on one knee, aiming his high-powered rifle, firing four times with two-second intervals between each shot. “I was scared of whatever was in the bushes that Tom was shooting at . . . then I heard Tom shouting for me to run and get the car. ‘I have hit someone by mistake,’ he yelled,” Tundo said. He went on: “Tom was with the man tying his handkerchief around [Njoya’s] groin to try to stop the bleeding. He was talking to the man telling him to calm down.”

The court also heard testimony from Steven Koigi, farm manager at Soysambu, who painted a portrait of deteriorating security at the ranch in the months before Njoya was killed. “Many people have been shot at the farm, many times, and since February, managers have been robbed by unknown people,” he said. “The farm had witnessed several cases of poaching, theft of fencing wires, and illegal charcoal burning.” Then, after more back-and-forth testimony that seemed only to add to the murkiness surrounding the shooting, the trial was adjourned until October 30, and Cholmondeley was returned to prison.

ON MY LAST DAY in Kenya, I set out to visit Kamiti prison, in the hope of getting a glimpse of Cholmondeley. I drove down the busy Thika Road and, half an hour southeast of Nairobi, arrived at the prison, a low, sprawling complex in a weedy field surrounded by a ten-foot stone wall. I made it through the first checkpoint at the front gate, and a prison guard escorted me into the main administrative building, which stank of disinfectant. From the windows in the stairwell, I had a view of the grounds: a series of manicured grass courtyards, each one surrounded by tin-roofed, whitewashed one- and two-story buildings with narrow slits for windows. Hundreds of prisoners, all black, wearing loose-fitting white cotton tunics and white shorts, most of them serving long sentences for murder or rape or drug trafficking, milled around outdoors.

From friends who have visited Cholmondeley in prison, along with published reports, I’d already gotten a sense of how he spends his days. I’d been told that he was improving his knowledge of Kikuyu, Kenya’s main tribal language, playing badminton occasionally in the courtyard, and reading books, including A. Scott Berg’s Lindbergh and a collection of British classics. Once or twice a week he receives visitors—his parents, Dudmesh, close friends—in a crowded room, broken into cubicles, that reeks of body odor and urine. These encounters are limited to 15 minutes, and Cholmondeley and his fellow prisoners are separated from their visitors by three layers of chicken wire.

I waited for half an hour outside the warden’s office before I was ushered in. I could hear the singsong conversation, in Swahili, of prisoners gathered just below his window. I explained to the warden that I was interested in hearing about Cholmondeley’s life behind bars and, if possible, getting a meeting with him. He smiled, shook his head firmly, and told me I needed the permission of the director of prisons in Nairobi. “I can’t say anything more,” he told me, then he politely asked me to leave.

As the court proceedings creep forward, there has been much speculation about what the verdict might mean for Cholmondeley—and for Kenya. Many point to the lesson of Zimbabwe: Beginning six years ago, President Robert Mugabe addressed disparities of wealth and land in his country by forcibly expropriating 4,000 white-owned farms and handing them out to independence-war veterans, military officers, and ruling-party hacks, destroying Zimbabwe’s economy in the process. Some Kenyans believe that the Cholmondeley killings could play into the hands of opportunistic politicians who would like to see the Zimbabwe scenario unfold at home. Should Cholmondeley be convicted and sentenced to hang, the thinking goes, the rest of the family—and, indeed, Kenya’s tiny white landowning population—might find life in Kenya so untenable that they’d opt to leave and sell their land at fire-sale prices. An acquittal, on the other hand, could create a different set of problems. Kenya is a country known for meting out brutal street justice to petty thieves and other minor criminals, and it is not an exaggeration to say that a man perceived by some as a killer would have to be extremely careful about his movements. He may well live in constant fear for his life. Whatever the verdict, the case has already sensitized many Kenyans as never before to the gross inequities between blacks and whites in the country. Observers believe that this is creating a seismic shift in Kenya, heightening resentments and leaving many whites with a deepened sense of insecurity. Either way, life in Happy Valley may be changed forever.

Earlier that week, when I’d talked to Hugh Simpson about his trips to see Cholmondeley in jail, he had insisted that his friend was upbeat about his prospects. “Tom knows that he didn’t go into this with malice aforethought,” he assured me. “He told me, ‘I’ll lose a lot of time and pay the price, but I didn’t do it intentionally, and the world will see it that way.’ “

His friends contend that the murder charge will be impossible to prove and that, at worst, Cholmondeley will be locked up for about a year while the case drags through the courts. But others aren’t so sanguine. “The defense counsel says he won’t get a fair trial. I completely agree,” Murgor, the former prosecutor, told me. “The whole background is too politicized—it’s become ‘the white man versus the black man.'” Journalist Parselelo Kantai believes that the version of the shooting presented by the surviving poachers will ultimately prove persuasive. “I think he will go down for this,” he said.

Nobody has been executed in Kenya since 1982, in the aftermath of a coup attempt against Moi, and it is highly unlikely that, if convicted, Cholmondeley will be sent to the gallows. But a life behind bars is a prospect that neither he, nor those closest to him, can bear to consider.

“Look, Tom is in a tricky position, but if he presents his case fairly, and honestly, I am certain he will prevail,” Simpson told me.

“Kenya is not a failed state, and Tom is going to get justice.”

The post The Kenyan Cowboy appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.