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CHAPTER 1

THE SAHARA'S BERMUDA TRIANGLE

Does the Sahara have its own 'Bermuda Triangle'? It was a question that both the world's press and many of the Sahara's inhabitants began to ask. People might occasionally disappear without trace, especially in remote areas, but surely not 32 of them – and especially when they were in at least seven separate groups. Although the idea of a Saharan Bermuda Triangle was fanciful, the facts were stark: between 21 February and 11 April 2003, 32 people had disappeared into thin air.

People only start being registered as 'missing' when they don't turn up. There may therefore be quite a time lag between actually getting lost, being abducted, or whatever else might cause one to disappear, and other people becoming aware of it. In this case, it was not until the second week of March, around the time of the Djanet conference and the public divulgence of the dossier on German looters, that tourism agencies in Illizi, Tamanrasset and Djanet began to receive the first anxious phone calls from friends and relatives in Europe. I had both been at the conference and heard the phone calls from friends and relatives at first-hand. My immediate thought was that enraged locals, or perhaps even the Algerian authorities themselves, had taken the law into their own hands. It was a chilling possibility which lingered for several weeks, until it became clear that the first disappearances had actually preceded the groundswell of anti-German sentiment that emanated from the Djanet conference.

If the disappearances had nothing to do with looting, then what had happened to those missing? By the second week of April the Algerian government had mobilised 1,200 troops, later to be increased to some 5,000. Ground patrols with local guides spread across the region, targeting especially the area around Ain el Hadjadj, while satellite surveillance, two helicopters (later reported to be ten) and one reconnaissance plane, all running four sorties a day, searched from above. Still there was nothing: no bodies, no vehicles (and there were ten all-terrain vehicles and more than half a dozen motor bikes missing), no clothes, no tracks. Simply nothing.

For several weeks, the question of what had happened to the tourists was almost the sole topic of conversation in the Sahara, while the world's media, especially in the countries from which the missing people came, became increasingly preoccupied with the mystery. Speculation was rife, ranging from the plausible to the ridiculous. In the early stages of the drama, the Algerian media were keen to suggest that the tourists had simply had an accident; they had got lost, perhaps as a result of sandstorms or, more likely, because their GPS systems were malfunctioning. Indeed, in the wake of a few prominent articles, most of the country's population tended to believe that the Americans had scrambled GPS systems to confuse the Iraqis prior to the start of their invasion of that country. The Algerians made much of the fact that the tourists were all travelling without guides – were 'off piste'- and that some of them, as Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika at one time suggested, had even entered the country illegally. Other 'official spokesmen', keen to absolve Algeria from any blame and further tarnishing of its image, suggested that the tourists had simply strayed into neighbouring countries such as Libya, Niger or Mali. Even if they had, this didn't explain why they had not communicated. One such spokesman even suggested that the tourists had staged their own disappearance, although for what end was not altogether clear. Following in this vein, one Algerian newspaper, no doubt still thinking of what had been revealed at the Djanet conference, suggested that they were 'looters' who had staged their disappearance to cover their misdeeds. Perhaps the most bizarre suggestion came from a European source which claimed that the tourists had been abducted by a group of Rommel's World War II followers who had been holed up in the Tibesti Mountains for the last 50-odd years and were now in search of healthy, young (German) breeding stock!

A slightly less fanciful theory, but one which found some resonance in the region, was that the disappearances had been engineered by Tunisian, or perhaps even Moroccan, tourism interests who saw the pick-up in Algeria's Saharan tourism since 2000 as a threat to their own tourism industries, neither of which could match Algeria's expansive and magnificent Saharan destinations.

Kidnapped: by Smugglers or Islamists?

However, as the days went by, fears grew that the tourists had been kidnapped. But by whom? No one had claimed responsibility. Speculation swung between two schools of thought. One was that the tourists had fallen into the hands of smugglers, or trabendistes3 as they are known, the other that they had been abducted by Islamist militants. But these were not mutually exclusive categories: those familiar with the conflict that had racked Algeria during the 1990s were only too well aware that the Armed Islamic Groups (Groupes Islamiques Armées – GIA) were also heavily involved in trabendo, as too were elements of the country's military. It was a complicated mix, even before the Sahara was added into it.

The Sahara is best imagined as a sea, across which trade, in one form or another, has flowed since time immemorial. The only differences between today and earlier times are the modes of transportation, the nature of the goods transported, and their greater commoditisation. The camel (and before that the horse) has largely given way to all-terrain (four-wheel-drive) vehicles, while the main smuggling lines are now in cigarettes, drugs, and the trafficking of arms and illegal migrants. Fuel, vehicles (stolen) and various electronic goods, such as satellite phones and GPS systems, also have their own markets and operational networks. Perhaps the main difference between present-day smuggling and earlier forms of trade is that, whereas the latter's routes were determined largely by the location of water points (wells, oases, and so on), which determined the caravan routes across the Sahara, modern-day smugglers are obliged to steer clear of such locations, as they are the nodal points of the security forces – the military, gendarmerie, police and douaniers (customs). Smuggling across the Sahara today thus has to be fast and flexible, with success being heavily dependent on having the right sort of all-terrain vehicles and on the ability to keep one step ahead of the security forces in finding new routes.

It is this simple matter of geography that enables us to understand the suggestion that the tourists had fallen into the hands of smugglers. Suffice to say that the Sahara, with its sand seas, mountainous scarps, minefields and military zones, has a limited number of north-south passages, even for all-terrain vehicles and the most brazen drivers. When the French started to penetrate the Sahara in the late nineteenth century, they were faced with the dilemma of whether to push across the Sahara to the east or west of the Ahaggar-Tassili mountain complex of southern Algeria, or to head directly through the massif. Today, smugglers face the same dilemma. The ideal route is through the massif, but this is complicated by the fact that the precipitous scarps of the northern Tassili allow very few crossing points. Those that exist – namely the main road across the Tassili between Zaouatallaz (Bordj el Haoues, Ft. Gardel) and Illizi (and its side tracks through Afara, Imihrou, and so on), and the two gorges of Amguid and Arak, are well-guarded by the security forces. Clandestine traffic is therefore pushed eastwards, across the extreme south-east corner of Algeria and into Libya; or increasingly further west of Ahaggar through the Ahnet region, across Asedjrad; or even further west into the exposed plains of the Tanezrouft. The holy grail for trabandistes is to find new, unguarded passages that can take them across the near-impenetrable barrier of the northern Tassili ranges into south-central Algeria, from where they can strike out into North Africa's lucrative market of 80 million people and the even bigger markets of Europe beyond. One such passage worms its way through the Tassili to the north of Erg Tihodaine, past the mountain range of Atafaitafa and out into the area of the Piste des Tombeaux around the southern end of Erg Tifernine and the Oued Samene – precisely where many of the lost tourists had last been heard of.

This corner of the Sahara, although recommended as 'safe' by the popular German guidebook they were using, is known by locals to be the haunt of smugglers, and therefore an area best avoided. Smugglers take great care not to be seen, for fear of having their presence reported. Thus, when it became clear that many of the lost tourists were travelling without guides and had last been seen or heard of in this area, it was only reasonable to suspect that they had stumbled across smugglers – who, to avoid their presence being reported, might have killed them and hidden their remains. This was the most widely accepted theory among local people in the first few days of the disappearances.

Another line of argument, also suggesting that the tourists had fallen into the hands of smugglers, was advanced at various stages in the drama by a number of 'Saharan experts', including both the Algerian authorities and the French journalist Richard Labeviere, who was regarded in many circles as being especially well-informed on Algeria's terrorism and other such intrigues. It is a thesis to which I shall return later. In essence, it postulated that the trans-Sahara smuggling business, especially narco-trafficking, had been becoming progressively boxed in since about 1999, when the Algerian security forces began to go on the offensive. This increasing pressure on the smugglers coincided with the reopening of the Algerian Sahara to tourism. From a mere handful of tourists in 1999, the number visiting the region at the time of the disappearances had risen to around 8,000 a year. The thesis put forward by Labeviere and others was that the major smugglers – notably Mokhtar ben Mokhtar, who was known as 'le parrain Marlboro' and who was the major trafficker in the few years prior to the disappearances – had decided that kidnapping European tourists for ransom might be a more profitable form of business than narco-trafficking. Although this argument has a number of flaws, which I shall consider later, it had considerable plausibility at the time.

The notion that the tourists had been abducted by Islamic extremists also had many variants. One view, which enjoyed considerable currency for a brief time in the early stages of the drama, was that Islamist extremists had deliberately sought out and abducted German tourists in an attempt to exchange them for four Algerian 'terrorists' recently gaoled by a Frankfurt court. The four had been accused and charged with planning to bomb a bustling market alongside Strasbourg Cathedral on New Year's Eve, 2000. This theory was soon discounted when it was realised that no demands had been received by the German authorities. Nor did the dates fit: the Frankfurt verdict was given on 10 March, some days after the first hostages had been taken.

After a few weeks most news reports were tending to settle on the idea that the tourists had been kidnapped by the GSPC (Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication de le Combat) – Algeria's most active terrorist group at that time, and widely held by the authorities to be linked to al-Qaeda – in order to obtain a ransom to help fund their violent campaign to establish an Islamic fundamentalist state in Algeria.

Others postulated that the tourists had been kidnapped by a group associated with al-Qaeda simply to demonstrate that alQaeda had global reach, and had the means to strike anywhere at any time. Several reports suggested a more political motivation, such as anger at America's build-up to war against Iraq, or the increasing rapprochement between Algeria and the US in the wake of the al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September. Back on the domestic front, there were many who believed that the disappearances were related to internal political struggles, possibly as attempts to embarrass and weaken President Bouteflika in the run-up to the country's general and presidential elections, even though these were still more than a year away.

There was a glimmer of hope on 5 April when German television, citing local police sources, reported that an abandoned vehicle, possibly belonging to one of the tourists, had been found hidden by branches close to a system of underground tunnels 50km east of Illizi, close to the Libyan border. This quickly turned out to be a false alert, with neither the vehicle nor the tunnel complex having anything to do with the missing tourists.

On the following day members of Germany's Federal Criminal Investigation Bureau – the Bundeskriminalamt or BKA, as it is more widely known – flew to Algiers to join a BKA officer who was already there. With Algerian troops and aircraft reported to be scouring the region, and with kidnap fears rising, Germany placed its special service forces, the GSG9, on standby. But, as the drama moved into the second week of April, there were still no clues as to what had happened to the tourists – in spite of the widespread search activity, the proliferation of theories as to what might have befallen the tourists, and experts insisting that it was impossible for so many people to disappear without trace.

On 11 April the tension heightened further, as two more Austrians were reported lost. The total of 'disappeared' had now reached 31. Then, on 12 April, came two important announcements. The first came from Austria's Foreign Affairs Minister, Benita Ferroro-Waldner, who, on returning from Algiers, reported that she had received information from the Algerian government that the ten Austrians were alive on 8 April. She gave no further details, although it was later leaked by the Algerians that they had found a message scratched on a rock in the Illizi region dated 8 April, saying, in German: 'We are alive'. The second announcement was from the Algerian authorities who, according to Der Spiegel, had told Berlin 'that they were now convinced that the disappearances were the work of an Islamic terrorist group'. Even more significant were the subsequent reports in the Algerian press that the only known terrorist group operating in the Ouargla-Tamanrasset-Djanet triangle was that led by Mokhtar ben Mokhtar, who was reputed to be linked to Hassan Hattab's GSPC – which was itself now being portrayed by the authorities as part of the al-Qaeda organisation.

Mokhtar ben Mokhtar, Hassan Hattab and the GSPC

Most fingers, at least for the moment, pointed to Mokhtar ben Mokhtar. The question of who is, or was, Mokhtar ben Mokhtar, is not answered easily. He has been – and still is, six years later – a major player in the Sahara's political scene, while already having become part of its mythology. To introduce him at this stage in the story is necessary but difficult, for a key feature of myths is that they are subject to both varying interpretations and change over time. In Mokhtar's case, there are plenty of people in the Sahara who even question whether he is alive, or even whether he ever existed – which is not surprising since his death has been reported in the Algerian media on at least six occasions! As this story unwinds, the reader will come to understand why he is often known as the 'phantom' of the Sahara, and how useful such phantasmatic qualities can be to the pullers of political strings. But let me begin at the beginning, bearing in mind that the 'facts' of Mokhtar's life are open to constant revision and question.

At the time of the hostage-taking, Mokhtar was still a young man – approaching 31 years of age. He is a member of the Arab Chaamba tribe, reportedly born in 1972 in the small town of Metlilli, a day's walk to the south of the Mozabite capital of Ghardaia in the northern part of the Algerian Sahara. Like most families of the Mzab region, Mokhtar's family was involved in commerce – a profession which, in post-Independence Algeria, has become almost a euphemism for smuggling (trabendo), or what most of the Sahara's population would be more inclined to see as le troc: the recognised system of quasi-barter exchange that enabled the flow of many commodities across the desert's national and regional frontiers. Mokhtar seems to have grown up into this business, while also performing his national service, like most young men, in the Algerian army. Mokhtar – or MBM, as he is frequently know in the media – has many aliases and nicknames. The best-known of the latter are 'Belmokhtar', a derivative of his full name, Le Borgne, and 'El Laouer' or 'Belaouer', the French and Arabic terms, respectively, for someone who is blind in one eye. This nickname was apparently acquired from a wound he received while allegedly fighting as a mujahideen against the Russians in Afghanistan. While many of Algeria's Islamist militants were known to have fought in Afghanistan, a question-mark must be placed over Mokhtar ben Mokhtar's time there, for the simple reason that, if the Algerian army's records are correct, he would have been only seven at the time of Russia's invasion of Afghanistan, and only seventeen by the time of their departure. That does not mean that he might not have gone there as a very young man, or, more likely, after the Russians had left. Whether myth or fact, Mokhtar ben Mokhtar's service as a mujahideen and the loss of an eye in their cause is now firmly part of his established image – although I have heard Tuareg cruelly question whether his damaged eye might not merely be trachoma, a disease suffered by many Saharan children of his generation.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Dark Sahara"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Jeremy Keenan.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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