Genocidal Organ (10 page)

At this point Erica Sales turned to us directly to give what seemed like a business pitch. “Our company employs a large number of former Special Forces personnel, and they played an integral role in our special projects last year.”

“In other words they’re Snake Eaters, just like us,” Boss explained, his face expressionless. PMCs cherry-picking his top people by luring them away with “offers they couldn’t refuse” was a perennial headache for Colonel Rockwell, but this wasn’t the time or place for him to publicly tug on that particular thorn in his side. I glanced at Erica Sales’s face to try and see if she had picked up on Boss’s irony-laden use of the term “Snake Eater,” but she was giving nothing away.

“Eugene and Krupps had the privilege of using the results of our R and D department’s research to present a plan to the US government last September. A plan to capture alive Public Enemy Number One for the region, a certain Ahmed Hassan Salaad. Using numerous cross-corroborated sources from within the insurgency, we were able to convince the Senate Budget Committee that our plan was viable and stood a good chance of success.”

I was hearing the businesslike spiel from this woman in front of me, and indeed she was painting a picture of an efficient bureaucratic procedure. But I had seen the other side—the reality that lay behind the anodyne, whitewashed words.

The walls painted red with the blood spurting out of the former brigadier general’s throat.

The burning bodies of the bullet-riddled men and women.

The corpse of the little girl who had her pink brains spilling out from the back of her head.

The images piled vividly on top of each other. Erica Sales talked of being able to “present a plan” and had managed to weave all these words and phrases into her speech that seemed singularly inappropriate when describing war. Her words carefully chosen for their blandness had the effect of erasing all the colors of the battlefield, and it was as if in the version of war that she was weaving, nobody ever died and nobody ever killed, as if war was just like any other ordinary civilian enterprise. A whole layer of meaning was being stripped away …

… the layer that allowed you to describe in words the surprise, the astonishment, the sheer freshness of what it was like to be in the middle of battle where anyone and everyone could kill and be killed.

“After that, the Senate Budget Committee presented the précis to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, and once they’d greenlighted it, SOCOM was consulted,” continued the USD.

Colonel Rockwell nodded. “Yes, and our answer—much as it pains me to say it—was that the plan was well conceptualized and completely viable.”

“As such, we had an Extraordinary Grant approved by the budget committee and then assembled a unit to put the plan into effect. Our company suffered no casualties in the execution of the plan, and there were no unanticipated factors that interfered with the smooth running of the operation. Everything proceeded to plan, you could say,” Erica Sales continued.

I looked at the man in the picture again. The top left corner of the screen showed the date and time, currently paused, and the coordinates where the recording was taken. The jerry-rigged interrogation room was a bleak white box, and we had our Ahmed sitting on a chair in the center. By the looks of it, this was right after he had been captured.

The man was trembling.

“Is this man really a key figure in the armed insurgency?” Williams asked bluntly, pointing a finger at the man. “Wouldn’t one of these two-bit dictators be more likely to denounce us for illegally detaining him and for our Western imperialist ways, rather than just sit there trussed up like a trembling chicken?”

“Well, Ahmed Salaad is Oxford educated. He’s familiar enough with the developed world to know that we’re not about to torture a prisoner of war to death.”

“So why does our boy Ahmed look like he’s about to shit his pants, assuming he hasn’t already?”

“Just sit tight and all will be revealed, sonny.” The undersecretary of defense gave the signal, and I could tell that the footage was rolling again only by the fact that the timer in the top left corner had started counting. When all you were looking at was a single, motionless prisoner in restraints, it was hard to tell the difference. Then an off-screen interrogator started speaking to him in English.

Interrogator:
 We are an organization acting as a legal proxy of the United States of America, and you are being held as our captive. One of the explicit conditions of our contract with the United States government is that we voluntarily adhere to all the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We will be handing you over to the US government in due course, and provided you do not act in a violent manner yourself, no illegal force will be used on your person.

Ahmed:
 Aren’t you using illegal force now?

Interrogator:
 Our client, the government of the United States of America, has gone through all the correct channels to ensure the international legitimacy of our actions in apprehending you. United Nations Resolution number 560097 gives us full authority to take whatever steps necessary to bring about the cessation of hostilities in Somalia.

Ahmed:
 So this is a legitimate military operation. I wonder who gets to decide what exactly it is that makes an act of aggression legitimate.

Interrogator:
 Perhaps it is the fact that an overwhelming majority of the international community sanctions our actions?

Ahmed:
 You know, our actions were also sanctioned by our community. We were supported by the vast majority of our people. Everyone wanted it to happen.

“Seems he’s not shy after all, shaking or no shaking,” said Williams, who almost seemed relieved. “Looks like this is just another run-of-the-mill mass murderer, then. A fanatical worshipper of what’s ‘right.’ ”

“Of course he is,” the USD shrugged. “But keep watching—this is where he starts to get all philosophical on us.”

Interrogator:
 The people can be wrong, of course. Look at how the German electorate voted in Hitler.

Ahmed:
 Then who’s to say that the people of the world aren’t wrong about interfering in Somalia’s internal affairs?

Interrogator:
 You have murdered huge numbers of your own countrymen.

Ahmed:
 We had no choice.

Interrogator:
 Are you honestly expecting me to accept that in the space of the last six months you have come to believe that there were all these people in your midst that you now just had to kill? I don’t accept that people can just flip a switch and go from living harmoniously with their neighbors to wanting to kill them just like that.

Ahmed:
 And yet that’s exactly what happened.

Interrogator:
 But why?

Ahmed:
 Who knows? All I know is that we had good reason to kill them.

Interrogator:
 And yet one year ago such a notion would have been inconceivable to you.

Ahmed:
 That’s right … you’re probably right about that.

Interrogator:
 But how could such a mindset develop in such a short time? I can just about understand it happening in one person. But for such a large, disparate group of people to suddenly develop such intense hatred that they felt the need to go about systematically murdering their fellow countrymen? Impossible!

Ahmed:
 I think you’ll find that we’re living proof that it’s very possible.

The clip came to an end.

“It’s estimated that there were a total of forty-six thousand victims of the Black Sea Massacre,” Erica Sales said, her voice dispassionate. “What we have to remember is that Ahmed here was an agent for peace in Somalia up until a year ago. There were bouts of civil unrest in the late twentieth century, but by the middle of the 2000s, that appeared to have been resolved once and for all. Somalia was about as stable a country as you could have found in the region.”

I asked if some foreign military power had intervened to put an end to their previous civil strife. I was embarrassed to say that Somalia barely registered on my radar, and I couldn’t have told you much about it. I’d been too occupied with work and eating pizza and watching
Saving Private Ryan
previews that my worldview was shaped almost exclusively by a combination of the dossiers handed to me in the line of duty, CNN, and the occasional TV movie.

“No, that was the impressive thing—it was the will of the Somalian people that brought about an end to their civil war,” Sales answered. “Their troubles started in the 1970s and intensified in the 1990s to the extent that the international community tried to intervene once, just after the first Gulf War. The problem was that the operatives—your predecessors in US Special Forces, if you will—failed, and spectacularly at that. After seeing the battered corpses of his key operatives being dragged ignominiously and very publicly through the streets of Mogadishu, President Clinton decided that Africa was beyond hope and abandoned the whole area to its own devices. After 9/11, Somalia was initially suspected of being a hotbed of Al-Qaeda activity, but that soon died down once the full-scale invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were underway. In fact, you could go as far as to say that the world at large had thoroughly forgotten about Somalia and its woes.”

The land the world forgot. You could try and publicize its plight online, but you might as well try and push back the ocean for all the good it would do you. There was too much noise, too many layers, and the plaintive cries for help were all but buried.
Help us. Help us.
The silent death throes of many a country, sinking under the weight of its own plight. No one gave them a second glance.

“But then, in the 2010s, Somalia started to pull itself up by its own bootstraps,” Colonel Rockwell suddenly interjected, and my eyes flicked over toward him to see him grinning. “You’re looking at someone who was actually there on the ground in Mogadishu back in ’93. I was part of Delta Force back then. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was in Bakaara Market when I heard the news of the Black Hawk going down. I’m one of the spectacularly failed predecessors that Ms. Sales refers to.”

“Forgive me, Colonel, I had no idea. Of course. I meant no offense.” Erica Sales put on a show of having the decency to look contrite.

“None taken. In fact, you’re absolutely right. The operation
was
a spectacular failure. Not so much militarily, as it happens, but certainly a political failure. In any case, I’ve had a keen personal interest in keeping tabs on developments in Somalia ever since. Not that there’s been much I’ve been able to actually do, other than send the odd donation. Anyway, my understanding of the situation—admittedly gleaned from what I’ve observed from afar—is that during the mid-2010s Somalia did indeed, as Ms. Sales suggests, start to drag itself out of the quagmire of civil war, entirely on its own initiative. The AKs and RPGs that had been the weapons of choice were gradually collected up in a general amnesty; civil order and education systems were restored, and the government, police force, and judiciary were rebuilt. The country found a semblance of order where there had been chaos. It’s as if they were determined to prove Hobbes’s theory wrong: that
bellum omnium contra omnes
, the war of all against all, was not always the inevitable and final result of civil breakdown. And by ‘they,’ I’m talking about one person in particular who was the driving force behind this recovery: a quiet but passionately determined man.”

“And that man’s name was Ahmed Hassan Salaad,” said Erica Sales.

To be honest, I wasn’t surprised when I heard this news. Just saddened a little, though mostly numb. The men who fought oppression on behalf of the weak, children, women, the destitute, and dying—had a habit of transforming into the next generation of oppressor once they had seized power. Power corrupts. It was a common story, and I couldn’t afford to be surprised or affected too much by a common story.

“It wasn’t an easy path, but Ahmed’s group managed to forge a semblance of peace in Somalia for a while. They established a consensus that however poor, however needy, however destitute the country was, there were still fundamental principles that could not be abandoned. Children went to school and learned to read and write. Jerry-rigged armored trucks no longer patrolled the streets at night, and people could sleep peacefully again. Once that basic level of law and order had been established as a fundamental principle, the country could start focusing on its desperate poverty.”