Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (67 page)

Having replaced three members of his team with the assassins, Khaled hinted that these new men were from ‘intelligence’, possibly there to keep an eye on everyone else. When officer Khaled shared his food with the new privates under his command, his batman was so surprised that he assumed that Khaled was trying to curry favour with the intelligence men.

The day before the parade all units were camping in tents. Khaled arrived with a battered Samsonite briefcase containing the ammunition and the firing pins. A brigadier drove through the camp with a loudspeaker and announced that all arms were to be concentrated in special storage tents. Khaled detailed two of his new men from ‘intelligence’ to be in charge of section security. One collected the firing pins while the other guarded the tent where all the arms were stored.

On the day of the parade, 6 October, Khaled and his men rose at 3 a.m., ready to move out at 6. Khaled took four Egyptian AKM assault rifles – semi-automatic machine guns with a collapsible stock – from the arms store in the tent and loaded them in the truck, placing four hand grenades in a helmet covered by a scarf. To identify the loaded weapons when stacked with the others of his section he placed a piece of cloth in the barrel of each ‘live’ gun.

The order was given to move off. Here, again, Khaled was lucky as his truck was on the right-hand side of a column of three, nearest to the reviewing stand.

At the parade six Mirage jets roared overhead spewing coloured smoke from their tailpipes. Everyone who was there remembered this and somehow linked it with the assassination. (During the 2011 revolution the appearance of jets over the Nile at Tahrir Square also signalled the end of Mubarak’s regime rather than, as he intended, its rejuvenescence.) It was at this very moment, which couldn’t have been planned better since it was so perfect a cover, that Khaled’s truck came alongside the parade stand. Sadat was at this point sitting down. Khaled pulled his Makerov pistol out and told the driver to pull over. The frightened man simply jammed on the brakes. Khaled did not try to argue, he just reached under the seat for the grenades and jumped out of the cab. He
ran forward and at this juncture Sadat stood up, because he believed that this was part of the parade and the man approaching was there for a reason – to be greeted by his leader.

Khaled threw a grenade which landed in the stand at Sadat’s feet but did not explode. At this point Sadat should have dived for cover. Khaled threw another. By this time Muhammad the marksman had stood up in the back of the truck and taken careful aim, resting the rifle on the metal sidepiece of the open truck. He started to fire.

Some survivors later said that the irregular rifle shots sounded like a backfire. And, from the evidence of the 2011 revolution, they do sound similar, the only difference being the slightly more contained sound of the AKM. But it is an easy mistake to make, especially when you are not expecting rifle fire.

The nearest member of the Presidential Guard was Brigadier Sarhan. He ducked like everyone else and spent some time telling Sadat to duck too. But Sadat remained standing even when it became apparent that he was under attack – one interpretation is that his outsize ego just couldn’t comprehend his impotence. He reportedly shouted, ‘Mishma’oul! Mishma’oul!’ (Outrageous! Outrageous!) at Khaled before finally falling over. It was as if he believed so much in his own power that mere words of disapproval would stop the assassin’s bullet

A wave of panic swept over the 2,000 people in and around the main stand. Many later said they had believed that the jets were also attacking, that they were part of a co-ordinated assault. In the stand everyone shrank lower as Khaled approached, firing continuously. A third grenade exploded, and Muhammad and his fellow assassins jumped down from the truck (quite a height) and ran forward, firing from the shoulder. Khaled stood right in front of Sadat pumping round after round into him, though later reports suggested it was a ricochet and not a direct hit that killed him. He was hit thirty-seven times. Khaled reputedly shouted to Mubarak and others near to Sadat to get clear, that he only wanted to kill the President. For a good minute there was no opposition to the attackers. In fact Muhammad the marksman was not only uninjured, he managed in all the confusion to get clean away. Of the other attackers, Khaled Islambouli and Essam el-Qamari were wounded and taken prisoner – and beaten very badly. Both received cracked skulls and had their knees broken during interrogation. The fourth member of the team, who had elected to come on his own initiative, was killed in the attack. (It was at his house that the assassination
team met and, though Khaled had asked for only two others, he was allowed to join.)

Sadat and seven others were killed and there were twenty-eight wounded.

In the footage of the assassination, as the firing continues you can see chairs being thrown towards Sadat in a vain attempt by the former Prime Minister Mamdouh Salem to protect him. Very soon after the firing had finished, Mubarak can be seen being hustled away to safety. Already people knew that Sadat was dead and were recognising Mubarak as the new leader.

Muhammad, the marksman who got away (on the film footage you can see the assassins scarpering like schoolboys out of an orchard where they have been caught pilfering), made his way to the house of his relatives. Perhaps he believed that the puny uprising co-ordinated by Colonel Zumr in Asyut would spread through the nation. Instead the security forces did what they always did and worked their way through his relatives until they found him. It is interesting to speculate that had Muhammad had an exit strategy in place – say a Bedouin smuggler willing to drive him across the Libyan border – he might well have escaped for good. Instead, he waited for a revolution that didn’t happen and found his martyr’s end along with Khaled Islambouli.

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Murder bros

All rivers want to join each other. Men say they do but live their lives differently
. Sudanese proverb

Even assassinating world leaders can be a family business. Khaled’s brother attempted to assassinate Hosny Mubarak in Ethiopia in 1995.

Mubarak only narrowly avoided being killed by Muhammad Islambouli and other fellow terrorists. Outside Addis Ababa his quick-thinking driver, faced with gunmen, did a perfect reverse-skid turn and hightailed it back to the airport where the presidential jet was waiting with its engines running.

Incidentally, it was the security chief Omar Suleiman (who briefly took over after Mubarak was deposed) who saved Mubarak from a further attack by ordering the return to the plane. A little down the road
was a second wave of assassins planning to finish the job. By the irony that invades the whole warp and weft of political intrigue along the Nile since the beginning of time, Khaled’s brother Muhammad had been one of the causes of Khaled’s involvement in the attack on Sadat in the first place. Khaled, it may be remembered, had taken up arms partly because of the incarceration of Muhammad. Now Muhammad had adopted the family trade against Mubarak. In all, Mubarak would survive six assassination attempts.

As for the assassins, their eighty-five-year-old mother Umm Khaled Islambouli unrepentantly told an interviewer in 2012 that she was ‘very proud’ of Khaled and Muhammad. Muhammad lived for years in Tehran, ‘where they named a street after him’. In an even less repentant move, his daughter married Osama bin Laden, and she and her child now live in Qatar. Muhammad eventually tired of Iran and flew back to Egypt. For a few years he was in prison, but he is now free and living in Egypt along with his mother.

One woman: two world-class assassins and a great-grandchild to the world’s most wanted terrorist. Children of the Red Nile.

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Do not forget this is a red river

A visitor is like a passing flood
. Ethiopian proverb

Egypt is the gift of the Nile, wrote Herodotus (though my pal, the satirist Mahmoud Zeydan, calls Egypt ‘the git of the Nile’). Egyptians consider the Nile synonymous with Egypt. It is of course bigger than that. Our story has moved up and down the Nile as the Red Tale has taken us. Sometimes Egypt has been the focus, at other times Sudan or the very source regions in Uganda and Ethiopia. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the importance of control began to fragment as dams were proposed, breaking the river into sections. With the completion of the high dam Egypt entered a new phase of autonomy. For the first time in history, it was no longer dependent on the rains in central Africa and Ethiopia. But these places, the headwaters, are just as much the Nile. Indubitably they are part of the Red Nile, as the following horrific tale will show.

When a dead body falls in water the rate of putrefaction is altered,
the ‘extinction of animal heat’ is accelerated, cadaveric rigidity sets in faster. And in creatures, including man, which are hunted to death, the onset of rigor mortis is especially quick. And these people were hunted to death.

But is this the right way to begin this story? Surely the fact that the place has been doomed before may be by happenstance, but happenstance is still reportable, still lives on in our minds. This place, a river medium sized, brown with earth-carrying water, is how it looks; a brown washing machine is its only significant waterfall, the Rusomo Falls, a short, compact waterfall, brown water narrowed down. This is where the only bridge over the Kagera was built, the bridge that carried so many to safety as they fled in April 1994. What went under the bridge, what went down the river, cannot be forgotten.

Especially by the people of the lake. The people of the river killed their friends, enemies, neighbours, pupils, masters, but the people of the lake only endured. They had endured already one disaster, they would endure another. The lake people who lived by the mouth of the Kagera inhabited a place known as the landing, Kasensero landing place. A beach on the edge of Lake Victoria, a mile or so from the exit of the brown river, the Kagera, which snaked back into the diseased heart of Africa.

Kasensero was where the first case of ‘slim’ was diagnosed in the lake regions of central Africa in 1982. The first case of AIDS in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Though the disease had been fomenting in the Congo since the 1930s, it is believed, and had transferred to Haiti (many Haitians worked in the Congo in the 1960s and 1970s), it was from the doomed lakeside village of Kasensero that AIDS spread like the plague it was into Africa.

It was never a pleasant place. The landing attracted displaced people, drifters, people unwelcome in their own villages. The fishermen were often drunk, it was said. They made full use of the large number of prostitutes in town. From these people, from this town, the disease spread across the lake into Kenya and Tanzania and down the highways of Africa to Zambia and Zimbabwe. It spread north to Kinshasa and Entebbe.

Though it was known as ‘the AIDS village’ for many years, it is known for other reasons. You would think that AIDS would be enough suffering to pile on to one settlement of tin-roofed housing, dirt roads, a poorly stocked clinic. Even now with the penetration of AIDS so
complete in Africa, Kasensero has only three nurses working full time at its AIDS clinic. There are families of twenty-four children looked after by a single grandparent.

But God, when he sought to punish Job, did not stop after round one. He kept going, piling it on. When God sought to punish the Pharaoh he sent plague after plague, and he turned the river red with blood. This is what happened to Kasensero. This is what happened to the Kagera river after the events of 6 April 1994.

People resort to biblical terms because they seek a story to explain what has happened. The Tutsi were the children of Ham; they were, supposedly, of Hamitic origin, cattle people who had drifted south-west over centuries from their homelands in Ethiopia. They had found the ripe jungle gardens of Rwanda and Burundi to their liking. Bringing their cattle they had displaced easily the original pygmoid people, the Twa. As for the other immigrants, the Hutu people of Bantu origin, they formed a society of a kind with the minority Tutsi. There was some intermarriage and a blurring of differences, but the conventional wisdom was that the Tutsi were blessed with straight noses and paler skin and cattle-owning tendencies while the peasant farming Hutu generally put up with things.

The reaction of the Twa is not recorded. There are no books written in Twa, a secret, almost lost language, since the Twa in modern times mainly use dialects of Bantu languages such as Rundi and Kiga. Down to only 1 per cent of the population by 1994, they are losers in history that we never hear about.

The bridge was the crossing place. Across the bridge came the Belgians in 1916, taking over from the Germans before them – short-lived masters – and adding their own twist to the Hutu and Tutsi saga. They encouraged the rift between the two people, had the tribal group noted and stamped onto identity cards. After independence in the 1960s these cards would remain.

The river would get clogged. It is not unusual in the case of a violent death for a ‘cadaveric spasm’ to occur, when the victim has been subject to terrible excitement and nervous exhaustion. It is not uncommon upon the field of battle to see the death expression, the expression at death retained rigidly in the face, the weapon still grasped tightly in the hand. Some of the bodies were like that: still clutching the hand of a child, also dead, both floating down the brown river, now red. Many were without heads, many of the men without genitals. The people of
Kasensero saw all this, for they were the ones called by God to bury the murdered ones, mainly Tutsis, and Hutu who were friendly to Tutsis.

The numbers will always be debated. The African scholar Alex de Waal puts the figure at over 750,000 murdered. Not that the Tutsi were without their own history of violence. In one of the least reported mass killings of recent times, 100,000 Hutu in Burundi were killed by Tutsi and Tutsi supporters in 1971. Was it something about this place, the very geography of it? Both of these peoples had come from other areas in Africa. Only the Twa were true natives. There is no record of the Twa being anything other than peaceable jungle dwellers. Maybe they should have been left alone. A fond hope; we would all be best off left alone, but we are not, nor ever will be.