Concerning his personality, all are in accord in praising his kindness, his cheerfulness, the disposition of a scion from a good family, confident, though a bit shy. And polite. There will be no one, among the people I meet in London, who fails to mention in the most glowing terms his modesty, his politeness, and his ability to pacify the tensest situations. "Violent, you say? Warrior? You must be joking! The contrary. Calm incarnate. Peace personified. All his aggression went into his arm wrestling matches. But, apart from that, an angel. The most gentle, the most delicate, the least bitter of young men. That's why we were so surprised when the news hit. We all telephoned each other-Have you seen? Have you heard? Omar? Really Omar? And yes, it was Omar, and we couldn't believe our eyes and ears."
The angel, too, sometimes has his peculiar side.
Inexplicable mood swings that worry his teachers.
Slightly weird laughter, a little too loud, which one of his friends tells me, seemed like "the laugh of a sleepwalker."
This same friend remembers the way Omar would say-he's only eighteen years old-that there is something spoiling in him, as if his mother had nursed him with poison instead of milk.
There are also surges of mythomania revolving around either the question of power ("I have friends in high places . . . I am friend to the great of the world . . . One phone call, just one, and I can have you hurt, or disowned, or fired . . . ") or the question of origins (one time, he explains that his mother is Scottish; another, he pretends that his family has, for many generations, one of the great fortunes of the Commonwealth and that his father, Saeed Sheikh, started the career of Mohammed Al-Fayed, the owner of Harrod's; in still another, he fights with a classmate who doesn't believe him when he says he has Jewish blood).
There is the strangely excessive joy he derives from seeing himself, after his heroic act in Leydenstone Station, featured in the neighborhood press. "He danced for joy!" says the same schoolmate. "He said it was the best day of his life. He dreamed of glory, you understand-whatever glory, but glory! He would say-and this seemed bizarre-that nothing in this world seemed more enviable than to live in the limelight! He had one ambition, just one: to be one of the most high-profile figures of his time. And that story . . . he drove us crazy for months with that story of the old lady he saved in the subway . . . "
But that is all part of youth. He wasn't the first nor will he be the last young man thrilled to have his fifteen minutes of fame. And it would be too easy to play the prophet, with hindsight, and say: the claim of having Jewish blood, for example, this absurd mimetic delirium, the obsession with Jews so common in anti-Semitic genealogies-doesn't the criminal show through there? Isn't this a classic case of the neurotic who dreams of the election of the "chosen people," and feeling excluded, sinks into the assassin's delirium? Omar, at the time, is still a normal young Englishman. Still a model student. All his classmates vaunt, I repeat, his generosity, his zest for activity, his effort to give meaning to his existence. So, here in November of 1992, in the cushy but casually radical universe of the London School of Economics-was it not the center of London's Trotskyism and Maoism at the end of the sixties?-the Islamic Society, the largest student association present on campus, launches "Bosnia Week": an occasion, as with others staged by similar organizations throughout Europe, intended to alert public awareness to the fate of wartorn Bosnia.
The Islamic Society, of course, isn't quite like the other organizations.
There is a certain atmosphere around the conferences, debates, the film and slide shows it organizes-an atmosphere which didn't exist in what we were doing in France at the time.
Either because of the particular personalities of its leaders, or because they run the society-and therefore "Bosnia Week"-in the name of inter-Muslim solidarity as much as in defense of human rights, their campaign has an orientation which, had our paths crossed, I imagine would have sparked debate between us.
But their tracts themselves are not so different, at least in their intention, and even sometimes in their words, from those we distributed in France.
They disseminate photographs of ethnic cleansing, portraits of raped women, images of the concentration camps at Omarska and Priedor, similar to photos I had found specimens of and which we had distributed ourselves at the time of the Sarajevo list and during our awareness campaigns.
Above all, they express views that are Muslim but not Islamist-as far as I can tell from the premier issue of Islamica, a journal created to mark the occasion and edited by the general secretary of the Islamic Society, Sohail Nakhooda (who has since become a brilliant Muslim theologian, passing through the universities of the Vatican, and now living in Amman). Islamica recounts, in detail, the coming together of "Bosnia Week" and the demonstrations that resulted, and shows the preoccupation with blocking the Islam-phobia mounting throughout Europe. However they are not using this banner to sneak in a fundamentalist hatred of the West. They express views which are, from the documents I was able to examine, not contrary to my own in the debate over the two Islams-the fundamentalist and the moderate-in which I was already participating at the time.
Of course, there are other branches of the Islamic Society, in London's universities-at Imperial College, Kings College and University College where the fundamentalist presence is strong and where the Hizb Ut-Tahrir is firmly established, and even in the majority. But that's not the case at the London School of Economics. I can't explain why, but it seems that the London School chapter was a center of opposition to the rise of fundamentalism in London at the time. So, when these other more militant chapters of the Society try to take over "Bosnia Week," to appropriate the whole project by announcing their intention to show up en masse, with their own speakers, at the London School campus on Saturday-the last day of "Bosnia Week"-the reaction is immediate: the local cell resists; the local cell revolts. On Friday night, Omar is among those who oppose the presence the next day of Omar Bakri and Yakoub Zaki, two fundamentalist preachers that he and his comrades categorically reject.
Omar, it becomes apparent, is at the heart of the whole affair.
Omar, nice, polite Omar, is at every demonstration organized by the committee.
Omar cuts classes. Omar slacks off in his reading. At the school library, Omar borrows only books on the Balkans or The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order by Samuel P. Huntington to which, in the coming months, he will not cease to refer. He doesn't miss a single television program on Bosnia. He doesn't miss a single article, and not infrequently, I'm told, Omar interrupts a class or a professor, even bounding up on the platform to shame him, and to shame the students for such terrible apathy in the face of the Bosnian tragedy: "No Sir!" he growls. "Yes Sir!"-except that he's come a long way since the Forest School and George Paynter's classes, and now his "No Sir! Yes Sir!" is pronounced in the name of an all-important solidarity with Europe's capital of suffering.
In a word, Omar is touched by the grace of Bosnia.
Omar has become, in a few weeks, enraged and obsessed by Sarajevo.
Omar tells anyone who will listen that he won't know a day, not an hour, of rest or peace as long as one man, woman, or child in Bosnia faces suffering.
Finally, for the last evening of "Bosnia Week," the committee has obtained the right from the school authorities to show a film of outrage, featuring testimonies on the horrors of the war. There are three, maybe four hundred people, crammed into a too-small room, to see the film and stay for the debate that follows. And Omar is there, in the first row, overwhelmed by what he sees, moved to his very depths, struck dumb. He relates in his journal, written during his Indian imprisonment, that it was the first, the strongest and the most durable political revelation of his life.
So much so that a few weeks later, when a London Pakistani, Asad Khan, holds another conference at the London School to declare that slogans no longer suffice, that now is the time to join words with action, and that a convoy will depart during Easter vacation with fresh supplies for the martyred city of Sarajevo, that a "Caravan of Mercy" will form to go into Bosnian territory to bring the besieged a modest but fervent expression of support (a few doing what, there again, is being done at the same time all over prosperous Europe), exactly seven volunteer to accompany three trucks loaded with food and clothing to bring relief to the city, and among the seven who, timidly, approach Asad Khan at the end of his conference to say that, yes, they are ready, but that it would help if Khan would talk to their parents and convince them, is young Omar Sheikh.
One film . . .
One humanitarian caravan proposing to challenge the blockade imposed by the Serbs and accepted by other nations . . .
As for the caravan, I'd have to be blind not to see the link with the reflex I myself had a few months earlier when gentle lunatics from Equilibre, a humanitarian association in Lyon, came to see me. They too, had it in their heads to force the Serbian blockade and get to Sarajevo.
As for the film, well I must confess that, the coincidence of the dates, the theme, what Omar himself said of the images that overwhelmed him and the way he described them in his diary, and what others who saw the screening told me-the image of the mutilated body of a young thirteen-year-old Bosnian, raped then killed by Serb militias; images of mass graves and concentration camps; sequences shot in a besieged quarter which, to me, sounded like Dobrinja-added up to my believing for a moment that the film, if not Bosna!, was my preceding film, the first one I dedicated to Bosnian martyrs, One Day in the Death of Sarajevo, made in late 1992 from images by Thierry Ravalet, and shown in Paris but also in London during the same weeks in November.
But it wasn't my film after all.
I succeeded, in a video store next to the Finsbury mosque, in getting my hands on one of the rare cassettes still in existence of the film that changed Omar's life.
It was a forty-five minute film, Destruction of a Nation, produced by the Islamic Relief, based in Moseley Road, Birmingham.
It was a good film.
It was a truthful film, put together with archival footage, some of which I would use in Bosna!
It was a film that, moreover, and to my great surprise, opens with an interview with Haris Silajzic, the social-democrat who was at the time the secular counterpart to the Muslim nationalist of Alija Izetbegovic.
It wasn't my film. But at the same time, it almost could have been. It was another film, written and edited by others, with intentions and ulterior motives that were not mine-but, made of images I know by heart and that mean a great deal to me.
I don't know if Daniel Pearl and I crossed paths or not in Asmara. But I know that his killer was roused by scenes I could have filmed. And I know that he arrived in Sarajevo in March or April 1993, which is to say-the notes in my book Le Lys et la Cendre are proof-at the precise moment I was there myself.
When the Pearl affair broke, certain people would try to explain it in terms of the rancor of a little Pakistani humiliated by the English.
They would serve up the old story of a child who is different, persecuted because he's different, champing at the bit, waiting for the hour of revenge.
Notably, Peter Gee, the English musician who served a sentence for cannabis smuggling in Tihar Jail in Delhi, from1997 to 2000, and who knew Omar during his first incarceration for the kidnapping in New Delhi. He freely talks about the Omar whom he knows better than anyone- they spent hours discussing philosophy and life, they played chess and Scrabble, sang, talked of Islam, evoked their respective adolescences (one at the London School, the other at Sussex University), they gave their fellow prisoners courses in general culture and geography, and thanks to the destiny imposed by alphabetical order (Mr. O. as in Omar; Mr. P. as in Peter) they slept side by side for months in the terrible dormitory of Prison Number 4 where more than a hundred were packed. "Well," says Peter Gee, "Omar became what he is because of a childhood wound. Omar kidnapped, then killed Daniel Pearl because England is a racist country and throughout his childhood he was called a 'Pakistani bastard.'"
There is no need for me to challenge a testimony, the accuracy of which I will have occasion to verify at other points in this investigation.
But I don't believe this theory.
I don't much believe, in general, explanations of the type: childhood humiliation, rejection, desire for revenge, etcetera.
And it seems to me that here the idea is particularly absurd.
First of all it flouts what we are told, not by the diviners of what has come, nor those obsessed by premonitions, nor those who picture the monster-already-peeking-out-from-behind-the-good-boy, but by the actual witnesses to Omar's adolescence, those who knew him and report: a perfect Englishman, I repeat, integrated without problems into an England that he never experienced as hostile to who he was.
It minimizes what we know of the London School of Economics in those years, when it was a model of liberalism, open to the world and its cultures, cosmopolitan in word and deed, and tolerant: Did it not have, in 19921993, according to the Islamic Society archives, more than one hundred Muslim students? How could Omar have felt himself different, ostracized, when we know that over half of these students, all religions and nationalities taken together, were born outside of England?
But the idea is absurd above all because the facts are there and even if they are embarrassing or shocking, even if I was the first, once aware of them, to have taken them as very bad news, they are, alas, undeniable. If we must put a date on the turning point, designate precisely the moment that saw Omar's life diverge, if we must put a name on the event that led this secular and moderate Muslim to understand his membership in the Muslim world and his ties to the Occident as antagonistic, if we want to mark with a black stone the event that caused him to think that an inexorable war opposed, from now on, the two worlds and that it was his duty to take part in this war, if we want to make the effort to listen to what he himself said and wrote incessantly, and initially in a passage in his diary where he explains that just the mere thought of the raped adolescent in Destruction of a Nation is enough, years later, to put him into quasi-convulsions- that event is the war in Bosnia.
The instant he decides to go, Omar is no longer quite the same.
He still plays chess.
He continues his arm wrestling tournaments and is even on the British national team that in December, in Geneva, will compete in the world championships.
But his heart is no longer in it.
His mind, Pittal and Saquib tell me, is elsewhere, over there, in Sarajevo which, according to them, preoccupies him completely.
And now, when he plays in a public chess match or accepts a challenge to arm wrestle on the stage of the cafeteria, it's under the double condition that those in attendance bet big and that the money goes to Bosnia.
He, who dedicated himself, without qualms, to the study of finance and who had already created, as early as his last year at the Forest School, a small amateur stock market company, now starts introducing to his friends new theories of Islamic finance, Mohammed's prohibition of interest on loans, and finance mechanisms that can be used as alternatives.
He, who according to his friends knew nothing more of the Koran than what is known in assimilated English families, which is to say very little, starts to quote it all the time, to ask and to ask out loud questions as decisive as, has a good Muslim the right to enrich himself during the time of his pilgrimage? He is heard wondering how can one be a banker without betraying the sharia, how does this or that sura help distinguish good finance from impious finance, or how another sura justifies opposing the trendy futures market sweeping the City, fascinating his fellows preparing for their careers.
He reads Islam and the Economic Challenge by a certain Umer Chapra.
He reads a compendium of texts-Abu Yusuf, Abu Ubaid, Ibn Taimiyya, Al-Mawardi-entitled Origin of Islam Economics.
He watches a documentary on the BBC, titled The Invitation, about Muslim integration in Great Britain, and it infuriates him.
But the truth is that his energy is concentrated only on the journey to Bosnia. He thinks only of that, he occupies himself with only that. He comes to classes only to talk about his precious journey, to promote the idea of the "Convoy of Mercy," convince his friends, collect money, blankets, foodstuffs. The real truth is that once he leaves, he never comes back.
He is still enrolled at the London School, but he doesn't return after Easter.
He re-enrolls, or his family re-enrolls him, in September, for a new year, but again he doesn't appear.
Where is Omar? What's become of him? Is it true that Omar joined the Bosnian army? Is he dead? Wounded? Taken prisoner by the Serbs? By a war lord? The rumors, at school, are flying fast. The legend swells. Muslims and non-Muslims alike, all are fascinated by the strange destiny of this polite young man, so nice, so perfectly English, who seems to have lost himself, like a new T. E. Lawrence, or Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, in a distant theater.
Only Saquib Qureshi sees him again. One time. In September 1993. Maybe October, he's not sure. Omar arrived without warning one afternoon in the Three Tuns Pub where he used to come for arm wrestling matches. Except that he's not the same Omar. "I have never seen," Saquib tells me, "a man change so much, in so little time. Physically, to begin with, he's changed. The beard. He's wearing the mujahideen beard now, just the size of a hand. He wears the traditional Pakistani pajamas. He doesn't have the same look. And not quite the same voice." "What are you still doing here?" he says to Saquib, as they go arm in arm, like before, walking on Houghton Street. "How can you continue courses with Fred Halliday, while so many Bosnians are dying?" And when Saquib asks, "What's the alternative? What do you propose in place of Halliday?" the new Omar gives him an answer that, at the time, surprises him, yes, but in retrospect, chills his blood: "Kidnappings. Kidnap people and exchange them for actions by the international community in favor of Bosnia, that's what I propose. There, for example"-he points toward the Indian embassy across the street-"there, you see, we could kidnap the Indian ambassador." Then he gestures toward the school. "Or, even simpler, the son of a Pakistani minister-I've made inquiries, he's arriving this year."
CHAPTER 4 RETURN TO SARAJEVO.
I went to Sarajevo.
I took advantage of a literary symposium organised by the Centre Andre Malraux to return to the Bosnia Omar and I have in common.
With my friend Semprun, I debated the identity and the future of Europe. I discovered the island of Hvar, in Croatia, where I went with my old friend, Samir Landzo. He'd gotten thin, Samir, and melancholy. People are ill-disposed towards veterans in Bosnia today, he tells me. It's no longer an advantage, but rather a disadvantage. It's no longer a safe-conduct, but something that makes people look at you askance. "Oh! Sarajevo's changed, you know. You won't recognize anything any more! The shirkers, the people from the outside, the profiteers have the advantage now. The people who didn't fight are in power now, and they resent us, the combatants of the first hour. At court, it was very clear. My lawyer tried to use my past as an argument, to say, 'A resistant, a hero, cannot have done what he is charged with.' He tried to find witnesses to say, 'Samir L. was one of the first defenders of the city. This very young man was one of those who had the right reflex. It is to people like him that Sarajevo today owes, etcetera.' Well, bad idea, that was almost worse."
He laughs. We laugh. With Suzanne, his wife, whenever we get together we talk about the bad times, that were, in a way, also the good times- days passed with only the flame of cigarette lighters for light, the trenches, the night before the victorious offensive of Donji Vakuf, when three or four of us amused ourselves by guessing in what order the stars would come out. Sort of ah, Bosnia, that we know so well, doobeedoobeedoo.
But the truth is-during the symposium, with Samir, on the hills around the city where I always go in pilgrimage, in the old city and the new, at the phone building that's been completely rebuilt and at the ruins that remain of the library, where till the end of my days I'll see, roaming through the rubble in his Ray Bans, his earrings, his brown fedora pushed back off his forehead, his gold vest, Ismet Bajramovic, known as Celo, the chief of the hoodlums of Sarajevo, at the Holiday Inn, in front of a bar in the rue Marsala Tita where a man just started barking one morning, and as I cross the paths of all these men and women who have gotten used to their crutches-I'm thinking of only one thing: I'm not in the Bosnia of today, but of yesterday. I'm not even in my own yesterday, but in his yesterday, that of Omar, in those days of April or May 1993 when I could have, or I should have, run into him. What does he do? What does he see? The town of Split, OK, in Croatia-but after that? Mostar? Sarajevo? What does the model student do when he arrives? Does he meet Kemal? The president? Does he witness, as I do, the startled moral and military reaction of the Bosnians? Does he see the lambs become wolves, the victims change themselves into fighters who render blow for blow on the two fronts-fascist Serbs on one side, Croatian paramilitaries on the other-where now, the war has spread?
I went to the Bosnian outpost of the French secret services, but there were no archives predating 1994.
I saw Amir, the man from the Bosnian services with whom I had concocted some still-born projects to transport arms across Turkey in that same year of 1993: He has a file on a Pakistani named Sheikh Omar, but who was born five years before the one I'm looking for, and who arrived in February. Is it the same one?
I went back to see Izetbegovic, retired to his home in the Sarajevo suburbs. A modest house, with only a guard at the street entrance. A Twingo parked in front serves as a staff car. Worn furniture. Medicines on one table. Books. Le Lys et la Cendre in a Bosnian translation. A satchel of black ska that he says, with a smile, I gave him-I can't remember when, but I don't dare ask. Where is Gilles? He seems surprised and disappointed that Gilles Herzog, the companion of my Bosnian adventures, isn't there. He has heart trouble. You look better, Mr. President. You don't look the way you did the last time, as if you were going down slow, la Mitterrand. Aha! But you should see a doctor all the same, come to Paris and see my friend Professor C. Oh, no, he says. But his daughter Sabrina appears ready to say yes. It obviously scares her to see him so pale, so tired, his large blue eyes taking up his whole face now, and I sense that she wouldn't be against his contacting Professor C. But no, he says with a smile, that would be silly, there is a moment when a man has lived his time and must put himself in the hands of God.
"But you? What did you come to talk to me about? You didn't just come back to talk about my heart and my health? Omar, you say? Omar Sheikh? Oh, all that is far away, so far away. Why dig up all those old stories? I know the international community attached a lot of importance to the foreign fighters who came here during the first two years of the war. But you, you know the truth. You know there was just a handful, and I did everything to stop them. And frankly, you who know the situation-Bosnia, of course, has no access to the sea, so where did they come from, these fighters? Who brought them here? Do people know, for example, that there were training camps in Slovenia? Can you explain to them that the grand mosque of Zagreb, under the authority of Sefko Omerbasic, regularly sent us recruits for jihad?"
And then, since I insist, since I tell him I'm writing a book and it's important for me to know, he searches his memory, turns to Kemal, his wartime advisor, and then his son, who are both sitting in on the interview and who, so far, have said nothing. He remembers, yes, he has a very vague memory . . . Perhaps not the Omar I'm looking for, but a group of young Pakistanis who came from London and proposed the formation of a foreign brigade of fighters. It was in the Tuzla region. But he has the impression they were Shiites-is that possible? Could my Omar have been a Shiite?
No, I tell him. Absolutely not. On the contrary, he was adamantly anti-Shiite. But wait one second-fighters? A brigade? At the same time I came to you in Geneva, with others, to propose the formation of an international brigade-remember?
He nods then, the gesture of one who was right before you were and would like it to be recognized. "Now maybe you understand why I wasn't wild about the idea. But rest assured, the speech I gave you was the same I gave them. I told them, too, no, thank you, that's very kind, but we have our fighters-Bosnia needs arms, it's true, but she does not lack young men ready to give their lives for the defense of their country."
The president is tired. He's not breathing so much as panting. Again he has taken on the same translucent mask that Mitterrand had at the end. The thought crosses my mind, as it always does, that this admirable man, this Bosnian De Gaulle, the man who, for four years, struggled to keep Bosnia and the cadaver of his idea alive, could have been playing a duplicitous game and making fun of me a little. Isn't that what my friend Robbe-Grillet said, right from the start?
"Izetbegovic? Aha! What a great joke! Did you ask him to explain his Islamic declaration? "
Isn't that the opinion as well of Jovan Divjak, the Serb general who defended Sarajevo? Wasn't that why, in the last year of the presidency of the "old man," he refused to attend the ceremony where I was awarded the Blason, the Bosnian legion of honor I'm so proud of, the only decoration I've ever accepted. I leave him. He hasn't told me anything.
I went to Bocinja Donja, an old Serbian village 100 kilometers north of Sarajevo that they say Izetbegovic gave as a fief to a hundred veterans of the 7th Muslim brigade, from the Middle East. There, in this village where women wear black burqas and the men long beards, where it is forbidden to speak to strangers and, of course, to drink alcohol, in this village that greets the outsider with a sign at the entry reading, "Be afraid of Allah," where life comes to a standstill for prayers five times a day, I finally found a man willing to talk to "the friend of Alija" and maker of Bosna! He is a veteran, now a schoolteacher, and willing to recall a young, exceptionally brave Pakistani, dedicated, solid as a bull, excelling in hand-to-hand combat and knife fights but nonetheless willing to pick up a shovel to dig a trench or do other menial labor. Nice boy, in other words, of above-average intelligence . . . although with a laugh that made his comrades' blood run cold. He said Europe was dead and there was nothing to expect of it. He explained that ammunition didn't grow on trees and should be used sparingly, which was why the knife was preferable. He was-and the schoolteacher remembers this, for the young man bragged a lot and liked to flaunt his exploits-a chess champion in England, and in the evening, around the fire, while the others watched, fascinated, he ran through all the battles, all the deployment strategies, as if they were huge chess games. He was obsessed with Bosnia's lack of access to the sea and said it was hemmed in, that Croatia was the enemy because only through Croatia could the Muslim nation secure a sea port. Any pictures of those days? Photos? You'd have to go to the military archives. There were some photos taken at Gradacac, he's sure of that. The problem was that Omar was out of control, a little loony, and the military police finally had to expel him because one day, in a fit of anger, he profaned a Chechnik tomb. What an extraordinary man! What a loss! Except . . . Again, is this really my Omar? Or is it still another with the same name? How is it that no one ever spoke of Omar's expulsion, for example? And why is it that this man, too, remembers him as a Shiite?
And so I went to Solin, near Split, in Croatia. There, in this lovely city on the Dalmatian coast, I went back to the two-story building that was the stopover, the logistical base, and the depot for the Convoy of Mercy. I found the trace of a Muslim NGO, the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), involved in the financing of fundamentalist groups in central Bosnia, with which Omar would have been in touch. I learned that he spent time with a dozen or so Arab fighters who had trained in the Afghanistan war and were on their way to Sarajevo, as well as with a certain Abdul Rauf, also a veteran, but Pakistani, a member of Harkat ul-Mujahideen, just arrived from Kashmir, who gave him a letter of recommendation for the Harkat representatives in London and Lahore.
"You're strong," he had said. "You're motivated. You speak any number of languages. You know modern techniques. Why don't you get the appropriate military training? Why not go first to Afghanistan, where there are excellent camps, and you'll come back trained for combat against the Serbs?"
Omar protests that he's still young, he has to finish his studies, only with great difficulty did he convince his father to let him leave on this Bosnian expedition and, for now, his father is still the one who decides everything.
"We'll talk to your father," says Rauf. "I'll organise a meeting for him with Maulana Ismail, imam of the Clifton mosque, a holy man, who is experienced at guiding young English Muslims to our places in Afghanistan and who will find the words to convince him, I'm sure. It's an honor for a family to have a son who abandons his useless studies to consecrate himself to the life of jihad."
Here, at Solin, Omar decides to wear a beard.
The vagueness, the contradictions, the lack of substance of these bits of information may be due to a number of things.
The first might be that Omar, at this time, is not yet the person he will become. He has a negligible existence. And so, he leaves behind him equally negligible traces. No records, it's normal. Past history rewritten, it's classic. Omar went to Sarajevo and fought there. But at the time he was far too insignificant to have made much of an impact.
The second might be found in the explanation of Asad Khan, the Convoy of Mercy organiser, whose address I found in London and who has become, a decade later, the head of a sort of all-purpose NGO that sends its "convoys" not only to Bosnia, but to all theatres of "Muslim misery." He receives me one evening in his office in the east of London, the office that dates from Omar's time. He tells me about his combat for the Chechens, and the other contemporary martyrs of the war of civilizations. He also says it's rotten luck for him to see the name of his dear association systematically linked to the itinerary of a terrorist.
"Did you know that for ten years, I haven't been able to set foot on Pakistani soil for fear of being arrested in connexion with Omar?" he says. "Did you know my name was even in the police report of the interrogation by the Indian police, in 1994? And can you imagine that in this police report, I am at the head of a list that includes the most important terrorists of Pakistan and Kashmir, noted as an 'associate of Omar in England'?"
But he has a theory, Asad, an explanation he begs me to listen to and to tell others, because, really, he is sick to death of the misrepresentations on the part of the press.
"Omar accompanied us as far as Solin, near Split, in Croatia, where the Convoy had its base. But he became ill during the trip. Not the flu, a sort of seasickness, with vomiting and diarrhea. He comes to aid Bosnia, he wants to play tough guy, but he's all soft inside, like Jello, and it's a burden. And if they have such great difficulty remembering him in Sarajevo, if you haven't found a trace of his presence in the field, it's because, the morning we left Solin, this valliant being, this hero, this jihadist-in-the-making who dreamed of exploits, of blood spilled, of martyrdom, quite simply didn't wake up in time, and he let us finish our mission without him. Omar never entered Bosnia, that's the truth. Never. We went there, to Jablanica, near Mostar, to distribute our truckloads of food and clothing. And we picked him up at the base in Solin on the way back, and took him home, sick, to London. Subconsciously deliberate mistake. Shame. I've rarely seen a man who felt quite as ridiculous. But that's how it happened. So he came by to see me three or four times in the next few months, here, in this office. He felt so guilty! He always came with a little cheque, fifty pounds, sixty-here, it's for the Convoy, I'm so sorry, excuse me . . . "
Of course I understand the interest Asad Khan may have in telling me all this. I sense that it is vital for him to separate his own destiny from that of Omar and to squelch the rumors that, since 1994, say that everything started with him, during that trip. But there's something that has a ring of truth in his tale, a real sincerity. And I have to admit that, despite its overall implausibility, I find my assumptions shaken. A detail, for example. A tiny detail: A few months later, passing through Split, I discovered while combing through the Croat papers of the period that during those weeks, perhaps even that day in Solin when Asad Khan says Omar stayed behind, there was a chess match between two international masters, Ivan Ljubicic and Slobodan Kovacevic. Does one in fact confirm the other? Could it be that Omar preferred chess to Bosnia? That he put on this phoney display of illness so he could watch a bold and magnificent gambit? That would be enormous. But after all . . .
The third explanation is that of Saquib, his friend from the London School of Economics, who is visibly very surprised when I tell him Asad Khan's story.
"I can't believe it," he says. "I can see him, so clearly, in October, going along the walkways of the London School, and then walking down Houghton Street, when he proposed kidnapping the Indian ambassador and the son of a Pakistani minister. I can hear him as if it were yesterday, telling me about how he fought in Bosnia."
"He really said fought?"
"Yes, he said fought, there's absolutely no doubt that that's what he said. I can't believe he lied."
"And so?"
"And so, I can only find one explanation," Saquib concludes. "There were two trips to Bosnia, not one."