on Sanasa’s outskirts, and it was hard to believe that individual explosions of temper could have escalated quite so quickly had the incident not tapped into long-accumulated grudges.
I stretched, checking my watch, abandoning my shawl. It was eight a.m.: the heat was rising, hotel staff would be up. I rang room service to order breakfast and opened the second, fatter, file, marked ‘THE INCIDENT’. This one was a mess. It contained a collection of transcripts from local-radio broadcasts picked up by BBC Monitoring, several editions of Africa Confidential and scores of press cuttings that contradicted one another in key details. The newspaper titles scrawled on the scraps meant nothing to me. I guessed they represented the contrasting views from the two neighbours’ capitals.
One thing they agreed upon: that on the evening in question, fifty-five-year-old Ahmed Ibrahim had settled his bill at a restaurant on the Sanasa quayside, shouted farewell to the proprietor, and boarded his 7.5-tonne Isuzu. In the summer months, like most local drivers, he always waited till nightfall before moving. In daytime, the tarmac got so hot it could rip black fronds of rubber from tyres. He drove in darkness towards the border post on the edge of town.
What happened after that was murky. Some accounts claimed Ahmed was a hardened smuggler of cigarettes and cheap gin, accustomed to oiling his passage across the border with bribes. According to this version of events, his usual routine was sabotaged by an unexpected change of the Darrar guards: the two middle-aged regulars he had spent years befriending had been replaced by eager-to-impress youngsters, who insisted that he remove tarpaulins, unbuckle ropes and make his goods available for inspection.
A rival version painted a different picture. His truck laden with vital pharmaceutical supplies destined for a clinic across the frontier, Ahmed – a law-abiding, respectable father of six – had negotiated the North Darrar border crossing without a hitch, only to discover that Darrar’s border post had shifted twenty metres closer to Sanasa since his previous trip. He had realised this a split-second after his truck had careered through the barricade, snapping it in half, bringing two Darrar guards piling out of a freshly painted hut, stuffing handfuls of pasta into their mouths, AK-47s at the ready.
Whichever version was true, a shouting match had broken out, which attracted the attention of the North Darrar guards on the other side of no man’s land, who radioed a local militia for backup. A first rifle shot was heard – perhaps no more than the spasm of a nervous finger on a trigger – but the damage was done. Next came an answering fusillade, and someone, unbelievably, upped the ante by throwing a grenade, the explosion deafening everyone. When the noise and smoke subsided, Ahmed Ibrahim lay spread-eagled in the sand, breath bubbling from the granular pink mash that had been his face. Arterial blood was pumping from one border guard’s thigh while another lay motionless, arms clasping a warm pile of entrails. Two more were writhing silently in the sand, squirming jumbles of bone and muscle.
The initial incident had not made the international news. On domestic television, it led the evening news broadcasts in both countries, but was consigned to a seven-line announcement read by carefully expressionless newsreaders. In the two capitals, emergency cabinet meetings were called, inquiries commissioned, generals summoned. Three days later, a motorcade of tanks, armoured personnel carriers and camouflage-painted trucks, dispatched by the government of North Darrar, trundled through Sanasa, heading for the blood-spattered checkpoint. A week later, Darrar’s tanks reached the front line and the artillery opened fire. Both sides, the geeks from Jane’s Weekly noted with interest, were using the same models of tank, the stolid T-55 bequeathed to the region by the Soviet Union during the Cold War era when the superpowers fought their battles by African proxy.
Leafing through the cuttings from The Economist, the New York Times and the Financial Times, it was clear that what had puzzled the Western journalists, diplomats and academics who had covered what followed was that Sanasa seemed so insignificant, the trigger incident so trivial, and both sides had so much to lose. Their articles smacked of exasperation: ‘Why can’t these people behave like adults?’ they implied. It was not, I guessed, that these observers had forgotten the grotesque consequences of a single shot fired in Sarajevo, or the arbitrary connections made between the flattening of the Twin Towers and Baghdad’s invasion. There was something more arrogant at play. In those cases, cause and effect might well seem disproportionate, historical justifications near-nonsensical but, dammit, they had occurred in places that mattered. The West could not tolerate a seeming absence of logic in a region so dry and hungry. Quixotic decision-making was a luxury denied countries this poor, as were the ingredients of most foreign policy: a leader’s hunger for dignity, a community’s craving for respect, destiny-defying pride. The domestic media showed no such bafflement. Their dispatches made knowing references to ancient kingdoms, nineteenth-century battles between feudal rases, long-running disputes over grazing rights, ‘the perennial obsession with access to the sea’, and ‘the hot topic of national identity’.
Within weeks, Sanasa was nearly forgotten as the war spread like a virus, infecting three other border towns. As truckloads of fleeing villagers headed in one direction, mattresses and cooking pots piled high, live chickens clenched like feather dusters, military conscripts and the occasional flak-jacketed reporter headed in the other, towards what was now a 1,630-kilometre front line. Nothing went as expected, although it took a while for the two populations to make out the broad contours of the conflict. The front line juddered confusingly backwards and forwards, each jerk marked in corpses that twisted in the sterilising Red Sea sun to form green-and-brown strips of human leather, a grimacing spray of teeth at one end, bulbous black boots at the other; landmarks initially greeted with horrified respect but attracting growing scorn from fellow soldiers as positions on crags and knolls were won, lost and won again. Two and a half years later, though, it was clear which side had been pushed onto the back foot. ‘We’re like a bar drunk who knows he has lost but can’t stop for dignity’s sake,’ the North Darrar minister of the interior confessed to an American diplomat one night over a ninth beer at Lira’s Havana Bar, an insight duly relayed back to the State Department. ‘One hand slapping our opponent in the face, the other leaning on him to avoid falling over.’
Across North Darrar’s eastern, central and western sectors, more than 150,000 men and women had died. Darrar had gobbled up flood plains, seized valley settlements and captured hill forts, sending hundreds of thousands of villagers fleeing. The familiar flags of humanitarian agencies flapped over hastily built camps for the dispossessed. Sanasa had been occupied, then thoroughly looted. Bored Darrar artillerymen had laid bets to see who could rip through the jetty’s slim rind, and the sea now poured through the Swiss engineer’s 130-year-old stonework. Fishing boats had been burned, the mosque daubed with obscene graffiti and the port arcades mortared until their roofs acquired the consistency of ancient lace.
The light was now so bright I was squinting. I rose to fetch my sunglasses.
At this point, it seemed, the administration in Darrar had paused, suddenly aware that while sending the North Darrar government into exile was theoretically possible, the game might not be worth the candle. The two states agreed instead to send their presidents to Tunis for peace talks hosted by the African Union. A Cessation of Hostilities declaration was signed, catering for a buffer zone and a blue-helmeted force of UN peacekeepers, allowing both sides to pull back their forces without loss of face. The border must be demarcated, it was agreed, further bloodshed averted. Both leaders declared themselves ready to go to international arbitration.
The last item in the file was a news-agency photo of the two presidents embracing in front of the television cameras, Kofi Annan’s hands resting on their shoulders in saintly benediction. I studied the image for a few minutes, wondering whether local viewers, while nodding in relief, had found themselves wondering how it was logically possible for both leaders – so certain of their own rectitude, so confident in the correctness of this method of solving disputes – to be simultaneously right.
I was sitting on the White Star Hotel’s steps, watching a gang of sparrows quarrel in the oleander bushes and savouring my first cigarette of the day, when a bottle-green Toyota Land Cruiser