Fleeing the Jurisdiction

I saw him the night before, grizzled and dusty as he stepped out of the wreck of a car. When I speak of the vehicle in those terms, I don’t disparage its make or upkeep, but rather suggest that its owner had miraculously survived a brush with death. Its chassis now resembled more a failed origami experiment in four-wheel drive manufacture than a serious mode of transport. He seemed nonchalant, all the same, smoothing the broken glass from his clothes and tossing the keys through the busted door onto the seat. He ran a hand through greying hair and laughed as he walked off.

I saw him the next morning, as I peered over yet another cup of some beverage almost entirely unlike coffee. His face was glossy and creased as a saddle. It emerged, as we both lumbered into consciousness, that he was ex-British army, and was setting up an Internet Service Provider in Sierra Leone. With the post-conflict explosion in civil society, and the scouts of larger investment now sniffing, it seemed a risky venture, but not without potential for return. A few questions from me elicited the news that he had, in fact, put in the Afghan telecommunications system during the Taliban era, using WWII era technology and some surprisingly adaptable British Telecom retirees.

Afghanistan was more stable then, he claimed, for all the curtailment of rights. The religious leaders maintained strict control of the drug trade, and a higher proportion of women were educated than presently (4%, as opposed to 2%). Whilst I recognise that the US-led incursion has become a mire of infighting and profiteering that has set back the country in many ways, I nonetheless take the points he raised with a grain of salt. 

His deep tan spoke of a long acquaintance with hotter climes, and it turned out that his spell in Afghanistan was preceded by time in Saudi Arabia, where he learned Arabic. He spoke of the nefarious effect of Wahhabi Islam, recalling his run-ins with the religious police, for whom his failure to espouse submission to Allah proved so provocative as to merit a beating.

In the country of my birth, it’s established practice for governments to court the churches for moral credibility on shaky policy, and to decry their interference where such a moral stance belies less noble motives. On the whole, the involvement of religion in political debate is tolerated as an occasionally useful tactical lever, rather than an omnipresent force. I am personally willing to acknowledge a legitimate spiritual mission enacted by some religious leaders by speaking truth to power, and giving voice to the concerns of society’s marginalised. What, though, becomes of this when the lines that divide church and state are not merely crossed, but dissolved?

Social change could, my breakfast companion suggested, initially be effected in fundamentalist nations through the pulpit. There were more moderate elements among the Taliban, he contended, though this reading perhaps requires an ability to perceive gradations of grey not well suited to a “you’re either with us or you’re against us” absolutist world view. Some of these representatives of a (mostly rightly) maligned regime were nonetheless busy prior to the post-9/11 invasion of their country studying national reform strategies in American universities.

The presence of the UN in Afghanistan would render little immediate good, its presence damaging the local economy, perhaps irrevocably, he opined. A ten-room house in Kabul was now being rented at twenty times its pre-war value to military advisers and private security agents with bottomless bankrolls and no prior experience. The lack of co-ordination between aid providers would, additionally, produce negligible benefits for the country’s impoverished.

This is a story I’ve heard before, and one I’m glad to see being rewritten, to some small degree, in Sierra Leone. The post-war era has generated entrepreneurialism and esprit de corps that is not entirely being quashed by disadvantage or inequity. The new wave of local development practitioners will, however, need to choose its friends carefully. The emergence, in the course of Special Court testimony, that the head of the country’s then-largest human rights organization had been, for some time, the sexual partner of the commander in chief of the Revolutionary United Front, understandably generated shockwaves. Titillation aside, leading the public to lose faith in the independence and impartiality of humanitarian agents may render unhappy results for the needy.

With these thoughts firing in my mind, I continued to listen as this spry quinquagenarian spoke of other travels, and of his recent construction of a beachside property in the Caribbean - usefully in the same time zone as his business interests in New York. Among other advantages, I would think. This all set me to (entirely uncharacteristic) introspection. I’m yet to enter my fourth decade. What sort of man will I be at fifty?