From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Sat Sep 21 2002 - 21:35:02 MDT
This unabashed puff piece says more than I ever could concerning
the purported 'objectivity' of The Independent or of Robert Fisk...
The Independent December 6, 1993, Monday
HEADLINE: Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to
peace;
The Saudi businessman who recruited mujahedin now uses them
for large-scale
building projects in Sudan. Robert Fisk met him in Almatig
By ROBERT FISK
OSAMA Bin Laden sat in his gold- fringed robe, guarded by the
loyal Arab
mujahedin who fought alongside him in Afghanistan. Bearded,
taciturn figures -
unarmed, but never more than a few yards from the man who
recruited them,
trained them and then dispatched them to destroy the Soviet army
- they watched
unsmiling as the Sudanese villagers of Almatig lined up to thank
the Saudi
businessman who is about to complete the highway linking their
homes to
Khartoum for the first time in history.
With his high cheekbones, narrow eyes and long brown robe, Mr
Bin Laden
looks every inch the mountain warrior of mujahedin legend.
Chadored children
danced in front of him, preachers acknowledged his wisdom. ''We
have been
waiting for this road through all the revolutions in Sudan,'' a
sheikh said.
''We waited until we had given up on everybody - and then Osama
Bin Laden came
along.''
Outside Sudan, Mr Bin Laden is not regarded with quite such high
esteem. The
Egyptian press claims he brought hundreds of former Arab
fighters back to Sudan
from Afghanistan, while the Western embassy circuit in Khartoum
has suggested th
at some of the ''Afghans'' whom this Saudi entrepreneur flew to
Sudan are now bu
sy training for further jihad wars in Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt.
Mr Bin Laden
is well aware of this. ''The rubbish of the media and the
embassies,'' he calls
it. ''I am a construction engineer and an agriculturalist. If I had
training ca
mps here in Sudan, I couldn't possibly do this job.''
And ''this job'' is certainly an ambitious one: a brand-new highway
stretching all the way from Khartoum to Port Sudan, a distance of
1,200km (745
miles) on the old road, now shortened to 800km by the new Bin
Laden route that
will turn the coastal run from the capital into a mere day's journey.
Into a
country that is despised by Saudi Arabia for its support of Saddam
Hussein in
the Gulf war almost as much as it is condemned by the United
States, Mr Bin
Laden has brought the very construction equipment that he used
only five years
ago to build the guerrilla trails of Afghanistan.
He is a shy man. Maintaining a home in Khartoum and only a
small apartment
in his home city of Jeddah, he is married - with four wives - but
wary of the
press. His interview with the Independent was the first he has ever
given to a
Western journalist, and he initially refused to talk about
Afghanistan, sitting
silently on a chair at the back of a makeshift tent, brushing his
teeth in the
Arab fashion with a stick of miswak wood. But talk he eventually
did about a war
which he helped to win for the Afghan mujahedin: ''What I lived
in two years
there, I could not have lived in a hundred years elsewhere,'' he
said.
When the history of the Afghan resistance movement is written,
Mr Bin
Laden's own contribution to the mujahedin - and the indirect result
of his
training and assistance - may turn out to be a turning- point in the
recent
history of militant fundamentalism; even if, today, he tries to
minimise his
role. ''When the invasion of Afghanistan started, I was enraged
and went there
at once - I arrived within days, before the end of 1979,'' he said.
''Yes, I
fought there, but my fellow Muslims did much more than I. Many
of them died and
I am still alive.''
Within months, however, Mr Bin Laden was sending Arab fighters
- Egyptians,
Algerians, Lebanese, Kuwaitis, Turks and Tunisians - into
Afghanistan; ''not
hundreds but thousands,'' he said. He supported them with
weapons and his own
construction equipment. Along with his Iraqi engineer, Mohamed
Saad - who is now
building the Port Sudan road - Mr Bin Laden blasted massive
tunnels into the
Zazi mountains of Bakhtiar province for guerrilla hospitals and
arms dumps, then
cut a mujahedin trail across the country to within 15 miles of
Kabul.
''No, I was never afraid of death. As Muslims, we believe that
when we die,
we go to heaven. Before a battle, God sends us seqina,
tranquillity.
''Once I was only 30 metres from the Russians and they were
trying to
capture me. I was under bombardment but I was so peaceful in my
heart that I
fell asleep. This experience has been written about in our earliest
books. I saw
a 120mm mortar shell land in front of me, but it did not blow up.
Four more
bombs were dropped from a Russian plane on our headquarters
but they did not
explode. We beat the Soviet Union. The Russians fled.''
But what of the Arab mujahedin whom he took to Afghanistan -
members of a
guerrilla army who were also encouraged and armed by the
United States - and who
were forgotten when that war was over? ''Personally neither I nor
my brothers sa
w evidence of American help. When my mujahedin were
victorious and
the Russians were driven out, differences started between the
guerrilla movement
s soI returned to road construction in Taif and Abha. I brought
back the equipme
nt Ihad used to build tunnels and roads for the mujahedin in
Afghanistan. Yes, I
helped some of my comrades to come here to Sudan after the
war.''
How many? Osama Bin Laden shakes his head. ''I don't want to
say. But they
are here now with me, they are working right here, building this
road to Port
Sudan.'' I told him that Bosnian Muslim fighters in the Bosnian
town of Travnik
had mentioned his name to me. ''I feel the same about Bosnia,'' he
said. ''But
the situation there does not provide the same opportunities as
Afghanistan. A
small number of mujahedin have gone to fight in Bosnia-
Herzegovina but the
Croats won't allow the mujahedin in through Croatia as the
Pakistanis did with
Afghanistan.''
Thus did Mr Bin Laden reflect upon jihad while his former fellow
combatants
looked on. Was it not a little bit anti-climactic for them, I asked,
to fight
the Russians and end up road-building in Sudan? ''They like this
work and so do
I. This is a great plan which we are achieving for the people here,
it helps the
Muslims and improves their lives.''
His Bin Laden company - not to be confused with the larger
construction
business run by his cousins - is paid in Sudanese currency which
is then used
to purchase sesame and other products for export; profits are
clearly not Mr Bin
Laden's top priority.
How did he feel about Algeria, I asked? But a man in a green suit
calling
himself Mohamed Moussa - he claimed to be Nigerian although
he was a Sudanese
security officer - tapped me on the arm. ''You have asked more
than enough
questions,'' he said. At which Mr Bin Laden went off to inspect his
new road.
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