LINDHOUT A BRAVE SPIRIT WITH IRON IN HER SPINE
TRIAL HEARS TESTIMONY ABOUT WOMAN’S FIFTEEN MONTHS OF CAPTIVITY IN SOMALIA
Amanda Lindhout was nothing less than magnificent. She may have been weeping as she entered the courtroom Thursday, leaning hard against the handsome man at her side, sometimes almost crumbling.
But her spirit was as brave as her bright red dress and her high heels, and she kept moving to the witness box.
You don’t survive 15 months of captivity in Somalia, days of humiliation and terror and deprivation, nights of physical and sexual abuse, without iron in your spine.
There is iron in her spine.
At first, it seemed as though she wouldn’t be able to start, and the court was ready to accommodate her if it came to that, allow her to testify by video from an adjacent room. Then she took some big breaths.
Several times, she put a hand to her heart, as if to still it; occasionally, so did the man at her side, a friend who was allowed to be there as her support person.
Lindhout was a young freelance journalist when in August of 2008, with an Australian colleague named Nigel Brennan, she was taken prisoner by a gang of armed bandits outside Mogadishu.
She and Brennan, respectively now 36 and 45, were held in ghastly conditions, subjected to cruelties huge and small, for 460 days before being freed after their families paid about $600,000 in ransom through a private security company.
After a failed escape, they spent the final almost 11 months of their captivity in makeshift shackles, Lindhout confined to a thin mat.
She suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder; it is a miracle she wasn’t flat-out broken.
At one point, she said to herself, “OK.” Then she began to answer prosecutor Croft Michaelson’s questions, both of them speaking slowly so the Somali translators could do their work for the accused, Ali Omar Ader, the Somali man in the prisoner’s box.
Ader, now 40, is pleading not guilty to hostagetaking. He is alleged to have been the negotiator for Lindhout’s kidnappers, and thus a party to the offence.
He was known to Lindhout and Brennan as “Adam.”
He was lured to Canada by an RCMP officer who pretended to be a book agent.
Ader's defence team is not disputing that the voice on the recordings of various ransom phone calls, most made to Lindhout's mother, is Ader's.
Several times in her evidence, Lindhout could not take her eyes off Adam/Ader; a couple of times, the prosecutor had to repeat his question, so lost was she in looking at him.
It seemed to make her stronger.
Certainly, she only grew stronger, and pretty quickly, she had her groove back, her answers accompanied by a wry smile, such as when she told Michaelson how she and Brennan had nicknamed the older man, named YaYa, “The Skids,” and the money man as “Donald Trump.”
She said that the day she was taken hostage, Adam was introduced as “the commander,” though she figured out pretty quickly that he was really “the comms guy,” the one in charge of ransom demands and phone calls.
He asked the name of her “village”; she told him “Red Deer, Alberta.” Then he came back, and there was that crooked grin, “and told us Allah had put it into his heart to ask for a ransom for us, and it wasn't a ‘program' (a Somali term for an official plan) yet.”
Later, Adam told her and Brennan the families would have 24 hours to pay.
She told him, she said, that her folks had no money — her mother worked in a bakery for minimum wage, her dad was on long-term disability — and said, “You may as well kill me now.”
“He looked me right in the eye and asked, ‘Are you ready to die?'”
Later, when defence lawyer Trevor Brown was questioning her, he suggested Adam had been so dramatic, she found it almost comical.
No, she said. He spoke coldly, and though she once used the word comical to police, what she meant was it had a surreal quality to it.
Adam/Ader is not alleged to have raped her. He was not among those who once hog-tied Lindhout — hands bound to her ankles, blindfolded, a sock as a gag — for days. He isn't alleged to have physically beaten her. He wasn't one of those administering daily threats and using her as a dirty Western woman. He was a peripheral player, but he was there on the same day the pair was abducted at gunpoint, there for one of the forced videos, but mostly a terrifying voice on the phone to her mother.
It was during the making of that video — the masked, armed-to-the-teeth teenage thugs arranged around Lindhout and Brennan — that Adam/Ader said something like, “Don't be scared” and told her the boys had their guns out to scare the Canadian government.
Trevor Brown suggested his client had been trying to be nice about it, and that Lindhout acknowledged this in a December 2009, statement to police.
“You'll have to show me,” she said, “where in there I say Adam's trying to be nice.”
Brown showed her, and Lindhout read the passage to herself and laughed out loud: “It all becomes pretty relative when you're a hostage,” she said with her wonderful grin. “They're all quite nice to you in the beginning.”
Then court broke for lunch.
I hope she was in the room long enough to hear the tinkle of Adam/Ader's shackles as guards led him away.
She finished testifying shortly after court resumed, and wept again, whimpering a few minutes in her friend's arms.
But when she came out of the courtroom, Amanda Lindhout's head was high, and she was gorgeous in her red dress.