Fowler won’t abandon Africa
The Canadian diplomat who was abducted in Niger by Al Qaeda will go to Angola to be honoured for helping end a conflict that took a million lives
OTTAWA— After his 130-day ordeal as a prisoner of Al Qaeda kidnappers in the Sahara Desert, you might think that Bob Fowler would be in no rush to return to Africa.
But the retired Canadian diplomat is gearing up to do exactly that, accepting an invitation from Angola to go there early this month to be part of celebrations marking the 10th anniversary of the end of that country’s civil war.
During his time as Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, Fowler led an effort to shut down supply lines fuelling the UNITA rebels in Angola, and his role in helping end the 27-year-old conflict will be recognized during the peace celebrations.
But despite the honour, Fowler admits that he gave his wife and daughters the option of saying no to the return journey to Africa. At the first meeting with his wife and children after his release on April 21, 2009, by members of a terrorist faction known as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Fowler pledged to never go back to the continent without his family’s approval.
“When I got out from the desert. . . I said to them that they had a veto on my future travel to Africa,’’ Fowler recounted during an interview.
With their blessing, he made one quick trip back to Africa since his release, to attend a conference in Dakar, Senegal, last year, accompanied by his wife Mary Fowler, who will also attend events in Angola.
And now he is going back again and Fowler says that’s because he can’t conceive of turning his back on Africa, a continent to which he has devoted much of his career.
“I would not like to think that I couldn’t or wouldn’t go back to Africa.’’
That said, he recalls experiencing something close to flashbacks in some of the back streets of Dakar.
“When suddenly the car would brake to a stop to allow some goat to cross the street, I did get some bad feelings. And I suppose that may happen again,’’ he said.
Fowler’s memoir A Season in Hell and the ensuing media blitz propelled him to near celebrity status in Canada. The story is well known of his captivity and eventual release after he was snatched during a UN mission to Niger along with fellow diplomat Louis Guay. But less well known — in some measure forgotten — is the remarkable role Fowler played in exposing how Angola’s UNITA rebels were busting international sanctions by exchanging blood diamonds for weapons, fuel and supplies. Holding Canada’s seat as a nonpermanent member of the UN Security Council at the time, Fowler was tasked with chairing the Security Council’s committee on Angola. To that point, the committee had made little headway in bringing about an end to the conflict, which killed as many as a million people, displaced another four million and led UNICEF to declare Angola the worst place on Earth to be a child. The civil war had raged on, despite a series of UN peacekeeping forces, observer missions and a range of sanctions against the UNITA rebels led by Jonas Savimbi. Savimbi systematically subverted the sanctions with the help of sympathetic leaders in Africa and elsewhere who found ways to launder money and deliver weapons, fuel and supplies in return for diamonds. Fowler, who has earned a reputation over the years for his brash style, engineered the establishment of a unique expert panel at the UN to push the sanction-busting issue. And then he did something even more unusual for the traditionbound UN: he personally travelled to Angola to investigate. In a makeshift studio set up in an abandoned UN camp in Luanda, Fowler conducted hours of videotaped interviews with some key recent defectors from the Savimbi camp, including Gen. Jacinto Bandua. “He was chief of UNITA’S logistics, he was the one with the shopping list and then the one who filled it. It was everything I wanted. He led me to half a dozen other defectors, all of whom had pieces of the puzzle.’’ “Finally I had my smoking gun, we had the exact description of who bought the arms, how they were delivered, which planes were used, which airports allowed refuelling and where the bullets came from.”
Hours and hours of interviews conducted by Fowler were condensed into a presentation for the UN and provided corroborating evidence for a sensational report in 2000 that laid bare the complicity of a number of states in supplying the UNITA rebels.
Fowler also took on the international diamond industry, confronting executives from De Beers and the powerful High Diamond Council in Antwerp, leaning on them to come clean and stop the trade in Savimbi’s blood diamonds.
“In view of all this publicity, the UN reports, the reaction to the naming and shaming and the decision of the diamond industry to clean up its act. . . Savimbi’s supply of weapons and fuel and munitions dried up and the government defeated him in the field, killing him in early 2002 and the war was over.”
Fowler’s critical role in helping to end the conflict will be acknowledged when he is given the stage to address a meeting of the Angolan foreign service and also during an audience with President Jose Eduardo dos Santos.
“It is not often that we get a chance to stop a war,’’ Fowler said. “I’m glad they remembered.’’