SUFFERING IN SILENCE
Canadians who have had loved ones kidnapped overseas say the government piles trauma on top of trauma — coldly demanding a painful and unhelpful secrecy. “There’s a world of pain around us . . . It’s far-reaching — and I don’t think our government conside
Part 4 of a Star investigation focuses on the families who are forced to stay silent after loved ones are kidnapped abroad.
There is a perverse purgatory where the families of hostages go after they learn a relative has been kidnapped overseas. Life goes on all around you, oblivious, same as it ever was. And yet everything changes when you live with this secret, especially when your loved one is held for weeks, months. For years.
You feel dread with every ring of the phone, every knock on the door. You feel terror with every news report. Birthdays hit you hard and there’s an empty place at the table for the holidays.
You have to bury it all and keep up appearances. Because friends and co-workers, the government tells you, should not be told much, if anything at all.
“You step into a parallel universe,” says Trudi Shaw, whose brother Robert Hall was executed in June by the Abu Sayyaf Group after a nine-month nightmare in the Philippine jungle. “Everyone around you is in the old universe and you are in this new one. They can see you and you can see them. But there’s this disconnect. You are kind of thinking, ‘This can’t be real.’ ”
Coping with a kidnapping should be burden enough. But some relatives interviewed by the Star for this series say the situation is made worse by warnings from Canadian officials to stay silent.
Staying away from the media has long been an opening strategy. The idea is to buy time to gather intel, to control the message and to eliminate any possibility that the identity of the hostage will cause the ransom demand to rise.
Silence has its advantages. News about CBC journalist Mellissa Fung’s 2008 kidnapping in Afghanistan was kept a secret until her release, 28 days later. Private negotiators and the RCMP benefited from the media blackout, working quickly without distraction to release Fung in a prisoner exchange.
“The team on the ground in Kabul was able to move through the murky world of dealing with kidnappers, Afghan police and intelligence services without the added burden of doing it in public,” says Fung’s partner, CTV correspondent Paul Workman. “There was extraordinary co-operation from other media to respect the demand for absolute secrecy, a rare model for co-operating in times of possible life and death.”
But the times have changed in the eight years since Fung’s ordeal and many argue this blanket ban is outdated in an era when kidnappers can instantly seize the narrative on YouTube, regardless of whether the families talk or not.
Silence also comes with side effects: it spares the government scrutiny over how such cases are managed; it creates opportunity for officials to prioritize cases according to their own sense of who among the abducted deserves Canada’s best efforts.
It is easy to forget about hostages who foolishly put themselves in danger. It is harder for the public to ignore when hostages become more than names and you see the faces of their parents, children, siblings, friends and partners.
A deeper problem, many families say, is that in exchange for their silence, they are often deprived of information by government officials, who simply don’t share enough timely knowledge for families to make potentially life-and-death decisions.
Silence is golden. But the price of silence, some families soon discover, is almost more than they can bear.
A brother, trapped in the jungle, two sisters at home in British Columbia, both with breast cancer.
Keep your lips sealed, Canadian officials would repeatedly tell them.
That was the burden Robert Hall’s family bore as the dust settled over the Abu Sayyaf Group’s brazen kidnapping raid in the Philippines in September 2015.
For Trudi Shaw, the demands of juggling her brother’s captivity during chemotherapy for breast cancer — and being unable to share the strain — drove her to another dimension.
She would replay the grainy CCTV footage that made the news within hours of the abduction, showing Hall and his Filipina fiancée Marites Flor, who everyone knows as Tess, being led away, and she would quickly be overwhelmed. “Seeing Bob and Tess being marched up the gangplank, sort of, with masked men with huge rifles surrounding them . . . just seeing my brother so vulnerable, and at the same time so protective of Tess . . . ”
Shaw pauses to gather herself through tears, then continues, “I was terrified for Tess as a woman because we understood this was a militant Muslim group. I was just terrified of what would happen to her. But I also knew that made my brother more vulnerable because he would want to protect her.”
An Anglican chaplain in New Westminster, B.C., Shaw had a circle of co-workers who were a big part of her support network, along with her husband and two children. But when she was well enough to return to work after her first round of cancer treatment, a new anguish took hold.
“We were continuously told you cannot say anything, not to friends or colleagues even. It had to be hush hush hush hush hush,” says Shaw. “Outwardly, we had to be normal. But it kills ya. And it totally, totally, totally takes so much energy to keep up the facade.
“As a chaplain, I have to be fully present to another person in their pain — and I’m feeling this horrible pain myself. So I don’t think I was very effective in my work. I had to sort of keep my distance to the people I was caring for because their pain would trigger my own.”
Perversely, Shaw’s cancer proved a useful ruse to hide the deeper truth. “I’d have to make some excuse for why I had to go somewhere to cry. That’s where the cancer was really an advantage because they just thought it was the cancer.”
Joshua Boyle and his American wife, Caitlan Coleman, vanished in Afghanistan four years ago and remain hostages of the powerful Haqqani Network. Boyle, 33, and Coleman, 31, have been held for so long that they now are parents themselves, with two children — two little boys who have never known a day of freedom.
The Boyle family is reluctant to tell much of their story, even today, as efforts continue for a positive outcome. But they will speak about the life of a family sworn to silence.
“We were told under no circumstances could we tell anybody,” Linda Boyle says about the first few months after her son was taken.
Linda, whose mother was dying when Josh was abducted, reached out to her family priest anyway, trusting that her confidence would not be violated. The RCMP, she says, was “disappointed” and said they would need a list of everyone the couple spoke with.
Like the Halls, the Boyles describe their last four years as a “parallel reality,” in which even the tiniest act of everyday living takes on new meaning.
“Keeping a porch light on for the first two years” is one example, says Linda’s husband Patrick, a federal tax judge.
“Jumping every time the phone rings,” adds Linda.
Even maintaining the phones became an issue. The Boyles had moved just before Josh and Cait went travelling in 2012 and so one of the early questions became, ‘What if the kidnappers are trying to call us? Does Josh even have our new number?’
So the Boyles kept their old line, forwarding calls to the new one. Just in case. Josh had been close to his grandmother, and when she died they did the same thing with her calls.
Dan Boyle, Josh’s younger brother, says he remembers starting a new job, and on his third morning, he arrived late, having to first meet Afghanistan’s ambassador to Canada. “My colleagues joked I must have been in court earlier since I was wearing a shirt and tie. I just let them believe I had been in court rather than tell them the truth,” he writes to the Star.
Dan says he wasn’t ashamed, just didn’t want the “I-feel-so-bad-for-you eyes,” he says.
As the years dragged on — Josh and Cait have been missing more than 1,500 days — scenes that used to shock the Boyles now seem normal. “You get home from work and six people from the RCMP and DFAIT (now called Global Affairs) are sitting at your dining room table? Meh, just another Wednesday,” says Dan.
His sister Kaeryn, who was 23 when Josh was taken, says she will never forget the day her brother’s kidnapping made the front page of Ottawa’s free Metro newspaper.
“Stepping on the bus to work to see his face staring at me from every second seat or so . . . longest bus ride of my life,” she says. There was no escape at the food court where she worked: more copies were everywhere. And more still on the ride home, “only now his face was trampled along the floor, ripped up and caught in the door, shoved down the side of seats. Some days it’s easier than others to stick it to the back of your head and try and continue with regular life,” Kaeryn says. “That was not one of those days.”
The youngest Boyle sister, Heather, remembers having to fill out an elaborate background questionnaire for a job application, including the whereabouts and work histories of her siblings. “Do I put down Josh’s job as ‘hostage’ or ‘unemployed’? Do I put down ‘address unknown’ or just the very vague ‘somewhere in Afghanistan or Pakistan’?”
Another unforeseen consequence of her brother’s abduction, says Heather, is a “warped sense of time. Most things fall into the rather broad ‘pre- or post-kidnapping’ categories.”
But whatever normalcy exists today for the Boyles melts away quickly when they think of the newest additions to the family — two boys born in captivity.
Says Heather: “That gets to me: Thinking about how I have two nephews that I have never seen and know essentially nothing about.”
On the surface, Westerners snatched off yachts in a marina sounds like a saga involving extreme wealth. And so the
opening narrative of Canada’s crisis in the Philippines, even without so much as a word from the families, suggested some of the hostages, if not all, were rich.
Nothing could be further from the truth for Robert Hall, who, with limited resources and a lot of hard work, had been able to put everything he had into sailing across the Pacific on his second-hand boat, Renova. An expert welder by trade, Hall had been scouting the nearby city of Davao the week before his abduction. He had no mountain of cash, not even a small pile.
Hall’s fiancée, Marites Flor, hailed from a family of modest means on the nearby island of Mindanao. Her family’s resources and the Abu Sayyaf Group’s financial ambitions were planets apart.
Kjartan Sekkingstad, the Norwegian marina manager, was also a working man, albeit a very skilled one, able to build a sailboat from scratch. With his late wife, Ellen, he had built the marina almost singlehandedly, and by 2014 the facility was finally coming into its own as a safe and affordable harbour in the southern Philippines, where sailors could wait out the monsoons and get their boats repaired. Sekkingstad was the one who would jump shirtless into the water to personally see to the delicate task of lifting the sailboats to dry dock. He trained and led his Filipino crew by the example of hard, sweaty work.
The story of the fourth captive, John Ridsdel of Calgary, however, got complicated within days of the kidnapping. Like many Canadians abroad, Ridsdel had worked as a corporate mining executive — a fact that would surely bring delight to his captors, if and when they knew it.
When news of the abductions broke, the Ridsdel family tried to scrub the web of details about Ridsdel’s life and career. But one online profile — a career listing on LinkedIn — prompted media calls to his longtime Calgary employer, TVI Pacific Inc., which he continued to serve as a semi-retired adviser. A TVI official confirmed the connection in a statement.
The cat, if not out of the bag, was pawing at the drawstrings. And it would get worse.
Five days after the abduction, the English-language site of CNN Philippines began reporting a new working theory that the raiders had been specifically targeting Ridsdel. Citing unnamed sources close to the investigation, the report suggested “Ridsdel could have made some enemies in his work” at TVI’s nearby — and controversial — projects in the southern Philippines.
Ridsdel’s daughter worried that perception was overtaking her family’s relatively modest reality, setting the ransom bar “higher than we could ever hope to overcome.”
She tried to push back against RCMP advice, reasoning that by going public, she would be able to set the record straight about her dad’s perceived wealth. (She has asked that we not publish her name due to privacy concerns.)
But the say-nothing edict continued for the duration of the crisis. Seven months later, as the Abu Sayyaf Group’s first execution deadline drew near, officials in Ottawa went one step further, reaching out to at least five Canadian news organizations, including the Toronto Star, re- questing that all references to Ridsdel’s ties to the mining company be removed from our latest stories.
All the news organizations complied with the request, agreeing to err on the side of caution. In the Star’s case, an agreement was struck to remove the references to TVI on condition that a senior policy official — policy, not communications — follow up with an off-the-record briefing for editors to explain the government’s reasoning.
How could Ottawa possibly think Ridsdel’s corporate ties, now so deeply embedded on hundreds of news and opinion sites around the world, would vanish by removing a handful of online references in Canada?
Ottawa followed with a briefing for the Star from a senior communications officer, who emphasized again the importance of saying as little as possible about the mining company to reduce ransom expectations.
“We were always asking (the RCMP) for ways to more strategically use the media and just getting this blanket policy of don’t-talk-to-the-media wasn’t helpful,” said Ridsdel’s daughter.
“We were asking, ‘Can’t we get a media strategy and explain that Dad is retired, he doesn’t have much money?’ but we didn’t feel like we had the space to do that (against Ottawa’s advice). We could have just done it, obviously — done it on our own. But you don’t feel like you are in a position to do that, really.”
Almost all of the families agree Ottawa needs to reform how it goes about sharing information. Everyone feels in the dark, always asking questions, always waiting for what often turn out to be unhelpful answers.
“Everything goes through this clearance process and takes three days to come down in some sort of really sanitized form of what the family is allowed to know,” says Ridsdel’s daughter.
“I guess from our perspective we felt the hypocrisy of that approach. We’d be asked to make decisions, potentially life-ordeath decisions . . . often on very short notice but we never felt like we had access to all the information.”
It is difficult for the Hall family to discuss, but one unexpected consequence of Robert’s murder in June was how the flow of information suddenly turned against them, from too little to too much.
Hall’s sister Bonice Thomas speaks of the festering swamp of online commentary beneath stories about her brother, where trolls weigh in with heartless glee, oblivious to the family’s pain.
The trolls went further in September, some contacting her directly after she posted a widely shared Facebook message sharply critical of the Canadian government on the anniversary of her brother’s abduction. That was fine, she thought. “I’m tough, I can handle this.”
Harder to handle, says Thomas, is the impact on her 92-year-old uncle, who hasn’t been the same since he stumbled across the Abu Sayyaf Group video showing Robert’s murder.
“There’s a world of pain around us. And that includes my elderly uncle, who now has PTSD from accidentally clicking on the beheading video of my brother,” said Thomas.
“It traumatized everyone from nieces and nephews to the patriarchs and matriarchs of our family as well as old childhood friends. It’s far-reaching — and I don’t think our government considers that in the least.
“This isn’t something that can be swept under the table — ‘No ransom, no release, no comment, no problem.’ It’s not. It’s devastating.”
Robert Hall’s cousin Lois Eaton, a retired school principal, is launching a campaign to demand change from Ottawa. Eaton’s intention is twofold: First, ensure that Canada builds new protocols with lessons from the U.K., the U.S., Australia and other countries that now assign fleetfooted Fusion Teams when a citizen vanishes abroad; second, ensure that Canada reinvents how it relates to the families in a way that makes them “feel valued and included in what is going on.
“I know something about government bureaucracy from my years as a school principal,” Eaton told the Star. “I was looped in on what our family endured from the start. And to me it just seemed like the government had no plan at all. The extent of Canada’s support was basically, ‘Thou shalt not talk and we won’t tell you anything because we don’t trust you.’
“This isn’t optional. This has to become a real priority for our government.”
Hall’s sister Trudi Shaw describes for the first time the moment in which she poured out her frustrations. Shortly after Robert was beheaded, the family took a condolence call from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Shaw listened numbly as Trudeau and her brother Bill exchanged words. At the very end, however, when the family was asked if there was anything else they wanted to say, Shaw unloaded.
“I said, ‘I wanted to tell you, Mr. Trudeau, what it was like. We understood the need to be quiet. We also understood the Canadian policy of no ransom.
“‘But let me tell you what it is like to be a family, aching in utter terror for your loved one. And there is no sense that anybody even knows you are here.’ ”
“We were always asking (the RCMP) for ways to more strategically use the media and just getting this blanket policy of don’t-talk-tothe-media wasn’t helpful.” A DAUGHTER OF JOHN RIDSDEL, KIDNAPPED AND KILLED “It totally, totally, totally takes so much energy to keep up the facade.” TRUDI SHAW SISTER OF ROBERT HALL, KIDNAPPED AND KILLED