Growing Up Bin Laden - Jean P. Sasson [82]
We were sad but didn’t know what to do. We knew our father would take the side of his war veterans. We were helpless witnesses to anything an adult might decide to do.
Imagine our surprise a few weeks later when our pet came limping up to the mosque door, pitiful, minus an eye and with other visible injuries, but alive. After that close call, we kept feeding her until we left Khartoum.
Nothing was more bizarre than the fate that befell our beloved pet monkey.
By this time, our father had acquired much land throughout the country. One of his farms was at Damazin, south of Khartoum, near the Ethiopian border. The cone-shaped huts where we sometimes visited were set close to a jungle with various primates that seemed to enjoy entertaining visitors. There was one particular female monkey who had the cutest baby clinging around her neck. One of the Sudanese workers wanted that baby monkey, so he set a trap, drugging the water and taking the baby boy away from its mother. Everyone loved that little monkey. Even the adults smiled as the children tamed it so we could play with it.
When we arrived one day, the baby monkey was nowhere to be found. My siblings and I looked everywhere. Then my father’s cook came to me and whispered that the sweet little monkey was dead, that one of my father’s men who had been sent to the farm to work had become enraged by the sight of the pet monkey. He had chased that monkey down and had run it over with a water tanker.
We were furious, failing to understand how anyone could deliberately harm such a cute little creature who did nothing but bring much needed gaiety into our lives. Imagine our shock when we learned that the ex-warrior gleefully told everyone who would listen that the baby monkey was not a monkey at all, but was a Jewish person turned into a monkey by the hand of God. In his eyes, he had killed a Jew!
My entire body shook when I heard such ridiculous talk. I was young and admittedly unsophisticated, but I was a rational thinker who knew that monkeys were not Jews and that Jews were not monkeys. One had nothing to do with the other.
Like many Arab children, I was aware of the enormous dislike, and even hatred in some cases, between Muslims and Jews and between Muslims and Christians. Children are not born with prejudice, however, so although I knew that many Muslims considered Jews their bitter enemies, my thoughts did not go in that direction.
I was even more astonished when I was later told that it was my father who had convinced the veteran of the ridiculous Jew/monkey theory. I was hurt and angry that my father had caused such a thing to happen.
The life I was leading was becoming increasingly weird and intolerable, but being a child, I was helpless, carried along by a deluge of hate so strong I was struggling to save myself. To add to my worries, since Abdullah failed to return into the family fold, I noticed that my father’s keen eyes began to fall on me more frequently. Was I the chosen son?
Soon there was talk that we might not be able to remain in Khartoum, that Saudi Arabia and other regional governments did not want Osama bin Laden in Sudan. We were told that even the U.S. president Bill Clinton and his government wanted us kicked out of the country. Why? I could not guess why the American president was sitting in his Washington office thinking about my father.
Of course, I had no knowledge of the ongoing schemes being fostered by al-Qaeda, or the other two radical groups so closely aligned to my father’s organization.
In the beginning, my father was curiously unconcerned about the calls for his expulsion. He was intimately connected with the government, called the National Islamic Front, as well as the president, General Omar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir. He was even closer to a very powerful man in Sudan, Hassan al-Turabi. My father’s businesses provided