|
|
|
June 16, 2002
REVIEWS: Osama, yet again
A new French novel, Damned be your source, a thriller which has just been published in Paris by Editions Michalon, has been rapidly disappearing from the shelves of the country’s bookstores. Not only because the book has been a surprise best seller, but also because the French secret services would prefer that its readership be as limited as possible.
The book happens to be authored pseudonymously by a high-level member of the French Secret Services and one of the country’s crack specialists on the Middle East. Also it puts forth the thesis — apparently based on first-hand intelligence (what the French refer to as “Secret Defence”) that not only is Osama bin Laden very much alive and well and living in the tribal territories of Pakistan, but also that the Al-Qaeda leader will be around for quite a while to come, forever a thorn in the side of the West, possibly provoking it — as a sort of Deux ex machina — to at last take a leaf from the events of September 11, 2001, and perhaps admit that after all there was a lesson to be learnt from what happened on that fateful day.
For, the book is set four years after the World Trade Centre attack, in 2005. According to the strategist based on some top-secret intelligence, which only the French are capable of developing from their exceptional sources and ages-old experience with the Middle East, Osama bin Laden is expected by French planners to be still around then. Albeit he is a symbolic figure, surpassed by one of his present lieutenants, an engineer specializing in hydraulics. The war of the future, posits co-author Olivier Da Lage, will concern not airplanes or skyscrapers, but water. Indeed the world water supply is considered much more vulnerable than was the World Trade Centre on the morning of September 11.
Da Lage, a journalist with Radio France International who co-authored the novel with the mysterious “Jean-Paul Riondet”, says water “happens to be one of the big subjects of contention of the forthcoming future, even bigger than oil, if that is conceivable. An important report published for the United Nations by the World Water Council has it that in 2025 water will have replaced oil as the natural resource most in demand. On account of the growing shortage of water resources, water will also become the subject of contention, indeed of wars.
Our novel — based much more upon fact than fiction — has Al Qaeda exploiting the shortage for its own ends.
As a result, notes Da Lage, Al Qaeda has become a master of subversion of water supplies in the past few years in a much subtler form.
“Rather than blow up US embassies in the region, the Al Qaeda terrorists decide to exploit the penury of water, and to push the world towards a crisis They play on the geographical and political disequilibriums that exists, as with oil with certain parts blessed with more water than others. Oil may be thicker than water, but by the year 2005, water, in its very special way, will not only weigh more on the future of the world than oil, it will also take on a much greater value, instrinsically as well as strategically.”
In the end, he adds, “the objective of Al Qaeda in 2005 will be to manipulate the world water situation, spreading havoc among the populations of the world — just as it did last year in the United States and in the West — and use the resulting political leverage that the situation produces to bring about the fall of a number of — purposely non-identified — Arab regimes, and this to impose the Caliphate.”
Not to forget, says Da Lage, “that Bin Ladin himself noted to his disciples in a videocassette released last December that ‘our arms are to be taken from the enemy,’ which was the case with the aircraft used in the World Trade Centre attack of last September. Our starting point, indeed, is that you no longer need to align tanks, guns or missiles to score a point (against your enemy). You simply have to exploit the weaknesses of the countries that are targeted, by putting your finger on those spots where the pressure hurts most.”
As could have been expected this is not an American “happy end” novel, but a French exercise in artistic and intellectual realism. The novel ends with a catastrophic bang, a most pessimistic ending. “We couldn’t imagine anything else but a catastrophic ending. What else could we have come up with?” asks Da Lage He adds that “it’s evident today that the situation of the world has fallen beyond the control, the reach, of any kind of rational behaviour. So much for the present leadership of the world.”
“All you need to do is to set in motion a few cases of destabilization, and as Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda have so well shown us, the destabilization that’s brought about will become self-fulfilling, will feed upon itself. And, as for coming up with a more optimistic ending, no matter how hard we tried to conceive of a less negative ending, we realized in producing our novel that when you write on the Middle East, whether you’re composing an analytical work or a book of fiction, in either case it’s extremely difficult to be anything but pessimistic.”
As for the identity of his co-author, Da Lage won’t say who hides behind the “Jean-Paul Riondet” pseudonym, but other sources in the French secret services point to an intriguing array of big names of the French espionage world, among them Philippe Rondot, the super-secret specialist on the Middle East (author of seminal works on Syria and Jordan) and the man who captured Illitch Ramirez Sanchez (Carlos the Jackal) in Sudan. It could be Roland Jacquard, the specialist on Al Qaeda and a leading “consultant” to the United Nations, who recently authored the world’s first biography of Osama bin Laden and says he knows the man, whom he has observed for quite a few years, like the back of his hand.
Maudite soit ta source: le retour a’Al Qaida
By Olivier Da Lage and
Jean-Paul Riondet
Editions Michalon, Paris
ISBN 2-84186-165-1
279pp. Euros19.90
|
|
|
|
