Haidara did not yet have an office in Bamako—“We wanted to be hidden,” he said, “we didn’t want people to know what we were doing. If we had had an office, it would have been official”—but Stephanie Diakité did, and in a much nicer part of town than Maiga’s rat-infested premises. ACI 2000 was a newly zoned quarter on the north bank of the river, and Diakité’s house was a modern building within it, almost pretty in a city of cinder-block monstrosities and slums. It was arranged around a small courtyard, which was planted with trees and flowers that struggled to survive at the hands of a bungling gardener, and consisted of a couple of bedrooms, a lounge with an exotic carpet, a kitchen, and a large office. The office was equipped with the fastest Internet connection Diakité could buy and a handful of phones, to supplement the ones Haidara kept in his voluminous robes. One wall of this room would become increasingly populated with the schedules and spreadsheets Diakité produced to model the evacuation.
Haidara and Diakité were now a team, as were their organizations: in future months they would describe themselves as a “consortium,” consisting of Haidara’s NGO Savama and Diakité’s development organization D Intl. They met seven days a week and worked from morning until ten or eleven at night, according to one source. Haidara would sit in an easy chair by the coffee table, often with a cup of Lipton, while Diakité sat at the desk working on Excel spreadsheets. She liked to start early in the morning, while Haidara lived on desert time: he didn’t reach the office till around nine or ten a.m. and did his best thinking at night. At noon they ate: Diakité was fond of her kitchen; she made sure they had good food—couscous, bulgur—at least twice a day, which Haidara avidly consumed. If he came to the house and nothing was offered, he would ask, “Where’s the food?”
In between times, “the terrible twosome” worked on the plan for the evacuation of the private libraries. How many people did they need? How many SIM cards? How much would it all cost? What if the couriers were stopped? It took four days on average to get shipments from Timbuktu to Bamako. Each courier should be responsible for no more than three lockers per trip—an amount that would not be crippling if lost, and which could be carried on a single push-push. The number of lockers divided by three was the number of runs needed; that number divided by the number of trips each courier could make was the number of couriers required.
“There were plenty of details, a lot of organization,” Haidara said.
One of the first concerns was where to put the manuscripts: they needed safe houses in Bamako. An unexpected benefit of the crisis was that the capital was now brimming with families who had fled the north, and Haidara called on them personally to find out if he could rely on them to take in his lockers. He wanted households that were calm, quiet, and free of inquisitive acquaintances. After a month of looking he had identified a string of twenty-seven families across the capital. “Most of them were people we had known very well for a long time,” he said.
For the Ahmad Baba manuscripts, it had been good politics to include state employees in the operation, many of whom were not from Timbuktu, in case there was a catastrophic loss: “If there are crises, problems, the state is the state, so we made sure that the agents of the state were with us,” he said. Now, with the private libraries, he was among his own people: “We had a trust between us. We knew our manuscripts. The families had no need of protocols.”
Fund-raising was central to the operation. Haidara had good relationships with the Ford Foundation and the Juma al-Majid Center, but the money they had given him didn’t last long. Diakité had meanwhile been working her contacts among the foreign governments and foundations she knew from her career in development. It was these organizations that would end up donating the largest quantities of cash.
One of them was an Amsterdam-based foundation, the Prince Claus Fund, named for the husband of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. The fund, which was supported by the Dutch government and the Dutch national lottery, specialized in cultural development. It even had a “Cultural Emergency Response” program, set up in the wake of the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001. The point of this program, according to its coordinator, Deborah Stolk, was “to make an international fist against the deliberate destruction of heritage,” and in pursuit of this goal she had followed the crisis in Mali from the early days, attempting to identify people who could warn her about potential threats. The researchers at the University of Cape Town’s Tombouctou Manuscripts Project had put her in touch with Savama, and now she was in daily e-mail contact with Haidara and Diakité. She had never met them, but she felt Haidara “seemed to have a good track record,” especially since he had already worked with the Ford Foundation. What was more, the Dutch embassy in Bamako confirmed that the applicant was a trustworthy and knowledgeable partner in this field, although several years after the crisis she appeared to mistakenly believe that he had once been director of the Ahmad Baba institute.
At the start of October, the information Stolk was receiving from Bamako via e-mail, phone, and Skype was increasingly alarming. In Haidara’s view, the need to take action to save the manuscripts was becoming urgent, Diakité told her, because of two recent developments. The first, a “good change,” as Diakité described it, was that since the MNLA had left Timbuktu, vehicles heading south were no longer being searched. This was “enabling,” according to Haidara. The “bad change,” on the other hand, was that the city’s occupiers had implemented a “search and seize” policy in private homes and businesses, and Haidara was growing more concerned that the manuscripts would become the target. In fact, the MNLA had left Timbuktu after the battle of Gao at the end of June, so the “good change” Diakité spoke of was now at least three months old. A search-and-seize policy, meanwhile, appeared inconsistent with the jihadists’ behavior since the start of the occupation. Still, Stolk and her Amsterdam-based team had little reason to question firsthand information from Mali, and after the destruction of the mausoleums, it fit the overall picture of jihadist vandalism.
There was a further worrying development in Timbuktu at this time. The jihadist Vice and Virtue Squad had begun a crackdown on the city’s women and girls in mid-September, announcing an eleven p.m. curfew and a strict new dress code. No longer could they wear the light, transparent veils that were favored by the Songhay. Their hair, ears, necks, wrists, and ankles had to be covered by an Arab-style toungou, an opaque piece of cloth a dozen yards long, and they had to wear gloves. Women with manual jobs found it almost impossible to work dressed like this, but anyone who broke these rules could be punished by being locked in the new women’s jail at the BMS, now branded the Center for the Recommendation of Propriety and the Prevention of Evil. This “jail” was actually the tiny kiosk where the bank’s ATM had been kept. It wasn’t large enough for even one person to lie down comfortably, and had no water or toilet. Even so, more than a dozen women at a time might be packed inside.
The man behind this morality mission was the “dark soul” who had invited so many Salafists to Timbuktu, Hamed Mossa. Mossa had just been appointed head of the Vice and Virtue Squad, and he and his men now went around Timbuktu beating and harassing those who weren’t conforming to the code. Within days, Mossa had become the “most famous and cursed man in the city,” as a local woman put it, and stories of his outrages abounded. When a teenage girl Mossa was chasing in his pickup eluded him, he locked up her father instead. On another occasion he ordered his men to grab a woman and throw her in the road “so that a vehicle crushes her head” because “she’s a bitch!” He would lift women’s clothes with the barrel of his rifle to check what type of undergarments they had on. Arrests he made became so frequent that when the children who played in the street around the BMS saw him returning without a new victim, they broke into a chant of “Hamed Mossa hasn’t had his breakfast.”
On Saturday, October 6, the women’s fury at this new tyranny boiled over. That morning, a group of women who worked in the Petit Marché decided spontaneously to march on Mossa’s headquarters. As they approached the BMS building, the Islamic Police opened fire, shooting over their heads, and all but seven of the women ran for cover. These seven were brought before a group of senior jihadists, including Mossa, who warned them: “If you march again, you will see what will happen to you.”
On October 8, Stolk received an e-mail from Savama describing this incident. The protest had been provoked by militia entering private homes to take unveiled girls into custody, the e-mail said. Against this alarming backdrop, Stolk was informed, the manuscript-owning families had indicated to Savama that they wanted to evacuate their collections. The lack of checks on the road south meant it was the perfect moment: there was a “window of opportunity” to get the manuscripts out.
Diakité gave details of how it would work. The manuscripts would be taken to Bamako in lockers, each of which would contain 250 to 300 documents, via two routes: one would take the main track south to Douentza and then Mopti; the other would go west, via Lere and Niono. Each shipment would be accompanied by couriers recruited from the manuscript-owning families, and there would be “supervisory and security personnel” camped out all along both routes, ready to give “indirect support services” and help in case of emergency. For extra security, each courier would check in eight times a day over a “quick turnaround secure (revolve hardware and software) cellphone communication network,” Stolk was told. Once in Bamako, the manuscripts would be hidden in the safe houses Haidara had identified. All that was now missing was funding. When that was in place, the operation could begin.
Stolk was convinced. She knew that there was a risk involved in evacuating the manuscripts, and that it was not known for certain it would succeed, but since there was clearly an imminent threat, this seemed the best option.
On October 17, the Prince Claus Fund signed a contract with Haidara and Diakité for the evacuation of two hundred lockers of manuscripts, which had already been collected and prepared for evacuation by Savama. Stolk was told these were exactly half of the four hundred lockers, containing approximately 160,000 manuscripts, that needed to be moved in total, and the cost to the Dutch fund would be 100,000 euros, or roughly 500 euros a locker. This was a high price, given that a refugee at this time could travel with luggage from Timbuktu to Bamako for around forty euros, but running such an elaborate operation was expensive. (Haidara later said more than a hundred people worked on the evacuation, while Diakité put the number of couriers alone at three hundred.) The money wasn’t just for transportation either, but for “overall coordination, transportation costs, couriers, cell phones to be used during evacuation, stipendium for families/safe houses,” and so on, according to Stolk. Phones were a notable expense, said Haidara: “We bought lots of telephones, for everyone, and I sent credit every day to each person … We had a trader here who gave credit, 5,000 francs [8 euros] for each person. And each week we paid him. We organised that because every morning they called me … all my colleagues.”
According to a later report of the evacuation in The New Republic that was fact-checked by Diakité, the first shipments started to leave Timbuktu the day after the Prince Claus contract was signed:
On October 18, the first team of couriers loaded 35 lockers onto pushcarts and donkey-drawn carriages, and moved them to a depot on the outskirts of Timbuktu where couriers bought space on buses and trucks making the long drive south to Bamako.
That trip would be repeated daily for the next several months, The New Republic’s correspondent noted, sometimes many times a day, as the teams of smugglers passed hundreds of lockers along the same well-worn route to Bamako.
STOLK KNEW THAT the first Prince Claus–funded shipments had arrived safely because she received a photograph taken that day by Savama officials. The image showed a large number of stacked steel boxes, with the disembodied arms of a man—apparently the eminent librarian himself—holding up a copy of the day’s newspaper, an authentication technique borrowed from the movies, as one of Haidara’s aides put it. She received further photos as the weeks went by.
The manuscripts’ journey south was fraught, however, and barely a day went by without a courier ringing in with what Haidara described later as “petits problèmes,” which ranged from mundane breakdowns to ransom demands and dangerous run-ins with the jihadists.
One of these petits problèmes concerned the Timbuktu office of Savama itself, which was on the Kabara Road, half a mile south of the town center. Savama had attracted the attention of the jihadists from the earliest weeks of the occupation, when the Islamic Police had called the organization’s administrative secretary, Sane Chirfi Alpha, to tell him they were about to requisition the organization’s assets. Alpha called Diadié, the vice president of the Crisis Committee, who also happened to be Savama’s treasurer, and together they hurried to see the jihadist police commissioner. It was true, the commissioner said; they had decided that since Savama was supported by UNESCO and had American funding via the Ford Foundation, it was a collaborator with Western interests, so they had decided to take it over.
Diadié thought quickly. “I told him, you are right to bring me here,” he recalled. If the commissioner did not understand the purpose of Savama, Diadié was more than happy to explain it to him. In fact, it was an association of people who held manuscripts, and its purpose was to safeguard their collections and create a framework for their development and exploitation. Since the families had no means, they had asked UNESCO and other organizations for support, but that didn’t mean it belonged to the state or to UNESCO, not at all. Savama was the property of the people.
“Here are the statutes,” Diadié concluded, showing the organization’s founding documents.
The commissioner relented. He had been told Savama was part of UNESCO, but if it was a private organization, he would not take action. In fact, he would instruct his men to protect it.
Two months later, Savama’s workers in Timbuktu had a more serious run-in with the police. Haidara’s nephew Mohamed Touré had a shipment to send to Bamako, and the trucks generally loaded their cargo close to the BMS bank in the Grand Marché. As the area was now crawling with jihadists, he arranged for the trucks to come instead to the Savama office at night. He planned to load several lockers there before the vehicles were driven back to the Grand Marché to be filled with other goods. He left the center of town with two ten-ton vehicles, pulled up next to the Savama building, and let himself in. Working by flashlight, he took four heavy lockers and carried them outside. It wasn’t exactly a covert operation—the large trucks standing by the building while flashlights flickered within—and soon they attracted the attention of one of the jihadists who had moved into the house next door. It was the Frenchman Gilles Le Guen, also known as Abdel Jelil.
“I was in the process of getting the lockers out,” recalled Touré, “when Abdel Jelil came directly. He called to me, stopped me, and asked me what I was doing. I said I was in the middle of getting my books out because it was the moment to put them away for the rainy season. I was worried that the water would damage them.”
Le Guen didn’t buy Touré’s story for a moment. “No,” he said, “you would not be doing that at this time of night. You are a thief.” He immediately called the Islamic Police, and soon a group of armed jihadists arrived. Among them was the commissioner himself.
“I am not a thief,” the desperate Touré told the commissioner. “These things belong to me. Everything here is mine.”
“Why didn’t you tell us you were doing something like this?”
“I didn’t know that every time you moved your own belongings you had to tell the police.”
The commissioner ordered that the trucks be taken with the lockers to the police station, where they were parked in a yard, and Touré was told to call witnesses for the following day who could testify that the manuscripts belonged to him, and to bring his papers. Touré quickly phoned Haidara to explain the problem, and he in turn began calling his contacts in Timbuktu.
It wasn’t Haidara who called Diadié, but rather the commissioner. Diadié was asked if he was aware that two trucks had been loaded with Savama manuscripts and were on the point of leaving town. “Trucks?” said Diadié. “How?” Come see for yourself, said the commissioner. Diadié said he would, but before doing so he went to find Touré.
Yes, Touré told him: as part of Haidara’s efforts to protect the manuscripts, they had taken “a certain number of measures” and had started to dispatch them to Bamako. They had been caught.
Diadié was astonished. “When there were problems before, whose door do you knock on?” he asked. “Yet when you decided to take these manuscripts out, you didn’t even feel able to tell us you were doing it. If you want to do these things you have to tell us!”
Still, he would come to Touré’s aid. He went to see the commissioner and told him that he had indeed known about the movement of lockers. Savama had an operation to make conservation boxes in Bamako, and it was as part of this program that the manuscripts were being shipped south. “I did not know they were leaving yesterday, otherwise I would have informed you,” he said.
Touré also went to the police with his papers. The commissioner gave the young man a rap on the knuckles. “If you want to do things like this, you must come to the Islamic Police to get authorization. You must not take things like that, when no one knows what you are doing, otherwise people will say you are stealing.” The punishment for theft was severe, he warned.
Touré agreed to ask before he moved manuscripts in the future, and the trucks and lockers were released. They stopped the operation for a while at that time, Haidara said, and the trucks went south without the lockers. When Touré started to move them again, he did it in the daytime.
Le Guen, meanwhile, still seemed convinced he had caught a thief.
It wasn’t only in the north that the manuscript smugglers ran into trouble. Later in October, Diakité told Stolk that government territory had become just as difficult, since numerous unofficial checkpoints had sprung up, manned by racketeers in uniform.
There were a host of legal infringements on which Malian travelers could be picked up—vehicle licenses not being carried; ID cards that were out of date—while others were dreamed up on the spot. Each problem could paralyze a bus for hours until the individual passengers had talked their way through it or paid a bribe. Between Sevare and Bamako there were nine government checkpoints, and Haidara had to make sure the couriers could pay their way through all of them. “We always had problems,” he said. “The transport was expensive. But it is normal [in a war situation]. And the couriers were expensive. But what can you do? All the money we spent on transport we can justify, all that we spent on the couriers we can justify. But the amount that went into bribes—how can you justify that?”
Corruption made the tedious journeys south even more exhausting. Touré’s worst trip, carrying six or seven heavy but “very beautiful, very important” lockers, lasted more than a week and involved five types of transportation. It began well: after sweet-talking his way through a jihadist search at Douentza by speaking Arabic and pretending to be ill, he reached government territory on the first evening. After that, the journey grew more and more difficult.
Whenever his manuscripts were found at a checkpoint, the uniformed officers made a big commotion. “They cried out when they saw the manuscripts,” recalled Touré, “saying, ‘Here we have a problem!’” Gendarmes were called. Touré would not say whether he paid them off, only that he “made them understand,” and that they gave him permission to continue.
One bus broke down. Another went the wrong way and took him closer to Côte d’Ivoire than Bamako. Days later, exhausted, when he found what he hoped was the last minibus and negotiated a fare for Bamako, another set of gendarmes stopped him and took him to their barracks. He was kept there for a day as they looked over his papers, asked him questions, and opened the lockers. As soon as they did that, they knew they were on to something.
A commanding officer was called. “Look,” he was told, “there is a young man who has brought the manuscripts of Timbuktu. They are everywhere!”
Touré called Haidara, who phoned a contact in Segu who could negotiate with the gendarmes, and finally they agreed Touré should be taken to Bamako under escort for further questioning. At one a.m. he arrived at the notorious Camp 1 gendarme base in the old colonial quarter of the capital, where the questions continued. He answered the best he could, and in the morning Haidara arrived to tell them that he was on legitimate business.
“I negotiated,” Haidara remembered.
As soon as he was free, Touré set off again for the north.
The most dangerous moments the smugglers described were when couriers and their lockers were held for ransom.
The main route from Timbuktu to Bamako ran along the right, or southern, bank of the river, through the population centers of central Mali: Douentza, Sevare, Mopti, and Segu. There was another route, though, along the river’s left bank. Instead of heading south from Timbuktu to Koriume and the ferry, 4x4s could take the track west through the sparsely populated desert to Niafounke and Lere before crossing the river to Segu. It was a long and wild drive of many hundreds of miles, through deep sand and around lakes that filled and emptied with the rhythm of the Niger’s inundations. If it was safe, however, the couriers could avoid the checkpoints and save a great deal of hassle and money. Haidara was told by many people that there were no problems with the Lere route, so they decided to try it.
It happened that the vehicle chosen for this first run was an ancient 4x4, a “carcass,” as Haidara described it, which kept breaking down: “You know, at the time, all the cars that you rented were carcasses. The cars that arrived from Sevare, for example, were exhausted, and they didn’t even have the right paperwork. You were always obliged to take another car.” They had scarcely traveled a hundred miles when Haidara’s phone rang with alarming news: the couriers had been stopped at gunpoint by a group of men and were now being held hostage. Haidara had no idea who the gunmen were or how dangerous they might be—they could have been jihadists or the MNLA, but it was more likely they were one of the many groups of bandits who roamed the desert. “They took the car and threatened the people who were in it,” said Haidara. “They said that they would not let the vehicle go and that we had to pay something.”
For him, one dead courier would ruin the whole enterprise: “If something bad happened to these men, then all our work would be like nothing. It would be a big problem.” So he tried to negotiate with the kidnappers to have the men and the lockers released. But conducting such a delicate conversation over the intermittent mobile phone network was impossible: “I was not able to reach an understanding with them. They wanted to take the couriers away. I didn’t know what they would do to them. I didn’t know what was going to happen! They got very afraid. We also got very afraid.”
He knew Niafounke well, though, and called a friend, who in turn called a respected imam who lived in the village where the men were being held. The imam went to talk to the kidnappers on Haidara’s behalf. “He spoke to them, negotiated a sum of money, and they were given their car back and allowed to pass,” Haidara said. It helped that the car was such a wreck the kidnappers didn’t want it.
They had been held hostage for twenty-four hours, and it took the couriers eight days to reach Bamako. “Eight days because the car was not good and they spent a day as hostages!”
It was the only time they tried the route via Lere. “We did not do that again,” Haidara said.
NEAR THE END OF 2012, Savama informed the German embassy in Bamako that between 80,000 and 120,000 manuscripts had been successfully evacuated from Timbuktu. At this time, though, the Malian crisis was entering a far more dangerous phase. In the second week of December, Iyad Ag Ghaly called a congress of tribal elders and jihadist groups at Essakane, a two-hour drive west of Timbuktu. This place of rolling white dunes was hugely symbolic for Ansar Dine and its allies: it was here that the Festival in the Desert had been held each year since 2003, with Western musicians such as Robert Plant and Damon Albarn playing alongside Malian stars such as Salif Keita and Ali Farka Touré. The Irish superstar Bono had sung there with the Tuareg band Tinariwen only that January.
There would be no Festival in the Desert in 2013. Concerts were banned in the Islamic Republic of Azawad, and in place of musicians the dunes on those days were populated with jihadist fighters. At the summit’s end, eyewitnesses reported seeing more than three hundred pickups race toward Timbuktu, with mujahideen clinging on in back, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” It was not yet clear what it all meant, but a rumor went around Timbuktu that a strategic decision had been made.
The cogs of international diplomacy were meanwhile grinding toward intervention. On December 20 the UN Security Council authorized the deployment of an African-led force in Mali, and three days later, the jihadists embarked on a new attack on the Timbuktu mausoleums in an act of defiance against the international community. Fighters drove through the streets and markets telling people that these places of idolatry had to be demolished. Then, as one eyewitness recalled, “using picks and shovels, the Islamic Police carried out the destruction of five mausoleums.” Once again, they pledged that not a single one would be left standing.
If that were not traumatizing enough, negotiations in Timbuktu over Mawlid were also reaching a crisis point. In 2013 the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday would fall on Thursday, January 24. The city had been largely resigned to canceling the event when Abou Zeid dropped in on Grand Imam Abderrahmane Ben Essayouti. The imam took the opportunity to ask the al-Qaeda emir about the festival. “He told Abou Zeid he wanted to speak about the celebration of Mawlid,” recalled Sane Chirfi Alpha, who was given details of this meeting. Abou Zeid responded that he would defer on such matters to his Islamic legal experts, the ulama. “They will decide,” he said. “When you are ready, you bring your ulama and we will bring ours and they can discuss it. If you can convince them, there won’t be a problem.”
As Mawlid approached, the two sides gathered and debated the matter all morning. “We met here at my house,” the grand imam recalled. “They told us to bring arguments and supporting documents if we had them which would authorize Mawlid.” The meeting lasted from nine a.m. to two p.m., as the Timbuktu ulama put forward their case, based on the Islamic texts, for the festival they had been celebrating for centuries. “We do not contradict anything you have advanced in your thesis,” said the jihadists’ experts, according to Alpha, “but there is one thing that happens during Mawlid we do not like: there is too much deviation, too much perversion. We cannot accept that.”
“Those who perform the perversion and the deviation do not wait for Mawlid,” replied the representatives of the town. “That is their life before, during, and after Mawlid. It is not Mawlid that causes this, and that is not a reason to stop us from celebrating it.”
When the discussion was finished, the Timbuktiens were told that they would soon receive the resolution, on the basis of the work they had done together.
By the start of the new year, it was becoming clear what the Essakane meeting had been about. On January 1, Ag Ghaly sent two extravagant demands to the Malian government: it must recognize the autonomy of Azawad and proclaim the “Islamic character of the state of Mali” in the constitution. The government refused. The next day, around fifteen hundred jihadists began massing at Bambara Maounde, the truck-stop village halfway between Timbuktu and Douentza. On Tuesday, January 8, gunfire was exchanged across the front line, and that night hundreds of jihadist vehicles advanced toward Konna, forty miles inside government territory. At eight-thirty the following morning they attacked the town from three sides, and by late afternoon it had fallen. “We are in Konna for jihad,” a rebel spokesman told Agence France-Presse on Thursday afternoon. “We have almost complete control of the town. After this we will continue to advance south.”
Mopti was less than an hour’s drive away. If the jihadists took that, there would be little to stop them from going all the way to Bamako.
The next morning, Friday, January 11, French president François Hollande announced that his country was going to war. “I have decided that France will respond, at the sides of our African partners, to the request of the Malian authorities,” he said, standing in front of his nation’s tricolor flag in the Élysée Palace. Operation Serval, the French offensive to retake the north of Mali, was about to begin.
HAIDARA HAD BEEN WARNED by heritage experts that the end of the occupation would be the most dangerous period for the manuscripts: “Before starting all this, people told me that the day they leave they are going to burn everything. They are going to sabotage it all. Everything that is important. That was part of the advice they gave me. But I did not know how it would happen.” The prospect of renewed fighting also alarmed Shamil Jeppie, director of the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project at the University of Cape Town. “Wherever you see military intervention, things are bound to get destroyed,” he said. “My initial fear was of neglect. The fear now is outright war and military engagement.” The director-general of UNESCO sent out a plea to all military units in the country not to further damage the Timbuktu monuments: “I ask all armed forces to make every effort to protect the cultural heritage of the country,” Irina Bokova said. “Mali’s cultural heritage is a jewel whose protection is important for the whole of humanity. This is our common heritage, nothing can justify damaging it. It carries the identity and values of a people.”
Against the backdrop of the pending conflict, Haidara and Diakité renewed their energetic fund-raising. On January 4, they went to the heavily fortified German embassy compound on the south bank of the river in Bamako. The ambassador was away on long-term sick leave, but a newly arrived chargé d’affaires, Thomas Strieder, agreed to meet them. Strieder remembered that Haidara seemed anxious. “He was searching for a few allies in the international community to help him to finance these [evacuation] actions,” he said. “He needed money.”
The librarian told Strieder that Savama had been authorized by the various families in Timbuktu to care for the manuscripts, which had been hidden among the people of Timbuktu in their homes. Now, however, the risk had become too great for them to remain in the city, since the rebel forces had been actively searching for the manuscripts and destroying them:
He told me that there was an immediate danger, that they had been destroyed, burned, and it had been done … during these weeks again and again. I remember that some of the books were found then by the rebel forces and destroyed. Burned, or … I think burned, yes.
Strieder was told the manuscripts had to be brought out by any means. He was convinced the threat was genuine—“I had no reason to doubt it,” he recalled—but he wanted more detail about how the evacuation would work. Was it even possible still to travel by road from Timbuktu to Bamako? Yes, said Haidara, but there were a lot of checkpoints to cross. How would the manuscripts be moved? By pickup trucks, in the night, hidden under fruit and vegetables that were grown in Timbuktu and shipped to the rest of Mali, Strieder was told.
There was no question that Germany would try to support the evacuation, the diplomat said, but he would need detailed costings as well as some sort of written agreement. He promised to talk to the German foreign ministry, and he and Diakité arranged subsequent meetings, including one at the bar in Bamako’s Radisson Hotel, to formalize the details.
On January 7, Strieder wrote to Berlin, setting out the case for aid. He had been in touch with the people who were carrying out a rescue of the manuscript libraries of Timbuktu, he told them. The manuscripts were in acute danger, and the Islamists had already destroyed the offices of the libraries, including PCs and furniture. Now, given the likelihood of military intervention, the documents needed to be moved out “as fast as possible and as completely as possible”: it was a question of saving these stocks “from the fire.” Everything should be kept highly confidential, since if the occupiers got wind of what was going on, it would be impossible to proceed further; Haidara and Diakité had turned to the embassy because they “especially trust the Germans.” They were looking for 500,000 euros over the next two years to relocate all the manuscripts and keep them safely in Bamako, but a quick donation of 10,000 euros right now would ensure the rescue of around twenty full lockers.
The money from Berlin came “astonishingly quickly,” compared with the foreign ministry’s normal procedures, Strieder said, since “they realized the urgency of the project at the top level.” A contract was signed for the transport of four thousand manuscripts “under adverse conditions” in exchange for 10,000 euros, and just eight days after their first meeting with Strieder, Diakité and Haidara returned to the embassy to pick up the money. The large bundle of euro notes was handed over covertly in a plastic bag bearing the name of a Bamako bakery. The manuscript smugglers were not allowed a receipt.
WHEN THE VERDICT ON MAWLID came at last, it was in the form of a note: “Abou Zeid wrote a letter,” recalled Sane Chirfi Alpha, “to say, truly, the arguments that you advance on Mawlid are just, but while we are here, we will not do it.”
“It showed us clearly that in reality they did not want Mawlid,” recalled the grand imam. The Timbuktiens decided not to force the issue, and the city’s imams asked the inhabitants not to celebrate the festival. At no point in the discussion were the manuscripts referred to, the grand imam said: “We did not speak of the manuscripts.”
If the recollections of the grand imam and Alpha were correct, the jihadists did not appear hell-bent on destroying all copies of the Ishriniyyat and the collections that contained it. Abou Zeid had organized a legal discussion, then waited until the last moment before calling off the festival. Yet this was not the impression Stolk was given. Savama told her that Ansar Dine had warned the town on January 13 that Mawlid was haram—forbidden—and its celebration would have “repercussions.” This was evidence that the manuscripts’ situation “had indeed been that dangerous,” and that the evacuation was justified.
The fighting in central Mali at this time meant the land route to Bamako had become too dangerous for most truckers to operate. Since there were still large numbers of manuscripts in Timbuktu, Haidara now decided to move them into the villages surrounding the city. “At that time, they took everything out,” said Haidara. “They brought everything there was into the little villages near the river at Kabara, Iloa, Hondoubongo, Toya.” Diakité would give an account of this move two months later, at a fund-raising lecture at the University of Oregon. It was a time, she said, when Malians from all walks of life helped bring the manuscripts to safety, spontaneously and at great personal risk:
Housewives offered meals and shelter to our couriers along the route. Merchants transported couriers and footlockers of books without charge, when they saw our people pushing them in pushcarts or carrying them on their backs to get them to the safety of the river … Whole villages created diversions at checkpoints, so our couriers could get them through with the books. In all cases, in the north but also in the south, the community came forward in the name of safeguarding the manuscripts … They called [them] our heritage, our manuscripts.
By mid-January, tens of thousands of manuscripts were in the villages waiting to be shipped south, and with the desert crossing closed, there was only one way to move them: on the river. This carried significant new risks, however, and became a major source of disagreement between the librarian and his partner. “Abdel Kader [Haidara] and I argued about using the water,” Diakité told her audience at the University of Oregon. “He was for it—he’s the courageous one in our terrible twosome—and I was strongly against. A wet manuscript is just a pile of old rags. Most of the manuscripts are made of rag paper, with ink floating on top. None of the inks on these manuscripts has any kind of fixative. They are completely volatile.” In the end they had no option, since the roads would only get more dangerous as French and Malian forces advanced. “The water became inevitable,” Diakité recalled. “I stopped sleeping altogether at that point. Abdel Kader told me that he did too.”
Transporting manuscripts by boat was not only risky, but also expensive. On Tuesday, January 15, Diakité set out once again to try to raise more funds, pitching up that day at the Dutch embassy in the Hippodrome quarter of eastern Bamako for a meeting with the embassy’s head of development aid, To Tjoelker. Diakité had been given Tjoelker’s name, as well as that of a charitable organization based in the Netherlands, the DOEN Foundation, by a contact in the Dutch development finance department. Tjoelker would at least listen, the contact had said. If anyone could make things happen, she could.
Diakité told Tjoelker the problem. “They said we would like you to help us because there are still 180,000 manuscripts left in Timbuktu and we can’t get them out without extra money,” the diplomat recalled. The jihadists’ reaction to Mawlid presented a genuine threat, Tjoelker was informed, particularly since the French forces were now pushing the jihadists back. “After the battle of Konna, the AQIM fighters who were occupying Timbuktu became very angry and said, ‘Okay, we will show you. We will do a big auto-da-fé on the day of Mawlid, the day of the birthday of Muhammad.’”
Auto-da-fé—meaning “act of faith” in Portuguese—was the term that had been used to describe the burning of heretics and heretical literature by the Inquisition in medieval Europe. But its modern resonance came from its use to describe Nazi book-burnings. Supervised by the SA and the SS, student societies in Nazi Germany destroyed blacklisted literature in pyres, including books written by Jewish authors, while reciting execration formulas. Josef Goebbels described these rituals as powerful and symbolic actions that would represent the dawning of the new age and the end of the old. Tjoelker was persuaded that this was what the jihadists now intended to do. “Mawlid is haram in the jihadists’ minds, as are the manuscripts,” Tjoelker recalled. “That’s why they said on the 24th [of January] we will do a big auto-da-fé of all the manuscripts.”
The “consortium” of Savama and D Intl spelled out the immediate nature of the Mawlid threat in a follow-up letter to the embassy, signed by Haidara. There were 454 lockers that needed to be evacuated immediately and in secret, the Dutch diplomats were told, since the jihadists had said they would destroy them. Failure to move them would mean that Timbuktu’s cultural heritage, “which carries the hopes and pride of an entire people,” would be “definitively lost.” There was not much time, since the festival was only a week away.
Tjoelker had no budget for saving culture, but Diakité had come knocking at an opportune moment: the Dutch foreign minister, Lilianne Ploumen, had just sent a note to the embassy asking what the government could do to help Mali, and Tjoelker was convinced this was it. She told Diakité that she would try to make a case to the foreign ministry for funding the evacuation, and wrote that day to her superior in The Hague. The response that came back overnight was unhelpful. “It was, you know, ‘It’s a bit complicated,’” Tjoelker said. She was so angry she called her ambassador, Maarten Brouwer, who told her to go straight to Ploumen.
“I said, ‘Okay, send [the request] directly to the minister and call the secretary to the minister,’” Brouwer recalled, “ ‘tell her this is something that should be on her desk or in her bag because we really need a quick response.’” Tjoelker did as Brouwer suggested, bypassing the usual ministry hierarchy. The next morning, January 17, Ploumen gave her blessing to the operation. “She said, ‘Okay, let’s do it,’” Tjoelker said.
The project had to remain highly confidential: “I said to [Ploumen], ‘You can’t tell anyone about it, it has to be kept really secret, because if it becomes public AQIM will react and hinder Savama’s saving action … It is top secret and you can only get the publicity after four or five months but not now, you have to keep quiet.’” Ploumen took Tjoelker’s entreaty for silence so seriously she relayed it to her ambassador. “Let’s not talk about it until it’s done,” she told Brouwer. The embassy even marked down the money in its own accounts as being for school exercise books in order to hide the real purpose of the donation.
The Dutch foreign ministry allocated 323,475 euros to Savama. Combined with the DOEN Foundation’s 75,000 and the Prince Claus Fund’s 100,000, the total donated by the Dutch public now stood at close to half a million euros. Tjoelker’s reluctant manager at the Africa desk e-mailed to say he had been ordered to help, and that afternoon she began to make arrangements. She went to the finance department and told them, “Okay, I have a top-secret mission. How do we do it?” and worked late into the night to get the paperwork done. If she could produce a contract quickly, Savama had told her, it could be used to borrow money to finance the operation. “In two days we had fixed the contract, all the paperwork, and we could sign the contract with Abdel Kader so that in one week he would get the money,” Tjoelker recalled. “He was working to a deadline, because there were so many manuscripts to move.”
That Saturday, January 19, Tjoelker took the contract to the librarian for him to sign. She met him in the Bamako lockup where the manuscripts were being received and dispatched to the safe houses. He looked unwashed, she remembered, and “so tired,” and to cheer him up she told him the work he was doing was “important for all humanity.” The contract stipulated that he would evacuate 454 lockers, containing roughly 136,200 manuscripts, which made the cost of transporting each locker a whopping 660 euros, though this included storage in Bamako for a year, the making of an inventory, at 212 euros per locker, and a 10 percent “management fee” for Savama and for D Intl. The 454 lockers were part of 709 that the Dutch were told had to be evacuated in all.
“That weekend a large numbers of boats—around twenty—were already starting to leave Timbuktu,” Tjoelker said. They could have loaded all the manuscripts at once on one of the larger Niger River pinasses, but instead they put only twenty or so lockers on each vessel, to reduce the risk of a catastrophic loss. The boats then set out on the 250-mile journey upriver, across the inland delta and Lake Debo, to Mopti, where they turned south up the Bani River for a further seventy miles to Jenne. There they were transferred to bush taxis that took the manuscripts the last 350 miles to Bamako by road. “In Jenne there were more than fifty pickups—even one hundred—that would take the manuscript boxes,” said Tjoelker. These were typically Toyotas, and they carried two or three of the heavy boxes in the back each time, covered with other goods—hay, potatoes, grain—to hide them.
“There were a lot of pickups,” said Tjoelker. “That’s why it was so expensive.”
IT WAS DURING THIS RIVERINE PHASE of the operation that, according to Haidara and Diakité, the incident with the helicopter occurred.
The Niger boatmen were terrified of French aircraft at this time. Captains such as Hassim Traoré of the Number One Transportation Company remembered seeing the helicopters flying over the river at night and even being approached by them. Their lights appeared “like a star, but flashing on and off,” Traoré recalled. “We got very, very afraid. Many panicked, because people were saying that if the French didn’t know who we were, they might bomb us, so we were really scared.” According to Tjoelker, Diakité and Haidara went to see the commander of Operation Serval to ask that boats that were carrying manuscripts not be targeted; if this is true, the message does not seem to have reached the pilots. Colonel Frédéric Gout, commander of the French helicopter regiment deployed in Operation Serval, was unaware of any special dispensation for the Niger boats, although, he said, they needn’t have worried: without positive identification of weapons on board, his men were not allowed to engage. Of course, the people traveling in the fragile vessels didn’t know that.
One night, according to Haidara, ten manuscript-carrying boats were traveling together “in a big convoy” and had reached the middle of Lake Debo when a helicopter came to investigate, fixing a spotlight on them. “The people who were in the boats were frightened they would be turned into mincemeat,” Haidara said. The whirring machine hovered over them for thirty seconds, scanning the vessels for weapons, before the pilot banked away. A terrified courier called Haidara at one in the morning to tell him they had almost been killed. “There is a helicopter that passed and was going to bomb us,” the courier told him. Haidara ordered that from now on they must stop at five p.m. wherever they were, and no longer travel at night.
“I knew that in the helicopters there were detectors, and if they did not detect something serious they could not do harm,” Haidara recalled. “But if they detected weapons or something like that, they could attack. They found that there were no weapons, so they left. But if they had been carrying weapons, they would have hit them, that is sure.”
Diakité related a version of this story to her audience in Oregon. In her account, the pilot of the French helicopter “demanded that the couriers open their boxes or be sunk on suspicion of harboring weapons,” but the pilot had a change of heart when he “saw the ship was carrying nothing but old piles of paper”:
Boats full of manuscripts and couriers were in danger of being sunk by French combat helicopters, [which] pulled away and saluted our couriers when they risked their lives to stay on the water, open a footlocker and show the pilots we had manuscripts, not guns.
Diakité told The New Republic of a further incident on the river around this time, which occurred after the jihadists declared that the “city’s elders had to turn over all the manuscripts so they could be burned before the [Mawlid] holiday began.” The threat put the smugglers in a panic, and they began calling all the couriers and ordering them to get the lockers on the river as quickly as possible. They had soon loaded a fleet of forty-seven boats, which then began to make their way south. As they approached the southern edge of Lake Debo, according to The New Republic, disaster struck:
Twenty of the boats entered a narrow strait of water. Suddenly, groups of men, their heads covered with turbans, materialized on both sides of the river, waving automatic weapons and ordering the boats to stop. The couriers had no choice but to pull their pirogues up to the shore, where the gunmen said they would burn their cargo unless they could deliver an astronomical sum of money. The teenage couriers pooled their cash, watches, and jewelry, but it wasn’t enough.
The young men were eventually allowed to call Haidara, who launched negotiations. “He basically gave them an IOU,” Diakité told The New Republic. “It was like Abdel Kader was using a credit card.” The manuscripts and couriers were released. A few days later, Haidara sent the money.
Tjoelker was given brief updates on these types of incidents via text message. “They would text and say, ‘They are at the Debo,’ ‘We have encountered a problem,’ ‘Problem solved,’ ‘We go on to Jenne,’” she said. “It was very short: ‘Boats are at this place,’ ‘Problem of this night solved,’ ‘Still going on.’” She also remembered hearing a story about people stopping the couriers, and said they had to give them money to go on: “It was a sort of holdup near Lake Debo … There were a lot of boats.”
Once or twice during the operation Ambassador Brouwer asked how things were going, and he recalled being told of difficulties on the route: “We got some stories about [lockers] full of manuscripts that were transported by pirogues and that it was done during the night and they had a lot of problems on the way because there was the police, there were rebels, and so on,” he said. He had heard that boats had been kidnapped or that people had threatened to set manuscripts on fire. “It was the people on the ground that solved those issues.”
As the lockers reached Bamako, Haidara took Tjoelker to see them. “He really made me part of the reception of all those boxes. He showed me their way of accounting—which parts have been financed by the Ford Foundation, what has been financed by Prince Claus, by DOEN. Every box had a number and the name of the funder on it so they knew who had paid for what.” She met some of the young couriers who accompanied the lockers. “Especially in Timbuktu I think they did really marvelous things to distract the AQIM guys, to get the manuscripts out of the city.”
Ambassador Brouwer accompanied Tjoelker on one of these visits. He counted roughly five to six hundred containers in the room, easily enough for Savama to have fulfilled its contract with the Dutch government, and was told there were more elsewhere.
“I looked at To [Tjoelker] and I said, ‘This is a lot. Are these all full?’ They said, ‘Yes, they are all full.’”
To be doubly sure, he even singled out one chest-deep in a stack at the back of the stockroom and said, “Okay, show me that one.”
“It was foolish,” he remembered, “but we actually did it.”
When the locker was opened, he saw it was piled to the brim with manuscripts.