OPERATION PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

A Dolphineros team is structured in units of two ‘companions’ who never abandon each other. That guaranteed that Belkis and I would always stay together.

The Leviathans extended our capabilities with intense courses.

Physical and mental fitness, of course, was imperative.

Since missions might take us anywhere, we had to be polyglots, too. Incredibly that proved easy. The Leviathans, asserting that the brain is the depository of every language, tapped deeply into our unconscious and released them.

History asserts that the oldest profession is slavery. When Hrant proposed that we should join an operation aiming to rescue some victims, we agreed immediately.

Code-named Pursuit of Happiness after that sublime phrase in America’s Declaration of Independence, the operation was proposed by JJ, a prominent campaigner against racial, religious and gender discrimination in the USA.

While planning the operation, JJ secured funding not only from anti-slavery and human rights organisations, but also from a bevy of cosmopolitan billionaires eager to support humanitarian causes instead of indulging in châteaux, yachts and football clubs.

He also recruited a team of intelligence wizards – nicknamed The Magi – and installed them in London to provide logistical support.

Then he approached the Dolphineros in every country. Thousands volunteered. After months of scrupulous deliberations with The Magi and a large cadre of Leviathans, he formed a task-force which possessed physical and psychological stamina, special skills and familiarity with the targeted regions’ geography, ethos and lifestyles.

JJ proved a master planner. He created a task force comprising 592 Dolphineros split into 296 teams from 88 countries and structured in units of two.

Every team was equipped with first-aid kits, satellite-phones, radios and tracking devices. Most teams were made up of male and female Dolphineros.

The task force’s inordinate size was vital. Despite our concern for the thousands who needed to be rescued, we had to give precedence to those in imminent danger. The Magi compiled a priority list but forewarned us that we would rescue only a fraction of them. There were, of course, many contingency plans. But no plan guarantees success. We had to accept that there would be disasters.

Since the operation encompassed many countries, it was divided into six tranches. JJ code-named them after Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved many Jews during the Holocaust only to perish in a Soviet gulag.

I note below JJ’s summary of the Wallenbergs:

Wallenbergs I was assigned to Africa and briefed to free: a) activists from Mauritania’s oppressed black populations; b) girls abducted in Nigeria; c) Tuareg secessionists in Mali; d) youngsters from Cameroon and Chad sex trade; e) adults from Niger and Benin sold for organ transplants; f) imprisoned Eritrean journalists; g) Sudanese and Somalian boys for sale as child soldiers.

Many stages of this operation involved long and arduous treks through inhospitable desert routes known only to smugglers. Despite tips on acclimatisation given by Mauritanian and Malian Dolphineros, the Sahara’s heat and sandstorms proved a bane to European teams.

In Mauritania where bribery is a traditional custom, envelopes of euros to notable ‘white’ officials secured the freedom of six political prisoners and fifteen young Fula and Soninké activists slaving in state-run agricultural compounds.

Bribery also enabled the Dolphineros to smuggle out five Eritrean editors arrested for daring to publish independent newspapers.

Four Tuareg leaders targeted by Ansar Dine, the Jihadist group that strove to impose a fundamentalist regime in Mali, were secreted into Senegal with the cooperation of activists. These men, prominent in the 2012 Tuareg rebellion for an independent state, Azawad, still campaigned to preserve their nomadic culture, a syncretism of Berber mythology and Islam.

Seventeen Nigerian school-girls kidnapped to breed future Jihadists were rescued after additional payments of danger money to facilitators.

Ransoms to human traffickers freed twenty-three men and women from Cameroon, Mali and Chad being groomed for prostitution in Europe, sixteen adults from Niger and Benin corralled for organ transplants and fifteen Sudanese and Somalian boys training under Al-Shabaab, the Somalian Jihadist group as soldiers-cum-suicide-bombers.

Three tragedies struck Wallenbergs I.

The first hit the Irish and Italian teams. While crossing the Sahara in Niger they were swept away by a freak sand drift. Mercifully the people they had rescued were picked up by another team using the same route.

The second occurred in Chad. A caravan of salt-traders coming across four teams and their charges mistook them for marauding nomads and opened fire. By the time they realised that the teams and their wards were unarmed, they had killed Khalil from Tunisia and severely injured Amina from Morocco.

The third transpired when an encounter in Sudan with an Al-Shabaab squad developed into a skirmish killing Somalia’s Maxamed, and South Africa’s Siyabonga. Only a reckless attack by the remaining Dolphineros and their wards forced Al-Shabaab to flee.

Eventually reaching Djibouti, the teams were flown to Paris where anti-slavery organisations took care of the rescued. The fact that 101 lives had been saved, offered scant consolation for the loss of seven Dolphineros and one paralysed for life.

Wallenbergs II were to free: a) women from Indo-China groomed for sex trade or enforced marriages; b) Malaysian youths on sale for organ transplants; c) Thai peasants in debt bondage; d) Filipino workers and domestics in slavery in Arab countries. e) Cambodian activists, writers, and intellectuals; f) Rohingyas in Myanmar facing ethnic cleansing; g) Uyghur human rights activists in China.

Poverty-stricken Laos, ruled by a communist military politburo, was rife with human rights abuses, extrajudicial killings, corruption and favouritism. Cambodia, an equally poor fledgling constitutional monarchy, was still recovering from Pol Pot’s genocidal rule. In the prevailing disquiet, dollars deposited in Western banks proved effective sweeteners for officials.

In Laos, the teams were able to ‘purchase’ twenty-eight women ensnared for the European sex trade, eighteen men in debt bondage and twelve imprisoned dissenters and religious activists.

Equally successful in Cambodia, they bought twenty-two dissidents, journalists, writers and bloggers incarcerated in Social Rehabilitation Centres for criticising the regime and eleven evicted smallholders condemned to forced labour.

Myanmar proved a dangerous theatre. Ruled by military dictatorship for decades – abetted by owners of the jade mines in the north – its primary conflict involved the Rohingya, an indigenous Muslim minority in Rakhine State that the authorities refused Myanmar nationality. The Buddhist monks’ organisation, Ma-Ba-Tha, alleging that the Muslims intended to devour them ‘like cat-fish’ became militant; so did the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) that claimed to defend the Rohingyas.

Helped by pacifists from both factions, teams from Australia, New Zealand and South Korea hiked to a Rohingya community hiding in the sparsely populated Chin State’s mountains. Dividing the people into manageable batches and trekking along craggy tracks, they transported all 115 Rohingya to the Irrawaddy Delta where they rendezvoused with an Indonesian junk hired by The Magi and sailed to Singapore.

The rescue proved providential for in August 2017, the government, using an ARSA attack as an excuse, descended on Rakhine Province and destroyed numerous villages and killed many of the inhabitants.

Other countries imposed dangerous situations, too.

Thailand was beleaguered by the Muslim Patani Liberation Front. Buddhist and Christian minorities in Malaysia, a federal constitutional monarchy that delegates to Sharia courts such religious matters as marriage, inheritance, divorce, apostasy and conversion, remained unsettled. Indonesia struggled with sectarian violence. Coup attempts, drug gangs, communist insurgents and overt hostilities from Muslim Moro separatists constantly plagued Democratic Philippines.

Nonetheless in Thailand, the Dolphineros freed sixty-two enslaved farmers, eleven youngsters sold for organ transplants, and nineteen young men and women trafficked for sex. In Malaysia, they rescued twelve young girls who were to be sold for marriages and three men who, choosing to convert to Catholicism, had been indicted for apostasy by Sharia Courts.

In Indonesia, they smuggled out eight male and seven female teenagers abducted for radicalisation. And in the Philippines, they bought thirty-six young women marketed as domestics to Saudi Arabia, and forty-eight men selected for slave labour in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Oman.

They transported their charges, in yet more hired junks, to Singapore and thence by air to South Korea and Japan. Dismally, the mission to Xinjiang, China, failed. The teams, while able to liaise with each other, failed to establish links with Uyghur activists. The teams soon discovered that the Chinese government had built numerous detention camps all over Xinjiang with the objective of indoctrinating over a million Uyghurs into the joys of vocational education, Chinese nationalism and the Communist Party’s humane laws. We had one satisfaction: we had alerted the world to the fact that many more internment camps were being built and gave the locations of those already in use.

Wallenbergs III were assigned to Asia to free: a) persecuted Christian priests, Buddhists, Ahmadiyya leaders and Iranian Bahá’í refugees; b) men in debt bondage; c) adults pressed into organ donation or domestic serfdom; d) Afghan youths being radicalised; e) Indian children sold for slave-labour.

The operation had a gratifying start. The teams sent to India, Bangladesh and Pakistan proved experts at bribery and bought out a total of 109 men, women and children from debt bondage.

Then we suffered two tragedies.

The first involved three teams transporting to Puducherry, in a hired bus, a community of forty-one Buddhists who, hounded by Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami activists, had had to shelter in the mountains.

According to a shepherd, the bus, driving through Odisha province on a pot-holed road made even more taxing by the monsoon, skidded into a ravine as it tried to avoid a cow. Noone survived.

The second tragedy struck the UK team of Torrance and Abigail who rendezvoused with six Iranian Bahá’í Teachers in Pakistan. The Teachers, accused of worshipping the false messiah, al-Masih ad-Dajjal, by obscurantist Pakistani Fundamentalists, had had to go into hiding.

Torrance and Abigail smuggled them into India and then, renting a minivan, set out for Puducherry. Driving through the Sahyardi region they were ambushed by Maoist Naxalites. When these insurgents, mainly indigenous Adivasi, demanded cash and valuables, Torrance and Abigail gave them all they possessed. The Naxalites then turned to the Teachers, dragged them out of the minivan and shot them.

The other missions went according to plan.

Teams from Europe made their way to a ruined monastery on the outskirts of Lahore where thirteen Christian priests – ‘a humble mirage of The Last Supper’, as their elder Father Clement jested – had taken refuge. Furnishing them with false ID documents and acting as a group of hikers, they crossed into India at the Wagah border-post. Thereafter they proceeded to Amritsar and then by train to Puducherry.

Other teams rescued eighteen Afghan youths from the Taliban; freed ninety-two Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan bonded labourers in the Arabian Peninsula; and bought twenty-one Indian children slaving in cottage industries. They were all flown from Puducherry on various holiday charters to Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Italy and the UK.

Though the whole operation rescued hundreds of souls, it claimed the lives of many others.

Wallenbergs IV were assigned to Latin America and the Caribbean.

They were commissioned to free: a) journalists, writers, lawyers and security personnel targeted for assassination by drug lords; b) politicos hunted by death squads; c) foreigners forced into the drug trade; d) persecuted transgenders, gays and lesbians; e) kidnapped aid volunteers; f) indigenes held hostage by coca growers; g) campaigners for the conservation of the Amazon.

The eight Dolphineros of the four Mexican teams – Raul, Ines, Lautaro, Magdalena, Jerònimo, Carlos, Ricardo and Matteo – escorting to safe houses three journalists, six public prosecutors, two incorruptible police chiefs and eleven social workers, were all murdered in separate ambushes. The killings proved yet again that Mexico’s Security Services were riddled with informers.

Medellin Cartel’s hatchetmen also targeted the teams sent to rescue backpackers and campesinos coerced to deliver drugs to Haiti, Dominica, Belize and Honduras. As a result, five Dolphineros – Costa Rican Ciprina, Nicaraguan Xochitl, Cuban Silverio, Panamanian Ernesto and Guyanese Yannick – were killed and seven Dolphineros – three of them seriously – were injured. Those unscathed – carrying their wounded comrades – barely managed to reach the safety of Nicaragua’s Little Corn Island. The grief of so many casualties and the failure to save a single person hit us very hard.

While teams from Brazil and Argentina succeeded in freeing thirteen politicos in Guatemala, yet another tragedy struck two American teams. Death-squads, liaising with the Guatemalan Clandestine Security Apparatus, managed to track the four Dolphineros – Dwight, Melanie, Leroy and Roberto – as they rendezvoused with six Mayan elders in the highlands and summarily executed them all.

Mercifully, the other missions ended satisfactorily. They rescued thirteen lesbians, gays and transgenders in Jamaica; six aid workers kidnapped for ransom in Haiti; five Ecuadorian journalists; the four lawyers defending them; and nine conservationists campaigning against the ecological devastation of the Amazon.

Twenty-one shepherds and nine indigene leaders used as slave labour by the coca growers were freed with the collaboration of both the Colombian Government and the FARC guerrillas.

Despite the fact that Wallenger IV suffered the loss of seventeen Dolphineros, and thirty victims they had failed to save, the teams had freed eighty-four people. This outcome was far below JJ’s expectations, but it confirmed his conviction that the world needed Dolphineros more than ever.

Wallenbergs V were assigned to Islamic regions of the Former Soviet Union.

They were to rescue: a) dissident politicians and journalists; b) persecuted Russian priests; c) ethnic leaders; d) gay activists; e) people in bondage; f) a community of Jews; g) women facing sterilisation.

In Azerbaijan the teams, exploiting the country’s raging corruption, freed six imprisoned journalists and four Armenian activists still campaigning for the disputed territory, Nagorno-Karabakh.

Kazakhstan’s ethnic conflicts, economic troubles and the despotic Nursham’s wily policies of divide and rule enabled the teams to manoeuvre with some ease. Bribing their way through officialdom, they smuggled out three editors and seven journalists; snatched nine Russian Orthodox priests and nine hieromonks under house arrest for practising religion outside state control; and liberated eight gay-rights activists and six minority elders. They led their charges via nomadic trails across steppes and taigas to the bordering Russian Republic, Altai.

The autocratic regimes of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan made the teams’ manoeuvrability exacting. But the Dolphineros – all native activists and proficient in their countries’ traditions – achieved appreciable success.

Hacking with precision through Tajikistan’s tight control of the social media, they freed eight journalists. Then, trekking through the drug routes of the Pamir Mountains, they smuggled the journalists into Afghanistan and delivered them to Canadian Aid workers.

In Turkmenistan they freed seven broadcasters threatened with having ‘their tongues shrivelled’; twelve Baluch activists campaigning for the restoration of their forbidden language and customs; thirteen Russian and nine Armenian priests; and eleven activists from the discriminated Kazakh, Tatar and Pashtun minorities. They were all smuggled into Russia in a cargo plane from Turkmenbashy International Airport.

The power struggle of members of Uzbekistan’s Supreme Assembly allowed the teams to operate with relative freedom. As the dollar was stronger than God, hefty handouts liberated sixteen imprisoned dissidents; twenty-one men and women in bondage – a tiny portion of the four percent of the population living as slaves; thirty-two Jews from Samarkand; and fourteen women facing sterilisation. All these people, provided with forged passports, were flown from Bukhara to Russia on scheduled flights.

Wallenbergs VI, assigned to the Middle East, were to rescue: a) a conclave of progressive Sunni and Shia imams sought by both the Yemeni government and Houthi rebels; b) Yemeni children in war zones; c) Saudi women accused of adultery; d) Iranian converts to Christianity; e) homosexuals; f) enslaved Bangladeshi, Filipino and Indonesian domestics; g) Syrian democrats hunted by the Syrian Saviour Hakim.

Despite the region’s numerous conflicts, most of these assignments went according to plan.

But we suffered a tragedy in Yemen.

Saudi Arabia, fearful that the new Houthi-Iran alliance threatened Sunni domination of the region, formed a coalition with Egypt, Kuwait, Morocco, Bahrain, Sudan and Qatar. With material and political support from the USA and the UK, the conflict escalated into an implacable Civil War.

The Dolphineros arrived at the height of this War.

Four teams rounded up eighty-four orphaned children and conveyed them to Mocha, the old coffee port on the Red Sea, from where they would sail across the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait to Djibouti. Their arrival coincided with Saudi bombardments of Houthi positions in Mocha. Though the teams managed to keep the children safe in the surrounding scrubland, their boat was destroyed and its captain and crew of three were killed.

Tonton promptly met the children and their Dolphineros at a cove near Mocha and cramming them all into his baghlah, delivered them to Djibouti.

But Al Qaeda located the safehouse where the Imams were hiding and sent a couple of suicide-bombers. The eighteen Imams and the Dolphineros who were guarding them were killed.

Three Saudi teams liberated six ‘adulterous’ women sentenced by Sharia courts to decapitation. The indictments, the Magi had ascertained, had been fabricated in every case by the women’s husbands who hoped to receive diyya – blood money – from the women’s families. Since the women’s families could not – or would not – pay the diyya, the teams readily paid out the demanded sums.

Other teams liberated seventeen Filipino, Bangladeshi and Indonesian domestics by offering compensation to the Saudis who ‘owned’ them. The negotiations went smoothly because the ‘owners’ were rapacious nouveau-riches who could easily purchase other domestics from the flourishing market.

Four Iranians accused of apostasy for having converted to Christianity with the intention of becoming missionaries – offences that carried the death penalty – had gone into hiding in the mountains near the Turkish border to evade Iran’s notorious Guidance Patrol.

The Iranian team went to Urmia, the capital of Iran’s West Azerbaijan Province, to find and rescue these men. Posing very convincingly as activists of a Christian Aid organisation, they discreetly questioned the registered worshippers of Urmia’s historic Cathedral of St Mary the Mother of God. They found out that the men moved from place to place and only appeared at odd times by an old disused sheepcote to pick up provisions. The Dolphineros duly proceeded to the sheepcote and waited until the men appeared. Then, handing them forged papers, they rendezvoused with an Armenian itinerant tradesman who took them in his minivan to Turkey through the Sero border crossing.

The Syrian team smuggled out a pacifist politician facing assassination for opposing Hakim’s genocidal regime. The politician – and his family of six – were transported in a fishing boat to the RAF base in Cyprus and flown to England where they were granted asylum.

And so Operation Pursuit of Happiness ended. Though it had saved over a thousand lives, it had lost many others. We were left with the feeling that we had achieved only a Pyrrhic victory. Nonetheless, the number of people saved drove JJ to plan a second operation – one for which Belkis and I would certainly volunteer.

I look at the sea wistfully.

Belkis and Childe Asher are paddling. Hrant, too. My triad watching over me, but keeping their distance to leave me with my thoughts.

I remember how Belkis coaxed Hrant to agree to be called by a name. ‘Leviathans prefer to be anonymous. But if you must have a name for me, pick one,’ he said. And that’s what she did.

He’s proof that death is a lie. That doesn’t mean Leviathans don’t bleed. They bleed all the time.