Monday, May 12, 2008
He was a Palestinian commando, and a clown and a cutup -- until one day he made a shattering discovery.
Jun 1, 2004 | As commandos go, Abu Moses was about as nice a chap as one is likely to find. Absent was the preening narcissism of so many of his ilk -- the inevitable chip on the shoulder, the puerile, self-absorbed pout. No, whether by intention or by nature, Abu Moses defied the mold: forever, among his cohort, the homeboy, the trickster, the class clown.
In retrospect, it would indeed have been far easier to imagine him some first-generation immigrant's son making his way through a sweaty, small-town Iowa evening, Brylcreem'd bangs slicked back, double-booked between some freckle-faced drugstore girl and his buddies out front revving a mint-green Buick, angry to get someplace small time.
But it was not some backwater Midwestern ville where Abu Moses dwelt; it was the city of Belgrade in the mid-1980s. During that nominally socialist era of post-Titoist sloth, just before the storm. Before the present-day Crusades; before the Berlin Wall had fallen. Before war had ravaged the land.
At the time of Abu Moses' stay in the Yugoslav capital, Marshal Josef Broz Tito had been dead a numbing seven years. Nonetheless, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (still highly esteemed throughout the Third World as the progenitor of the Movement of Non-Aligned Nations) continued to host students from member states: fresh-faced youths from such far-flung climes as the People's Republic, Nepal, Cuba and Peru, Egypt, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and both Iran and Iraq (then at war with each other and simultaneously supplied by Yugoslav tank and munitions factories in Skoplje and Kragujevac).
During this same era, the Republic also provided what was reportedly the most generous refuge of any East European nation to the Palestine Liberation Organization (under the strict caveat, of course, that no organization-related violence would occur on domestic soil). The terms of the PLO's guest residence had been negotiated between Abu Moses, his colleagues, and the Yugoslav chief of security over mandatory gifts of customs-restricted Johnnie Walker in the bowels of Belgrade's underground police headquarters and prison (where domestic dissidents languished), known as the Cave.
And indeed, that agreement was honored: During the PLO's entire Belgrade stay (with scores of youth on PLO scholarships, many from bitterly opposing factions) only one such incident occurred: In leafy Kalamegdan, an Ottoman Turkish fortress, now Belgrade's central park, when a rank-and-file Fatah member stabbed a low-level recruit from Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-General Command. Word had it that the incident was personal, rather than political, in nature.
Though Abu Moses' given name was Ibrahim, his colleagues all called him by his nom de guerre, with its curiously comic ring: "Abu," though he had no child of his own and therefore was not, at least in civilian terms, truly entitled to a filionym, and "Moses" (rather than the Arabic "Musa"), pronounced in gum-snapping American; a name that, while not uncommon among Arab newborns, was bequeathed far more iconically to Jewish ones. The result was a slightly clownish moniker eliciting fond hilarity every time it was uttered.
"Abu Moses! Abu Moses!" his cohort would hoot affectionately at welcoming ceremonies for touring PLO dignitaries, from whom the young operatives were cordoned off on the sidelines, like stock, behind crimson velvet ribbons. Here, at the margins of the action, discipline waned, and the leather-shod PLO scholars would once again transform into village boys, with village boys' ruthless compulsion for scorching nicknames.
Why was the man called Abu Moses? Last century's end has come and gone and that small mystery was never revealed. Perhaps to commemorate the prophet of the three faiths or, more likely, some fallen comrade. Or perhaps it was a mere product of the times: the twilight years of the 1980s, when insidious, prefabricated pop music -- either American-made or a direct imitation of it -- had begun to metastasize in promising young minds from purist Scandinavia to the most obscure regions of the former Ottoman Empire.
Gone, in a fleeting generation: French as the verbal currency of European diplomacy. Vanished with it, formality, courtesy, the perfumed turns of phrase, irony as weapon -- all replaced by the boorish yet unconquerable "bottom line." Yes, it was during Abu Moses' time that the English language had begun its cultural search-and-destroy mission round the planet. And should, say -- oh, the Libyans -- decide to bomb a symbol of the West, they no longer chose a crumbling, mildewed British embassy on some sedate, 19th century boulevard, but rather a neon-thrashed Berlin discothèque blaring the mercilessly cheerful ABBA or "Thriller" -- the fading gamine Michael Jackson's jaunt through noir.
In those days, Abu Moses carried on a long-running but doomed love affair with a tawny, waiflike girl with the puffy eyes and gentle stupor of a petite drug addict. The young woman's parents (mum, a blond Muslim Kosovar from the prewar elite; father, a former Egyptian engineering student returned to his Yugoslav alma mater as diplomat) resided in the upper-class Belgrade neighborhood of Dedinje, alongside the domestic Communist nomenklatura.
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