Let’s say it all started with an incident at the ad-hoc check point somewhere in the turbulent north of Mali. It resulted in an injury of a French citizen by the name of Jean-Marc Gadoullet, a.k.a. “the Engineer”. The former colonel and employee of the French DGSE secret service, illegally entered the country in an SUV, most likely by way of the unguarded northern border. Accompanied by an elected Mali official (!), he slyly avoided the checkpoints until he came across one that was not on his map. He accelerated and got a bullet to the shoulder in return. The French government swiftly repatriated the wounded citizen, even though he had been fired from DGSE a while ago. He had implicated himself in an elimination of a prominent opposition leader in Chad a number of years ago and has been swiftly taken out of circulation. After a dishonorable discharge, the Engineer held jobs as a safety expert with different multi-national companies and some less known third world countries; wherever a chance offer itself. Among others, he was hired by the Vinci conglomerate, owner of the Areva concern, which is part owner of a uranium mine in Arlit in Niger. This is where, according to the results of the investigation by Blair and Bush Jr., the Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein would buy spare parts for his nuclear weapons. Almost a year ago, seven Areva employees were kidnapped from that same mine. Three of them had been set free. The Engineer is believed to be negotiating the release of the other four. Driven by the invisible hand of the free market, which miraculously auto-regulates itself, the Engineer developed new, innovative business methods. He bartered in every direction and with everyone involved and expected a hefty reward from them all, after raising the usual ransom of five million euro per kidnapped white man in the case of Areva to ninety million apiece.

Jean-Marc, the Engineer, was still on his probably not very pleasant repatriation plane ride, when seven heavily armed men barged into a hotel to the north of Mali in the town of Hombori, approximately five hundred kilometers south-west of the scene of the Engineer’s incident, and kidnapped two white men. These were first said to be delegates of the World Bank, then geologists employed by the South African cement factory, and finally infamous mercenaries Phillipe Verdon and Serge Lazarevic. The first rose to fame in 2003, when he was arrested in the Comoros after a failed coup. His mentor and associate was perhaps the most famous freelance mercenary of all times, with a name of some comic book value to the Slovenian public: Bob Denard (the last “d” is silent), creator of a long series of grueling coups and interventions in Africa. The other, Serge Lazarevic, was, naturally, a safety and security expert and owner of a corresponding French agency, wanted in relation to some unsolved criminal offences in Kosovo and among other things known as the architect of the personal security detail of the Zaire dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Verdon and Lazarevic had just managed to get settled in an inconspicuous small hotel, when they were kidnapped. It was impressive timing and also the first time for something like this to happen south of the Niger River. It got especially interesting when it turned out that all three characters were old acquaintances and business partners. People of many identities and professions, depending on the direction of the money flow. Once employed by countries, self employed today. Sometimes friends sometimes, sometimes rivals on an ever more competitive white booty market.

The Sahara vastness is not exactly friendly to young employment seekers. Commerce and contraband have always been overlapping terms here. The white-slave trade has always been an integral part of both as well. Sometimes more, sometimes less. It must be difficult to be a professional kidnapper. First, one must have a considerable amount of startup capital. In cash. In the face of the religion of greed, the bankers would have some difficulties approving credits for that. Then, one has to be extremely informed, have superior logistic capacities, be at least partly a polyglot and politician, connoisseur of western mentalities and rules of the game. And most importantly, infinitely patient. A year or more may pass from the kidnapping to the ransom payout. Are we aware of how much a single such individual eats and drinks in that time? Also considering that shopping for them is far from catching a free bus to the nearest shopping mall around the corner; it is more like a Mata Hari of Marco Polo excursion. Not to mention regular caprices and health and psychological problems. Then there are the above mentioned sly characters, always competing amongst themselves and racing to be the one to make all the problems go away and collect the hefty commission for the successful finale of the kidnapping drama. Without them, everything stops. They can be considered as the merchant in the manufacturer–consumer relationship. The most trusted neighbor, Tesco perhaps; but all of a sudden you then have Boots, analogue Amazon, Google and every other sort of ware peddler. The result is a mess that perhaps seems whimsical to everyone but the victim. However, the main problem of every reputable kidnapper is the lacking of an educational system. Where is an aspiring businessman supposed to get the proper knowledge? There are no private schools and private teachers are apparently not to be trusted. The only option seems to be the thorny path of independent entrepreneurship. To be a self-made man. Who knows, with good work you might someday become the Warren Buffet of the Sahara. Fine, but before you venture into the business, you have to first educate yourself on how much your future goods are even worth. Here, the Algerian research journalist Salma Tlemcen comes to your rescue, as she has monitored the development of this new service-providing field since 2003. So: a white, unharmed man is worth approximately 45,000 euro. A black man, on the other hand is worth only two to three thousand of the same currency. True, the cost of victim manipulation may be considerably lower there, they are incomparably more cooperative, and when flung into their uncontrollable fate, they patiently count the steps toward the Promised Land. While the white man came here voluntarily and uninvited, but is resisting now. Like, for example, the 58-year-old Berlin native, Martin Eugen A., who was at the worst place in the worst time and decided to fight back, leaving his life behind. Timbuktu, the mythical sub-Sahara commerce and university center, has attracted white adventure seekers for centuries, even though it is proven that there is nothing there, was fatal for him. A day after the siege on the mercenary duo in Hombori, immediately after the main Friday prayer, four disguised men parked a Toyota pickup in front of the popular restaurant in the north-west part of the city. The driver and the guard stayed outside, while the other two rushed inside. Their catch was a colorful band of travelers: a Dutch couple with a Toyota, a Swede and South African with dual citizenship on motorcycles, and a German using public transport. The tandem scored three  men, who were handcuffed robocop-style and threwn into the back of the car. The wife of the Dutch traveler, who was busy tidying their toyota, did not seem to intrigue them much. Women mean only trouble in this business. As they were leaving, the kidnappers spotted the unlucky Martin, a quasi-baksheesh, who was just leaving the nearby store. Martin was deaf on his baksheesh ear, responded to force with force and got shot in the face. Had he bought one more ring, necklace, anything, his brain would still be in his head and not on the wall next to the hotel entrance. The brutal professionals wrote their testament with a few shots: we are not here for fun, but for business. The suspected offspring of Libya’s thriving democratization and at the same time protégées of some western professor of death then leisurely drove to the first sand dunes that start a few hundred meters ahead and disappeared in the North-Northwest direction. The first settlement, deserving an actual official name, is one thousand two hundred kilometers away. And then, quiet. The army budged four long hours later. Somehow understandable – when paid a good hundred euros a month and with about six hungry mouths to feed.

This is big news for a desert, which is still like a village despite its size and where every gossip lives seven parallel lives, not to mention a bomb of never before seen events like these. We think about it from far away, where it is safe. Two neo-nomadic couples that happened to meet exactly here and nowhere else while exploring the Dark Continent. On the edge of town, where the GSM modem is struggling with the web, we are painstakingly assembling pieces of contradictory information into a picture that would make some sense. We agree that with the flood of mercenaries of all colours and with practically every shepherd owning a satellite phone, things in the Sahara are getting, well, hot. Once we finally connect some dots, we realise that the kidnapping actually took place in today british owned Alafia Hotel, which used to be well known under another name and owned by some Swiss or maybe Italian folks. It is the same locale where we spent some nights too, not long ago.

“How should we act in future, considering we don’t feel like going home?,” we contemplate safely tucked away in a place, where on the surface the state of affairs seems to be somewhat less troubled. In reality, there is a completely different kind of terror here. Here is Western Sahara; simply Sahara for the Moroccans, or even simpler: le grand sud. The great south, the last African colony, which has been annexed to the Moroccan kingdom, circumventing internationally accepted rules. For almost four centuries. Most of the original inhabitants of the Sahara who escaped from the combined military-civilian flood from the North (350 thousand unarmed Moroccans in the front with the royal army behind them; this was later called the Green March), went to refugee camps near the Algerian city of Tindouf and they are still there. Have been for almost four centuries. And during this time, the Western Sahara, like the Wild West in the past, has been plundered endlessly. As long as you stay meek and silent, you will be okay. But the moment you move in a forbidden, albeit unwritten direction, the government is ruthless. And paranoid. The few Saharans who did not succeed or did not want to run (and who have multiplied in numbers in the meantime) are controlled by raw violence: the stick. The Moroccan inhabitants can get the stick AND the carrot: tax breaks, subsidies and micro-credits, drenched in a vinegar of patriotically-nationalistic myths. Which are a palpable reality here. Beside the daily life of more or less subtle extortions, every now and then a wide-spread violence breaks out. But since the Moroccan machine has taken care of internet violence beside the analogue violence, such news rarely seep into the comatose conscience of the external world. In the past year, Western Sahara has witnessed three major eruptions of violence. The first occurred last November when the protester camp Gdim Izik to the east of the city of Laayoune was violently emptied. The undignified, fed up Saharans packed up their hajmas and left the city in large numbers. Twenty kilometers to the east, they set up a Ghandi-like campsite, which quickly grew to enormous proportions. The campsite withstood violence and mistreatment for a month, until a tidal wave of authorities came in the form of water cannons filled with boiling hot(!) water and washed the protesters away. The ones, who managed to escape, found refuge back in the city, which was now left defenseless and with no protection. The end result: about twelve to thirty dead, an unknown number of wounded and missing and a number of demolished administrative complexes. The next incident happened last February, on the last day of the royal festival in Dakhla, which celebrates the Moroccan identity of this Spanish-built city, when Moroccan savages barged into a nearby Sahara quarter and indulged themselves in an unimpeded all-night violence orgy. The authorities did not intercede until the next day, when the aggressors were already sleeping peacefully. Eight dead, burnt houses, an unknown number of wounded and missing. At the end of September of this year, another incident occurred in Dakhla, when an actual war broke out between the Moroccans and the original inhabitants of the Sahara; the latter group met the conflict much better prepared, despite their inferiority of numbers. The authorities completely lost control over the situation. For two days, there was utter chaos reining the city. The main battle took place in a huge empty area, which usually serves the scene for various parades and similar burlesques and which roughly divides the city on the Moroccan side and the Sahara side. It was like something from another era, like drawings of the battle between the Huns and the Goths or something. The end result: 43 dead, 160 missing, burning houses and cars, an unknown number of wounded. The exact number is practically impossible to determine. I am looking through some photos taken a day after February’s pogrom. One especially hits a nerve: a closed rank of a hundred Moroccan soldiers, dressed in a colorful pallet of uniforms, with rifles with bayonets and some kind of white clubs in their hands, with expressed question marks on their faces, galloping into the unknown. In front of them remnants of a destroyed car, a young man in a white jacket sprinting and a distorted face of a middle-aged man, reportedly a vegetable vendor. No one is paid and everytbody is more than afraid.

The journalists who were invited to report on the wonderful gift of the Moroccan king, the Dakhla festival, were immediately hermetically sealed in the Sahara Regency Hotel after the outbreak of the violence, which is actually right next to the scene of the battles. The next morning at eight, the entire reporting crew was drummed up into SUVs and taken to an idyllic beach far away from the city, where they could burry themselves in oysters, champagne, and cocaine, which was actually intended for by then departed VIP guests. The journalists could also enjoy unplugged concerts of Alpha Blondie and Johnny Clegg, musicians, who will lightheartedly sing about all the injustice in the world for a good fee. It has been more than two months since then. The military that peeked out on the third day of the civilian battles, is slowly skulking back to their barracks. The bread is still subsidized. The shifty bakers add sugar to it, to make it go down easier. There. Like the numerous French pensioners with their snow-white mobile refrigerators, cooly tanning their porous bones, we, mighty African adventurists, also feel safe here.

Clearly this will not last.