After an American missionary abducted in Niamey was freed, diplomats and mission boards have rolled out a Trans-Saharan Residency Framework that treats kidnapping as an unscheduled secondment. Nine months is now a semester, complete with dietary forms, exit interviews and a travelling cake. The man goes home; the process, as ever, stays on tour.
The American missionary abducted in Niamey last October has been released after nine months, his organisation says, in good health and in the care of United States officials, with a family reunion promised in the usual hushed tense. The crime, such as it was, has already been absorbed into the machinery. What remains is paperwork, a press backdrop, and the faintly festive air of people who have found a process for a tragedy.
Within hours of the announcement from SIM International, a coalition of foreign ministries, mission boards and the sort of think tank that keeps a bowl of mints next to a map of the Sahel unveiled the Trans-Saharan Residency Framework. Under the framework, the kidnapping of aid workers is to be treated not as a failure of security but as an unscheduled secondment. Nine months has been adopted, with the solemnity normally reserved for interest-rate decisions, as the standard semester.
“We have taken a messy, frightening, entirely preventable episode and given it a cover sheet,” said Dame Felicity Harridan, the newly visible Under-Secretary for Prolonged Inconvenience, standing before a thicket of flags that had been arranged by someone who still believed in flags. “The family gets their relative. The ministries get a workflow. Everyone goes home with a lesson-learned annex. It is, I think, what we in the trade call closure.”
The family gets their relative. The ministries get a workflow. Everyone goes home with a lesson-learned annex.
The framework, circulated on thick cream paper that will outlast several governments, sets out a menu of courtesies that would be touching if they were not being offered to people who have been locked in rooms. Sending organisations are invited to file a dietary-preference form within seventy-two hours of an abduction. Captors, or “host institutions” in the new argot, are encouraged to provide a mid-term evaluation. The released party is to sit an exit interview, not about fear or theology or the precise location of the hut, but about whether the unscheduled residency met its learning outcomes.
A leaving card, and other consolations
Pastor Marjorie Fleece, director of field placements at the Alliance of Sending Boards, a body that exists chiefly to turn vocation into a rota, described the nine-month span as “pedagogically tidy.” She did not smile when she said it. She had the look of a woman who has explained hardship to a donor breakfast and still has the croissant flakes on her lapel.
“Our people go out with a calling and a duffel,” she said. “What they have lacked, until now, is a feedback loop. The Framework supplies one. There is even provision for a cake. Nothing ostentatious. Something that travels.”
None of this, it should be said, alters the reported facts of the case. An American missionary was taken in the capital of Niger by assailants who have not been usefully identified in public. He has been returned. He is said to be well. The rest is the international system doing what it does when it cannot prevent a thing and will not admit it: it catalogues the thing, gives it a logo, and schedules the sequel.
Ambassador Horst Winkelmann, the European Union’s Special Envoy for Recurring Episodes, told a briefing that the Framework would “reduce the improvisational quality of these affairs.” He meant this as praise. One gathered that the objection to the last decade of Sahel abductions was not the abductions but their failure to keep minutes.
“We are not so naive as to imagine that armed men will fill in a questionnaire,” Winkelmann said, in the tone of a man who is precisely that naive and has a driver waiting. “We are merely offering them a corridor in which to become boring. Boredom is the unsung instrument of statecraft.”
The disappointing sequel
It is all terribly familiar. The region has been a stage set for this production so often that the extras no longer need directing. A capital is declared relatively safe until it is not. A compound is described as well-protected until it is entered. A statement is issued about unknown assailants, then about good health, then about the care of officials, then about the long work that remains. The long work that remains is always the same work. It involves a lectern.
Colonel (retired) Peter Gristle, now a consultant at the Institute for Recurring Calamities, which occupies two floors above a sandwich shop and publishes papers with titles like “Uncertainty as a Service,” welcomed the Framework as “the first honest admission that we have been running a timeshare.” He produced a slide. There is always a slide.
“You will notice the cadence,” Gristle said, tapping a timeline that could have been photocopied from any year since the French first discovered they were not, after all, indispensable. “Abduction. Silence. Rumour. A proof of life that is treated as a press exclusive. Negotiations that dare not speak their name. Release. Cake. Review. Repeat. We have simply decided to print the itinerary in advance. It saves on toner.”
Asked whether the missionary himself had been consulted about his new status as a founding case study, Dame Harridan looked briefly human and then recovered. “He is with his people,” she said. “We would not dream of bothering him with the architecture. The architecture is for us. It always was.”
Niamey’s own protocol office, which has had rather more practice at receiving other people’s emergencies than it ever requested, issued a two-line note welcoming the man’s freedom and declining, with exquisite courtesy, to comment on cakes. A clerk who asked not to be named said the city had hosted quite enough frameworks for one climate and would prefer, if it was all the same, fewer residents of the involuntary sort.
The mission boards, for their part, have already begun amending the brochures. “Unscheduled residency” photographs rather well. It suggests grit without requiring the donor to picture a locked door. Several agencies are said to be preparing a module on structured uncertainty, to be delivered, inevitably, in a conference hotel with a carpet that has seen things.
One is reminded, inevitably, of every hotel ballroom in which a ceasefire has been announced before the ink, or indeed the shooting, had quite dried. The sequel has the same plot, a slightly better buffet, and a cast that has learned its marks. The missionary goes home. The flags are folded. The Framework is filed. Somewhere offstage, the next semester is already being arranged, and nobody will be so tactless as to call it what it is until the leaving card has been signed.
