Burridge Unbound Read Online Free PDF Page A

testify again. And what she says next freezes my blood.
    “There was one other thing. I think you should just go to bed, but I know you won’t, so I’ll tell you. Minitzh was assassinated last night. The whole of Santa Irene has been turned upside down. The phone’s been ringing off the hook for you. I finally just turned it off. Bill?”
    Breathe and breathe and breathe. Sometimes it’s all you can do.

3
    A reporter from the BBC calls, asking for a reaction. I tell him I’m like everybody else, stunned. CNN broadcasts a five-minute segment of amateur video of riots in the capital: blurry colour shots of a crowd overturning a bus and then setting it ablaze, of distant troops in ragged green firing at unknown targets, of a dog writhing and yelping in a muddy backstreet. That’s it – on to Yeltsin overturning his cabinet and Angola sending soldiers into the Congo. The South Asia desk at Foreign Affairs doesn’t know what’s happening – who murdered Minitzh, what the army is doing, whether the Kartouf is behind it or how they’re reacting, who will take over. The mission in Santa Irene was closed two years ago after they got me home safely.
    Another reporter calls from CBC Radio. “Mr. Burridge, how do you feel when you hear that the country where you suffered so much is now in the throes of such confusion?”
    “I’m concerned for people, obviously,” I say.
    “Do you fear that the rebel Kartouf, the group that kidnapped and tortured you, could now be on the verge of taking power in Santa Irene?”
    “It’s unlikely, I think, that the Kartouf would be in a position to take power. They really are a raggedy force. Their support is in the villages, which have been decimated. In the capital there’s no love for the Kartouf, and the military is the real power. There could well be a struggle going on now within the army and some new strongman will emerge. We’ll have to see.”
    “Reports are reaching us today from AP and other sources that the ‘strongman’ could actually be a woman, Suli Nylioko. What can you tell us about her?”
    The question takes me by surprise, and my pause turns into a ponderous radio silence.
    “Mr. Burridge?”
    “Suli Nylioko,” I say, “is the widow of the former leader of the Democratic Coalition, which was banned in the early 1980s. Her husband, Jono, was shot at the airport after being given a promise of safe passage from General Minitzh. Suli and her children were allowed to leave. The family was very wealthy, although I don’t know how much money they were able to take out of the country. She studied at Oxford for a time. I had no idea she was back in the country.”
    “So she is like an Aung San Suu Kyi?” the interviewer asks.
    “Or a Corazon Aquino,” I say. “Or perhaps a Benazir Bhutto or Winnie Mandela.”
    “That’s quite a range of possibilities.”
    “We’ll have to see,” I say.
    There are more questions to which I give careful, not very informed answers. The urgency of it is somehow satisfying, though; it takes me away from thrashing about in my own personal swamp. Then just as I have this thought she asks the inevitable.
    “Since returning from your captivity two years ago, Mr. Burridge, you’ve managed to build a human-rights organizationthat has won a strong international reputation. You’ve won the Olof Palme Award and the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, among others. But in your book you indicate what a tremendous personal price you’ve paid. How are you faring these days? Have the ghosts of your ordeal been put to rest, or does the new uncertainty in Santa Irene bring them back to life?”
    My sigh at the question is audible, I’m sure, across thousands of kilometres. Another ponderous radio silence.
    “I’m sorry, Mr. Burridge, if that’s too personal a question. You don’t have to–”
    I try not to sound too impatient. “What I tend to say is this: On a good day, I work too hard to think about it. On a bad day, I haven’t