http://www.iht.com/articles/116599.htmlIn the late 1970's, Osama bin Laden went to visit his brother Yeslam, who lived in the sprawling family settlement near Jidda. Answering the doorbell, Carmen Binladin, Yeslam's Swiss-born wife, stood face to face with her brother-in-law and invited him in.
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But Osama bin Laden froze, grumbled something in Arabic, and turned his head away. "I was unveiled and he couldn't bear looking at my naked face," recalled Carmen, who is back in Switzerland and involved in a tortuous divorce battle with her Saudi husband, who also lives in Geneva. "My brother-in-law never deigned to speak a word with me," she added.
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In a revealing biography, "Inside the Opaque Kingdom," Carmen Binladin chronicles her nine years of married life in a puritanical, male-dominated community, "where women are no more than house pets."
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The book is a diary-style account of her struggle to cope with rules and strictures as suffocating as the desert climate. The English edition will be published by the end of the year by Virago in London.
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The couple has three daughters but no son, much to her husband's disappointment. Binladin, who says that was not an issue in the divorce, returned to Geneva in 1987 "because I could no longer take it and I didn't want my children to grow up in a prison." The couple has been separated for more than 10 years, and the divorce battle is dragging on, for reasons she will not discuss. An elegant woman in her late 40's, she says she wrote the book as a "document for my three beloved daughters, not for my own notoriety or glory. After all, they have to live with that name, and after 9/11 that has been sheer hell."
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In 1973 Carmen Dufour, daughter of a prosperous Swiss businessman and a patrician Iranian mother, met 23-year-old Yeslam Binladin in Geneva, a summer retreat for Saudis fleeing the searing heat of their desert kingdom.
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"Yeslam was courteous, handsome and intelligent, and I was adventurous and impulsive," Carmen said in an interview at a Geneva lakeside hotel.
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A romance blossomed between the green-eyed brunette and the westernized Saudi, who had a predilection for Schubert symphonies and fast sport cars. In December both enrolled at the University of Southern California, where Carmen took up English and Yeslam business administration.
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The attentive Saudi plied his Swiss girlfriend with gifts and trips to Las Vegas in his airplane. One year after meeting, the couple decided to marry.
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Yeslam's father, Sheik Muhammad, the legendary patriarch who spawned the prolific Bin Laden clan and forged its complex links with the royal family, had 22 wives, which explained Yeslam's 25 brothers and 29 sisters. In Saudi Arabia the notion of half-brother or half-sister does not exist.
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Yeslam's insistence on a traditional marriage in Saudi Arabia beckoned like an adventurous challenge at a time when the Bin Laden name had not yet acquired its toxic connotation with terrorism.
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In August 1974 the pair flew to Jidda. Misgivings gripped the young Swiss woman even before the plane landed in what she describes as "that brown, treeless, inhospitable land, where veiled women look like black triangles." She had brought her own Swiss-tailored abaya, a long, loose-fitting overgarment, but was told she had to put it on before disembarking. The wedding was an elaborate Islamic ritual with strict separation of men and women, loud Arab music and endless rounds of sweetened tea.
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"It gave me a queasy feeling, but Yeslam showed understanding and assured me everything would be all right," Binladin recalled without bitterness. After the wedding the pair returned to California, but the oil shock was bolstering business for the Bin Laden family consortium, and Yeslam wanted to be part of it. So in 1976 they settled in Jidda. When Carmen entered her husband's modest, three-bedroom house in the "Bin Laden village," she recoiled.
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"The whole place was green, with green walls, green carpets and so many chandeliers it resembled a lamp store," she said. "Fortunately, Yeslam allowed me to redecorate the interior." Although Carmen Binladin had married into Saudi Arabia's richest and most powerful clan, she decided to retain her Swiss citizenship, "a decision I'm eternally grateful for."
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As a Bin Laden wife, she could not even cross the street unveiled or walk in her garden. Once, when she wanted to buy swimwear, a male servant went out and returned with two suitcases full of bathing suits. She made her selection and the rest returned.
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While her husband was out working, Binladin was confined to the house, caring for her baby daughter Wafah and "suffering the company of women who never read a book and only talked about their relatives and the Koran."
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For relief, there were visits to her countless new relatives. That is when she first saw Osama Bin Laden. "He was slight of built but tall, with a stern, commanding presence," she recalled. "All the Bin Ladens are Wahhabite Muslims, but Osama's fierce, forbidding piety intimidated even his more religious relatives. In that clan my brother-in-law was a revered personality."
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Osama bin Laden, by then in his late 20's, was married to his mother's Syrian niece. "Osama had been a diligent student at Jidda's King Abdulaziz University," Carmen Binladin said, "and Yeslam said he didn't believe the gossip about Osama's wild days in Beirut."
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Long before Osama's Al Qaeda notoriety, the family zealot had became a national hero while fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. "He was a personal protégé of King Fahd," Carmen affirmed. "When the first Gulf war broke out in 1991, Osama wanted to send his warriors to fight Saddam Hussein. But Fahd declined the offer."
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Carmen hoped Saudi Arabia would become a more livable place after the oil boom, perhaps something like Iran, where she had often visited her grandmother. Within a few years the petrodollar avalanche transformed dusty Jidda into a modern town. "But the mentality didn't change and it never will," Carmen said. "The innate aversion toward the infidel is constantly fanned in mosques and schools. And a woman in Saudi Arabia remains a voiceless, faceless object. I felt like a goldfish in a bowl, gasping for air."
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In Geneva, where he runs his own private bank, Yeslam has publicly denounced his notorious half-brother and the Sept. 11 attacks.
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Has Osama, stripped of his Saudi nationality, really become the outcast of the nation and his family? Don't believe it, Carmen said. "The clan ties are sacred," she said. "The financial conduits remain opaque. Westerners just don't understand the culture. A Bin Laden will never turn his back on a brother."
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In her book she refers to an old Saudi maxim: "Me and my brother against my cousin, but me and my cousin against the stranger." International Herald Tribune Osama's Swiss sister-in-law
GENEVA In the late 1970's, Osama bin Laden went to visit his brother Yeslam, who lived in the sprawling family settlement near Jidda. Answering the doorbell, Carmen Binladin, Yeslam's Swiss-born wife, stood face to face with her brother-in-law and invited him in.
.
But Osama bin Laden froze, grumbled something in Arabic, and turned his head away. "I was unveiled and he couldn't bear looking at my naked face," recalled Carmen, who is back in Switzerland and involved in a tortuous divorce battle with her Saudi husband, who also lives in Geneva. "My brother-in-law never deigned to speak a word with me," she added.
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In a revealing biography, "Inside the Opaque Kingdom," Carmen Binladin chronicles her nine years of married life in a puritanical, male-dominated community, "where women are no more than house pets."
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