by Anne Summers
Yet, less than a year later, Max Walsh had sent me off again, this time to Pakistan. This assignment was also tied to a Prime Ministerial CHOGM trip. Fraser was travelling to New Delhi for a CHOGM regional meeting, and Max had suggested I peel off at the end and try to interview President Zia ul–Haq, the general who had seized power two years earlier, deposing Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was later executed. Before I left Canberra, I had made a formal request through the Pakistani High Commission and once in New Delhi, while the rest of the press party took the day off to visit the Taj Mahal, I found myself being shunted between bureaucrats in the soulless offices of the Pakistani Embassy, trying to firm up the interview. Go to Islamabad and wait, I was advised, and that was how I came to be in Lahore, on my way to Islamabad, and discovering how very different Pakistan was from the laidback countries of most of southern Africa.
I discovered in less than an hour the truth of the saying of the time, that in Pakistan there are three sexes: men, women and Western women. I was trying to get my bearings in an overcrowded Lahore airport, picking my way through bunches of people who clung together in seeming trepidation, anxious perhaps about the looming adventure of flight. The next day, 11 September, was a major public holiday: 48 years since the death of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and millions were on the move, visiting their families. It was almost impossible to move in the airport. I found myself trying to edge around a bunch of women who were squatting on the cold floor, in a circle around their bundles of belongings. They were tiny, these women, almost miniature people, the smallest adult human beings I had ever seen, clad in light-coloured robes. It was a chaotic and contradictory scene: women covered and not moving, animals squawking, a sense of nothing happening, yet the only reason to be there was to travel. It felt more like a bus stop than that most modern of places: an airport. Were these women nuns? Or an example of the creeping Islamisation being instigated by President ul-Huq? Women were being, for now, merely encouraged to cover up. Wear the chador, at least. Compulsion would replace encouragement before long. Or maybe these women were just in traditional tribal garb? No one seemed to take any notice of me, despite my height, my informal clothes, and the fact that I was female, with unruly uncovered hair. At Lahore airport and, later, in Islamabad and travelling to the border, I was able to get at least a superficial glimpse of the craziness and the paradox that was Pakistan in 1980: the ultra-modern and the medieval in lockstep. Or in contest?
The line was very long and moved slowly. When I eventually made it to the front, the young man at the information counter beamed, as if it were the happiest moment in his life to have before him a scruffy and travel-worn woman whose jeans and checked cotton shirt, purchased in a bazaar in New Delhi a few days earlier, clearly branded her as epitomising Western decadence. I asked for directions. I was in transit to Islamabad. His instructions, delivered in highly excitable English, were difficult to understand. The man noticed my hesitation.
‘Let me show you,’ he said as, abandoning a lengthening line of travellers needing help, he leapt over the counter, grabbed my hand and started pulling me towards the door. As soon as we were outside, in a chaotic and noisy space where decrepit vehicles played dodgem cars, the man’s warmly ingratiating manner changed: ‘There is a hotel we can go to,’ he said, waving his arm towards some buildings on the perimeter of the car park. He was not coercive, rather his dark eyes looked pleadingly at me as if to say, I know all you Western women are whores so why not with me? ‘No!’ I said firmly as I disentangled my arm and marched back into the terminal, from where, it turned out, my next flight would soon be leaving.
It did not occur to me to be nervous, let alone frightened, during my week in Pakistan. I took risks that today would be inconceivable. The political, and religious landscape of Pakistan is vastly different post 9/11; post the assassination of several of its Prime Ministers; post the movement of the Taliban into sections of the country; post the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden who, it turned out, had been hiding out in Pakistan for some years. Today, Westerners cannot move freely, and even within protected compounds are at risk from suicide bombers. Journalists face particular perils such as befell Daniel Pearl from the Wall Street Journal, who was kidnapped and executed in 2002. But in 1980 it was not yet dangerous for a Westerner, even a Western woman, to travel alone to places that today are more-or-less no-go areas. Or, maybe, I was just lucky.
I checked into the Holiday Inn Islamabad and began immediately to organise my work. I would meet with the Foreign Affairs Minister, with whom I had an introduction, as well as making contact with local journalists and foreign diplomats. I also hoped to travel to the Afghan border, of course, through the famous Khyber Pass, but my most pressing task—the reason I had come to Pakistan—was to keep pushing for the interview with the President. I went to the hotel coffee shop for some lunch. I was fascinated to see, for the first time, a number of Arab men in thobes and headdresses. I fell into conversation with one of them. Sheik A was a diplomat, he told me, from one of the Gulf States. He invited me to have dinner with him the following night. Later that afternoon I wandered down to the bar where correspondents from various Western newspapers were hanging out. They were friendly enough, if perhaps a little patronising to someone who was new to the scene and who clearly knew nothing. There was talk of how the Russian occupation of Afghanistan was going; it had been nine months since the invasion and refugees were starting to come across into Pakistan. ‘It would be interesting to talk to them,’ I ventured. ‘No way,’ was the consensus from the blokes at the bar. ‘You can’t get to the border.’
The next morning, the day of the big holiday, everything was closed but I asked the hotel about hiring a local driver. They soon found me M., a young man who seemed affable and who agreed to drive me for the rest of my stay. I said I wanted to go to Peshawar. ‘No problem,’ he said. We agreed to go Sunday. On our way, my driver took me to Murree, a summer resort in the hills outside Rawalpindi, the old city that lies adjacent to Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad, and one of the most beautiful places on earth. He introduced me to his family, which I took as meaning he wanted me to know that I could trust him not to behave the way the guy at the airline counter in Lahore had. I was relieved. I was going to be spending a lot of time with M., and in some very remote and potentially dangerous places.
The drive to the outpost of Peshawar, the last town before the Afghan border, took a couple of hours. We stopped so I could see the Old Town. I walked through a bazaar, conspicuous not only as a Western woman wearing just jeans and a cotton shirt, but as the only woman around. I did not feel any hostility towards me. Bemusement perhaps. In the stalls along the dusty streets, ancient vendors presided over baskets piled high with spices and other substances.
‘You want heroin?’ a bright-eyed boy called out to me. ‘You come with me?’
‘No thanks.’
Was that really hashish? I wondered, peering more closely at one of the piled-up baskets in front of an old man.
‘Madam, like?’ he asked, apparently seeing no difference between the drug, the quantities of which would make several of my friends back in Australia gasp in wonder, and the baskets of turmeric, cumin and other spices he had on offer. No, Madam would not like. She might be foolhardy, travelling by herself to what was fast becoming a war zone, but she was not insane. She was not going to even think about what could happen if she was discovered carrying the tiniest quantity of this drug as she made her way home through Bangkok and Singapore.
I had been given permission to visit the Afghan refugee camps at Jamrud and Aza Khel, outside Peshawar. In these tent cities, people surrounded me, begging for help. ‘Tell your government,’ they said, eyes fixed on mine, testing my sincerity, ‘tell your government we need Kalashnikov.’ ‘I can write about your situation,’ was the best I could offer. And indeed as soon as I was back in Islamabad I went to see the people at UNHCR, to get more material for an article about the displacement of tr
ibal people by the Russians, but I knew that no one back in Canberra was going to care about these people.
We then headed for the border. The road was narrow as it wound tightly around the large mountain range that divides Pakistan from Afghanistan. The landscape was dusty, brown, inhospitable-seeming, with low-slung mountains in the distance giving the terrain its only relief. I saw tank traps, formations of rock blocks, similar to today’s ubiquitous bollards outside public buildings, and left by the British after World War II. The Khyber Pass, the only way from Europe to Asia though the mountains to Pakistan and, beyond there, the riches of India, is not known as the ‘gateway of conquerors’ for nothing. The road was isolated, unpatrolled and, I had been warned, the domain of various gangs, some of whom might demand money. I hoped that was all they would want. At Landi Kotal, a town midway to the border, we saw a sign: ‘Visitors are requested not to stop or sleep at remote or lonely places. They must try to reach Peshawar before nightfall.’ We were stopped once by some kind of militia who searched the car. They were convinced that the only Westerners who travelled in these parts were drug-smugglers. Another three or four times groups of men, brandishing rifles, demanded money. Each time I handed over the amount advised by M., huge wads of local currency that amounted to just a few Australian dollars. One group, obviously officials, at Jamrud Fort, even gave me the bottom copy of an in-triplicate receipt. There was no paper acknowledgement for the other ‘taxes’ that I had handed over, although I kept track of the amounts so I could claim them on my expenses. There were men in the Canberra Press Gallery who boasted of claiming for brothels on their expenses, so I didn’t see why I could not make a legitimate claim for baksheesh.
After being stopped the first few times at no cost except a few dollars, I relaxed enough to start to worry about what for me was the most terrifying part of the trip: the traffic. The road was mostly narrow, with sharp hairpin bends, and as we crawled higher and higher in our tiny car, I steeled myself at each bend for the gaudily decorated and overcrowded bus that would invariably come hurtling towards us. There was scarcely room to pass, especially at speed. Each time we survived what I thought was an inevitable head-on collision, I breathed heavily with relief. M. was highly amused by my fear. ‘Allah will look after us,’ he reassured me cheerily, though I noticed that he, too, closed his eyes as the buses sped towards us. Fortunately Allah did ensure our safe passage and we made it to the Afghan border. I stood beside the sign that noted Kabul was 225 kilometres away, and looked down on the road between the two countries. The border functioned as a duty-free port and it was quite astonishing to watch the steady procession of men and black burkha-clad women, looking like mobile tents, trudging eastwards, their backs burdened by contraband. They were carrying stoves, refrigerators, car-parts, rugs, furniture, huge cartons containing cigarettes. There were also cases of what looked like Coca-Cola—from Russian-held Afghanistan! It was said that you could buy anything at that border, and that if you wanted something that was not on offer, you’d be told to come back the next day and it would be waiting for you. Watching the human carriers (I saw very few vehicles) walk from Afghanistan with their multifarious goods, I could believe it. I settled for some cigarettes and a bottle of Coke. None of these were intended for consumption, and I was quite annoyed a few months later when a friend who was staying with me in Canberra told me she’d drunk the Coke.
‘I’ll replace it, of course,’ she said.
‘That will not be easy,’ I told her.
Back in Islamabad, I breasted the bar at the Holiday Inn and, trying to maintain my sangfroid, mentioned in passing that I’d just returned from the border.
The other journos looked at me sceptically.
‘No way you could have got there,’ one of them said disbelievingly. ‘The road’s closed.’
I continued to press my case for an interview with the President. Be patient, I was told. He will see you. I had been waiting four days now and I was not encouraged. I kept busy, gathering information and perspectives. Whatever the outcome with the President, I would be writing something about my visit to Pakistan. I called on the Thai Embassy and the Japanese, saw the US Political Counsellor and met with local journalists. I was asked to do an interview with a local newspaper, The Muslim, about the position of women in Australia. Later, I was surprised to see myself described in the article as ‘the young blonde Australian journalist Anne Summers of Woman’s Day and the first woman Bureau Chief of the Australian Financial Review’—I would have put it the other way round, my weekly column for a women’s magazine being an add-on to my main job of writing about politics. I was even more surprised to see myself quoted as saying, ‘If young smart, brilliant girls begin wearing this garment which has a flare of its own, it will gradually become more popular.’ I most assuredly had not endorsed ‘this garment’, the chador, the local version of headscarf, which the Zia ul-Haq government was trying to compel women to wear. The Australian High Commission thought this misquoting of me was hilarious: ‘Never knew you were so Islamic,’ commented the person who had sent me the article.
The President’s people said I might have a better chance of seeing him if I went to Karachi. While I was there I would try to meet the Bhutto women, the widow of the late President, killed by the current President, and his daughter, Benazir. They were apparently under some kind of house arrest. I sent out some feelers. I also heard from the Thai Embassy that I should make contact with their people in Karachi. It was my last night in Islamabad and I was finally going to have the several-times deferred dinner with Sheik A. When I arrived in the hotel lobby I did not, at first, recognise him. Gone were the beguiling robes; in front of me was a man wearing what could only be described as a John Travolta suit: it was clinging, it had flared trousers and it was baby blue. Serves you right Summers, I said to myself as I followed him across the marble floors of the Holiday Inn, you were objectifying him; you don’t like it when it’s done to you.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked, trying to rescue the evening.
‘To a friend’s place,’ he said. ‘You will see.’
As we climbed into his chauffeur-driven embassy vehicle, I noticed that a group of men who had been lingering near us in the foyer had followed us out, and were clambering into other vehicles that formed themselves into a convoy behind ours. We headed out of town, and as the houses grew fewer I began to feel apprehensive.
‘Whose place are we going to?’
‘We are nearly there.’
And indeed we were. The cars pulled up outside a nice-looking low-slung desert house, with vines and flowering creepers, and we all piled out. There must have been ten men, most of them wearing robes. And me. Oh shit, I thought to myself, and not a soul in the world knows I am here.
We sat down to dinner. I was placed at the head of the long table. Our host, who was an ambassador from, I think, Tunisia, sat at the other end. We were served on plates of solid gold. My recall of the evening is incomplete. We may have been served by a woman, I am not sure, but I do remember this: these men could not have been nicer, more considerate or more anxious to make me feel welcome and safe. We must have talked politics. However strange it must have seemed to all of us that I was there, and however impossible such a gathering would have been in this country anywhere outside an embassy residence (as I learned this house was), on this occasion being a Western woman was a plus. It was yet another instance of the privileged access journalists have to people, to places and to experiences that lie outside the ambit of their usual lives. As conduits to the wide world of our audiences, we are often used and manipulated and misled for craven motives, but we also get to see and do extraordinary and amazing things and meet the world’s best (as well as its worst) people. It is a trade that allows seamless access and interchange and where work relations often gravitate into friendships and more.
While I was having no luck getting to meet with President Zia, I did have my interview with the Aga Shahi, the Minister for Foreign Affairs. His sist
er lived in Canberra and had kindly arranged this for me. When I arrived at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs it was raining heavily, and as I made my way to the entrance I lost my balance on the slippery terrazzo and fell flat on my face. Worse, I was unable to stop slithering along the wet surface. Very undignified, I thought, trying to scramble to my feet. It was then that I noticed the group of men squatting on the verandah outside the main entrance. They watched me, impassively. By the time I had managed to stand up, I was soaked through. I sent a grim smile in the direction of the men. No response. Inside, the Foreign Minister’s aide looked surprised when I asked for a towel.
Minister Shahi was a courtly, dignified man whose eyes made no comment on my bedraggled state. I began to ask him questions, but it soon became clear that he had an agenda of his own. He started telling me about a four-country peace initiative that was to be launched in a week’s time. I felt the rising excitement that always accompanied getting a leak, the knowledge that I was going to be able to scoop my colleagues. In this case, those bastards back at the bar of the Holiday Inn.