Unreasonable Behavior

by Don McCullin

  ‘There’s no way I can accept this,’ I said to Roger.

  ‘Will you do me a favour, and keep it,’ Roger hissed. ‘He will go mad if you try and give it back. It’s his way of trying to show us hospitality even while he’s telling us to shove off.’ So we flew out with our precious stones, and I later had mine made into a brooch for Christine.

  It wasn’t exactly a window-shopping sort of situation but I was entranced by the carpet souks near the British Embassy. There was obviously great depth to Iranian culture, though not much to its cuisine, which mainly consisted of boiled rice with a knuckle on top. It was incredible to me that a country which could come up with Persian carpets and turquoise domes should content itself with such lousy food.

  Roger and I travelled to many little villages and other towns like Tabrīz, where religious fundamentalists had burned down cinemas and banks, apparently as symbols of Western decadence. It was always tough going. The men seemed surly, and it was hard to know what to think of the women with so many of them shrouded in the chador.

  It was a relief for us to go up into the Kurdish Hills, where the landscape seems to have an almost biblical quality, and people were genuinely pleased to see us. I know that a lot of journalists fall in love with the Kurds, but there’s good reason for it. The men are always ready to smile and the women go in for gloriously cheerful colours, golds, reds and blues. I was fascinated by the way they lived on top of their houses as well as in them, though really it was a practical way of being ready for any dangerous approaches.

  My particular Kurdish friend was a young man of twenty-four who showed me round his village and told me of his nation’s history. Said to be descended from the Medes who were conquered by the Persians over 2,000 years ago, the Kurds preserve a distinct national identity. I asked my friend how he managed to acquire such good English in the mountains. He said it was the result of a brief descent to Hatfield College in England.

  A year later I went back to the Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini. Savak had been swept away along with the Shah, but the torture ethic survived under the mullahs. Public hangings also made a big comeback, and when the gallows broke there was usually a machine gun handy to finish the job. The United States, the Shah’s great ally, had become the house of Khomeini’s ‘Great Satan’.

  It was a pleasure to see Roger Cooper again, though he was now in constant demand. Tehrān was thronged with newsmen from all over the world, trying to figure out what the Iranian revolution was all about, and Roger seemed to be the only one who could actually read a Tehrān newspaper.

  Most journalists were concentrating their efforts on the American Embassy and the hostages story. President Carter had already made his big mistake, trying to free the Embassy staff with a military operation. There was a belligerent, gloating atmosphere in the capital. I did a couple of shifts facing the dragooned, drummed-up chorus outside the American Embassy denouncing anything and anybody from the West, including me. I was relieved when Roger managed to break loose from his commitments so that we could leave Tehrān.

  Iran is a country of many ethnic groups. Almost half the population is composed of minorities like the Kurds, the Turks, the Arabs and the Baluchis, and most of them live outside the capital. Our idea was to get to these minority peoples and see how the revolution was affecting them.

  We decided to take the train to Tabrīz, where there was a large disaffected Turkish community. Despite the mullahs’ prohibition on booze, Roger would not be parted from his home-made elderberry wine, and brought along a bottle with him. We both refreshed ourselves at the station before he plunged the bottle down to the bottom of his hessian shopping basket for maximum security.

  The train moved off. Not long into the journey we were visited by the ticket collector who was accompanied by a grim-looking, unshaven revolutionary guard. At that stage of the revolution the guards were more feared than the army or the police. They had powers to dispatch people after only the most tenuous legal proceedings. When the ticket collector departed, the revolutionary guard poked his head back in the door.

  ‘I smell alcohol on your breath,’ he said to Roger. ‘I would like a cup.’ He then left, saying he would return shortly.

  We had three tense minutes in which to decide whether this was a puritanical guard trying to get us to incriminate ourselves before hauling us off, or whether he was another secret sufferer from the dry revolution. I let Roger make the decision. He reckoned the guard probably needed a drink. When the guard returned and pulled down the blind I realised, with relief, that Roger was right.

  In Tabrīz the revolutionary guards were out in oppressive strength. I tried to photograph some local Turks being roughed up by the guards and immediately found myself rammed up against a wall. Again it was Roger who extricated us from a nasty situation, but it took a lot of talk to some pretty thuggish characters. I’m no expert on revolutionary theory but in revolutionary practice you always see very unpleasant people on the rise. When bad things have to be done they are usually better done by bad people. The demand for them in Iran and the Lebanon was plain to see.

  We got up to the Kurdish Hills again to find that revolutionary guards had rampaged there before us. The Kurds had fought them off but they had left many dead—among them my young friend from Hatfield College. He had been dragged out of his car and executed on the spot.

  On the way back to Tehrān I witnessed another kind of carnage. With flights disrupted, Roger and I took a taxi 400 miles along the country’s most famous road, once used by rally drivers going from Tehrān to Tabrīz, then through Afghanistan and into India. I was hoping to sleep but was kept wide awake by the spectacle of one appalling motor wreckage after another. Some were rusting and had obviously been there for years, perhaps to discourage reckless driving, though there was no sign of this happening. In any event, this seemed to be the area with the clearest continuity of policy from the tyranny of the Shah to that of Khomeini.

  One day Roger said he’d heard of something incredible happening just outside Tehrān on the edge of the mountains. According to his information there was a secret firing range out there specifically for churchmen. It was true.

  As we approached the range we were met by a mullah with a 9mm pistol where you would normally expect a prayer-book to be. Naturally it was the old story—no pictures. Then Roger really started to lay it on, telling the mullah how glorious the revolution was, how keen we were to further its aims. He cited my revolutionary credentials, and how I was ‘close to Arafat’. The mullah was still having none of it, but I could see that he was intrigued by the Arafat reference, probably because the Palestinians were identified as fellow revolutionaries.

  I drew Roger to one side to tell him that I just happened to have in my hotel room a copy of The Palestinians, the book I had done with Jonathan Dimbleby, and as a matter of policy I always carried my room keys around with me. Next minute we had the cab driver roaring back to Tehrān to get the book while Roger continued to work on the mullah. Two hours later we saw the dust of the cab charging back. Roger advised me on a suitable inscription—some perjury about wishing the revolution well and this group especially well. Roger handed the book over to the mullah, then turned to me and said, ‘You can do it. Take the photos.’

  Photographically it was amazing. Khomeini had spoken of a ‘twenty million person army’, which sounded ludicrous in a country of thirty-five million people, but now I saw how he could do it. There were mullahs everywhere lying down with splayed legs, trying to get their Kalashnikovs up straight. Some were having trouble with their skirts, and those who weren’t tended to have turban troubles while in the prone position. They were banging away, with every appearance of enjoyment, and a few were already quite good shots.

  There were squads of girls and young women too, many wearing the chador but some in informal gear, also learning to be marksmen. I noticed that the women tended to get a poorer choice of weapons. Some had G3 rifl
es which have a very nasty kick. Only the lucky ones had AK-47s. The general effect was of seeing a synod of Anglican bishops and several troops of Girl Guides getting down to some serious gunplay together.

  At that time, before the outbreak of the terrible war between Iraq and Iran, I was most struck by the elements of farce in the situation, though it did occur to me that a country which set out to militarise its clergy and its women, two of the greatest restraining influences against war in any society, could probably do a lot of harm.

  33. A SHORT WALK WITH THE MUJAHEDDIN

  By the spring of 1980 the Sunday Times was anxious to reclaim circulation lost during its closure, and spending money as never before. The lid on the foreign budget flew off. Everyone seemed to be on the road. I pursued my projects in Iran and the Lebanon, and also took a short walk in the Hindu Kush.

  The summer saw me in Sinbad the Sailor outfit, with a brand new pair of Doctor Martens boots, trekking beside Roger Cooper and some vicious-looking members of the mujaheddin up the Khyber Pass. Well, not directly up the Khyber, but close. We were entering Afghanistan illegally while the Russians were in occupation. Our forty mujaheddin, we had been told, were bent on giving the Red Army a bloody nose, and we had to blend in with them. We had been secretly vetted, turbaned and supplied with very wide, very baggy trousers. After travelling to Peshawar, where we collected food, we were to join a band of guerrillas who were heading north into the mountains.

  We stood on a parched area of hillside with two large and heavy sugar sacks containing our supplies—predominantly pilchards. All we had been able to buy on the North-West Frontier were tins, which the mujaheddin escort would have preferred us not to bring, but I had learned my lesson about going on long marches without sustenance. Besides, guerrillas in mountain country usually have mules to carry such things.

  When our hosts arrived, bristling with arms and moustaches, they brought no mules and immediately set off in an upward direction into trackless country, leaving Roger and me standing with the sacks. When Roger translated from the Farsi the news that they didn’t want to carry the sacks, I complained that I couldn’t carry the cameras and the pilchards for a hundred miles over the Hindu Kush. Two aggrieved Pathans were then deputed to heave up these daunting mountains of food.

  Before long we stopped for target practice. A small hand mirror was produced and placed a hundred yards away for the guerrillas to fire at with their AK-47s. Nine out of ten of them missed by a wide margin. It was going to be quite a show, I thought, when they engaged the Russians. Roger and I felt it prudent to decline their invitation to have a go.

  Don and tribesmen, Afghanistan, 1982

  For four days we kept up the hard walking through immensely rugged terrain, along crystal streams packed, I noted wistfully, with darting trout. We stopped at mud-walled villages and slept in Afghan fortified houses, eating with our hands from the communal pot. I was dubious about this, but it was obligatory for the sake of good relations.

  It was for the sake of relations as well as my fastidiousness that eventually I broke into the sardines. That was when I discovered why the streams were still well populated with trout. The Afghans don’t like fish.

  We made more of a hit with Roger’s field glasses. They passed from hand to hand, and that was the last we saw of them. The one boy in the band was blamed for their disappearance, though he was clearly not responsible. Other journalists told us later that this was par for the course. Indeed we may have got off lightly. Making people carry heavy sacks was reason enough to bump off a Westerner or two on the North-West Frontier.

  Two Russian MiGs came rushing through our high valley and we were forced to take cover under mulberry trees. I knew now that we were close to a Russian outpost, our presumed objective, and I made efforts to pin down our commander on when we would be arriving at the front. Always his reply was, ‘Soon. Very soon.’

  The MiGs came over again, and once more I pressed the commander. This time he surprised me. ‘Three o’clock. We move at three o’clock.’

  With a few spare hours in which to prepare ourselves, Roger and I went to bathe in one of the crystal streams. Be clean, I thought, if you’re going to the front, in case you have to meet your Maker. I lay back luxuriously in the clear water, then leapt out swiftly. I was covered in leeches. We got them off and returned to find the mujaheddin snoring in a cave. I said to Roger, ‘I don’t believe this lot intend going anywhere near the front.’ Roger tried out his Farsi again, and so it proved.

  ‘We are not taking you to the front in case it brings the Russian air power down on us.’

  Instead they took us to an old Russian helicopter that had been shot down long ago and looked remarkably like one that had appeared in every TV news report I had seen. They posed on it for the camera in a practised sort of way before Roger announced that they were taking us next to see a newly captured gun which they planned to turn on the fort. It turned out to be a Russian howitzer with flat tyres. There was no way it could be moved, and no way either that the Afghans were ever going to become close-combat fighters. The terrain has never made it necessary. They are nevertheless very effective at long range, as the Russians found to their cost. You can starve people by surrounding their positions, even cut off whole areas. Because of the frequent ambushes, no one could get to them. You can achieve a total amputation, but it is a long and slow business that doesn’t lend itself to the camera.

  For the whole eight years of the Afghan war no journalists who went in ever came out again with any credibility. They all got the same old run-around, the same Russian helicopter shot. So after seventy miles of hard hill-walking I was feeling pretty fed up and said to Roger, ‘We’ve done all this sweating for nothing. I won’t walk another mile with these people.’

  We started back in the care—if you can call it that—of two unfriendly brigands from the guerrilla gang. So protective were they of their charges that after prayers one day they left their rifles behind. ‘Oh dear,’ one of them gestured, hitting the side of his head comically, as if to jog his memory before going back for them.

  Roger became highly suspicious of their conduct. ‘You know the old Afghan tradition,’ he said. ‘If they want to bump you off, which they often do just to be rid of you, they wait until you’re asleep and then drop a great rock on your head.’

  ‘In that case,’ I suggested, ‘you sleep while I watch. Then you can do the same for me.’

  We slept at night in caravanserais when we could find them, so as to be with groups of people. In the morning our guards said their prayers and then we would be off. One day, as we were climbing a steep escarpment, the MiGs came sweeping in again. They bombed the caravanserais below and we heard frightened whinnying as half the camels ran away.

  Further on, I washed my feet in a stream in what appeared to be an abandoned village. I had an enormous blister and my boots were filled with blood. An old man appeared with a filthy bandage on his finger, the top of which had been chopped off. While I was treating it with antiseptic, two surly Afghans with rifles came up. A shouting match ensued. They thought we were Russian spies, and the old man, deeply insulted at the slur on his new friend, went for them with a knife.

  I launched myself after him like a rugby forward, and just held on to his wavering old hand as it brandished the knife. I brought him away with my arm around his shoulder until we reached the outskirts of the village, where we shook hands and said goodbye. In all this our two protectors were nowhere to be seen.

  That night we kept guard in turn in the open, scanning the astronomical positions of the great galaxy of stars.

  Fifteen miles from the Pakistan border, Roger started to look very strange. He was forty-eight years old and the strain was beginning to tell. He had a hiatus hernia and was building up a fever. Somehow he staggered through on aspirin and at the border fell into the nearest transport, which happened to be a pick-up truck full of refugees. Physical tiredn
ess swept over us like a tidal wave, but there was still the Pakistani post to pass. We were entering illegally of course, just as we had left illegally. Black with the sun, with light Caucasian eyes, we were dead-ringers for Russian spies for those with suspicious minds.

  As I lay drowsing at the border post I felt a digging in my back. ‘Come down, mister, come down.’ Roger, on his last legs, collapsed into manic laughter. Two English Sinbads climbing down from a Japanese truck. Two escapees from Sadler’s Wells and Gilbert and Sullivan were being taken under armed guard to a police station in Peshawar. I wondered if illegal entry came under the Islamic laws on flogging.

  After much explaining we ended up before the turbaned District Commissioner at a very grand residence. ‘Well, gentlemen, I suppose you’d like a cup of tea,’ he said. I felt we were all right as we sat there on the lawn in our filthy garb, gazing into the fading sun. I knew when I saw the arrival of the cucumber sandwiches.

  Afghanistan was a lesson to me. I had always thought that shared hardship brought you closer to people. The Afghans were a special case. I approved of their aims, but despite sharing a hard time there was no way I could feel affection for them.

  I am not so sure about Roger. I saw him in London a few months later, after he’d created quite a stir coming through Heathrow in full Afghan rig. I brooded on about the wretchedness of our adventure with the mujaheddin, but he said it hadn’t been so bad. While convalescing from his fever, he told me, he had learned Arabic.