Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  In Bam, after spending the first few nights in a tent village and sharing a toilet block with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, we risked staying in a hotel on the fringes of the quake zone that had such wide cracks in the walls that you could almost peer into the next room. In southern India, we started off at a decent-enough hotel about a mile inland, and by the end of the week we were actually running it. Fearful of another tsunami, the manager simply did a runner, leaving Vivek, our producer, in temporary charge. Not only did he organise the kitchen and housekeeping staff but he also started taking bookings from the other foreign journalists arriving in town. For an impromptu party on New Year’s Eve, he managed to rig up a sound system in the garden at the rear and procured a few crates of south-Indian beer and a stock of Old Monk rum.

  Unforgivable as it no doubt sounds, I have rarely been at a New Year’s party where the revellers drank so quickly and so hard, and as the sun appeared over the palm trees along the devastated shoreline there was still a small group of stragglers supping the last drops of Old Monk. All I can say in our rather feeble defence was that after almost a week of being surrounded by such awfulness, we needed to disappear for a few hours into drunkenness. Early the next morning, we returned to the relief camps and orphanages nursing hangovers that seemed a reasonable price for escape.

  Like many of my colleagues, I have tried to expiate any feelings of guilt about prying into the misery of others with consoling thoughts about opening up viewers’ wallets and increasing the pressure on foreign governments to donate more aid. Often, we sponsored survivors ourselves, and gave them food and rebuilding money. In Sri Lanka, I would even like to think we played a minor role in saving international aid agencies a small fortune by hectoring the finance minister so much on air and off that he finally decided to drop an import levy on the four-wheel-drive vehicles and trucks shipped in to help the relief effort that were waiting still on the quayside.

  There were times, too, when survivors appeared to draw a measure of therapeutic comfort from having their stories retold on camera, and they perhaps even experienced something of a catharsis. Still, the pressure and temptation of professional competition meant that our motivations were not always as pure as they should have been, and I often came away from disaster zones with even stronger feelings of existential anguish than usual.

  Confronted by a looming book deadline in October 2005, now less than 48 hours away, I was seated at my desk long before dawn that Saturday morning in the hope of having it ready for the printers by the end of the weekend. When the screen on my laptop appeared to be quivering slightly, my first thought was that it must be time for a screen-break. When it started visibly vibrating and rattling, along with my desk and the pictures hanging on the wall above, it was clear that a gigantic earthquake had hit the region. In the short time it took for the walls of my bedroom in my Delhi apartment to stop shaking, which I suppose must have been 15 seconds or so, over 75,000 people had been killed.

  To begin with, we could only guess at where the quake might have hit. Gujarat, where an earthquake had killed 20,000 on Republic Day in 2001, was one possibility. Another, more optimistic, scenario was that the epicentre would be traced to a remote mountain range in the Himalayas, where the death toll would be nowhere near as high.

  Within a few minutes, the first wire reports started to appear, as one-line flashes on my computer screen. An earthquake had hit Kashmir. Early estimates of its magnitude varied from 6.8 on the Richter scale to 7.8 – eventually, we would settle on 7.6. According to seismologists, it was a shallow quake, some six to ten miles underground, which meant that it would cause much more damage at the surface. Its epicentre was on the Pakistan side of the Line of Control, and there were early reports, so far unconfirmed, of damage as far away as Islamabad. From the Pakistan capital came eyewitness accounts of an apartment building collapsing in on itself, burying hundreds under the rubble. Thought to be a luxury block of flats, it was almost sure to house foreign diplomats or businessmen. Perhaps someone we knew.

  Exact information, as ever in the immediate wake of a major disaster, was hard to come by. Phone lines were down. The mobile network was out. Landslides blocked the roads that snaked from Islamabad into the mountains, where the devastation was sure to be worst. From the Delhi bureau, one team set off for Srinagar, while we dashed to the airport to catch the only flight of the day to Lahore.

  By now, a team from our Islamabad bureau was outside the Margalla Towers, the high-end residential complex, where one tower had been flattened and another partially demolished. It was feared that some 150 people were buried under the collapsed concrete, a high proportion of them women and children. From the airport, we headed there too, for on that first night the Margalla Towers served as ‘ground zero’ for everyone’s quake coverage, a dramatic floodlit backdrop where rescue workers dug into the rubble in the hope of pulling people alive from the wreckage, stopping occasionally during aftershocks. There were 20 that day.

  Later on, we learnt that more than 250 people had perished in the Margalla Towers, yet it hardly merited a mention in the days after. That number simply paled in comparison with the mounting death toll elsewhere. In the cruel way that news assigns a hierarchy to such things, Saturday night’s lead story had become almost incidental by early Sunday morning. As roads started opening up into the worst-affected areas and military helicopters launched relief flights, everyone headed for the mountains.

  To begin with, we lingered, for early the next morning Ali, our Islamabad-based cameraman, and I managed to finagle our way aboard one of the Pakistani Army Puma helicopters conducting an early sortie over the disaster zone. First, we headed to Muzaffarabad, the alpine capital of Azad Kashmir, where it looked like a hundred Margalla Towers had collapsed.

  Following the line of the Neelum River into the city, we looked down on half-demolished hotel buildings that resembled toppled dominos, and suspension bridges that looked to be dangling from frayed strings. Already, it was estimated that over half of the buildings in the city had suffered some kind of structural damage.

  After circling the city, we swooped in to land on a cricket field, which was now a tent-strewn field hospital. Doctors and nurses tended to young children with the most hideous head and facial injuries, wrapping bandages around their heads to staunch the bleeding and to contain the swelling. So swollen were their bruises, so reddened their wounds, that it looked like they had been clubbed over and over again with iron bars. Broken limbs were being encased in plaster casts. Emergency amputations were being performed. Saturday had been a school day in Pakistan, and the carelessly constructed school buildings had been among the first to fail.

  Close to the field hospital was one of the schools that had been half-destroyed, where the piercing stench that always accompanies death was already overwhelming. Nobody knew how many dead children were buried beneath the rubble. Inside one of the wrecked classrooms, we saw the lifeless body of a young girl – she could not have been more than eight or nine – hanging from one of the collapsed rafters. Incomprehensibly, freakishly even, she had been strangled in the wreckage, with her headscarf acting like a noose. Because of the time it takes to reach the scene of natural disasters, usually the dead bodies have been covered up or stretchered to some kind of makeshift morgue. But here the little girl’s body just hung there motionless, as if frozen in time, with relief workers too afraid to touch it lest they bring down the entire building. Of all the sights I have experienced in conflict and disaster zones, this remains the most vivid and haunting. Much as I would prefer to delete it from my mind, to drag it into some mental trash basket, I fear it has become part of my permanent memory, fixed and immutable.

  From Muzaffarabad, we flew further up the Neelum Valley, edging closer all the time to the epicentre. We were actually crossing over some of the most staggering scenery that Pakistan has to offer – lush mountains, flowered meadows, tumbling escarpments, grand canyons – but it was impossible to appreciate the beauty of the setti
ng, for the landscape was strewn with destroyed farm buildings. Each twist in the river valley brought more destruction.

  Then we caught our first glimpse of Balakot. A once-pretty tourist town, now it was unrecognisable as a place where people had lived, worked, worshipped, studied and slept little more than 24 hours before. The landscape was strangely colourless. A grey clutter. Close to the river, there was a mound of rubble where the town’s mosque had once stood, its fractured minarets pointing up at odd angles into the sky. The bazaar, normally so bustling, was a heap of shattered bricks and knotted metal. The roads were blocked with overturned lorries; those lavishly decorated Pakistani trucks that looked more like mobile shrines, whose gaudy colours were now darkened by dust. So complete was the devastation that the chopper pilot could not make out a clearing where the helicopter could safely land. The Kashmir quake had a new ground zero.

  Before dawn the next morning, we set off in convoy to reach Balakot by road – a journey not without risk given the continual danger of landslides and rockfalls. Our biggest obstacle, however, was a badly damaged suspension bridge that looked like it might collapse at any minute into the river valley 20 metres below. Somehow, it remained open, but only to light vehicles and pedestrians. The question for us was whether it could withstand our heavier four-wheel drives.

  Determined to become the first journalists to reach Balakot, and fortified by the usual ‘luck favours the brave’ sense of invincibility, we thought initially we should risk it, despite the fact that our vehicles were laden with broadcasting equipment. In these situations, it also takes a courageous person to confess to cowardice. Helpfully, however, our Pakistani drivers pointed out that Balakot was now within walking distance. So we trekked into town following the line of the river and witnessed from the ground in more detail what we had seen the previous afternoon from the air.

  To our left as we entered the town were the remains of a boys’ school. Of its 700 pupils, 500 were feared dead. Its basketball court was laid out with white plastic body bags containing dead children. Next to it, a team of men had started digging up the playground. A mass grave. Above the school was a steep escarpment with sweeping views of the Kunhar River, which had clearly been Balakot’s most sought-after place to live. The earthquake had made it the most treacherous.

  Clambering up through the wreckage, we caught sight of a group of men peering hopefully into the flattened floors of a hillside house. From metres down, they had heard the cries of an 18-month-old boy. Minutes later, young Ibrahim was dragged from the rubble, given his first nourishment in 48 hours and handed to his overjoyed father. ‘Thanks to God!’ shouted the old man, and then he started sprinting down the hill, presumably to reunite Ibrahim with his mother.

  Away to our right, another rescue was underway. Shaukat, a man in his 20s, was trapped under some collapsed masonry, and his family members did not have the combined strength to drag him out. Standing just 20 metres away was a unit of Pakistani Army soldiers, the usual bunch of ball-scratchers, who refused to help. Often, a camera crew can shame the indolent into action, and we stormed over to the unit and started remonstrating. Not having received orders from their superiors to pull people from the rubble, the commanding officer explained, they would be unable to offer assistance.

  We shouted some more, brought the camera in accusingly close, and eventually he agreed to follow us up the hill. In a matter of seconds, Shaukat was free. Needing to head back towards Muzaffarabad, where a team following up behind us had established a tented base camp and set up a satellite so that we could file our report back to London, we left Balakot a short while afterwards. By the time we did so, the mass grave was full of bodies, and the workers had started digging a new one – the coda to our report.

  Among the structures badly damaged by the earthquake was the Peace Bridge at Kaman Post, linking the two sides of Kashmir. The early signs were that this might become a helpful metaphor: an emblem of how both Pakistan and India had suffered losses. With more than 1500 people killed in Indian-administered territory, certainly there was renewed hope that this shared disaster would bring about a speedier rapprochement between Islamabad and Delhi.

  The offer of help from India had been immediate, and Pakistan was just as quick to accept. Completing within days what they had been unable to achieve in decades, diplomats even agreed to open up five crossing points along the Line of Control so that aid convoys could deliver food, tents and medical supplies to some of the remote mountain communities more easily reached from the Indian side.

  For all that, though, Pakistan’s India fixation, its refusal to be portrayed as the lesser neighbour, prevented it from going further. When Delhi offered to send helicopters into Pakistani-administered territory to drop aid, Islamabad said it would only accept help if the choppers were piloted by Pakistanis – a ludicrous demand, which Delhi, or any other government, would never countenance. (They did, though, agree not to shoot each other’s helicopters out of the sky.) Instead, the aid remained undelivered. Always, the Kashmiris had paid the heaviest price for the stubbornness of Pakistan’s and India’s leaders, and that remained the case in the aftermath of the earthquake.

  By now, help was coming from all over. Washington had diverted hulking great Chinooks en route from Kansas to Kabul, which vastly bolstered the airlift capability. Black Hawk helicopters, stripped of their machine guns, were also flown over the border from Afghanistan. Yet this created an altogether different problem. The quake zone was a hotbed of militant Islam, and one of the Chinook pilots claimed his helicopter had narrowly avoided being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade fired from the valley down below (although a Pakistani military spokesman, faithfully parroting the usual script-lines downplaying the jihadi threat, said the pilot had confused road dynamiting with enemy fire).

  In the hours following the earthquake, jihadists had also proved themselves to be adept first-responders, because they were so intimate with the terrain and could also perform battlefield first aid. By contrast, the reflexes of the Pakistani military had been much slower, which was partly because over 400 soldiers had been killed in the quake and a further 700 injured. Though the military top brass had always claimed that the army was the one Pakistani institution that could guarantee stability, it was not meeting the requirements of the moment. Jihadists were filling the void. Certainly, the relief camps lining the valleys were crowded with volunteers affiliated with militant groups, the most active of which was Jamaat-ud-Dawa (the Preaching Society), an offshoot of Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Righteous).

  As infidels, I suppose there was a slight risk that we, like the Americans, would be targeted, but the only time we harboured any concerns for our security was when we set off in an 11-boat aid flotilla up the Indus River into the remote tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. Our aim was to reach cut-off communities in the Black Mountains, an area that, since Kipling’s day, had never looked kindly on expeditions involving the British. So called because of the dark forests of sycamore, oak and pine trees that rose up sharply from the river, the Black Mountains were stunning. But a Time correspondent who joined the aid armada was convinced they drew their name not from their topography but from the fate that befell Westerners foolish enough to venture up the valley. He likened the trip to the movie Deliverance, where a boat party of city boys led by Burt Reynolds were terrorised and sodomised by a bunch of back-woods hillbillies.

  The Pakistani doctor leading the expedition did little to allay his fears. He had taken to calling the expedition Operation Congo, a voyage into the heart of darkness. Long before the creation of the state of Pakistan, the tribal leaders who ruled the mountains were suspicious of outside interference, and many regularly crossed the border into Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban against the Americans. Word had come from the mountain villages, however, that help was desperately needed, even if it came in boxes stamped ‘USA’.

  As the arrow-shaped flotilla nudged up the Indus, local tribesmen scrambled down the steep banks to the wat
er’s edge. Many had guns slung over their shoulders, and we waited to see how we would be received. But the turban-clad tribesmen seemed much less concerned by the presence of outsiders than by what we had brought with us. Casting their eyes over our cargo, at first they seem aggrieved. ‘We don’t want flour and cooking oil,’ shouted one of the villagers. ‘We just need tents.’ But then massive rolls of tarpaulin were hauled from another boat.

  The tarpaulins were designed to shelter 60 people each, but with countless mountain people homeless there were not enough to go around, because we had to keep some back for other distressed communities further upstream. This raised the possibility that the armed tribesmen would prevent us leaving. But, in my experience of disasters, especially in poorer countries, the victims are often impressively selfless, and though the survival instinct is incredibly powerful, so, too, is the desire to help others. So, with the sun dipping behind the mountains, they eventually waved us on our way so we could make the next delivery by nightfall.

  With winter fast closing in, the Pakistani Government and international aid agencies faced a much tougher race against time, as the rush to get aid into the mountains unavoidably came to be called. The earthquake had struck in early October, and there was just a three-week window before the first snowfalls arrived. Not only would many mountain villages have to contend with four metres of snow, sub-zero temperatures brought with them the danger of a second wave of deaths. Just as alarming, of the 450,000 tents needed to provide shelter through the winter, international donors had so far pledged a fifth of that number.

  Still, somehow Pakistan managed to avoid a second catastrophe and the dire warnings never came to pass. Its people had survived another calamity and, as usual, soldiered on.

  Even though stories are often sapped of their emotive power with each passing day, an unwritten convention of major-disaster coverage is to return to the scene a month on, then three months later, then six and finally on the first anniversary. So immense was the scale of suffering and destruction with the tsunami, however, that whenever we returned the plight of the victims and survivors always had the capacity to stir and sometimes shock.