by Mark Austin
Then, from the window, I saw a military vehicle heading across the tarmac, lights flashing. Three or four austere-looking soldiers in uniform jumped out and clambered up the steps to the plane. Were they coming for us? Had Mr Kim decided to report his suspicions after all?
They spoke with the pilot and stewardess before coming straight towards us, pushing people out of the way. I thought the game was up. One of the men reached for the inside pocket of his uniform and pulled out… an envelope. It was one I recognized. It was mine and it was full of $100 bills. In our rush to leave, I had left $1500 in the room safe, and the North Korean security officials were returning it. It was a remarkable moment.
We thanked them, exchanged handshakes and breathed a huge sigh of relief. The men disembarked, the door was pulled shut and the plane began taxiing with ten or so people still standing in the aisle. All the while, military music accompanied adoring images of Kim Il-sung on the seat-back screens. It was on a loop that never ended the entire flight, and each passenger was handed propaganda sheets promoting the government’s achievements.
Next to us was a man standing and clutching two live chickens that were flapping and shedding feathers all over the place. A couple of seats behind us, a woman was heating water in an old battered saucepan on a sort of Calor gas stove. It was nuts.
Now, Mick Deane was not a comfortable flyer at the best of times, and this flight out of Pyongyang was certainly not the best of times. As the plane lifted into the gloomy sky, he gripped his armrests, closed his eyes and hoped for the best.
I noticed the chicken carrier was wearing a Kim button on his tunic. In those days – and indeed this is still true today – very few North Koreans could afford to fly and even fewer people were actually allowed to leave the country. So it occurred to me that the Koreans on this plane must have belonged to the elite, and if that was the elite then the mind boggles.
We were served what I took to be cabbage soup, which I politely declined. Mick didn’t even open his eyes. Almost everyone on the flight was smoking. The fog from the cigarette smoke inside the plane was almost as bad as the frozen fog we’d taken off in. The ancient Russian plane shook, rattled and rolled its way to Beijing, the Kim Il-sung adulation video played relentlessly on, until finally we bounced onto the icy runway and ground to a halt. We had survived the craziest flight I’ve ever taken from the craziest place I’ve ever been to. Communist China seemed like a beacon of freedom and liberty by comparison. North Korea was that bad.
There were quite a few advantages to playing cricket for the Cathay Pacific airline team in Hong Kong. The games were fun, the upgrades flowed and just occasionally you’d discover something that could benefit your career. On one occasion in June 1991, I got a piece of information from our left-arm spin bowler that was to give me a distinct edge over my BBC rival, Brian Barron. And trust me, that didn’t happen very often.
Brian was one of the most accomplished correspondents of his generation, and had seen and done it all. He was in Saigon when the Americans abandoned the city in 1975, and covered Idi Amin’s overthrow in 1979. He remained grittily competitive into his fifties, which is when I came up against him as Asia correspondent. He made my life incredibly difficult, and unwittingly taught me a huge amount about being an ‘operator’ when on the road. But once, just once, I stole a march on him, and for that I have to thank our aforementioned spinner, Rod Eddington.
Rod, who was the top man at Cathay at the time and subsequently became chief executive of British Airways, mentioned that one of their aircraft had hit big problems flying into Manila in the Philippines. I had been toying with the idea of heading over there because there had been a number of minor eruptions of a volcano called Mount Pinatubo, just north of Manila, and scientists were predicting a big event in the coming weeks. The problem was timing. Rod said that his people had been told that a much bigger eruption was now felt to be imminent. He’d decided to make that evening’s flight to Manila the last one. He told me Philippine Airlines had also suggested they would ground their flights from Hong Kong, because of the ash cloud and predicted winds. I decided then and there that cameraman Mick Deane and I should take that last Cathay flight to Manila.
It was a risk that paid off. There was a larger eruption the day after we arrived, and Manila airport was immediately closed to all air traffic. And then, twenty-four hours later, it happened. We were having dinner in the Manila Hotel when we all felt a few minor tremors. The series of small earthquakes was the prelude to one of the biggest volcanic eruptions anywhere in the world in living memory. It was also the cue for yet another perilous journey.
Mick decided we should leave immediately for Angeles City, the nearest town to the volcano. He was convinced it would be in a dreadful state given the size of the reported eruption. We phoned the driver and left within the hour. It was close to midnight. It was around ninety miles away, and it was only after about twenty miles that the problems started.
It was eerie. Suddenly, the clear night sky gave way to a thick cloud and it began raining ash. The road was covered with several inches of it, and as we wound our way along the main road to Angeles City there was another, much larger tremor that lasted well over thirty seconds. The driver stopped, turned to us and suggested we should stop a while. We told him to carry on, anxious to get to the City of Angeles.
About a mile further up the road, a mudslide suddenly came crashing down the mountain right in front of us. We skidded in sludge caused by the mud and the ash, and ground to a halt. Ahead of us, a torrent of earth, boulders and debris was lit up by the headlights. It was a horrifying spectacle. We feared we could be washed down the rocky hillside at any time. Then we heard a thunderous crash as another rockslide happened behind us. We were trapped with nowhere to go.
All we could do was sit in the minivan and hope we survived. After an hour, the torrent ahead of us subsided and we navigated a way through the debris. There were no other vehicles on the road as we ploughed on through the ash storm to within a couple of miles of the town. And then we saw the lights in the distance coming towards us. Mick got out to film what was the most extraordinary sight. Cars, farm vehicles, trailers and carts, all rammed with people and whatever possessions they could muster, made a slow, pitiful procession out of the city. Then came the people on foot. Hundreds at first, then thousands, most of them covered in white ash that gave them a ghostly appearance I will never forget. The pictures were extraordinary. Women and children trudging slowly through the ash. In this deeply Catholic country, many carried religious statues, which added to the almost biblical vision before us. The darkness, the lights, the falling ash, the desperate plight – all created a beguiling scene on our journey to Angeles city.
Mick filmed for an hour or two, and then we drove to the place they were fleeing. It was immediately obvious why. The city of angels was uninhabitable. Everywhere, buildings were on fire; homes, shops, churches, all badly damaged. And the ash kept falling. In places it was six inches deep, and yet thousands of people just sat at the roadside waiting for help and for transport to arrive. It never did; not that night, anyway.
The people of Angeles City were abandoned to their fate and at the mercy of nature. They had lived in the shadow of the mountain their entire lives, and it had turned on them in the most cruel way. Homes gone, livelihoods lost and many people killed. And we were watching the whole thing unfold. It was desperately sad to witness.
By first light, much of the area was covered in several feet of ash and mud. Square mile after square mile was inundated. Thousands were stranded in a place they no longer recognized. We realized that the only hope of getting our pictures out to the world was to give ourselves plenty of time for the journey back to Manila. We had no idea if we would even make it. The driver decided it would be best to effectively drive around the other side of the mountain and cut across the northern Philippines rather than head back the way we came. He was right, and we got back to Manila in about four hours. We were later told the road
we had taken the night before was completely impassable. Another crazy night, another crazy journey and another unforgettable experience.
Decades of war, lawlessness, occupation and corruption cannot change an unalterable fact about Afghanistan: it is one of the most beautiful places on earth. There is no more alluring scene than the snow-capped mountains of the Hindu Kush, where I found myself in late 1996 seeking out Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was a formidable warrior and military commander.
To reach him, my American cameraman Jon Steele and I had to travel along the spectacular but treacherous Salang Pass. It is 13,000 feet above sea level, snow-covered for most of the year, and prone to rockfalls and avalanches. Massoud was camping out in a place called Charikar, from where he was overseeing the battle against the Taliban, who had just pushed government forces out of the capital Kabul and imposed their own strict brand of Islam. It was a memorable drive, but nothing compared to the journey we were about to make in a couple of days’ time.
We found Massoud and his fellow commanders in their temporary HQ on a farm just outside Charikar. They were trying to hold back a Taliban advance from Kabul towards the Panjshir Valley, to where government forces of the Northern Alliance had retreated. Massoud had amassed tanks, heavy weapons and hundreds of fighters, and the battle was going well, if a little chaotically. Where else would you see commanders push-starting an old Russian tank?
Massoud was directing fire onto Taliban positions on the other side of the Shomali Plain, on the northern outskirts of the capital. After a few rounds were launched, Jon pointed out that it might make sense to move, on the basis that what goes out often comes back with interest. At that moment we heard the whistle, screech and thunderous explosion of an incoming shell. It landed about a hundred yards away. I hit the deck face down, Jon was still stood trying to film it, and as I tentatively got up, covered in dust, Massoud broke into uncontrollable laughter.
We spent the night editing our piece at Massoud’s HQ and then sent our producer on the twenty-six-hour journey back to Pakistan in order to send the material via satellite to London. Nowadays, by the way, we would have a backpack with the equipment necessary to send the pictures from exactly where we were.
Jon and I then had a decision to make. We had wanted to get into Kabul to report on life under the Taliban. We could forget it and film another story with Massoud, we could make the long, tortuous journey back over the mountains in order to reach Kabul, or we could drive to the capital, forty-five minutes away across the deserted Shomali Plain and hope for the best. It had become a kind of no man’s land as there was unrelenting crossfire, and the one road across it was in the sights of the Taliban fighters.
We asked Massoud for advice and he said he would provide a car and a driver, and added that we should cross the plain at dawn while the Taliban fighters were sleeping. It seemed like a plan. We rose at 5 a.m., washed in a nearby stream, ate canned tuna and boiled eggs for breakfast and loaded the equipment into the ramshackle vehicle that would carry us to the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, or to our deaths…
It seems amusing in retrospect, but at the time both Jon and I were terrified.
Our driver, Jawad, chewed tobacco, laughed a lot and drove very fast. Once out on the open plain, Jon and I scoured the mountains for any sign of Taliban positions. We couldn’t see any. All seemed calm, it was a clear day. The sun was rising in the bluest of skies, birds swooped playfully and the plumes of smoke that had dotted the hillsides during the previous evening’s battle had disappeared. We were very soon halfway across, and my heart was pounding a little less. It began to feel like a Sunday afternoon drive in the countryside.
And then, just as quickly, it didn’t. You don’t hear rockets until it’s way too late. Or at least, we didn’t hear the one that came spearing into the road ahead of us. Jawad swerved violently to the left, the car veered off the tarmac and he struggled to keep control. The one thing Massoud had warned us about were the landmines strewn across parts of the plain on either side of the road. In the event we missed any landmines and avoided the rocket, which had mercifully failed to explode. Jon wanted to stop and film. He was outnumbered. Jawad accelerated, chewed ever more feverishly on his tobacco and turned up the Afghan music on his car radio to full volume. I lay across the back seat wishing I was beginning a twenty-four-hour journey back through the snowy mountains of the Hindu Kush. I also was wondering – not for the first time in my career – why on earth I had thought being a foreign correspondent was a good idea. Jon, on the other hand, found the whole incident rather amusing, his earlier terror now forgotten.
Eventually, a mile or so from Kabul, we reached a Taliban roadblock. The soldiers were suspicious but remained relaxed and smiling, and were seemingly fascinated by the large camera resting on Jon’s lap. They wore shalwar kameez (long shirts and baggy trousers), black turbans and long beards, and carried AK-47s. They all looked like very young religious students, probably from the madrassas inside Pakistan, institutions that provided an almost limitless number of highly motivated but largely untrained foot soldiers for the cause.
They carried out a cursory search of the vehicle, looked at my passport upside down and waved us through. Jawad drove us to the Intercontinental Hotel and disappeared. He’d got us to Kabul in one piece… just. And for that I will be eternally grateful.
We spent several days in the city watching the Taliban enforce their fundamentalist interpretation of the Islamic faith. Upon taking control, they quickly introduced a number of decrees: women must not work, girls should not go to school, men must grow beards and pray five times a day, music and entertainment venues had to close and the radio could only broadcast Islamic prayer and poetry. TV shops were shut down, VCRs destroyed and tape was strewn in the trees like a decorative symbol of repression.
Strangely, they didn’t mind us filming them. One group even invited us to sit down with them one afternoon at one of the palaces they had taken over as headquarters. Tea with the Taliban. They tried to outline their ideas: ‘We want a pure Islamic society free from crime and corruption,’ said one.
It is true that under the Taliban, crime was virtually eradicated and there was peace in the capital after years of conflict. But that peace came at a terrible price. The edicts of the Taliban were enforced without mercy. Arrests, public beatings, amputations and executions became routine. Women had basically disappeared from view. It meant that the hospitals, crammed with victims of war, were hopelessly understaffed; 80 per cent of the nurses and 40 per cent of the doctors were women, and they were no longer allowed to work.
We interviewed one doctor at her home, who spoke to us through her burka for fear of being identified: ‘I can’t go to my job at the hospital, I can’t help my people because they say we must just sit in our houses, we can’t even go outside. I feel very bad about this and I want to leave this country.’
She wasn’t alone. Thousands were fleeing every day, despite the best efforts of the Taliban to halt the exodus.
Kabul was free of war, at least temporarily. But it was a place cast into the dark ages, and to Westerners like us at least, unremittingly depressing.
The Taliban’s mistake was to harbour Osama bin Laden, providing sanctuary for the al-Qaeda leader and his cohorts. From caves in the Tora Bora mountains, they somehow managed to mastermind the terror operations of the organization. It was a mistake, because after the devastating attack on America on 11 September 2001, US intelligence tracked bin Laden’s whereabouts, and the United States and its allies launched the invasion that toppled the Taliban.
One interesting footnote to this: a couple of days before the 9/11 atrocity, a camera crew travelled to the Panjshir Valley to interview my new friend, Ahmad Shah Massoud. Once the camera started rolling it exploded, killing Massoud and the crew, who turned out to be al-Qaeda suicide bombers. They’d wanted Massoud dead, knowing he would be a key commander for the Western allies responding to the 9/11 attack.
I was sad to hear the news of his death
. I liked and, in a way, admired him. And he gave us Jawad, the driver who took us on one of the most memorable journeys of my life.
THE FLOOD
DEREK MAUDE – the gruff Yorkshireman who was one of my first programme editors at the BBC – had a saying he would recount at every opportunity: ‘Don’t give me a good reporter, give me a lucky reporter.’
His long experience at BBC Television News had taught him that some reporters are lucky and some aren’t. ‘That’s just the way it is,’ he would say. I thought of him in February 2000. I was by this time Senior Correspondent at ITN. And there’s no question that, at least then, I was a lucky reporter.
It didn’t feel that way for several days in mid-February. I was sitting in the newsroom at ITN headquarters in London tearing my hair out. A big story was happening in southern Africa, a part of the world I knew very well, and I was not being sent. The heaviest rainfall for fifty years across South Africa, Botswana and Mozambique was causing catastrophic flooding, mainly in Mozambique, where three large rivers – the Save, the Limpopo and the Zambezi – all flow down to the sea. Millions of people were displaced, hundreds of square miles of precious arable farmland were flooded and the scenes were biblical. It hadn’t escaped my attention that the BBC’s Ben Brown was there and sending back reports night after night.
For some reason, it just didn’t appeal to our bosses, who seemed to think it wasn’t worth the effort or the money. There was always a conundrum for ITV News: which stories to cover and which to leave alone. BBC News could basically throw money and people at any major story, pretty much regardless of the cost, whereas we had a finite budget and so tough decisions had to be made all the time. As hard as I tried, I could not persuade the foreign desk to change their minds.
But still the rain fell, the flooding worsened and the BBC were now leading their Six O’Clock News with the unfolding drama. In the end, Nigel Dacre, the editor, stepped in and decided it should be covered. He decided to send me to join our Johannesburg cameraman Andy Rex and producer Glenda Gaitz to compile what he called a ‘special report’ for the slot just after the break on the Evening News. It was a good way of concealing the fact that it was a hopelessly late call and we should have gone earlier. But that’s the way TV news works. Never admit you were wrong; just pretend it was always intended to be this way. We all do it.