While he was in Karachi, President Zia’s plane fell out of the sky in a world-puzzling way. With the American ambassador and the US head of the aid mission to Pakistan on board, it took off from a display of military hardware that the trio and some top Pakistani military brass had been to witness. Almost immediately it began bucking up and down, then it lunged forward suddenly and ploughed into the ground. There was hardly anything salvageable of Zia’s person but he left behind him a dictatorship of eleven years. He had ousted Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and seven months after the ouster, had hanged him and relegated his ‘socialist democracy’ to a rump, the Al-Zulfikar Movement, where Bhutto’s children figured prominently and from where the eldest, Benazir, between bouts of imprisonment and house arrest, emerged to lead the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy and to take over the chairmanship of what remained of her father’s party when her mother became too ill to continue.
Zia’s dictatorship had moved the legal system of Pakistan towards Sharia Law of the Sunni variety. His ouster of Bhutto coincided with that of the Shah of Iran by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had set about establishing Sharia Law in a Shi’ite Muslim state. The two states, Sunni and Shia, coexisted quite happily despite their religious differences, with Zia providing arms for Khomeini during his war against Iraq. This coexistence would have affirmed the view that the schism in Islam was of little importance at that time in the affairs of the Middle East. For the West, the schism was insignificant when compared to the Cold War, in which Zia was an ally. Zia’s Hudood Ordinances were simply seen as high-handed and unpopular, rather than hard-line and fundamentalist.
Punishments under the ordinances were harsh: for instance, the amputation of hands or feet for theft and robbery, flogging for adultery or rape out of marriage and stoning to death for adultery or rape within marriage. In cases of rape and adultery, both victims and perpetrators were liable to be punished. A charge of rape brought by a woman required four adult male witnesses to stand up in court and say they saw it happen – if she couldn’t find them, she would be deemed as guilty as her assailant, or more guilty, and the assailant would be let off the charge and she, punished. There were also personal taxes instituted, which had the Ayatollah involving himself, asking to have Shi’ites exempted as an article of Shia faith, which says personal tax is to be given directly to the poor and not to governments.
Many people in Karachi – ordinary folk encountered by Eli in boarding houses or tea shops – were keen to elect Benazir, who was expected to rescind the hated laws, but when he moved north, to Peshawar, he found an atmosphere that seemed only tenuously connected to Karachi, an atmosphere where Benazir Bhutto seemed far less likely to succeed.
Eli was learning fast. He had found Karachi quite vibrant and with-it in spite of the ban on alcohol. A victim of alcohol-induced headaches, he only ever drank beer, anyway. Peshawar, by comparison, was ancient and conservatively Sunni, its women invisible and kept so, even on the street, by their voluminous head-to-toe garments. I wondered why, he wrote. It looked uncomfortable and hot and it must have been difficult to see where you were going, but the only time I came across women with their faces showing was when I saw a group of Kalash people being photographed for the National Geographic outside the Museum. Their dress was enchanting. The women’s hair was plaited from the centre part and hung around them in coils. They wore massive beaded and embroidered headdresses that must have weighed kilograms and, around their necks, they had string upon string of orange beads. They also had big collars, almost like embroidered yokes – they couldn’t possibly have done work in clothes like that. The brown-toothed, withered museum guards, swaddled in their drab garb, stood about, hands behind their backs, ogling. Brilliant, Mum, like a gash in the dun-coloured universe that is this part of the world.
I had a few meals with the National Geographic people later, made a contact or two and they said they’d have a look at my work – but to be honest, I’m not a patch on some of their photographers and I feel that what I want to say isn’t for light reading.
My boy was blossoming, discovering, putting his adolescence behind him.
We’re right next to the Tribal Areas here. I’d go in there, but it isn’t safe for Westerners. The hippies hire armed escorts and go in to buy their hash, but who’s to say that the escorts can be trusted? They swear the hash is the best in the world and they’re prepared to risk their lives for it, or do they realise they’re risking their lives? The Tribal Areas have their own police force and Westerners are sometimes kidnapped and ransomed with nobody able to do anything about it. In Peshawar itself, the drugs culture is so pervasive that the rickshaw drivers have a thing going with the police whereby they spot a Western bloke and offer to sell him good brown hash in full view of the police and if they succeed, then the police come over and arrest the bloke, who then pays for his release without charges being laid and the cops split the take with the drivers.
Hash is smoked everywhere. Blokes sit around on these woven bed things in parks and drink tea and puff. I only drink the tea, but, although it tastes all right, I sometimes wonder what’s in it that makes the taps corrode!
The Russians are pulling out of Afghanistan and you see these great, lumbering trucks full of refugees arriving on the outskirts from places like the Khyber Pass and the more southern, high-altitude areas like Quetta, where the Afghan-Pak border is just some dotted line an English chappie drew in a school atlas. Divide and conquer, I don’t think! The Pashtuns are a pretty passionate lot who make their own rules. They’re obliged by their religion to be very hospitable, but they’re also obliged to murder you if you give one of their women the eye, which would be hard, given that they keep their women hidden in the depths of their homes. Their lands stretch halfway up Afghanistan and overlap Pakistan in a big, biting swathe.
There’s a refugee camp called Kacha Garhi where I went to have a look. It’s only a couple of kilometres from the university area near where I’ve been staying; it’s on a kind of heath (where nothing grows), virtually the city’s edge, but packed with tents and some of the Afghan people have been there for years and have even built mudbrick houses. I wondered why they’d been there that long: I was told by a UN worker out there delivering food that they were driven out by fighting during the Russian invasion and now, they’re too poor to return. No one wants them and the UNHCR can’t move them on, so they make what life they can for themselves here. A brickie nearby employs some of them and I guess that’s where they get their bricks. They’re always in danger of being sanitised out of existence by official bulldozers, of course, but more and more and more of them keep arriving and there are lots of camps like this one. I’m going to try and write something about them, because everywhere I’ve been I’ve seen this – displaced people who can’t get out of their situations.
You see kids out scavenging, like in Calcutta. They go right into the shit and the rubbish looking for food and things to sell. And you see them in the bazaars, looking for anything that hasn’t yet made it to the rubbish trucks. And over all the distant cry of ‘Allah-u Akbar; Allah-u Akbar’ at prayer times through the megaphones on the towers of the mosques. Seems God’s too great to bother with refugees.
I sent the articles he wrote to Australian newspapers, where editors would direct them to the travel sections! Most of them were rejected as being too unappetising, but a visit to a tenement inhabited by Afghan refugee musicians made the cut. Even so, the editor wanted more colour and less speculation on who these people were.
They flee for fear of being drafted into the Russian Army and sent to serve outside Afghanistan. They never wanted Sovietisation: it wasn’t compatible with their way of life. The local mujahedeen kept the Russians out of their areas, confining them to the geographic girdle of Afghanistan’s cities, but fighting destroyed their villages, their irrigation channels had been cut off and their animals had been killed.
This wasn’t the type of stuff for travel sections, but the news editors didn’t want anything
on Pakistan or Afghanistan that hadn’t come from the major agencies, so Eli found himself stuck for outlets. Funds were getting low, so he tried tutoring in English and, that way, made a number of contacts that allowed him to keep on with his journalism and gave him a few clues about being published in newspapers elsewhere.
Another guest in Eli’s cheap hotel was an irritating American of about forty. He follows me around all the time and wants to see all my photos. First of all I just thought he was lonely, but he wouldn’t leave me alone. Every day, there he’d be telling me, ‘Don’t go here,’ ‘Don’t go there,’ ‘You’ll be robbed,’ ‘Don’t give to beggars and be on the watch for distracting tactics – you’ll be looking one way and someone will be robbing your back.’ It was like being a piece of flypaper doomed to catch the same fly every day and listen to it buzzing in your ear all day long. Whenever I tried to give him the slip, there he’d be again, playing hide and seek in the dust kicked up by the rickshaws and the mule carts. Eventually, I got what I could of myself on a bus that was stuffed to the ceiling and carrying more people on top, got off a few stops later, went to a market and bought the full Dick Whittington kit and caboodle – and now you’d be looking at Eli Jan Coretti with a beret and waistcoat, baggy pants and a sack over my back. I’ve shifted digs, as you’ll notice. And I’ve been out, unaccompanied, to the biggest of the refugee camps, Jalozai, which is out along the road towards Rawalpindi.
I was tramping down the roadway when I came across a bunch of Dutchies trying to change a tyre on a four-wheel drive ute. You would have been proud of me! ‘Gidday,’ I said, and they nearly jumped out of their skins. They’d never been spoken to by a Paki street ruffian before, let alone one who spoke an odd brand of English and was a top tyre changer. I was pretty chuffed to be taken for a local, given that I’m a Coretti-Russell blue/blue cross in the eye department. Not even they, northerners though they were, were as blue as your boy. I asked them what they were doing and they said they were making a film on the refugee crisis for Dutch television.
The bloke with the camera was called Jager and I’ve made friends with him, particularly as he can get photos developed quickly so that I can stop sending you so many reels. I feel a bit less like a rookie now, because I know a bit more about getting into places than Jager does. He’s very conspicuous with his big movie camera. That said, there’s a girl in his crew called Lotte who can speak Arabic, Dari and Pashto and she’s only twenty-four. She’s a blue-eyed blonde who’s dyed her hair black, but that doesn’t make her Pakistani. You know the sort, Mum, worn-out, body-moulded Levis, cotton blouse open down to the cleavage with those little dingle-dangle cotton things on the end of the string around the neck. She thought that wearing a headscarf was enough. Jane Fonda on safari. I may be a dope at languages, but I’ll bet that if I keep my mouth shut I’ll get further with these people than she does.
Eli had had the common sense to go to the camp with a flat-packed, low resolution camera that he wore around his neck under his shalwar kameez. He was out to take photos on the sly in case he wasn’t allowed to photograph. He wondered if the crew would be permitted to film and, in the event, while he cowered low in the tray of the ute, lying on his cap and waistcoat so he wouldn’t be noticed, a gun-toting, turbaned tough at the camp gate turned Jager and the big camera away, disregarding all the papers and permits he was carrying.
So we went and filmed among the poor unregistered bastards waiting outside the camp fences. When they saw Jager’s camera, they started tugging at him, desperately wanting him to film them and take their plight to the outside world. Crouching Afghan women clambered over each other to speak into Lotte’s recorder. None of them were wearing the burqa – they were working women from farms – but they all had headscarfs and shouted over each other to make themselves heard. They’d been waiting to be processed for months. They were too poor to be able to afford the bribes you need to get into the camp. The better-off get in while the poor have to stoop to selling their daughters in exchange for drinking water. It happens all over the world. I’ve seen it in Thailand, in Cambodia and in Vietnam – girls for cash. Some of the poor bloody Thai women I met didn’t even go by their names; they went by their brothel and a number.
He wrote of the Afghan refugee mothers’ hands, clutching desperately for invisible cups, their mouths open with fear and thirst, and he couldn’t imagine what such wretchedness would be like to live out.
To him, it seemed like Dostoyevsky’s Russia – the used girls would come back to the camp dishonoured and have to hide away, sometimes injured, inside the roasting, putrid tents. Some of them were as young as ten and forced to act as leverage to get food and water for their families. Their pathetic eyes glowered out at the strangers from dark, foetid places.
The camp stinks. There are holes dug somewhere for latrines but the stench of human waste among the habitations made my head swim. That buffalo I saw drop dead in the Calcutta car park seemed bad enough, but there are rats here and I’m not a big rap for rats, especially rats near little kids. They tell me that little kids have starved to death in these tents but the caravan of arrivals is relentless. When you’re fleeing annihilation, maybe starvation is better. Some start to unpack, but become so discouraged that they just pack up again and move off – probably to another camp just as wretched.
We saw a UN truck drive up and pass through the gates only to be mobbed on the other side. It crawled to the distribution point, blasting its horn. The women told us that inside the camp girls are swapped for sacks of rice. They scavenge with the mothers on the streets and in the rubbish heaps. Boys from inside the camp get work as paper pickers under a permit system, but it isn’t especially enviable. They have to fill sacks the size of themselves and take them to a shredder, then they have to bundle them in a great clumsy bundler for men in Afghan berets who are designated to hand out the rupees. These men are sometimes Afghan, but often not. They’ve graduated through a rough system controlled by the camp mullahs, who are government agents.
Seasons came and went over the camps, bringing with them misery or relief. When flowers were in bloom, the outsider women were left behind to gather rags and fragments of wire, while the insiders were away picking for the perfume trade. Spring was the best time of year, but even in spring, day piled up upon day, children were listless and hungry and adolescent girls were hidden away, anxious and depressed. The women were dirty and felt it. Their men, also down, looked on, squatting about in the camp rubble, smoking weed that might have been their reward from an occasional job, like sheep or goat herding.
A man called Daoud spoke onto Lotte’s recorder. He was wandering round and round the crew, crying out that he’d lost his head. Lotte called him over to the mike. He said he couldn’t think any longer. He’d been a farmer in Afghanistan where the ground, at least, was fertile. Here, in this hot and dusty place, even if you had seed, it wouldn’t grow. He was ashamed to have left his home and brought his family to this. In Afghanistan he’d owned his own house, he grew melons, grapes, figs, onions, tomatoes and green vegetables. He wanted to go back – even if the land was devastated – but he had no money, his tent was falling to bits, there was no oil for cooking. The big camp supplied the outsiders with water only and then it often came at a hideous price and you had to tote it back to your camp site in a pot that might or might not have holes in it.
While Daoud was talking, Eli saw some boys playing cricket with sticks in the dirt inside the compound. The Pakistanis were mad on cricket and it had taken off with the Afghans, too. Everywhere they could, people listened to the cricket on the radio, even outside the compound. Eli knew heaps about cricket. He had an idea that might get him inside. He’d come back later with a bat and ball. Meanwhile he asked me to send some photos from his school magazine.
While he was hatching his plan, Jager was offering to pay for the unhappy Daoud to go back to Afghanistan and to provision him if he could film the return. He would buy equipment and the needed tents back in Peshawar a
nd help to arrange a small exodus. But Daoud fidgeted and dissembled then and Eli couldn’t understand why. He wrote that given such an opportunity he’d jump at the chance, but Daoud wouldn’t go unless a certain other man would go with him. It’s like…‘Oh no, not unless my brother’s mother’s aunty can come, too.’ I mean, Jager couldn’t take everyone. It was exhausting trying to get this bloke to see what was on offer. He wanted another bloke who was the local landowner to come with his family. He was one of these people who needed someone else to be in charge. Eventually, Jager promised to look for the man Habibullah and his family. He’d try to stretch the budget to include them. It’ll be an opportunity, anyway, wrote Eli – so I took it that he was going, too. Wouldn’t his place have been room for another Afghan? I wrote back. He didn’t answer that one.
The expedition to Afghanistan would take a while to organise. Meanwhile, Eli would go sightseeing with Lotte and buy a bat and ball for his attempt to get into the camp. He could pretend to be a local come back, hunting for relatives after an upbringing abroad.
I was wandering across the old city when I came across a shabby group of kids sitting on the ground reading a blackboard. It was where a number of laneways intersected, making an outdoor schoolroom on an extended corner. At the board was a middle-aged teacher in white shalwar kameez. He was a neat-looking chap with little round wire glasses and he had the nicest smile, so I raised my hand and called out, ‘Salaam Alaykum.’ ‘And peace be with you, God willing,’ he answered in English. ‘What!’ I thought my Dick Whittington outfit made me look just like everyone else. ‘Ponytail,’ said the bloke.
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