by Tom Bamforth
I was offered a job helping to coordinate all aid agencies working to provide emergency shelter across the North West Frontier Province—a job that was for me a vertical learning curve and had to be performed under acute pressure. For weeks during the early stages of the response, I slept next to my desk in a makeshift office and still wished I could spend more time working. ‘Don’t worry,’ one faintly sympathetic colleague assured me, ‘as a coordinator, you have all the responsibility for an effective response and none of the power to ensure this happens.’
‘We’re basically a humane trucking company,’ my new employer told me when I reported for my first day of work. I’d had the temerity to ask what the organisation and, by extension, I would be doing. ‘We started sending people home after World War Two and are basically doing the same thing today. Although,’ he added reflectively, ‘much of what we now do is to try to get people to stay where they are—it’s much easier for us all that way.’ It was a pragmatic introduction to humanitarian work and largely devoid of ideology or ethical position. In a ‘yee-ha’ moment sometime later I saw him high-five another new colleague with the words ‘Savin’ lives—makes you feel damn good, don’t it?’ as he got back into a car after dropping me at my new office—a collapsed primary school in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. ‘Imbecile,’ someone muttered as the car took off, away from the place where lives might be saved and back to the capital, Islamabad. Unlike headquarters, field offices are often unsentimental places.
In some ways, however, this description of my new aid agency’s work was refreshing in its bluntness and enthusiasm, even if it did reveal a paradox of humanitarian work. Much of the rise in international funding was motivated not by compassion but by fear—keeping people at home would potentially limit the number of refugees and asylum-seekers making their way to wealthier countries in an increasingly immigrantphobic world. In this view, addressing the consequences as well as the ‘root causes’ of crises through humanitarian work and longer-term development programs would reduce insecurity and instability while promoting what has increasingly come to be known as ‘human security’. Ultimately, it was hoped, development programs and effective humanitarian response would prevent ‘state failure’ and forced migration to the borders of Western Europe, the US and Australia. For many donors, humanitarian response was as much a moral imperative as it was a product of perceived military, economic and political necessity. It nicely linked altruistic ambitions and self-interested concerns—terrorism, migration, domestic voter reactions. It has led to what commentators have called the ‘securitisation of aid’, promoting not only security in countries affected by turbulence and turmoil but also security from perceived external threats within the donor states themselves. The terrorists who had attacked the Twin Towers in New York and their al-Qaeda controllers took refuge in such ‘failed’ or ‘failing’ states—Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan and Somalia. Aid programs were seen as a way to provide an alternative to the political manifestations of extremism in countries suffering state breakdown, war and poverty. ‘Keeping people at home’ through humanitarian action was, therefore, in part a strategic response to Western security concerns.
The institution I worked for—International Organization for Migration (IOM)—saw itself as offering a pragmatic, practical service unburdened by ideology or even a desire to make the world in some way a better place. IOM was not an NGO, nor was it quite a member of the UN ‘family’, although it did take on a number of UN functions, and its employees travelled around in cars labelled with the familiar blue lettering and flags of the UN. Yet its independence from the UN system and its lack of clear humanitarian founding principles or mandates meant that it frequently provoked animosity among its more established half-siblings—an animosity that combined institutional rivalry and occasional personal hostility with ethical concerns about what a ‘proper’ NGO or UN agency was actually about.
‘Do you realise,’ I was asked as I innocently walked into one of my first aid coordination meetings with the heads of various UN agencies, ‘that you are working for the bastard child of the UN?’ Unacknowledged and often mistrusted, IOM frequently undertook work that was controversial, not strictly humanitarian, and ultimately informed by the combined development and security preoccupations of the UN member states that funded it.
Far from the aspirations of headquarters, students and people at home, the field offices were absorbed in the mire of daily activity—its chaos and challenges—and this left little room for overt expressions of idealism. We were ‘international civil servants’ and did what we were funded to do. In part this was because of vague ideas about being ‘humane’ to people who were forced to move as a consequence of war or natural disaster. It was also because the organisation was ‘paratatal’, as the phrase went—effectively a private arm of government—and could be subcontracted to do difficult work in difficult places that was in some vague way related to population movements. This was work that ranged from emergency response to managing elections in Iraq and Afghanistan—programs that were funded by the very countries whose troops made up the NATO forces, Britain and the US. It was an agency to which the business of government could be farmed out to provide the cover of independence and plausibility. In Pakistan, the organisation’s interest in migration (and anything linked to it—which was basically everything the aid world had to offer) had led it to play a leading role in the coordination of emergency response, for which it had no pre-existing mandate or expertise.
The first humanitarians have always been the family, friends, neighbours and community associations of those immediately affected by disasters: the people themselves. The state and its resources—civil defence and military organisations—have been a problematic and sometimes slow second, and in some cases state action or inaction exacerbates the disaster itself. A distant third in the race to assist has tended to be what is perhaps misleading called the ‘international community’—a phrase that evokes a homely sense of common purpose that is completely lacking in either the political mechanisms for international decisionmaking—such as the UN Security Council or the General Assembly, or the international mechanisms for humanitarian response. To echo the phrase of fictitious British bureaucrat Sir Humphrey Appleby, the organisations that manage a humanitarian response are less a caring community of practitioners and donors than something more reminiscent of a confederacy of warring tribes each with its own agenda, ‘mandate’, source of funding and, increasingly, sense of self-proclaimed moral purpose.
The humanitarian sector is now rapidly developing into a profession. It is estimated that there are more than 200,000 aid workers active around the globe, as well as an uncountable number of international NGOs and organisations devoted to aid and development assistance, sometimes estimated at about 40,000 organisations that operate internationally, in one way or another. This level of interest and engagement is a far cry from the ‘early days’ before communications technology when, as a colleague once told me, he was sent a letter by the British Red Cross which said it thought ‘there may be something happening in Uganda’ and was given $20,000 in cash and a motorbike and told to ‘do something about it’. Despite being a rapidly professionalising, multi-billion-dollar ‘industry’, humanitarian work—given that it takes place in crisis situations—is still often ad hoc, driven by people rather than systems and, above all, accidental.
While I was completely new to the practice of humanitarian response—the roles, mandates and responsibilities of different aid agencies, and especially to the specialised role of aid coordination—I was not entirely lost. I had some understanding, by the time the earthquake hit, about the Pakistan context. I had studied its history and politics and, bizarrely, because of a youthful phase reading widely in Russian literature, I somehow felt that working in an emergency response was strangely familiar. It was far from the smooth bureaucratic operation I had imagined, with clear roles and leaders and the rest of us following along in well-marked footsteps. Instead,
the response was very much the embodiment, in crisis, of the institutions, interests, and personal and political ideological conflicts with which Pakistan was obsessed and which fill the moving, funny and periodically tortured pages of the best Russian novels. Understanding this ‘personality-driven’ context was as important as knowing about the guiding principles and best practices of humanitarian assistance. Each night, I climbed into my sleeping bag with two books: the sections of the various humanitarian guides that I felt I needed to learn about and a copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. In the end, it was probably Anna Karenina that provided the better guide, with its intensely complex and fractious set of embedded social relationships that reflected the way that disasters and conflicts, too, are social phenomena. Tolstoy famously begins the book with the statement that ‘all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’—something that could easily describe the collective achievements and failures of people and institutions responding to crises: a collective enterprise of liberal internationalist values that, with its humanity and its flaws, never quite lives up to the ‘happy family’ ideal.
I was dropped off at a small collapsed primary school, which was where I slept and where our makeshift headquarters would be situated for the next few weeks. Ostensibly we were coordinating all organisations providing emergency shelter to the more than 700,000 people who had lost their homes during the earthquake. We had been lent some space amid the concrete debris by a mobile German medical unit that had quartered there, and during the day we set up our office on a series of string beds, one of which we turned on its head and moved every half-hour following the sun, to provide shade. Every few minutes the dull thud of rotor blades roared overhead as NATO helicopters—sent over from Afghanistan—flew past on aid missions. The nights were bitterly cold, and even though I slept in a cracked classroom I learned quickly to leave my sleeping bag open and to run out into the courtyard every time there was an aftershock—which came frequently and massively in the aftermath of that first tectonic jolt.
IOM had been given a central role in the relief effort but had taken some time to scale up its operations to respond on the massive scale required. When we arrived, our reception was harsh. We were addressed by our institutional acronym, rather than by name. The multi-pocketed, pseudo-military jerkins we wore quickly became known as ‘the target’, owing to the organisation’s round logo and the hostile response it guaranteed. As they subsequently became an established part of ‘field wear’, sported by anyone who wished to suggest they had somehow been ‘at the front’, they became known as ‘the wanker jacket’. ‘Don’t you realise there’s been an earthquake?’ I was asked early on by one exasperated aid worker who, ironically, had come to us for help.
The nights were equally unremitting, and what was officially termed ‘the close of play’ began sometime after 10pm with the announcement of an hour of reflection—a sort of humanitarian Nunc Dimittis, complete with the swirling smoke of Raj-nostalgic cigarettes: Player’s, Pall Mall, Craven A. We called this almost religious moment ‘fuck-up of the day’.
But information on the earthquake was limited and uncoordinated. Reports dribbled in from field staff of new population movements, uncontacted villages and whole districts in the mountains still reeling from aftershocks. Random shell-shocked people would turn up at our door asking for aid, sometimes with battered handwritten letters of supplication in English or Urdu that had clearly been taken from aid agency to aid agency in the hope of finding a tent, sleeping bag or box of military rations.
I spent a day with a team conducting aerial assessments of the northern valleys most severely hit by the earthquake. I had read the reports and seen some footage but only after eight hours in a helicopter, weaving in and out of the valleys, did I begin to comprehend the full picture. From on high little damage could be seen, but as we swooped low on unsuspecting hamlets clustered together at altitudes of up to 10,000 feet, the destructive power that had been unleashed across these vast alpine tracts was awesome. Roofs of houses that looked intact from above were suddenly revealed to be unsupported by walls and sat a few feet off the ground, covering the debris that had crushed those inside. Roads, carved through the vast mountains over decades with conscripted muscle and dynamite, had been swept away in seconds, cutting off whole regions from the outside world. In a land of swallowed roads and shattered bridges, everything covered in a grey dust of concrete, rubble and brick, only the domed mosques—built, ironically, for another world—continued to stand.
In a few places we landed, blowing down tents and covering the landscape and its inhabitants with dust from the helicopter’s downdraft. We leapt out clutching notebooks and GPS units, vigorously recording our altitude, coordinates and observations, as if this rush of note-taking would somehow shrink mountains, unify villages and bring order to chaos.
But this new appreciation for the enormity of the disaster only diminished our feeble initial response. After some days trying to establish a presence in Mansehra and acting as the de facto punching bag for the international community, I was sent north to the town of Balakot to assess the effectiveness of our operations there. I had never seen a disaster zone like this before: the scene was shocking and unreal, familiar to me only from the grainy footage of post-apocalyptic Hiroshima after the flight of the Enola Gay. Towering snowcapped peaks were etched sharply against the sky like monumental tombstones, standing guard over the remains of a city of 30,000 people now compacted to little more than knee height. No structures remained standing. Even in the ruins of the town the air was so clear it crackled with each breath and the vertiginous scale of the mountains lent a paradoxical clarity and euphoria to a scene of confusion, disorientation and loss. Men and women walked through the former streets at once familiar and yet now vanished, displaced strangers amid the destruction of their own home.
Strangely, given northern Pakistan’s conservative patriarchal society, I saw a young girl leading her father, bleeding from the head and evidently unable to see, towards a Pakistan Red Crescent field hospital. As if responding to the absurdity of a world turned upside down, fruit sellers had set up stalls in the rubble of a collapsed market, offering their oranges to non-existent crowds. A green-domed mosque—the sole surviving building—emitted a call to prayer, a lone human voice that echoed hauntingly in the brutal grandeur of the valley.
Our set-up in Balakot was dysfunctional and needed almost as much assistance as the homeless former residents themselves. Huddling in leaky canvas tents, wallowing in sludge, already coughing from bronchial infections and ineffectually led, our team of Pashtuns was demoralised and at breaking point. I had been sent up in an effort to take control of the local operation and get evidence to dismiss its venal and incompetent international manager—Jabba the Hutt, as he had become known. On arrival I had received a message from headquarters in Islamabad to ‘rock no boats’, and I had no authority to intervene in the operation or the treatment of staff. ‘I will eat him,’ roared one of my Pashtun colleagues in rage, having just been dismissed for the unpardonable crime of being competent. It was a mess: the city was destroyed, our operational response was useless, and its field management beyond redemption. As I walked out of yet another freezing tent I stumbled into a muddy and treacherous area by the riverbank that turned out to be an open sewer. Everything in that place on that day seemed cursed.
Back in Islamabad I met with our new operations manager, an American with pale blue eyes and slightly bucked front teeth whose number was listed in my phone as Bugs. New to the business of aid and overwhelmed by the enormousness of the task ahead of us, I hoped he would give me some clear direction and advice. We discussed the weather and his recent visit to Indonesia, and before heading off he handed me a brown envelope. ‘Read this on your way back,’ he said. ‘It’ll give a you a good idea of what we’re all about.’ In the car I tore open the envelope, looking for the instructions that would solve the earthquake and provide winter shelters for the almost one milli
on people who were now homeless. ‘Proposal for Rubble Removal,’ the document said. Back at base—amid the debris of the former primary school—my emails addressed to ‘Rubble Rouser’ and ‘Rubble with a Cause’ went unanswered.
1 Now known as Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) in deference to Pashtun ethno-nationalist aspirations.
2 In Pakistan today, the remote Kalash Valley is inhabited by an animist tribe of fair-skinned, light-eyed people who drink wine from amphorae and who are said to be the descendants of Alexander’s armies.
‘YOU KNOW, TOM,’ said Colonel Mohsin, ‘I was once a POW.’ The colonel was in an expansive postprandial mood as we settled on the verandah of the Frontier Force Officers’ Mess in the leafy garrison town of Abbottabad.
I had known Col. Mohsin (Retd) for some time now. He had appeared one day at our office with a brilliantly trimmed moustache, regimental cravat, and cuffs that crackled and shot with every opportunity. Since then he had managed a vast logistics operation—300 trucks, drivers and field staff—moving hundreds of thousands of tarpaulins, blankets, mattresses, tents, tools, clothes, and tens of thousands of people around the treacherous mountain roads with sangfroid and studied understatement. He had converted our office into an operation and had, with his years in the army, brought the art of war into the business of aid. Because of him, there was purpose in our work and the rooms were now covered in maps, diagrams and checklists; the atmosphere was a strangely relaxed, avuncular authority. Everyone now addressed each other as bhai (brother) or bhaji (sister), while heels clicked and salutes were given in the corridors of what had become a humanitarian war room.
Behind the nicotine-fuelled histrionics of the internationals, so visible during the initial phases of the earthquake response, our Pakistani friends and colleagues had brought order, humour, clarity, dignity and direction to the response. ‘Thank God the earthquake happened here,’ one departing aid worker told me. ‘We would have been lost anywhere else.’ With Colonel Mohsin and my indomitable colleagues—Shahab, Zubair, Usman and Samira—grinning broadly in response to each new setback (and there were many), we thought we could do anything. One glorious day I overheard Shahab, a fearlessly self-confident Pashtun, talking to a recently arrived international head of a major UN agency. ‘Boy,’ he commanded across the gulf of rank and pay, ‘I would advise you to go outside and see actually what’s happening.’