A Life Half Lived

by Andrew MacLeod

  Following detailed discussions with different organisations, a decision was taken in mid-January to remove the cluster coordination system for the early recovery phase. This decision to close the clusters was premature. The degree of cohesion and coordination within the international community would be diminished and the interface between local authorities and international actors would become less clear. By the end of March we formally closed the Federal Relief Commission and moved the residual relief staff into a new Transitional Relief Cell (TRC) as a component of ERRA. While the main component of ERRA began the process of massive reconstruction and rehabilitation with a budget estimated to be around US$6 billion, the TRC ensured that people didn’t fall through the cracks, and made sure that transitional arrangements remained in place to look after people needing residual relief until their livelihoods could be restored. By April it had become clear that the closing of the clusters had been a mistake, so Nadeem and I reinstated them.

  A General, A Jock and a Feminist Over the next two years through to the middle of 2008 some incredible achievements were made under Nadeem’s leadership. The enrolment of girls in schools had increased by 50 per cent; significant land reform was achieved; schools and hospitals were built; and the quality of life for people in Kashmir had significantly improved. I particularly like the story of how girls’ enrolments in schools were increased.

  I don’t like it when feminism blinds us to problems that are open to both genders. While feminists will speak of ‘women only households’ they rarely consider the problems confronted by ‘male only households’.

  The United Nations has within it many gender advisers that come to post-conflict or post-disaster settings with a feminist lens. To the gender advisers the reason girls were not going to school was because of the repression of females by Islam. In early 2006 the Canadian Embassy had suggested the secondment of a gender adviser into Nadeem’s office in ERRA. Nadeem and I met Christine Oullette, a French-Canadian. Christine introduced us to the concept of ‘age and gender disaggregated data’. That means that when making a base analysis, there is a need to breakdown information according to both genders, and according to age differentiation. For example, it isn’t good enough to say ‘3.5 million are homeless’. We needed to know what the gender and age breakdown was, since different ages and genders have vastly different needs.

  Christine made a passionate case that to plan an operation, we need to analyse the difference in problems faced by males and females and not favour any particular group. Data should be analysed for the root cause of the problem. Christine was the first gender adviser I had ever heard who didn’t push a ‘feminist’ view exclusively. Gender issues apply, by definition, to both genders.

  Christine was warm and affable, and smart enough to know that to bring gender-related issues dressed up in the lens of feminism would really piss off an army general and an Australian bloke. She framed the issue as a question of analysing data and understanding real problems. Through this approach we discussed the problem of girls’ attendance at schools and realised that girls were not absent because of repression in Islam; they were absent from school because they spent between four and eight hours a day collecting water.

  “So let us build taps,” said Nadeem. And so, a new policy was implemented that in order to gain compensation to rebuild a home the homeowner needed to install a tap in the house. Girls would then be free to go to school.

  Land reform was a major issue in Pakistan since much of the country still operated under a feudal landlord and tenant system. The government of Pakistan had made the decision to give compensation for each destroyed house. But who would receive the compensation – the landlord who owned the house or the tenant who was now homeless? The landlord had no obligation to provide housing for tenants when the house was destroyed. A tenant had no rights, and certainly no rights that would be considered normal in the more advanced economies.

  In Pakistan the question of land reform was highly controversial and fraught with danger as it fundamentally challenged the remnants of the feudal system. Nadeem’s reforms would challenge entrenched power structures by giving the compensation to the tenant to build a house. If the landlord saw the new house and decided to take the house and remove the tenant, then the landlord would have to pay the tenant the equivalent of the compensation. In effect, the landlord still owned the land, but the tenant now had rights over the house.

  Did the Relief and Recovery Work? While there were difficulties in implementing a new system in the midst of a major emergency, the cluster approach in Pakistan produced results that speak for themselves: One million tents, six million blankets, 400,000 emergency shelters delivered or built through a coordinated and consolidated effort. Military and humanitarian logistic capacities were combined and cargo grouped collectively and allocated according to need, not by the agency that was dispatching it. In total, 350,000 Internally Displaced People (IDPs) were housed over winter, with 95 per cent returning to their homes in the first year after the relief, thanks to a unique combination of humanitarian and military management. All medical measures showed an improvement in the rate of cold-related infections compared to standard years. All schools and hospitals were able to remain functional; first in an emergency setting, and then in a transitional setting. It was the largest single relief effort ever.

  Statistics such as these, and a recognition of the joint role of the military and the NGOs in the clusters led to Jan Vandemoortele, the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Pakistan, dubbing the operation “[The] most successful civil and military co-operation ever.” The early deployment of the UNDAC team was an essential element. Jan Vandemoortele, while addressing a donor meeting on the Pakistan earthquake in Geneva a few months after the earthquake, was asked by a donor representative what the UNDAC team did for them. Jan said that, ‘The UNDAC team brought order out of chaos through their calm professionalism and made us feel that we could deal with this emergency when we were overwhelmed by the event.’ This was high praise from a man who doesn’t give high praise lightly.

  The establishment of the cluster approach as the key coordinating mechanism was controversial. In the end, the clusters provided a mechanism for information and idea exchange between civil and military actors alike. A sharing of a common understanding of ‘who is doing what and where’ allowed for gaps to be identified. The level of information sharing seen in the Pakistan earthquake was rare if not unique. I don’t believe that the senior officers of the Pakistan army fully understood how special the earthquake operation was until major floods hit Pakistan some time later, and the relief effort was less successful. It was only after the event that many of those involved realised that in 2005 we had a close-to-unrepeatable series of events including a new coordination mechanism that no one knew how to stop, and open-minded military, and critically, a whole series of key personal relationships that just happened to work. In short, it worked like no other operation either before or since.

  Together, we also tackled the challenge of ‘transition’ from relief to recovery. The transition is handled very poorly in most natural disaster operations including the major bushfires in Victoria in 2008. There is generally a lull after relief but before reconstruction. We avoided this in Pakistan. The recovery also worked. The creation of the Transitional Relief Cell within ERRA was an essential element in maintaining continuity of service to those who needed it.

  In my two and a half years in Pakistan I grew to like Nadeem and respected him immensely. He didn’t see the challenge of the earthquake as merely to keep people alive, he saw the challenge as one to improve the quality of life of people and in that he succeeded. Nadeem and others in Pakistan forced me to question the preconceptions one has of countries such as Pakistan when information comes only from the international media.

  Pakistan also relieved me of a self-imposed burden. I had developed in my mind an obligation to ‘use my skills for the betterment of other people’. In Pakistan I felt that I had made a diffe
rence. It allowed me to start my life free from that weight.

  During the time we were implementing the recovery phase of the earthquake operation in Pakistan, the United Nations went through a global process to examine potential reform of the normal developmental activities of the United Nations. In many ways this process would supplement the Humanitarian Response Review process that had created the cluster approach for emergency relief operations. It turned out to be ‘just another reform’.

  The United Nations Secretary General had appointed a High Level Panel to explore how the UN system could work more coherently and effectively across the world in the areas of development, humanitarian assistance and the environment. The panel was led by the Prime Minister of Pakistan and the Prime Minister of Mozambique.

  Between May 24 and May 26, 2006 the High Level Panel took evidence in Islamabad from members of the diplomatic community, NGO community, government of Pakistan and members of the United Nations system. Usually these organisations would all give evidence separately. Nadeem had another idea. He had said to me that the cluster approach had worked so well that he didn’t quite understand why the United Nations was going through the whole process of asking itself how it could perform better. In Nadeem’s mind the earthquake relief operation in Pakistan was a very good example of how the UN could develop system-wide coherence.

  Ryan Crocker, the United States Ambassador to Pakistan, agreed. So did I, so we decided to give evidence together. I believe this was the only time a UN official, a serving army general, and a very senior ambassador all representing different viewpoints and from different countries, gave combined evidence to a UN panel. Our point was simple. To get systemwide coherence, the United Nations needed to recognise that there is no such thing as the United Nations. There is a bunch of ‘discoordinated agencies’. What was desperately needed was some degree of authority and command. As outlined in the previous chapters, the UN Secretary General has no command and control capacity over the different agencies of the United Nations. Likewise, the United Nations Resident Coordinator in the country has persuasive authority and no command and control over agencies in any given country. Our evidence was quite simple. If you want system-wide coherence then someone needs to be in charge.

  One of the great strengths of the earthquake relief operation was that the Pakistan army was able to give someone in charge. When the High Level Panel delivered its report it initially came up with the idea of creating a ‘One United Nations’, however, once the bureaucrats in headquarters grabbed hold of these recommendations the catchphrase changed from ‘One United Nations’ to ‘Delivering As One’ because people didn’t want the perception created that there was only one organisation. For me, the moment that the catchphrase was changed any substantive reform would face the same future as all previous attempts at reform: failure.

  Aid in Development Like me, one of the junior ministers in the Pakistani government was also a swimmer, so we trained together on some days. At the end of a lap one morning I asked him why he was involved in politics.

  “I’m here to protect my family’s land interest,” he said. It shocked me that there was no pretence at good governance, nor government for the greater good of the Pakistani people. His involvement in politics was about the wealth of his family, pure and simple.

  Take that matter-of-fact statement and recognise it as a realisation that in most post-feudal or post-tribal societies those in government are merely the former feudal overlords or former tribal leaders dressed up in a cloak of democracy. The mistake that we make in the West is that we look at our governments and assume they are trying to do the right thing for the people. If the government doesn’t do what is in the best interests of the people that government will get voted out at the next election. We transpose this presumption on to governments in the developing world and fail to recognise that more often than not the interests of the people and their government may not coincide.

  In 2005, more than 100 nations came together in an attempt to improve the effectiveness of foreign aid. The meeting resulted in the Paris Declaration, which was aimed at reducing a feeling of ‘neo-colonialism’ from donor countries. The declaration stated that aid should be given on the host government’s agenda not the donor government’s agenda because donor governments’ agendas were often perceived as controlling and restrictive – almost colonial.

  The Paris Declaration went much further than previous agreements of a similar type. At its heart was the commitment to help governments of developing countries formulate and implement their own national development plans, according to their own national priorities, using, wherever possible, their own planning and implementation systems. The problem with this declaration is in the presumption that the governments’ ‘own national priorities’ match those of the people of that country.

  Reflections on Pakistan: A Different View of Muslims I am often asked what it was like to spend two and a half years in Pakistan. In the West many people have a perception of Pakistan based on television news, but all that one sees is the negative part of Pakistani culture – terrorism, political dysfunction and cheating at cricket. While there is some truth in each of these, they represent only a small part of what is Pakistan.

  In Pakistan it is the culture more than the law that determines how people live. The divergences of culture can be a trap for locals, not just foreigners.

  The history and geography of Pakistan makes the country a melting pot of small Christian communities, a number of Islamic communities and even a small animist community said to be left over from the days of Alexander the Great. Even within Islam, the culture can diverge radically in a short geographic distance.

  A woman may walk the streets of Islamabad wearing jeans and a T-shirt, hair flowing freely, eat McDonald’s and live a life similar to that in many major capitals around the world. A mere 100 km to the north as the crow flies, the small town of Bana represents a more conservative life. When I first went to Bana if a woman saw me walking down the street, she would turn her back, squat down, cover her head and wait for me to pass. The culture of that area deemed that she may allow no man’s eyes other than those of her husband and family to see her.

  When the earthquake operation began we needed to hire local drivers. Given the nature of United Nations work, drivers were often a long way from home. We started to receive reports of drivers being beaten by local villagers. At first we thought these attacks were aimed at the United Nations and foreigners. It was only after we did a thorough examination that we found something far more unusual and parochial.

  In some parts of Pakistan the most important seat in a car is the rear seat and should be reserved for men. In other parts of Pakistan a woman may not sit too close to a non-family member male driver, so she should not sit in the front seat. We found that on occasions male drivers who came from the parts of Pakistan where the back seat is reserved for men had female passengers in the front seat in accordance with their own local culture, but were driving through villages where the cultural requirement was the reverse. In extreme circumstances the drivers were taken from the car and beaten.

  The second thing to learn about Pakistan is that the vast majority of the population are extremely tolerant of other religions. I had no expectation of a good Christmas in 2005, having gone to bed on Christmas Eve huddled around a single gas fire in a tent in the earthquake-destroyed town of Muzaffarabad. Snow was falling; people were still buried under rubble. I thought that Christmas Day would be a day like any other during the emergency operation.

  I woke and was surprised to find that people, who did not believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God, and who had lost everything in an earthquake a few weeks before, managed overnight to put up big signs in every village saying: “Christian Brothers thank you for being with us on your special day. Let us be your family.” Outside our tents on Christmas morning lines of villagers and townspeople who had lost almost everything brought us cake, fruit, and whatever small gifts they could make. They expr
essed their humanity by understanding that we were thousands of kilometres from home in order to help them. In return, their hospitality was unforgettable.

  For Muslims, Jesus Christ is the second most important prophet in Islam, behind Mohammed. If one were to over-generalise, the followers of Judaism regard the Old Testament as a holy book. The Christians regard both the Old and New Testaments as holy books. Muslims regard the Old and New Testaments and the Qur’an as holy books. In my experience the Muslims understand that their religion worships the same God – the God of Abraham.

  For the everyday Pakistani, to be a person of faith, Jew, Christian or Muslim, is acceptable. To be a non-believer was bewildering. I spent many hours in conversation with many people trying to explain why I was a ‘nonbeliever’ with the normal reaction being “if only you were a Christian we would understand”.

  Far from being a country full of dogmatic terrorists, I found most Pakistanis to be a lot more open, tolerant and understanding of others’ political or religious views than in Australia, the United States or Great Britain.

  The third thing to learn about Pakistan is for the moderate Muslim it is the radical terrorist who is destroying the religion and good name of Islam, not the United States or the West. The average Pakistani does see that Western countries, inadvertently or not, assist the radicals in their recruitment of young and illiterate rural classes, simply by being the West or the ‘enemy’ that the radicals use in motivation.

  What we see in Pakistan is the real frontline in the War on Terror. In my view it is a battle between moderate and radical Islam for the winning of the hearts and minds of poorly educated rural Muslims. Drone attacks, invasions into other countries, and fundamental misunderstandings by radical southern United States preachers burning the Qur’an in ignorance of that holy book which supports the same God as their holy book, only serve to inflame and power the extremists.