In late 2006 General Nadeem sent me to Peshawar and Muzaffarabad to check with the two Provincial Relief Commissioners (Kashmir and NWFP) that they had made adequate plans for the upcoming second winter following the earthquake for those still homeless. I had been working with Nadeem for more than a year and most Pakistanis in the earthquake operation no longer viewed me as a ‘foreigner’. Rather, they saw me as part of the government team and as a representative of Nadeem not the United Nations. In this context it was not unusual for me to go to a provincial official and ask for them to report to me.
There were satisfactory contingency plans in place in Kashmir but the same could not be said for North-West Frontier Province. I went to visit the Provincial Relief Commissioner for that region in his office in Peshawar. There is no doubt that Peshawar is a much more conservative, and in some ways fundamentalist area than Muzaffarabad. In addition, the Provincial Relief Commissioner was an Islamic cleric. When asked why he had no adequate contingency plan the Provincial Relief Commissioner fundamentally changed the way I look at the issue of religious extremism. “You need to understand something, Andrew,” he said. “God sent the earthquake because the people were bad and he punished them. If the people have been good this year, this winter will be fine. If they have been bad, God will punish them again, and who am I to get in the way of the will of God?”
I went straight back to Islamabad, somewhat bewildered, and said to Nadeem, “Sir, it’s like he believes that God sent the earthquake.”
“He does,” Nadeem said.
“No sir, I mean it is like he believes that God pushed a button and the earthquake happened.”
Nadeem smiled and said, “Andrew, he does.”
I must have looked really confused because I found the notion that God ‘caused’ the earthquake a bit of an anathema.
“I want you to think about it this way,” said Nadeem. “He believes God sent the earthquake because he read that in a book. You believe that tectonic plates caused the earthquake because you read that in a book. Whose book is right?” Only then did I realise that the main battle is that between moderate Islam and radical Islam. By its nature it is easier to motivate people around radicalism than it is around moderation.
The Provincial Relief Commissioner was a very conservative man. He was not in any way offended or threatening to me, given that I wasn’t a Muslim, or even a believer in Christianity. When I told him that I ‘did not believe’, his reaction was a genuine feeling of sorrow and sympathy that I wouldn’t go to heaven. His principle emotion was one of regret that I wouldn’t join him in eternity.
It is bizarre that a person can hold strong religious beliefs and accept that another has the right to hold different beliefs, even if those beliefs ran counter to theirs. Friendship and hospitality is indeed a trump card. I am not sure people of other nations display that tolerance. Motivating people to be ‘moderate’ and tolerant is the challenge of our and future generations. It is a challenge that exists in each country and culture. And this is the point of freedom.
The Provincial Relief Commissioner did not consider it a matter of “belief” that God caused the earthquake, he considered it a matter of “fact”. To this day I do not consider tectonic plates to be a matter of “belief”. Like the Provincial Relief Commissioner I hold the view that my opinion represents “fact”. It is simply not possible to negotiate between different views of “fact”. Until the day he dies, the Provincial Relief Commissioner will consider it “fact” that earthquakes are caused by God.
That view should not seem unusual to many Jews, Christians or Muslims. At the heart of those religions is the same belief in the same all-powerful but benevolent God, whose actions are mysterious and sometimes confusing. When one starts to put one’s mind in the place of a fundamentalist Muslim, and recognise that the place is not too different from a fundamentalist Jew or a fundamentalist Christian, then one only begins to understand the difficulty of the battle some call ‘war on terror’.
To my mind the war on terror is not between the West and Islam, or between the United States and Afghanistan, the war on terror is more accurately described by the question: how does General Nadeem persuade the Provincial Relief Commissioner that contingency planning is not against the will of God?
The fourth thing I learned in Pakistan was the strength and power of friendship. The two most important friendships I developed in Pakistan were with two army generals, both of whom were critical to the relief effort – Farooq and Nadeem. These two men are incredibly different and there were times when I was caught in the middle of disagreements between the two.
8.
Pakistani Military: Building Bridges With My Father
I
got on particularly well with two of Farooq’s children – his son Ibrahim and his daughter Rasti. I first met Rasti one Sunday. She was then a precocious 13-year-old who had accompanied her father into work that day. The government of Pakistan had held a formal closing ceremony back in March 2006 to mark the end of the relief effort and shift the focus to recovery. President General Musharraf conducted the ceremony that took place at the same time as the Commonwealth Games were being held in my home town of Melbourne. Musharraf is a squash player and Pakistan has one of the world’s best field hockey teams.
While we were at the ceremony I asked General Farooq to introduce me to the President.
I asked him “Are you watching the squash at the Commonwealth Games?”
“I was, and you Australians are winning too much,” said the President.
“Then you won’t be watching the hockey!” Australia had just defeated Pakistan 3-0.
While the other generals looked nervous, Musharraf laughed and asked, “Do you like sport?”
“Yes, I love it.”
Musharraf said to Farooq, “you must make sure this man goes to the Shandur Festival”. Held in the second week of July every year since 1936 and irregularly for centuries before that, the Shandur Festival pits the towns of Chitral against Gilgit in a game of old world polo on the highest polo ground in the world in the Shandur Pass.
Chitral and Gilgit are cut off from each other for much of the year as snow closes the Shandur Pass. Traditionally, during the summer months when the snow clears, these two towns fight it out just below 4000 metres, where the altitude takes its toll on both horse and rider. It takes two and a half days to get there from Islamabad and the journey takes one along some of the world’s most remote but spectacular roads, in the far northwest of Pakistan just below the Afghanistan border.
At around the same time as the ceremony closing the relief effort in Pakistan, an earthquake hit Lorestan in Iran. There should be better collaboration between India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran for natural disaster response. Each of the major earthquake fault lines runs east to west, often having an impact on those countries. Major weather patterns also run east to west. Jan Vandemoortele had asked me, on behalf of the United Nations, to look at a tri-nations natural disaster program to see if we could organise better collaboration between Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. India would be ideal to include in the mix, although politically impossible, given the state of tension between India and Pakistan.
Even though the Iranian government has a particularly good mechanism for earthquake preparedness and response, they are always willing to learn and invited Farooq and I to address an earthquake management conference to be held late in June. This allowed three things to happen. Firstly, Farooq and I got to know each other a lot better on long flights (there is no direct flight from Islamabad to Tehran let alone Lorestan, so one has to go via Dubai). Secondly, we had a fascinating evening in Tehran with my cousin’s friends (my uncle Allan married an Iranian doctor named Zohreh) – and thirdly we could sound out the Iranians on a proposed tri-nations disaster management program.
In late June the two of us boarded the Emirates flight from Islamabad to Iran via Dubai. We travelled well together as he preferred the aisle and I the window. We had also work
ed out a very good routine. When travelling, the requirement to pray five times a day for a practising Muslim can be waived. Farooq chooses to still conduct his prayers even when travelling. In the post 9/11 era to have a bearded Muslim man praying in a business class seat tends to make other travellers panic. My job was to calm people should they panic during his prayers. If the food service came during his prayers it was my job to ensure that there were no pork products in the meal.
Farooq, being on the aisle seat, had an altogether different role. If the drinks service came when he was not praying, he would first ask for his tonic water. Then pointing at me he would say, “But him, he starts with a champagne, he will then have a gin and tonic and he will have a red wine with his meal!”
Somehow this story always sums up for me the tolerance of a deeply religious Pakistani. Even though Farooq would pray, refuse to touch alcohol or eat pork products, he would have no problem with me not doing the same and he would even go as far as ordering alcohol for me!
After touching down in Tehran we took a connecting flight to Bam to observe how the reconstruction was progressing after the 2003 earthquake, which devastated that city. We took two very important lessons away from Bam to share with Nadeem on my return and have since included them into current thinking for reconstruction and recovery in Pakistan. Firstly, expectation management is one of the most difficult balancing acts in postdisaster recovery and reconstruction. There is always an expectation from the affected community that the government should respond quickly. However, if one is to rebuild a community so that its future is better than its past, then one needs to take time in planning. Expectation management is about balancing the needs of a community to see ‘something’ being done immediately, with a better future being planned slowly. I was able to apply this lesson not only to Pakistan but also to Australia, showing that lessons can be learned in natural disasters and applied to vastly different countries.
The second learning from Bam was to be careful of transitional housing, which has a habit of becoming permanent. In Bam many shops and houses were immediately reopened by temporarily locating shipping containers among the rubble in place of the destroyed home or shop. However, by the time the city was rebuilt, some of the shipping containers were too long, literally, to be removed from the now rebuilt streets.
From Bam we went to Lorestan to present a paper on natural disaster management. The long drive to Lorestan coincided with the Australia-Italy game in the 2006 World Cup football finals. We needed to find a place to watch the game even though we were halfway between Tehran and Lorestan in ‘the middle of nowhere’ Iran. We stopped at a roadside cafe where the owner is probably still telling the story about how an Australian and a Pakistan army general turned up in his café to watch the soccer. After plying us with mint tea for the entire game, the owner felt sorry for us because Australia lost and he refused to take any payment.
A little further down the road all that mint tea caught up with us. We pulled into a roadside fuel station to visit the washrooms. Inside the male washrooms were individual urinals along the walls. The uncommon thing, to my eye, was the roll of toilet paper next to the urinal. I had never seen a urinal with a toilet roll before. For ladies who may be reading this there is a golden rule in men’s urinals all around the world. A man must never look at another man’s willy. So, while we were both relieving ourselves I asked Farooq why there was toilet paper next to the urinal.
“You need to dry yourself after urinating,” he said. Australian primary schoolboys used to say: “No matter how much you wiggle, wobble or dance, the last drop always stays in your pants!”
“You see,” Farooq went on, “if you have a drop of urine left on you then God will not accept your prayers.”
Ablutions and cleanliness is an essential part of the pre-prayer ritual in Islam. I clearly must have looked bemused as Farooq said, “Here, I’ll show you.” He then proceeded to wash and dry himself and instructed me on how to wash and dry after urination as a father would to a young son. This was yet another of my ‘how the heck did I get here moments’!
When my uncle Allan married Zohreh, my extended family included Zohreh’s nephew Arash and niece Shideh. Arash left Iran when he turned 15 to understandably avoid military service in that country and went to live with Allan and Zohreh. Arash grew up to be the captain of the Point Lonsdale Surf Life Saving Club, and also a designer for Holden, working on the Ute. Shideh, while living in Australia, kept in touch with many of her childhood friends from Iran. She organised for Farooq and I to have dinner with a number of her friends in Tehran. Shideh’s friends had no idea that Farooq was an army general and just thought he was a friend of mine. What unfolded over dinner was a very frank but eye-opening discussion on the differences between the application of Islam in Iran and Pakistan.
In general, the law in Iran requires strict observance, so the culture, at least among the rebellious educated youth, was to avoid the observance as far as possible. Headscarves were pushed back as far on the hair as possible. In Pakistan, on the other hand, the law required little, but the culture demanded a lot, with observance varying greatly, depending on where in Pakistan one was.
Farooq found the discussion about Islam in Iran fascinating, as did I. Iranians found the discussion about Pakistan equally as fascinating. We also found it quite distressing to see how disillusioned many of the youth in Iran were. There was a general sense of hopelessness about the future and disillusionment in the direction the country was heading, particularly in the religious sense. People were in two minds, however, about the actions of the President when it came to nuclear weapons.
Few of the youths we spoke with agreed with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s tormenting of the West, but they held the view that if the United States was entitled to nuclear weaponry then so should Iran be. Many in the West misunderstand Iran, as the country is not Arab but Persian. In many ways Iranians perceive the Arabs as a greater threat than the West. Nuclear weaponry is as much about re-establishing the predominance of Persia in the minds of the Islamic world, particularly the Arabian world, as it is about threatening the United States.
Farooq and I left Iran and headed back to Pakistan via Dubai. I was to learn another thing about Farooq during the return trip. We were due to land at 9 am on June 30, 2006. This was the day that Pakistan was to confer national awards on people for their role in the earthquake relief. Farooq told me while we were waiting in Dubai that both he and I had been nominated for an award but that he, Farooq, had blocked both his award and mine as he thought ‘we were only doing our duty’. This was to prove embarrassing to the government of Pakistan. If the general in charge of the Federal Relief Commission, Farooq, was refusing his award then how did it make all the other generals who were to receive an award look? While we were in transit in Dubai, Musharraf telephoned Farooq and insisted that he accept the award. Farooq refused.
We landed the next morning in Islamabad and as Farooq’s staff car was driving us from the airport back to Farooq’s home, Musharraf called again. Musharraf again asked Farooq to take the award. Farooq again refused. While I admit to being disappointed that Farooq had blocked my award, I had to admire that he applied the same standard to himself, going so far as to refuse the direct request of President Musharraf.
I don’t think that Farooq understood how unusual and exceptional the Pakistan earthquake relief really was. It wasn’t until the massive floods in Pakistan and later natural disaster responses, which were not run anywhere near as smoothly, that Farooq understood that what we had done in Pakistan for the earthquake was unusual and exceptional, not just ‘normal duty’ Farooq and his family remain my friends. Farooq was proud of his eldest son Ibrahim but thought that he needed to improve his swimming. I agreed to coach Ibrahim and through that process was introduced to the Pakistan National Swimming Team. I also agreed to act as voluntary assistant coach to the team during my two years in the country. This connection with the national swimming team taught me two ad
ditional very strong lessons about Islam and developing country governments.
For the first time in the country’s history we had the national female swimming team and national male team training in the same pool at the same time, albeit with the boys in lanes one and two and the girls in lanes seven and eight.
General Farooq was appointed by Musharraf to head up the new National Disaster Management Authority. It had been a weakness of the government of Pakistan that there had not been a pre-existing national disaster management authority that would have had the responsibility to respond to the 2005 earthquake. This was an error not to be repeated.
It struck me that there were a lot of constitutional similarities between Australia and Pakistan. Australia is a country of six states and two territories. Pakistan is a country of six provinces and two autonomous areas. Even though the constitutions of the two countries are applied in very different ways, there are enough similarities in the way the Federal government structures work in both countries, for Pakistan to look towards Australia to gain some ideas on setting up the National Disaster Management Authority.
Australia’s natural disaster response mechanism works very well. Our states have principal responsibility for immediate response, with the federal government giving support when needed. There is a national organisation, Emergency Management Australia (EMA) that facilitates exchange of lessons learned and knowledge between the states. Most Australians have never heard of EMA as the organisation simply gets on with its job without much fanfare. I thought this could be a good model for Pakistan.
The Australian High Commissioner in Pakistan at the time was a woman named Zorica McCarthy, who coincidentally was the ex-wife of John McCarthy, the Australian Ambassador in Indonesia at the time I was in East Timor. John was by then the Australian High Commissioner in India. I always thought it funny that Australia would put a divorced couple as High Commissioners in India and Pakistan, two countries technically at war. Fortunately, John and Zorica remained friends and are both talented and capable diplomats.
A Life Half Lived Page 21