These people make any sort of gun you require and they were busy churning out Chinese pistols and even used the arms company Norinco’s trademark. How cheeky is that! I was offered one for around $60 but I declined, much to the disappointment of the boss man. US dollars are the unofficial second currency in Pakistan, thanks to the black market.
Pasha pulled me aside and said I had made a wise decision because the guns were not reliable and, after they had fired fifty rounds, would be of no use to me. I giggled. Quite why I would want to buy a gun and quite why I would want fire a single shot was beyond me. Yes, I can just picture the expression of the usually blank-faced customs men at Heathrow Airport asking if I had anything to declare. Yes, sir, one pistol. Is that OK?
Pardon the pun, but it’s funny how something triggers the memory. Seconds later my mind was in Beirut Airport, 4 January 1997. I had just spent more than a week in Lebanon, a truly splendid place, and as usual I was running late. I dashed through the airport like a maniac with a holdall and my open handbag. I stood impatiently as other passengers went through security checks and their baggage was X-rayed. When it was my turn, luggage and handbag duly went through the X-ray machine and I passed through the security check.
When I reached the other side a Lebanese official had my handbag and asked me if it was mine. I nodded and went to take it. He pulled it back and said, ‘Do you recognise this?’ He then dipped his hand into my bag and produced a handgun, which dangled menacingly from his little finger.
‘I’ve never seen that gun before in my life,’ I protested with wide-eyed innocence. ‘Someone must have planted it on me.’ Then I thought: I bet he’s heard the same protest many times before. My God, I thought, I’m going to end up in prison in Beirut because someone’s set me up. What would my friends think? More importantly, what would my mother say? I bet they would all think I was trying to pull off a newspaper stunt, which had backfired.
Just then I heard a woman start to scream and I turned around. She was shouting at me in a very accusing manner and her little son looked on with a peculiar look on his face. The security guard thundered something back at her.
He returned my bag to me and waved me off in dismissive fashion. I was so grateful I didn’t remain behind for the outcome and thankfully made my flight with mere minutes to go.
As I queued to board the plane a man who had been following behind me and had witnessed the drama told me I had had a narrow escape. He explained that the young boy had deliberately put the gun in my bag for a joke and when his mother saw the gun she had shouted and accused me of stealing it from her bag.
The mind boggles! What was she doing with a handgun in the first place? But I learned a valuable lesson that day: do not go through airports with your hand luggage or bags open.
Pasha nudged me forward and I was propelled rudely back from my thoughts of Beirut to the Pakistani gun shop. As we walked around, it was explained to me that the metal came from the salvaged hulls of shipwrecks in the south of the country. Once it reached the village it was moulded and pressed into a crude gun shape, and then the men and boys got to work crafting the weapons on the old lathes.
I asked if I could take some pictures and the owner, swatting away the young boys, stood there proudly with his men. When I started asking if I could have the young boys back in the picture the mood changed and Pasha advised me to leave.
‘They think you are one of those Christian Aid workers who don’t like young boys working for a living,’ he explained. How strange, I thought, that a journalist was deemed far preferable to have around than a charity worker. As we left, another man tugged at my sleeve and urged me to cross the main road and look inside his shop.
We went across and he pushed a heavily pregnant goat out of the way of the entrance so we could walk in. There on the wall was row after row of semiautomatics, Kalashnikovs and a variety of hand pistols – all copies but all capable of killing. He then showed me a nasty little weapon that looked like a cigarette lighter but was in fact a crude gun capable of firing a bullet.
Through Pasha, he explained that it was just a mere toy and couldn’t really kill anyone unless the would-be killer were at close quarters with his victim. Just then the air was ripped apart by the sound of semiautomatic gunfire and I leaped in the air. Pasha roared with laughter and the man looked at me as though I’d just been beamed down from Mars.
The two men talked and started laughing again. There was more rapid fire outside and I asked what the hell was going on. It transpired that this was just one of the many feudal ruckuses that happen between factions of the tribal people who live in this district, which can only be described as bandit country.
The tribal fights date back generations and are usually started by something trivial. ‘They have a saying here that if your hand was your cousin you would cut it off,’ confided Pasha in sagelike fashion. I nodded knowingly but I still can’t quite work that one out.
Once the ‘family row’ outside had stopped, we headed out of the door and I noticed some shiny folds of silver paper. I pointed them out to Pasha and he hurried me out of the door. The silver paper contained heroin and was on open sale for anyone to buy. I was slightly irritated that Pasha had more or less frogmarched me towards the car but as we drove off he said, ‘You know, madam, sometimes you are sticking your nose into dangerous things and I worry about you.’
I told him I had God on my side – either that or the devil looks after his own. He laughed and said if I wanted to write a story on the heroin trade he would try to organise something. This excited me greatly because Afghanistan and parts of the Northwest Frontier produce the largest amounts of heroin in the world.
Although it is hotly denied by the Taliban, their war machine exists thanks to huge profits from the heroin trade. The leaders probably reconcile themselves with the fact that this evil drug is being smuggled abroad and sold to poison Westerners. Yes, I thought, we will make this our next project.
That night, I returned to the Crown Plaza and filed the copy to Jim and had the photographs developed at a nearby camera shop. The results were fine, so we took them to an Internet place and had them scanned in and sent off to London.
In an ideal world we would have had our own photographer with an electronic camera and the pictures could have been sent immediately. However, this is not an ideal world and you have to be resourceful. Also, and this will infuriate the legions of pals I have on picture desks throughout the UK, I prefer to work alone and hate being responsible for other people.
Many times I have seen good reporters and excellent photographers fall out over the coverage of a story – each blaming the other. I remember really upsetting a bloke called Tony Bartholomew when we visited the Falkland Islands in 1990 while working for the Northern Echo. We were staying with the resident infantry company, the Green Howards, and I introduced Tony as ‘my photographer’.
He snarled that I wasn’t his photographer and I thought he was being a wee bit precious until a couple of days later he introduced me to one of the officers as ‘his caption writer’. Ouch, that hurt. Touché, Tony!
On another occasion, while covering the Tyneside riots in 1991 for the Sunday Sun, I arrived at a very hostile scene not far from the Scotswood Road, where police in riot gear and wielding shields were standing at one end of the street and a highly charged crowd were gathered menacingly at the other.
Both sides looked on incredulously as I pulled up slap bang in the middle in my office car with a photographer who had just joined us after spending much of his career in fashion and wildlife. I told him the editor, Chris Rushton, desperately wanted a close-up of someone throwing a petrol bomb. What Chris wanted he usually got – or he would throw a huge wobbly.
The photographer looked concerned, so I explained that we would go over to the public and start chatting to them. I told him not to show any fear and to look them straight in the eye and walk over calmly. The last thing to do, I told him, was make a sharp move, otherwise it could provoke
the crowd into doing something silly.
He was still not convinced. We got out of the car and I talked to him calmly. I urged him not to run, otherwise he would become a moving target. There was complete silence and suddenly some stones and bricks began to rain down.
I turned, instructing him not to run, but when I looked he was gone. He was sprinting towards the car and some of the yobs decided target practice was in order. I turned towards the crowd and looked at them again and decided to get the hell out. As I walked briskly towards the car a brick bounced off the bonnet and hit me on the cheek. You can imagine the exchange of words in the car.
I know photography is an exact science, and I don’t for one minute think I can produce better results than someone who has trained for years in the art of taking a picture, but the type of work I largely do doesn’t require the skill of David Bailey to illustrate the story.
Obviously, I could never do a fashion shoot, cover a riot, take a portrait picture or get anything usable from a sports event, and how they have the guts to leap all over prison vans trying to get ‘that’ picture of the person inside is beyond me.
Anyway, now that I have managed to alienate and upset every single photographer in the world, I shall continue.
Jim Murray was delighted with the story about the illegal gun factories and asked me to head for Peshawar for a few days because that was where all the militant demonstrations were happening. I decided to keep my room at the Crown Plaza because decent accommodation was becoming as rare as hens’ teeth, thanks to the media invasion.
On the way to Peshawar we dropped off to an executive-style housing estate on the outskirts of Rawalpindi to meet General Hamid Gul, the former director general of Pakistan’s intelligence service the, ISI. It was a meeting Pasha had organised because he knew the brother of someone’s cousin who was married to the nephew of the sister-in-law of General Gul’s aunt. No, I couldn’t quite work it out either, and was not entirely convinced until the former general called me in person and invited me to his home.
He talked enthusiastically about the Taliban and said he has just returned from Afghanistan after being invited over to see their military parade the previous month. Three hours, he said it took, as the military might of the Taliban was paraded before his eyes.
He listed the tanks, the missiles, the bombs and the strength of the army. He said the young Taliban fighters were rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of American and British soldiers invading their country. His belief was that Afghans are great fighters and had already repelled the British Army twice during the previous century as well as holding off the Russians for ten years.
I sat there thinking that I was talking to Pakistan’s equivalent of Stella Rimmington, the former director general of MI5, and could not imagine her waxing lyrical like this.
Of course you have to remember the ISI was very closely linked to the Taliban and, despite denials from all sides, the regime has received support from the ISI. I mentioned in passing that I wanted to go to Afghanistan but kept meeting a resistance from the people in the embassy. He promised to see what he could do and said he would call them direct because he might be able to oil the wheels for me. Come hell or high water, I knew I would get over the border.
When we arrived in Peshawar all the hotels were fully booked and, on top of that, hotel and bed-and-breakfast prices had risen as much as fourfold. It was ironic that, while New York was, tourist-wise, like a ghost town, the hotel industry in Pakistan was bursting at the seams.
One of the better hotels there was the Pearl Continental and I managed to get myself a room after greasing someone else’s palm. There was an arcade attached to the hotel and I noticed a bookshop. As I peered through the window I saw what appeared to be an interesting tome on Afghanistan, and so I decided to investigate further.
I was beaten to the door by a very imposing man who must have scraped in at six foot two, and he went for the same book. Damn! After making his purchase he went off and I discovered he had bought the last copy. The man was none other than the BBC’s world-famous John Simpson, whose reports from Afghanistan have moved millions. This was not the last time Simpson was to steal a march on me.
Despite all my self-congratulatory pats on the back over how self-sufficient I was being, the deputy picture editor, Shawn Russell, contacted me to say the picture quality of the gun factories was crap and asked us to resend them. By this time I had bumped into Ghaffar again and he happily took the picture from me to whack over to London.
That night I walked into the bar on the fifth floor of the Pearl Continental. There, standing before me looking unshaven and unkempt, was my old friend Ian Gallagher and a Mail on Sunday photographer. I gave Ian a big hug and told him I felt quite emotional because he was the first Brit I’d spoken to for a week. A couple of other guys shouted over: it was the duo from Czech television whom I’d chatted to at the airport in Lahore.
I asked if they had managed to get into Afghanistan and one waved his hand down and rolled his eyes, but added they were still working on a plan. I smiled and then returned to Ian and asked him how he was doing, and he offered to buy me a drink.
It was a weird bar inasmuch as if you wanted a spirit, you had to buy the whole bottle. This concept would go down well in Gerry’s, I was sure, but I stuck with a beer.
I was introduced to a couple of guys from the Sun and we had a very convivial drink, talking about work and about life in Pakistan, and speculating about what was going to happen in the future. I stuck to the golden rule of journalism and avoided talking about my trip to the gun factory.
On the Friday, 21 September, there was a big demonstration in Peshawar which I went along to with Pasha. I had covered demonstrations before but this one was particularly hostile and I could detect an ugly tension in the air. Fridays are regarded as a holy day among Muslims and this demonstration was being organised by one of the leaders of a religious political party.
Pasha and I stood near to some policemen as the angry crowds marched past. I had my head covered and was wearing clothes that would not offend anyone, but I still felt vulnerable. Pasha whispered to me that he thought we should go and, having been in his company for nearly a week, I began to value and trust his judgment.
I returned to the hotel and spoke with the news editor, Jim. I told him that I did not want to cover any more demonstrations and described this particular one to him. I said my very presence there was causing offence because I was a woman and these are all-male events. I said that it wasn’t worth getting beaten up for and he said that was fine and respected my assessment of things.
Just then one of the room managers of the hotel said I had to vacate my room because it had been prebooked to someone else. I checked out but remained on site in the business centre filing copy about the day’s events. Pasha said he would organise a bed-and-breakfast for me and urged me not to worry. That man was proving invaluable and took away all the little stressful niggles out of my life.
In the business centre I made the acquaintance of a very nice Irish reporter called Miriam Donohoe, who had been to the Khyber Pass some days earlier. She was the Asia correspondent for the Irish Times in Dublin and had been sent from her office in Beijing to Peshawar to cover the impending crisis, conflict or even war.
I told her I wanted to go to the Khyber Pass but she said it was closed to all media. She did, however, have some copy I could crib from her if I needed to. It was a kind gesture and I gave her my email address, but, like anyone else, I wanted to see this place for myself.
Just then the telephone in the business centre rang and she took the call. She was up to her eyes filing copy and asked me if I would speak to a radio station from Bogatá in Colombia. I spoke to a reporter there, who asked who I was and what I was doing and what I thought of the situation after 11 September.
Although I will guard an exclusive with my life, I don’t mind helping out colleagues whenever I can, so I started pontificating about President Bush – how he sounded
like the sheriff of a local town saying he wanted Osama bin Laden dead or alive. This was not or should not be the rhetoric of a superpower.
I pointed out that unless America had changed its constitution overnight everyone was presumed innocent until proven guilty – or had Bush held a trial in bin Laden’s absence? Basically, I bashed up America, sympathised with President Pervez Musharraf, who I thought had been placed in an impossible position, and said that, out of the 80 million moderate Muslims in Pakistan, the vast majority were against any form of military action in Afghanistan.
Warming to the theme, I went on to say that Musharraf was being bullied by America and Britain into joining the coalition and he was walking a political tightrope that could end his career.
I continued, ‘While everyone condemns the events of 11 September, we have to take a step back and think. People are still in a state of shock, many haven’t had time to grieve properly and others will never have a body to grieve for. Talk of war and a crusade is entirely inappropriate.’ I could hear some Spanish speech in the background but just assumed that I was talking to a bloke in a busy newsroom.
The reporter thanked me and asked me to hold on the line. Minutes later he came back and said the broadcast had been perfect. Oh my God! I thought I had given a fellow journalist an off-the-record briefing when in fact I had just spouted forth to millions of listeners in South America in a live broadcast.
I told Miriam and she laughed. I wandered off into the lounge and there was Jason Burke, chief reporter of the Observer. There were big hugs and kisses because we hadn’t seen each other for ages. Although Jason was now based at the Observer’s offices in London, this was very much his back yard. He had lived in the region, freelancing, for two years, during which time he was snapped up by the ‘Obs’ to be their man covering Asia. Jason and I had met in the ‘Insight’ office of the Sunday Times and when he moved abroad we kept in touch sporadically by email.
In the Hands of the Taliban Page 4