Deep Field (2 page)

THE NUMBERS ROSE SLOWLY,
like a cricket innings, and the commentators droned. There was little new information and the television news recycled the same pictures, overlaid with a boxed scorecard showing a slowly growing body count. An apartment complex in Islamabad had collapsed: fifteen people missing. An hour later it had turned to twenty-five; by mid-afternoon it was 150. The army had been called up, and stood around with guns looking helpless as rapid-reaction teams with sniffer dogs arrived to pull the living from the vast pile of concrete and dust. With every news update, the death toll rose steadily and threatened to continue.

For me, living in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province
¹
in 2005, this was no distant event. I had felt the ground shake violently, and took cover under my bed as plaster fell from the ceiling and furniture crashed around me. For a moment the walls and the ceiling had seemed to sway in a disjointed waltz. I watched as the fan slowly detached itself from the ceiling, and calculated that it was too late to bolt down three flights of stairs. I had heard the term ‘triangulation’—getting down next to a solid object so that when the roof came down it would form a small, triangular, survivable space. But the furniture didn’t look that solid. As I got down next to the bed, the earth moved again—first from side to side, and then up and down in jolts.

And in those minutes, shortly before breakfast on a Saturday morning, 83,000 people were crushed to death. A further three million were instantly rendered homeless across the hills of the Karakorum and the Himalaya.

I knew nothing of this at the time. After the hotel stopped shaking I went out into the bustling town of Mingora, in the Swat Valley (later the site of a major battle against the Pakistani Taliban), and continued what I had left Australia to do: explore the astonishing ancient remains of Indo-Hellenic civilisation which had spread across Pakistan’s northern plains and into the foothills of the Hindu Kush. Oblivious to the news of the earthquake slowly trickling in, I climbed amid the ruined monasteries and universities of the Bactrian Greeks, whose mesmeric fusion of Greek and Buddhist cultures scatters the Gandhara Plains from Kabul to Peshawar and the outskirts of Islamabad. I pored over ancient coins embossed with the profile of Alexander the Great, and sculptures of curly-haired, toga-clad Buddhas.
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My Muslim guides spoke of the importance of pluralism, the subjectivity of truth and the arcane theological meaning embodied in the myriad poses of Greco-Buddhist statues exquisitely preserved in the stone of the North West Frontier.

One guide had studied to be a teacher in Russia and returned to the Swat Valley because of its strong educational traditions. He used to take his classes around the ruins, explaining to them the pre-Islamic history of the region. When I got back to the hotel that evening I received a call from ABC Radio National, desperately seeking an Australian ‘eyewitness’ to the earthquake. ‘Is there a danger,’ the interviewer asked, ‘that orphans will attend madrasahs and become the next generation of terrorists?’

While the cosmic stone masonry of the Bactrian Greeks had lasted the millennia, the squat concrete structures of modern Pakistan disintegrated in seconds. Back in Islamabad some days later, I could see the true scale of the catastrophe. I attended public meetings of the UN coordination team, and the situation looked desperate. The earthquake had ripped across the entire north of the country, shattering cities and destroying villages. There were insufficient resources, mountain roads had been swept away and thousands of small villages at vast altitudes were inaccessible. Helicopters had been ordered to fly reconnaissance and aid sorties over the deep valleys of Pakistan’s north—but there were too few of these available. Most of the army’s 114 Chinooks were engaged fighting a nebulous ‘war on terror’ in the country’s tribal agencies and could not be recalled. In any case, we were told, it was technically too difficult to remove the machine-gun awnings to make way for cargoes of aid.

For forty-eight hours the international media circus descended on the city—flown in from New York, London, Paris, Brussels and Tehran—to capture on camera the reeling of a concussed nation and the growing stench of its stricken cities, before flying out again. Night after night the TV news brought updates and crossed live to journalists in Islamabad solemnly intoning the ‘universal truths’ about Pakistan: a nuclear-armed Islamic state beset by ‘terror, the bomb and military rule’.

I recalled the words of my Russian history lecturer from university, who had said he wanted to rescue the past, and consequently the present, from theorists and commentators who saw the world in terms of systems rather than societies. In Pakistan the same experts and analysts had migrated from Soviet studies to the more fashionable concerns of terrorism, Islam and South Asia. Having failed to predict the demise of the Soviet Union in their previous careers, they were now equally unable to account for Pakistan’s resilience. But for the surviving three million people in the distant hills of the Himalayas, brutally dislodged from their mountain fastness, facing rain and sleet and snow and ice, these debates were meaningless.

Amid the chaos of the early response, I volunteered at a local charity and spent an afternoon loading trucks with anything people could throw together to send into the mountains. Blankets, jumpers, bedding and food arrived from across the country, the donors all knowing there would be little hope for the millions of earthquake survivors once the Himalayan winter set in. I sat in a small circle with the charity’s founder—a Gandhian figure whose humility, simplicity and perhaps feigned illiteracy were a foil for his immense organisational abilities and intellect. He had founded the country’s only national ambulance service, and a network of schools and orphanages. Deeply devout, he was asked by one woman seeking to imitate the depths of his Islamic belief how many times he prayed each day. ‘Sister,’ he replied with more than a hint of the Mahatma’s wit, ‘I deal in wholesale, not retail.’

Wanting to do more than load trucks, I was tipped off by a friend that an international aid organisation was expanding its operations and needed people for more substantive work. I was invited to an interview with the operations manager, who already looked haggard and overworked. We sat on director’s chairs in a garden in a leafy and subdued Islamabad suburb. He looked over my CV for a few minutes before asking if I liked camping. ‘Very much,’ I lied, and tried to look as if I meant it while he examined me for an unnerving moment before throwing his hands up in resignation. ‘Look, you can walk, you can talk and right now we need bodies on the ground. Do you know where I can get a case of Scotch in Islamabad?’ Fortuitously, I had just been given the number of shady local alcohol supplier known simply as Mr Scotch. I was hired.

The following day I was put in a car and driven to Mansehra, the town that would become a hub for the relief effort in the North West Frontier Province and my home for the next eighteen months. I had no idea what I would be doing or who I would be working with. The first signs weren’t good.

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.