Deep Field (9 page)

I was redeployed to Muzaffarabad, the destroyed capital of Kashmir and the epicentre of the earthquake, which still hosted the majority of the people living in residual camps. A group of British MPs from the cross-party House of Commons International Development Committee was coming through, and this was seen as an important opportunity to make a strong case for increased aid for the ‘second winter’ and to add external pressure on the government to allow preparatory relief operations. I was responsible for looking after the MPs and presenting our case.

It was a strange, heartening and baffling experience. I met with the committee’s clerk before meeting the MPs themselves and was impressed. She had a PhD in development and had read every report and studied UN maps and was exceptionally well-informed. She took no persuading that we faced a humanitarian crisis, albeit on a smaller scale, unless aid agencies were funded and given authority to act. Elated, and somewhat awed by her clear command of the situation, I drove out to the Muzaffarabad helipad to meet the MPs—a collection of Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat representatives who served on one of the most sought-after parliamentary committees. I had instructions to give them twenty minutes at their hotel (a cracked concrete wreck and the only hotel still standing in the town) and to take them straight out to the camps. ‘They’re not here for a holiday,’ I’d been told—‘they mean business.’

After a round of vigorous greetings, we piled into a bus and I took the opportunity to rehearse my arguments to the committee clerk as we sat next to each other, before a more formal meeting with the exalted parliamentarians that evening. It was a warm day and brilliant sunlight streamed into the bus. Looking round during a lull in conversation, I saw that all the MPs had fallen asleep, heads lolling in an intercontinental coma of jet lag and sun.

‘Where the hell are we?’ asked one of the MPs as we stopped outside the first camp—a short, sharp scramble up a rock-strewn path from the road. I tried to explain but he wandered off, returning to the bus unconsoled.

‘He thinks his entire constituency in the UK is from here and he’s a bit worried about re-election,’ the clerk reassured me as I tried to wake up the others. The Labour MPs struggled, and one had to be carried up the hill; the one Conservative was up in an instant, ripping off his shirt and storming up the path. I ran between the two, trying to keep an eye on the Conservative while lending a hand pushing the Labour MPs on. The Liberal Democrats walked at a medium pace, able to manage by themselves but conscious of our efforts to keep everyone together.

‘It reminds me of Scotland,’ one of them said to me during a breather. ‘My constituency would have been like this in the nineteenth century.’ He scanned the arid hills, looking over the tents and mud houses that were now coming into view. While some of the community leaders had been informed about our visit, word had clearly not got out to the residents themselves. Catching up with the Conservative, I found him standing in the entrance to one of the tents, interrogating an unsuspecting family in resonant English tones. They looked stunned at the arrival of a semi-clad European.

‘What’s this all about?’ he roared. ‘Why are you still here?’

Our translator struggled. ‘They don’t want to go back,’ he said. ‘They don’t have a house.’

‘Looks like a case of aid dependency to me,’ replied the Conservative, and shot off disappearing over a hill.

‘It must be terrible being disabled,’ said one of the Liberal Democrats, staring back down the path we’d just climbed. ‘Imagine doing this in a wheelchair.’

The Labour representatives had by now given up and were sitting morosely on a rock halfway up, discussing internecine debates in Oxfam in the eighties about whether the organisation should be ‘humanitarian’ or a ‘development agency’.

Back at the bus, I was becoming worried. The Conservative had failed to reappear, while the MP whose Pakistani-dominated constituency somehow threatened his political career had refused to leave the bus. At last I found the Conservative, standing on a rock looking at the view—shirt on this time, but open to the waist.

‘Good job,’ he declared, ‘nothing to be seen here,’ and trotted off back to the bus. He later famously featured in the UK parliamentary expenses scandal in which he had claimed thousands of pounds for the renovation of the bell tower in his eighteenth-century mansion. State assistance for bell towers or moat cleaning was clearly acceptable, but a new tent for someone living in a residual camp facing a freezing winter was not.

Back in Muzaffarabad the winter had started and, as predicted, the camps turned to mud. We had received some funds to work and were now attempting to ‘winterise’ the leaky canvas from the year before, wrapping tents in huge quantities of plastic, digging drainage ditches and trying to ensure that they were nowhere the camp toilets, whose effluent drained randomly. The rains increased and the ground became increasingly waterlogged.

The Refugee Commissioner had continued to try to pull down the camps where he could and send people ‘home’, back up the windy, unstable roads whose edges had been deeply corroded by the earthquake and had fallen into the deep Himalayan ravines and valleys below. I joined up with a specialist ‘alpine unit’ from the UN Operations Department to monitor return conditions in winter of a convoy of thirty vehicles heading from Muzaffarabad to the Leepa Valley. The report was stark:

At an altitude of 2700 metres, a new snow avalanche had descended and blocked the road. The avalanche had been partially cleared but posed a significant obstacle to vehicles, being at a steep incline and on a tight hairpin bend. It took a skilled local driver in a jeep 20 minutes to traverse the avalanche debris. There was a further sector of the road where avalanches were expected. It was observed that, further on, deep mud ruts were developing on the road surface. By 16h00 the weather began to deteriorate with a cold north wind and freezing rain falling. By 16h20 a group of 8 jeeps were blocked by a snow avalanche. The drivers did not appear to be skilled in these conditions and their attempts to pass were weak and disorganised. None of the vehicles had snow chains and the tyres were worn and lacked deep tread. A second wave of 12 vehicles arrived at 17h20. Darkness due to fall at 17h40.


With further snow expected at higher altitudes, return by road was, in the words of the alpine team, ‘a dubious policy in safety terms’. We discussed alternatives if the road was inaccessible—there was some spare helicopter capacity, and if the people and the government agreed there was a possibility of flying the camp’s residents back to their places of origin in the Leepa Valley, but we had to be sure that life and livelihoods were sustainable when they got there, and this was dubious given what we knew about the road at the relatively low attitude of 2700 metres. The best thing was for people to remain in the camp with as many relief supplies and as much ‘winterisation’ as we could get. But when I got back to the camp the next day they had disappeared—driven out by more government trucks, along the extremely hazardous road to their destroyed homes that were now under snow.

Outraged at our inability to get any sort of reasonable solution to the problem of residual camps, I contacted two journalists from the BBC and they agreed to head up and film the results. If we could get nowhere through negotiation, then our last resort was to expose what was happening. But by now the route was untraceable and the people who had been in the camp had disappeared into the mountains. The BBC crew filmed miserable snow-clad villages and the nerve-wracking jeep manoeuvres past avalanches on unstable roads. The film ended with an interview over tea with the commissioner’s wife. ‘The relief effort is going very well,’ she said. ‘Its simply swimmingly marvellous.’

CALLING FROM THE TOP
of a rubbish dump in the earthquake-destroyed city in Muzaffarabad, I could connect by phone to Khartoum. And from the foothills of the Himalayas, overlooking the Vale of Kashmir and the Neelum and Jhelum rivers, I accepted a job in Darfur.

‘Time to move,’ I was told by wiser heads. ‘Once the emergency phase is over the politics starts, development intervenes, and nothing happens.’ During the earthquake, the mantra of relief workers was ‘Don’t make a catastrophe out of a crisis’. The real catastrophe was elsewhere—no matter how bad the destruction and loss of life in Pakistan, it was a different order of magnitude to the catastrophe of Darfur. All disasters and emergencies are to some degree ‘man-made’: in Pakistan, we saw complicity through poor construction standards and a sluggish government response. In Darfur the decision had been taken by the country’s president and senior leaders to kill, rape and displace, systematically and indiscriminately, whole groups of people based on an increasingly racialised conception of ethnicity. Belatedly, and after the worst of the killing spree was over, the international community had turned its head towards Darfur.

From Islamabad I flew to Melbourne, wincing as the customs officer in Lahore stamped my passport with a red X and the words
Do not readmit
, and from Melbourne to London and then back again across the globe to Dubai, and Amman and Khartoum. I sat next to young Americans mostly on this Middle Eastern leg—some naive and some sceptical, the fresh-faced and the haggard, mercenaries and Wilsonian internationalists. It was my reading matter that started the conversations on the plane—and ironic, perhaps, that Orwell had become hallowed ground for these illiberal interventionists going to reshape the Middle East.

I flew on, transcending worlds and time while watching videos in my metal tube, until fifty hours after I started, dots of houses emerged from the expanse of desert tan, clinging tightly to the confluence of the White and Blue Niles. From the air Khartoum came into view—not the resonant place of my imagination conjured by the words
Omdurman
and
dervish
, the place of heroic imperial last stands, the literal and metaphorical ‘heart of Africa’—but a neat, modern city arranged in lines, perched precariously on the edge of vast waves of desert tending massively and irrevocably to the interior.

‘Call me Ernie,’ he said. ‘My name’s Hernando, but all the guys in Geneva call me Ernie—do you know the guys in Geneva?’

I regretted that I didn’t know the guys in Geneva, and it was a refrain that echoed again and again as my newly arrived colleague Ernie and I made our way from the hotel to the Khartoum office and back again. We had both been sent to the ‘operation’ in Sudan, knew no one, and had little conception of what we were actually supposed to do. After a brief meeting with my supervisor, whose only words—‘I see you’ve made it’—were uttered without looking up between emails, I remained unenlightened.

‘Don’t worry,’ Ernie reassured me when I wondered how long we were going to sit around in Khartoum, ‘the guys in Geneva are all over it.’

But the days passed slowly as I went through endless rounds of briefings. A political advisor from the UN took me into the organisation’s map room, where I stood gazing at the neat, sanitised cartography of war. Maps of flat, empty space marked with crosses to indicate major battles, circles for cities, and triangles to show refugee camps. Dotted lines marked possible roads whose existence and accessibility no one could really guarantee. The only permanent fixtures were thick black lines representing international borders, labelled
Libya
and
Chad
—a misplaced assertion of certainty, as I discovered, because these borders meant nothing in a conflict that engulfed the Sahara, a conflict that found its geographical echo in drought, displacement and gradual desertification. The movements of time, politics and a changing climate had little use for lines on maps. Layered onto these humanitarian maps was a political map that showed spreading, amorphous shapes that represented estimates of areas under the control of a dozen progovernment and rebel groups—expanding, contracting, realigning with the cruel exigencies of irregular desert warfare. ‘Nobody really knows what they represent,’ said the political advisor. ‘It’s the best we can do but most of it’s made up in Khartoum.’