Stones Into School (15 page)

This made both of us pause to take a deep breath.

In addition to its notorious geological instability, Kashmir lies atop a web of political fault lines whose intractable complexity is matched only by the clash between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The origin of this conflict can be precisely dated to midnight on August 15, 1947, when Britain's Indian empire was officially partitioned into the new nations of India and Pakistan.

The upheaval of Partition produced one of the largest migrations of refugees in modern history (twenty-five million people) and the slaughter of nearly one million civilians, as Hindus and Sikhs fled south into India while Muslims raced in the opposite direction toward Pakistan. Another casualty was India's northernmost principality, the state of Jammu and Kashmir, which had a Muslim-majority population ruled by a Hindu maharaja named Hari Singh, whose great-grandfather had purchased Kashmir from the British in 1846 for 7.5 million rupees, or about 5 rupees per citizen--the cost of a cup of tea at an Indian roadside cafe.

Two months after Partition, Pakistan invaded Kashmir and rattled the composure of Hari Singh, a man whose interests up to that point had focused mostly on polo, late-night champagne parties, and shooting safaris. In the early hours of October 26, the maharaja fled the kingdom with his most exquisite jewels, his Webley & Scott shotguns, and his dog Tarzan. Meanwhile, the Indian government mobilized its entire fleet of passenger planes and airlifted three hundred Sikh troops into the capital city of Srinagar.

When the first round of fighting ended, two-thirds of Kashmir was in Indian hands, including Jammu, the Buddhist region of Ladakh, and the biggest prize of all, the legendary Vale of Kashmir. Pakistan controlled the regions of Gilgit and Baltistan, plus a sliver of southwestern Kashmir that India now refers to as Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK) and Pakistan calls Azad Kashmir (Free Kashmir). On the map, Azad Kashmir is a narrow tongue of land, at some points only fifteen miles across, whose shape is similar to that of the Wakhan Corridor, but with a north-south orientation. The demarcation between the two Kashmirs corresponds almost exactly to the final position of the battle lines when the military ceasefire was declared in January 1949. This 450-mile border, which starts near the Indian city of Jammu and cuts a diagonal, northeastward swath toward China, is known as the Line of Control (LOC).

In 1965 and again in 1971, India and Pakistan fought wars in Kashmir, both of which Pakistan lost. Then during the summer of 1989, a civil uprising exploded among ordinary Kashmiris who wanted independence from both India and Pakistan. Within months, the revolt had turned into a violent war that would eventually pit some sixty separate Islamic guerrilla groups against half a million Indian army troops and result in the deaths of more than thirty-six thousand people. Atrocities were committed on both sides. While Indian security forces detained, tortured, and executed civilians, Islamic militants who had been trained in Pakistan slipped across the border to attack Indian soldiers and carry out an assassination campaign against Hindu poets, judges, and social workers. The situation was not helped by the fact that twelve months earlier, Pakistan had conducted its first successful nuclear-weapons test.

Repression and reprisal followed one another until April 1999, when eight hundred Pakistan-supported militants launched a surprise attack across the Line of Control, seized a seventeen-thousand-foot ridge overlooking the cities of Kargil and Dras in India-controlled Kashmir, and began shelling a vital Indian military road that connects the cities of Srinagar and Leh. India responded with full force, and by early May there was heavy fighting along one hundred miles of the border. By July 4, when the Indian counterattack and pressure from the Clinton administration had forced Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif to back down, both sides had reportedly put their nuclear strike forces on alert, provoking President Clinton to declare Kashmir “the most dangerous place on earth.”

According to the United Nations, the final disposition of this disputed region--which has been pending for more than sixty years--is to be determined by a plebiscite among Kashmiri citizens, the majority of whom are still Muslim. Until that vote takes place and residents on both sides of the LOC are afforded the chance to exercise their UN-sanctioned right of self-determination, Kashmir is likely to remain inherently unstable and highly volatile.

By the time of the 2005 earthquake, Azad Kashmir had been closed to almost all foreigners for decades. As a result, despite having spent more than a dozen years living and working throughout Pakistan, I knew almost nothing about this place. The Central Asia Institute had no relationships, no connections, and no history in this part of the country. In short, we hadn't shared a single cup of tea in Azad Kashmir.

Given the magnitude of the disaster, however, the restrictions on foreign travel had been lifted overnight and NGOs from all over the world were now pouring into the area. So I suggested to Sarfraz that he should get back on the road and do his best to make his way into the eastern side of the damage zone, deep inside Azad Kashmir.

At this point, of course, neither Sarfraz nor I had ever heard of the Gundi Piran Girls' School--nor had we met Shaukat Ali Chaudry or Saida Shabir. But the events that would eventually draw all of us together had now been set in motion.

No Idea What to Do

When your heart speaks, take good notes.

--SUSAN CAMPBELL

Distribution point after earthquake, Neelum Valley, Pakistan

O
n October 15, Sarfraz again headed out of Islamabad, this time in the direction of Muzaffarabad, gateway to ground zero of the earthquake. The road he took proceeded east from Pakistan's capital and wound into the foothills past the idyllic summer resort of Murree, a former British hill station where lowlanders flee the Punjab's sweltering, humid heat in summer. From Murree, the road plunged down through a series of stunning canyons to the Kohala Bridge, which marks the entrance to the green hills of Azad Kashmir. Sarfraz was amazed to note that the Frontier Works Organization (FWO), Pakistan's military civil-engineering unit, had already managed to clear more than a dozen massive landslides and open the road. But upon rounding the bend into Muzaffarabad, which sits at the confluence of the Neelum and Jhelum rivers, he found himself confronted once again with the sort of carnage and suffering he had already witnessed in the Kaghan Valley.

Almost every structure in the city was cracked, leaning, or collapsed. Each street and alley was crowded with homeless, wandering, injured, or traumatized adults and children whose emotional stability was not helped by the numerous aftershocks. In every neighborhood, Pakistani army crews were sifting through wreckage searching for bodies and any possible survivors. People were milling everywhere, dazed and looking for food and water.

Sarfraz spent that first night in a sleeping bag on the sidewalk outside the Al-Abbas Hotel and Restaurant, which was perched on a cliff high above the Neelum River (and which the members of the Dirty Dozen would eventually dub the Crack Hotel on account of the massive vertical fissure that zigzagged down one side of the structure). The next day, as he moved about the city, he called me on his sat phone to report that there would be an inevitable bias toward concentrating most emergency supplies in Muzaffarabad in order to use the city as the staging area for the whole region. This, Sarfraz went on to explain, was good news to the residents of Muzaffarabad; but it would offer little comfort to the 2.5 million displaced people in the surrounding valleys and hillsides who were cut off from most contact with the outside world.

After laying this out, Sarfraz proposed that he head northeast in an effort to reach the most remote villages along the most distant reaches of the Neelum Valley, a 150-mile-long gorge carved by the Neelum River, which is named after the color of the rubies that can be mined at various points along its folds, and which once served as one of the world's most important centers of Buddhism. Thanks to its precipitous canyon walls and the fact that it had received some of the heaviest Indian artillery shelling during the past two decades, the Neelum qualified as perhaps the most underserved district in all of Azad Kashmir. By virtue of these attributes, argued Sarfraz, this was probably where we would want to target our work. (Although we didn't know this at the time, more than 10 percent of the valley's 140,000 residents had perished in the earthquake, and the majority of these victims were schoolchildren.)

I told him I agreed completely, and I wished him luck.

Sarfraz had hired a car to bring him this far, but when he saw the condition of the road beyond Muzaffarabad, he sent the driver back to Islamabad and continued on foot, carrying several bottles of water, his sleeping bag, and a package of salted crackers. The road up the Neelum Valley was blocked by dozens of landslides, and in some areas entire slabs of mountain had crashed into the river.

As he threaded his way through the mud and the debris, everyone whom he spoke to had a story, and every story was tragic. Without exception, each person he encountered had lost at least one close relative, usually more. Anyone who had been inside a building was lucky to be alive, although most of them had lost all of their worldly possessions. It seemed like nearly everyone was limping or had a field dressing that was matted with dried blood. Men and women either carried two or three children on their backs or pushed their families along in a wheel-barrow. With his sleeping bag and his package of biscuits, Sarfraz qualified as a man of enviable riches.

That night, while sleeping under a smashed truck, he called me on his sat phone. “The roads are filled with people: people walking, people looking for food, people crying,” he reported. “It is very bad everywhere. When it is dark and when nobody is looking, even I start to cry.”

Most natural disasters are followed by a high degree of chaos, and the first goal of the authorities is to try systematically to reduce that chaos. But in Azad Kashmir during the second week of October, things only seemed to become more confused and more disorganized with each passing day. Within forty-eight hours, the only two roads leading from Islamabad into the devastated valleys to the north were jammed with every kind of conveyance, including donkey, bicycles, and rickshaws, as relatives and friends poured into the province in the hope of finding loved ones. From all across Pakistan, well-intentioned volunteers were now rushing into the mountains to offer assistance. As a result, the few stretches of highway that had not already been blocked by landslides were now hopelessly gridlocked. At one point, the Pakistani army began bulldozing vehicles off the road in order to get the flow of traffic going.

Adding to the confusion was the flurry of international assistance that was converging on the stricken region. The international NGOs needed a plethora of ancillary support, including Land Cruisers, kitchens, generators, remote servers for their laptops, mineral water, and much more. In order to facilitate the flow of humanitarian and medical aid, five crossing points along the LOC between India and Pakistan had been opened--but these thoroughfares were soon bottlenecked as aid teams began arriving from around the world. Twelve days after the quake, the Pakistani government still had not reached 20 percent of the damaged areas. Two weeks after that, the U.N. World Food Program would estimate that five hundred thousand people still had not received any aid at all. By the middle of November, more than three million refugees would be huddling in the mountains without shelter or adequate food on the threshold of the winter.

As Sarfraz headed north, hiking first from Muzaffarabad to Patika and then proceeding for seventeen hours from Patika to the village of Nousada, he could see that in many places the landslides that had destroyed the roads had also obliterated entire communities. Ten miles north of Muzaffarabad, for example, lay the Kamsar refugee camp, home to about a thousand Muslim refugees from India-controlled Kashmir who had been living there since 1992. The camp had been situated on a narrow bench approximately two thousand feet above the Neelum River; during the quake, half of the settlement had broken off the hillside and plunged into the gorge, taking with it more than three hundred of the camp's residents. The buildings on the portion of the bench that remained intact had all been destroyed, rendering the seven hundred survivors refugees twice over.

Three days after leaving Muzaffarabad, Sarfraz reached the village of Nouseri, where every house had been obliterated and people were wandering the trail in rags, still unable to fathom what had taken place and having not the faintest notion of where or how to begin rebuilding their lives. Eight miles farther on, in the tiny hamlet of Pakrat, he met a woman named Alima whose husband and two children had perished in the quake. She was squatting atop a wooden bed outside the remains of her home, staring blankly at a sheaf of papers. These were the official documents that she was supposed to fill out in order to qualify for a government disbursement of cash. In addition to being immobilized by her despondency, Alima was illiterate.

“I asked the fauji havildar (army sargeant) for help,” she said to Sarfraz, “and all he gave me was this piece of paper--and when I started to complain and ask for food, he told me to go away or he would beat me with his stick. This paper is not even food enough for a dog.”

Alima's predicament struck Sarfraz as twisted and surreal, a kind of satire of cruelty. The forms that she was supposed to fill out featured a slew of questions to which she had no answer, including the place and date of her birth, her age, and her national identification number.

“How is a woman like this ever going to survive?” he exclaimed that night on the sat phone. “Everywhere I am looking, there are dead bodies, and the people who are not dead act like they are dead. This is too much. No one has any idea of what to do.”

Sarfraz is a resilient man who has lived a challenging life, but the scenes he was encountering in Azad Kashmir were beginning to grind him down. Each night, his report to me was depressingly the same. In every direction, from every angle, the world seemed to be filled with chaos and despair.

One of the few bright spots to which Sarfraz could point during his reconnaissance trips involved Operation Lifeline, an internationally organized effort to transport emergency supplies via helicopter into isolated villages and towns all across Azad Kashmir. This mission included several choppers provided by the British and the Germans, along with a number of Pakistan's own Soviet-era Mi-17 helicopters. The heart and soul of the operation, however, involved fourteen American Chinooks flown by an Army Reserve unit from Olathe, Kansas. These machines, along with their two hundred pilots and support crew, were the unsung heroes of the early relief effort.

The Chinooks had flown in straight from the war in Afghanistan within two days of the quake, and their first mission involved ferrying bulldozers, trucks, and other heavy equipment necessary to rebuild the main roads, while using their return flights to evacuate the severely injured. Later, they hauled tents, roofing materials, medical supplies, flour, cement, baby formula, and anything else that might be needed--including a special consignment of sewing machines. The 6,000 tons of material that the helicopters delivered in the first three months following the earthquake--one of the most massive helicopter airlifts ever conducted--was eventually credited with keeping half a million people alive over the ensuing winter.

As the choppers penetrated ever deeper into the damage zone, their fame increased, and eventually the toys that were most coveted by the children of Azad Kashmir were little plastic helicopters. Everyone loved the Chinooks and their crews, who were invariably greeted with waves and cheers and, of course, hordes of kids. Sarfraz talked to some of the pilots and learned that those who had served in Iraq could not believe that the people of Pakistan actually liked them. In the coming years, many of these pilots and their crew members would look back upon those weeks as the highlight of their military careers.

As the Chinooks delivered their payloads of heavy equipment and as the traffic jams were sorted out, the roads gradually began to open up. By the middle of October, Sarfraz reported that Muzaffarabad had become command central for the entire relief effort as the big international aid organizations--UNICEF, Oxfam, the Red Cross, CARE, the Red Crescent Society, and more than a dozen others--erected satellite dishes, set up computer banks, and began stockpiling supplies. But “upside” in the more remote communities, there was little evidence of this progress, which created a troubling dichotomy. In downtown Muzaffarabad, for example, Sarfraz saw six large emergency field hospitals lined up in a row, each equipped with generators and surgical supplies. A village only ten miles away, however, might have received absolutely nothing. Six months after the earthquake--in some instances even a year later--Sarfraz was still hearing about villages that had not received a single ounce of aid.

Another problem was lack of coordination. In the earliest weeks of the catastrophe, the supplies that were flown in by helicopter were distributed almost randomly. Whenever a helicopter began heading up a valley, everyone could hear it coming, and the race was on. The supplies were distributed on a first-come-first-served basis, and many of the scenes that unfolded on the chopper landing zones were quite unpleasant. In some areas, a refugee camp stocked with tents, clothes, and food would simply materialize--courtesy of the Chinooks--and thousands of people would rush in to grab what they could. A week later, another camp might be set up four miles away, and everyone would rush there. Amid the “every man for himself” atmosphere, some people enjoyed a windfall while others wound up with nothing.

By the end of October, Sarfraz was also starting to notice an odd gap between what was being delivered and what people actually needed. A number of outdoor manufacturers from the United States, for example, had donated impressive quantities of high-tech mountaineering tents made with synthetic fabrics that are highly flammable. As the weather turned cold, these tents became crammed with families who relied on candles and kerosene lanterns for illumination and who prepared their meals on cooking fires directly outside the front flap. Many of these tents ended up catching fire, resulting in horrific burns and several deaths, especially among children. In retrospect, low-tech, heavy-duty canvas shelters would have been more effective and less dangerous.

A notable exception to this trend were the “home-rebuilding kits” donated by the Turkish government after significant consultation with refugees on the ground. The kits, which Turkish officials purchased in Pakistan, consisted of hammers, nails, shovels, saws, wire, corrugated sheet metal, and other essential building items so that people could fashion temporary shelters in their own villages instead of packing up and moving to a refugee camp. When I later asked people in Azad Kashmir what had benefited them the most during the aftermath of the earthquake, the reply was fairly consistent: getting the roads reopened and the Turkish home-construction kits.

By early November, Sarfraz was starting to see groups of women who would bundle up huge bales of donated clothing-- expensive waterproof parkas, pants, and bibs--and set them on fire to heat water or for cooking. It turned out that what these women really needed was an efficient source of cooking fuel, and without a steady supply of kerosene or propane, they were forced to prepare their families' meals over fires made from The North Face, Patagonia, and Mountain Hardwear gear.