Deep Field (8 page)

Most of the supporters were armed—and politics, despite the gentlemanly conduct in front of the returning officer, was highly factional. I looked at Imran and he produced a small envelope we had been given before we left Islamabad on our mission. ‘Only open this if there is a serious problem,’ we had been told. It seemed to us that being surrounded by armed and angry supporters of a candidate who had just discovered the obvious and overt extent of electoral rigging constituted such a scenario. Imran tore open the envelope and produced a small card:
In case of emergency ring the duty manager in Brussels during working hours
. AK-47 shots were fired—whether in anger or in triumph—into the night.

WHILE AID HAD POURED
in for the earthquake, a year later a smaller but in many ways nastier emergency presented itself. I had stayed on through the summer in Pakistan after the first earthquake and had continued to work with aid agencies on the longer-term humanitarian and recovery efforts. I had witnessed the frenetic activity of the first response, followed by a gradual diminishing of the aid effort as the weather slowly improved. Aid agencies had left along with their resources and personnel and with them, the vast amounts of information and intimate knowledge of the small villages and hamlets of Pakistan’s North seeped away—lost to the grinding juggernaut of official long-term development planning. The imperatives of immediate practical action had given way to the bigger politics of reconstruction loans, strategies and policies that were negotiated not from small towns but in distant centres of political and economic power in Washington, Brussels and Islamabad. Eager to demonstrate that normality had returned and the recovery effort was well underway, the government had put a freeze on emergency shelter programs, and donors had largely drifted away. This left World Bank consultants to develop outlandish plans for earthquake-resistant houses made from reinforced concrete and brick, in the mountains where people had traditionally used only mud and timber—a plan met with great enthusiasm by Pakistan’s military government, whose retired generals and officers managed the country’s army-owned construction and engineering companies. Earthquake reconstruction promised to be an economic boon if billions in reconstruction funds based on plans hatched in Washington and Islamabad were to go ahead.

Many of the people displaced by the earthquake had returned home, but a small population of about 40,000 people remained in residual camps across the North West Frontier and Kashmir. There had been significant government pressure for them to leave, out of a totally misplaced fear of ‘aid dependency’ and conviction that the authorities had the situation in hand. It was often a case of disappearing camps—monitoring teams would report that a site they had visited the day before, a thriving community, had been bulldozed and no one knew where the people had gone. Despite repeated calls for a more cooperative response to the residual camps, allowing people time and giving them information about their options (if there were any), the pace of camp destruction continued. My counterpart, the Commissioner for Camps, was normally the Commissioner for Afghan Refugees, a position that afforded him considerable influence over trade between the two countries, and he was keen to return to his more lucrative day job. For him, the residuals were both a blot on the relief effort and an impediment to obtaining greater riches.

I had grown to like the camps, and would sometimes walk through the nearest ones at night when I had finished work or needed a break. Although they were crowded with people housed in poor-quality tents, I found something almost reassuring about passing through the nightly rituals of family life after the frenetic work of the day. Fires were lit, lights were on, people talked in the warmth of the evening and fascinatingly, for a country in which domestic life is so closed to anyone beyond the immediate extended family, they offered me the chance to glimpse behind the scenes.

But another emergency was waiting. The camps and the tents had been put up quickly following the earthquake, and a year later people still lived under the now-worn canvas. In Australia, for people to still be living under canvas more than a few days after a major disaster was seen as a failure of the state response, but in Pakistan families of five to seven people had been living in tents for almost twelve months. While most had tried to go back, these people could not—entire villages had been swept away in a deluge of earth and there were no homes to return to; some were tenants who no longer had land tenure, others had had their livelihoods or farmlands destroyed. These were no malingerers, and in any case the camps were no place to stay if there was any other viable option. Those in the decrepit residual camps now faced a second winter under canvas with even less than they’d had during the immediate emergency response, and with a freeze on further relief activity. The apparent pleasures of family life on long summer evenings were a temporary reprieve: in a few months’ time the camp would become water-logged mud pits with shelters that could not conceivably withstand the harshness of the Himalayan winter.

One of the frequent visitors to our office was a representative from a small Italian education NGO that was providing food, shelter and ongoing education to children who had lost everything—a vital attempt to stave off the longer-term loss of opportunity and ‘development gains’ that disasters bring in their wake. In her perfect Italian-inflected English, my friend Alberta would storm in and demand, ‘What about the children?’ I tried to help by supplying her NGO with the relief provisions we had—clothes, blankets, roofing materials, tents, hygiene kits, water purifiers, anything that we could provide. But it was difficult—response is in many ways an economy of scale and, collectively, we were trying to assist 700,000 people across the North West Frontier. While drawing up relief distribution plans for hundreds of thousands of items, Alberta’s requests were very specific. When a shipment of 50,000 sets of assorted children’s clothes came through, Alberta appeared in the office.

‘I want thirty-four,’ she said adamantly.

‘For fuck’s sake, Alberta,’ I intemperately replied, ‘can’t you at least take five hundred?’

The average family size was estimated at 7.44 and we were aiming for ‘coverage’ of the entire population, which did not generally cater for specific needs. But she insisted, rightly, and putting the dictates of the majority aside we packed and repacked until she had the exact number.

Possibly the worst moments in the battle between generic large-scale response and individual needs was when people would come to our door with petitions. Often these were damp, stained, handwritten notes with stories of personal tragedy or lists of households and family names of people who had lost their homes. Some we were able to re-direct but others were turned away.

‘I’m sorry but we can’t help individuals,’ I was told. ‘They need at least to be assessed.’ There were genuine fears that if we stared handing out relief items there were thousands more people who could appear at our gate and we would have no means of responding. Human misery, as always, appears between systemic cracks.

When serving the interests of a majority—the ‘target population for coverage’, in humanitarian jargon—some individual cases became emblematic of the situation. We heard reports of a girl who had a broken spine and was lying in a tent in an unspecified location in Pakistan’s North. The story was repeated and shocked everyone. The Pakistan Army commander for the response in the North West Frontier province even cried at a public meeting when he heard it, and army units were dispatched to locate her. A German medical team scoured the district but, while the story had been vivid in its depiction of suffering, it was vague on specifics. Who was this girl? Where were her parents? Where, in fact, was she? In the end we concluded that the story was probably an unsubstantiated rumour but somehow it captured the worst fear of responders—that in trying to reach everyone, numbers became more important than names and real needs could be missed. By the end of the winter there was 97 per cent ‘coverage’ and no ‘reported incidence of increased morbidity’ as a consequence of the earthquake. ‘These mountain people are tough’ was a common refrain in the aid community, but was this resilience or was life just incredibly tenuous in Himalayan poverty at the best of times?

Strangely, for relaxation during those precious few hours after work I would sit in my room in front of a two-bar electric heater and read Primo Levi—an Italian chemist who applied his scientific brilliance to describing the fundamental elements of human experience of Auschwitz in his piercing accounts that conveyed both manufactured hell and moments of humanity.
If This Is A Man, The Periodic Table of the Elements
and
Moments of Reprieve
, disturbing enough in themselves, were books that found a very remote echo in their reflections on chaos, carnage and reprieve in the destruction and freezing conditions of northern Pakistan, where I first read them.

Somehow the books began to make sense in that context, and the context began to make sense from the books. As things began to settle into some sort of a routine during the response, we would call it a day at around nine in the evening and head off to find what privacy and silence we could in search of solace from the endlessly urgent and competing demands of the day. I had just heard that my university thesis had been accepted for publication and, after staring intently into the glowing radiator bars for half an hour, I would switch on my computer again and start reading and editing my work on Andrey Bely—an obscure, experimental, and somewhat anarchic Russian author. Plot and narrative were dispensed with in his works: characters represented only by their salient features (an ambulant nose, a feather boa) would move in and out of the chapters, while the language itself had been written so as to emulate the ticking of a time bomb that would eventually blow up St Petersburg and with it the ordered and linear streetscape of the rationally organised state. While this had seemed intriguing, if bizarre, when viewed from the British Library where I wrote my thesis, these descriptions strangely seemed to make sense in Pakistan. Cities had literally been destroyed and the fractured, disconnected prose of this experimental novel, which had initially made it almost unreadable, actually began to take on new meaning. In the destruction of the earthquake the rationally organised state was nowhere to be seen, while moments of continuity and recovery carried the absurdity of fleeting encounters whose own salient features remained etched in my mind, such as the orange sellers setting up brightly coloured stalls in the ruined city of Balakot. Such images would continue throughout my career, like the bottles of Coke kept cool in holes in the ground in Darfur.

A week’s mandatory rest and recreation, coincidentally in Germany, compounded the sense of alienation in catastrophe. Despite the elegance and solidity of the country’s reconstructed cities, every corner of every square seemed to have been annotated with the memorials of crimes past. At one stage, finding a corner of Berlin near the Humboldt University in the (appropriately renamed) Bebelplatz, I stood in the sun and looked for a moment at the attractive view of neoclassical buildings dominating the square. This was an illusory moment of tranquillity, as I soon realised I was standing over a glass paving stone under which stood an empty white bookshelf—the very place where the Nazi regime had burned ‘un-German’ books more than seventy years earlier. Unable to escape from either the reality or the collective memory of death and destruction, I got on the next train and fled to Belgium—an artificial buffer state between the European powers and itself the product of European conflict: a cartographic attempt to discourage wars between France and Germany. A short stroll the next day down the imposing grandeur of the Avenue des Colonies, built from the profits of King Leopold’s peculiarly brutal nineteenth-century occupation of the Congo, immediately put paid to my hope of finding somewhere not contaminated by violence. Thinking, for some reason, that I might find this escape on a tour of the Royal Palace, I soon found myself in the Hall of Mirrors gazing at another massacre: an enormous insect-like chandelier and ceiling decoration constructed from the phosphorescent wings plucked from 1.6 million
Buprestidae
beetles. These were quite common and not an endangered species, according to the information plaque in the hall, but this claim seemed unlikely given the aestheticised scale of this entomological carnage.

I couldn’t wait to get back to Pakistan and was not sure what was more disquieting—the monuments to savagery in a European ‘dark continent’ or the contemporary state of crisis in which I lived. At the very least, while Europe seemed in constant mourning over its appalling wars, in Pakistan, at the time, there was a humanitarian moment caused by the shock of the earthquake—a random calamity rather than the deliberate and genocidal expansionist ambitions of states. Everyone was taken totally by surprise, and there was a brief sense of common purpose to do something urgently, even as calculations of political interest and influence to be gained from the disaster began to brew.