Small Wars Permitting Read online

  SMALL WARS PERMITTING

  Dispatches from Foreign Lands

  CHRISTINA LAMB

  In memory of Wais Faizi,

  and all the many people like him all over

  the world on whom we journalists depend

  Contents

  Prologue: The Plane to Kish Island

  Where It Began: Invitation to a Wedding

  How Many Wars Have You Covered?

  Death of a General

  The Last Happy Nation

  Dictators and Dinghies: Journeys in Latin America

  The Rise and Fall of Fernando Collor

  The Tarantula Crossing the Street

  Love Intervenes

  To the City of Gold – via Baghdad

  You Never Know When You Might Need a Wailer

  Yes, I Was a Cynic until I Met Her – Diana

  A Zanzibari Wedding

  Tea with Pinochet

  A Day Trip to Lagos – the Sad Story of Damilola Taylor

  A Short Arrest in the Ivory Coast

  9/11 – Back to Where It Started

  All Roads Lead to Pakistan

  War in Iraq with a Dolphin-tamer

  The Last Summer in Baghdad

  Saddam Stole Our Water

  An Afghan Asks Why

  The Madness of Mugabe

  Where’s bin Laden?

  ‘Have You Ever Used a Pistol?’

  ‘It was what we feared, but dared not to happen’

  PS In Memoriam

  Acknowledgements

  Index of Articles

  Read On…

  ‘Goodbye,’ said the fox to the Little Prince. ‘And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can rightly see; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’

  ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPéRY

  Prologue: The Plane to Kish Island

  Here is a typical morning in my life. It happens to be Sunday, 2 July 2006 and it is the day of my son’s seventh birthday party.

  I arrived back on a plane early this morning from Afghanistan. At Heathrow I am one of the lucky people greeted by a name board: for the first time ever my newspaper has arranged a car to pick me up. London has a grey hung-over gloom and St George’s flags droop forlornly from windows. The driver tells me that England was knocked out of the World Cup by Portugal the night before. Penalties, of course: I needn’t ask.

  After dropping off my bags at home along with some Starbucks croissants from the airport, and drinking my first decent cup of tea in a month, we drive to Sainsbury’s to buy ham and sliced bread. I have to make ham sandwiches for twenty 7-year-olds.

  I make twice as many as anyone will eat, buttering slice after slice of bread with great purpose. Then I take them and a cool box of drinks to nearby Palewell Park where we are having a football party.

  Some of the children at the party are pointing at me and whispering. They have seen me on the news or the front page of the Sunday Times that morning and know that four days ago I was almost killed by Taliban – the ‘baddies’ I hear one of them explain.

  My mother is there, looking shocked, though I had phoned from Heathrow to warn her before she bought the paper. My husband, who is Portuguese, has said nothing.

  This, after all, is what I do.

  It is a sunny afternoon and I throw myself into arranging children’s drinks and ice creams and acting supremely unbothered. I want to keep hugging the blue-eyed birthday boy who I thought I would never see again but I know he will regard that as ‘embarrassment-making’. My phone beeps insistently with text messages – a bizarre mix of horrified concern from those who have seen the story in the paper and jokes about the state of my marriage after the Portugal–England match from those who haven’t.

  My jeans and long printed smock are covering cuts, bruises, burns and thorns that I will still be picking out in six months. Some of them are infected and in a few days I will go to a local GP who will say, ‘You have been in the wars,’ and I will laugh and let him assume I fell off my bike into a thorn bush.

  I have spent twenty years living on the edge. I have been pinned down by Russian tanks in a trench in Kandahar, narrowly missed a brick that smashed through my car windscreen on the West Bank, navigated through roadblocks manned by red-eyed drug-crazed boys with Kalashnikovs in West Africa, been kidnapped in the middle of the night by Pakistani intelligence, survived car crashes and emer-gency landings in planes held together by tape, and come under sniper fire in Iraq. All around me people have died. My life, I believe, is charmed.

  Now I have come as close as possible to being killed. The British paratroopers with whom I was ambushed were so convinced we were about to be ‘rolled up’ that they talked of saving their last bullets for themselves. In that ditch surrounded on all sides by Taliban with mortars, RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) and Kalashnikovs, for the first time I really believed I would die. And I swore if I ever got out I would never go back.

  Two months later, I will grab the bag with my flak jacket, helmet, medical kit and satellite phone and be back on a plane to Afghanistan.

  Why do it? Every day I run away from that question.

  I am not an alcoholic, a heroin addict, or from a broken home. I am a mother of a gorgeous curly-haired boy, wife of a loving husband, daughter of devoted parents, part of a close circle of friends…I have no excuses.

  I could tell you it’s a search for truth. A hope that by exposing the evils and injustices of the world I can help make it a better place. Sadly, the pen is not that mighty or else the likes of Mugabe would not still be in power.

  I could tell you that when I was a child I loved to read the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson and turn the sheets hanging on the washing line into doors on to faraway places. One of our neighbours had an apple tree that served just as well as Stevenson’s cherry tree for climbing up and looking ‘abroad on foreign lands’.

  I could tell you that I felt suffocated by suburbia, living in a place called Carshalton Beeches where the only excitement was to go ‘up the wine bar’ or ‘down the pub’. Adventure was missing the last train from London and having to take a series of night buses from Trafalgar Square.

  I could tell you that I adored Hemingway and wanted to run with the bulls in Spain, watch big game among the green hills of Africa (though not hunt it), drink mojitos in bars in old Havana and find love behind the lines.

  I could tell you that once you see others die and evils such as boys turned into killing machines with AK-47s, or families forced to bury stick-limbed girls because they could not afford HIV drugs, one’s own life becomes pretty insignificant.

  I could tell you that there is nothing more thrilling than getting on a plane to somewhere you have never been, particularly with a name like Bujumbura or Cochabamba. That used to be true but these days endless security queues have spoiled the magic of airports.

  Maybe the truth lies in Dubai Terminal 2. That’s where you go to catch planes to the bad places. The destination board reads Kabul, Baghdad, Mogadishu and the airlines have names you’ve never heard of like Chelyabinsk Airlines, Don Airlines, Kam Air, Ossetia, Mahan Air and Samara Airlines. These are airlines so dodgy that they are not allowed to land at the proper airport. Many, like Ariana Afghan Airlines or Reem Air of Kyrgyzstan, are on a list banning them from European airspace and describing them as ‘flying coffins’. Their planes are old Tupolevs bought second or third hand from Aeroflot or Air India.

  The name, Terminal 2, makes it sound as if it is attached to the main airport but in fact it lies a half-hour’s taxi ride away. It seems in another country entirely to that gleaming glass temple to capitalism where Arabs in white dishdash and sunburnt passengers in shorts and miniskirts shop for Rolex watches and Fendi
handbags and buy $100 lottery tickets to win a Jaguar X-type.

  At Terminal 2 there is just one shop and people stock up on Mars Bars, tampons and biscuits, for they don’t know what will be available at the other end. Mostly they are bounty hunters, Afghan money-changers, aid workers, private security guards and journalists. Instead of smart shiny suitcases they have battered kitbags and rucksacks, black plastic crates of survival equipment, or, in the case of the Afghans, large cloth bundles. The ones with briefcases are consultants, being paid thousands of dollars for something called ‘capacity building’, but they will get on a special United Nations plane. Sometimes there are dead bodies being flown back from comfortable exile to be buried in harsh homelands.

  Most people have grimly resigned expressions, particularly if like me they are flying Ariana. For the airlines of Terminal 2 departure times mean nothing and it is common to turn up day after day before a plane finally arrives. Besides we all know that the Ariana pilots prefer staying in Dubai to piloting their ‘coffins’ back to a destroyed country. We debate with those holding Kam tickets whether it’s safer to fly with an airline that has already crashed or one that always seems about to crash. Passengers that make a fuss and try to find non-existent airline representatives are exposed as newcomers.

  Some might be committed do-gooders; others are only doing it for money. ‘George Bush has paid off thousands of mortgages,’ says a Scottish ex-para on his way to be a $1,000-a-day security consultant in Afghanistan after a long stint in Iraq.

  But there are a few that have a look on their face that I recognise. It’s a sort of suburban restlessness. Not in a grass-is-always-greener kind of way: but a search for adventure.

  These are the people whose eyes light up when they see the name Kish appear on the destination board. Where is that? Kish Island in Iran, someone tells me. It sounds intriguing. I know I will try to go there. It will mean flying Kish Air which last crashed two years ago.

  Biographers of Alexander the Great used the Greek word pothos to describe his endless yearning to be somewhere else, whether it was to cross the Danube, go to the oracle of Ammon, sail the ocean, see the Persian Gulf or untie the legendary knot at Gordium.

  I liked that description. But then I read that the longing for something unattainable expressed by pothos could also signify a desire to die. For pothos is also the name for delphiniums, the flowers that Greeks traditionally placed on someone’s tomb.

  I never set out to be brave or daring or intrepid or any of those labels often attached to the title ‘war correspondent’. What I wanted to be is a storyteller. I have been lucky enough to live in countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Europe at a time of huge upheaval when the world was adjusting from the cold war to a whole new war of terrorist attacks and suicide bombs.

  To me the real story in war is not the bang-bang but the lives of those trying to survive behind the lines. Working for a weekly paper has given me the luxury of time to be able to go behind the lines where other reporters don’t and tell the stories of the forgotten. Sometimes the story behind the article is more interesting than what appeared on the printed page, and where that is so I have tried to include it.

  This book then is not an attempt to answer the question why, but a record of what I have seen as it is. It is a mixture of memories, articles and impressions jotted in notebooks and diaries. These are my places of hope and despair.

  London, October 2007

  Where It Began: Invitation to a Wedding

  Pakistan 1987–1989

  I am lying in bed in Karachi. The air is damp and sticky and I am breathing in the headachy smell of jasmine. White and crimson petals are falling over me. Bollywood film stars, politicians and khans are flitting around like shadow dancers. Delicate henna flowers and blossoms twist across both sides of my hands and over my feet, and fireworks explode into showers of red and white stars in the sky.

  It is very hot. Several times in the night I had to put my sheet under the cold water tap to cool myself down.

  In and out of consciousness I drift, peacock colours flashing before my eyes. At the edges of my slumber I am dimly aware of a man shouting and drumming. The sound is growing louder and louder and my henna-painted palms itch until I can resist no longer. I open the curtains and blink at the yellow morning sun over Clifton beach, a sun that at 8 a.m. is already blurred round the edges and throbbing ominously. On the seafront is a tattered monkey in a red fez, banging a drum while its owner jerks a chain round its neck to make it dance. Beyond, a line of camels bobs slowly up and down along the sand and a group of women in long baggy pyjamas are dipping their toes in the Arabian Sea.

  It is day three of the wedding celebrations of Benazir Bhutto and my life has just changed for ever.

  Only a few days earlier I was in drizzly Birmingham, blinking back tears as I drove round and round Spaghetti Junction in my electric-blue Morris Marina. I was trying to find the turn-off for the Bullring, the

  most depressing shopping centre in Britain, a hulk of concrete in a web of ring roads. Inside, most of the shops were either closed down or closing down and two local firemen were trying to beat the world record for the number of days wearing gas masks. I was interviewing them for Central TV where I was a trainee reporter. Once the cameraman, sound man and sparks (lights man) had all arrived (separately, so as to each claim mileage allowance), we got under way. The report was supposed to be funny, the firemen’s answers distorted by their masks. However, it was so cold that the camera battery kept seizing up, forcing us to start all over again. By the fifth take even the firemen were looking bored.

  Actually that was a good day. As the most junior person in the Central newsroom, I often spent mornings going through the tabloids checking out stories in our patch and discovering half were not true. Worst of all were the door-knocks. Our area encompassed both the M1 and M6 motorways where young people were often killed in drink-driving accidents and there was nothing harder than knocking on the doors of their families and asking for a photo.

  So it is that on that December morning in 1987 when I look out on Clifton beach, a huge grin spreads across my face. Later that day, I walk along the promenade to the green-domed shrine to Abdullah Shah Ghazi, an eighth-century mystic regarded as Karachi’s patron saint. There, I pay a few rupees to a man with a scrawny parakeet for it to pick me tarot cards. ‘You will be back within a year,’ he predicts. I manage to get through to the international operator and make a reverse-charge call to the Financial Times in London. They put me through to something called Copy where a very nice lady tells me not to speak so fast. It is my first report as a foreign correspondent.

  Bhutto the bride

  Financial Times, 19 December 1987

  THERE’S A STORY going round Karachi at the moment of a wedding so successful that the gifts had to be carried away in trucks. But over the past few weeks gold cards have been landing on doormats around the world inviting people to a wedding destined to outdo them all.

  Invitations to the public reception are in such demand that fortunes have been made forging them, while one man in Punjab set himself alight because he could not afford the train fare.

  The five-star hotels are full; the tailors are working day and night to create visions in spun gold. Like a huge Christmas tree, 70 Clifton Road is festooned with lights. Inside, preparations and festivities have been under way all week. For this is no ordinary wedding. The lights are red, white and green – the colours of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). And Pinkie, as the bride is affectionately known, is more familiar as Benazir Bhutto, leader of the opposition People’s Party and daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the former Prime Minister hanged in 1979.

  Inside the women’s quarters, the pressure is intense. Weddings are a matter of face here and families will go without food and spend much of their lives in debt to give their daughters a good send-off. The average wage is £50 a month, yet parents spend £100 a time on gold-threaded dresses for the bride’s troussea
u that will probably end life as cushion covers.

  Benazir’s landed family is far from poor and her husband-to-be is from one of the twenty-two families which once owned two-thirds of Pakistan. He has already given her a heart-shaped ring of diamonds and sapphires and sends her roses every day. But the would-be prime minister is locked in a battle with an array of aunties dismayed at her refusal to accept the traditional trousseau from the groom’s family. Instead of the twenty-one to fifty-one sets of clothes usually presented to the bride, Benazir has set the limit at two. As for the gold bangles that brides are supposed to wear all the way up each arm from wrist to elbow, she says she will wear glass. When Auntie Behjat complains this will bring shame on the family, Benazir protests, ‘I am a leader, I must set an example to my people.’ For once her voice is ignored. Every day more and more presents arrive at the gate: embroidered shawls, platters of sweets, fruits and almonds dipped in silver and gold.

  Benazir is a fanatical perfectionist and her assistants are well aware that the eyes of the world are focused on their efforts. But, they complain, she will keep slipping out to the office when traditionally she should spend this week in purdah – behind a veil and inside four walls and wearing yellow clothes and no make-up so as not to attract the evil eye. ‘I don’t have time for this,’ she protests.