He took the lives away from Botan, Farzana, Abid, GulRukh and Mohammad. Our colleagues and friends.

Botan Al-Hayawi (41) was Iraqi. He leaves behind a wife, two sons and a daughter. Botan was on mission in Peshawar when suicide bombers blew up the Pearl Continental Hotel in June. I met Botan several times back in 2002 and 2003 when I worked in Iraq.

Yesterday, Botan posted something on the Interagency ICT discussion forum:

I arrived to Islamabad last Monday morning with a busy day planned. I had just returned to Islamabad after recovering from the Peshawar blast on June 9th, 2009, which left me with some minor injuries but did not break my spirit.

He wrote this less than 24 hours before someone took his life away.

Farzana Barkat (22) was an office assistant. She worked in our logistics office, right next to where the suicide bomber blew himself up. A young woman at the start of her life.

Abid Rehman (41) was our senior finance assistant. He leaves a wife, two daughters and two sons. I worked with Abid when I was based in Islamabad from 2000 to 2002. We always exchanged friendly and teasing jokes as I stretched the finance unit with my urgent requests.

GulRukh Tahir (40) was our receptionist. She leaves behind a husband.

Mohammad Wahab (44) was our finance assistant. He leaves a wife, two daughters and two sons.

I am a bit numb at this moment. I think back of all the people I have known, and who lost their lives in the line of duty. Abby, Saskia, Pero, M.….

I think how it is possible to be close to those we want to serve, without having to isolate ourselves with barbed wire and sand bags. I think how we can still work in places we are still needed, but know we are at risk. Algeria, where our offices were bombed in 2007. Somalia, where we lost two colleagues earlier this year. Sudan, where we lost several drivers over the past years… Only to name a few.

It is strange.. It is only after the hours go by that the cruelty and the reality of the act today really seeps through… And the consciousness that if we are to work in a higher risk environment, there actually is not one place, where one is totally safe. Where would that be? In the office? They drive a truck through the gates and blow it up. In the guesthouse or the hotel? Same thing…
You can restrict the movements of staff and reduce field visits to minimize the risk, you can drive armoured cars – as we do in some operations – but then again, what holds them from blowing up an anti-tank mine underneath your vehicle as you stop in front of the traffic lights? What holds anyone from gunning you down when you get out of the car. Even when you think you are safe in the office compound.

Security for humanitarian workers has been more and more restrictive on what and how we can do our work. “Protecting ourselves” is a must. But how far does that conflict with being able to do our work, which entails having direct contact with those we serve? Should we all pack and go home?

I do not know the answers. I know one thing. This is not a happy birthday for me…

This song keeps on playing in my mind…

Picture courtesy The Nation

During major humanitarian crises, 13 British charities often raise money jointly under an umbrella organisation called the Disasters Emergencies Committee (DEC), with appeals shown on all the major television networks.

But the DEC had its fingers burned when the BBC and Sky decline to cooperate on its last appeal for the Gaza conflict, fearing the media’s involvement would compromise their political neutrality as news organisations, a story we reported previously on The Road.

The consequence of the BBC’s Gaza decision seems to have a deeper impact then we anticipated: it was a precedent of how the media could “make or break” a humanitarian appeal effort. The Gaza media incident spilled over into the current humanitarian catastrophes in Sri Lanka and Pakistan as now DEC is still contemplating whether or not to launch appeals for Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

“The issue is whether the broadcasters will support an appeal and my impression is that they won’t, for perceived reasons of (aid) access in either case, and for perceived reasons of political complexity in either case.” (Full)

So, let me get this straight: because the media decide not to provide coverage for an appeal, a humanitarian organisation decides NOT to launch an appeal? Eh? Would that make DEC’s decision not to appeal for Sri Lanka and Pakistan as revolting as the BBC’s decision not to provide media coverage for the appeal? Are soon humanitarian organisations ‘picking and choosing’ which operations to support, based on ‘the possible support by the media’?

Current balance: Humanitarian organisations’ resources already stretched because of the current economic crisis, are left close to depleted. Not because the need was not there – Pakistan’s war in Swat Valley uprooted close to 3 million people – but because of lack of support and attention from the media.

The phenomenon is known amongst aidworkers as “The CNN Effect”: If an emergency gets the spotlight on CNN, humanitarian wheels start rolling. If it is not featured on CNN, the emergency is forgotten and hushed in a corner. You might just as well not start an emergency operation if you feel you won’t be able to fundraise for it, right?

Which turns the Rupert Murdochs and Ted Turners of this world the Gods deciding between life and death for thousands.

Or maybe not… Maybe the machines also play an important role in the dis-security. I remember in Islamabad, Pakistan, shortly after 9/11, we had to push our stuff through a monster Xray machine as soon as we entered the airport building. The machine hardly ever paused, and the security guards seemed to enjoy to see stuff jammed off the belt at the end. A guaranteed mess, certainly as people there were not known for “travelling light”.
One day, I could see the screen of the Xray machine, reflected in the glasses of the guard. I thought I saw the screen flickering as if it were defective. I got suspicious, and while I was grabbing my bags from the pile, I bent forward to see the actual Xray screen. It was as I had expected: the screen did not work, apart from ‘snow’ it only had large horizontal stripes scrolling over it, like an old TV which had lost it signal. The thing was defective, and the whole security setup was only a show..!

Talking about pre-flight security. The funniest was in Teheran-Iran, where during one visit, I had to take national flights regularly. The pre-boarding screening was done manually. You disappeared, with a guard, in a small cubicle, with curtains at two sides, and the guy would frisk you. It seemed it was always the same guy, who frisked me. And he did it very… eh… thoroughly. He clearly liked the body contact, and would hold me really close when frisking my back, standing in front of me – rather than having me turn around… The last thing he always did, was softly squeezing my private parts, while giving me a wide wink and smile. Hmmm…

Anyways, on the flight from Kuwait to Rome, the view from the plane onto the remote areas in Iran was astonishing. Some were like we were looking at the world, from a space ship.. A sample I wanted to share with you…

Dubai International Airport – October 7, 2001.
I step out of the plane and look at my watch. 10 pm. Two hours to shop in the Dubai Tax Free before boarding my connecting flight to Islamabad, Pakistan.
I follow the stream of arriving passengers moving along on the first floor of the airport, overlooking the shopping area. I look at the vast crowd below. A dense mix of every possible nationality, religion and ethnicity in the world, expressed through a myriad of dress codes. From formal western suites, the traditional Arab dishdashahs, women in mini skirts mixed with those fully veiled. Rough Afghani chupans, expensive Indian silk sari’s, Berber djellabas, Australian safari shorts, Sudanese turbans, American baseball caps and Arab hijabs. This crowd seems to represent the world within one space. But the crowd is not strolling along from one shop to another in its usual way. The people are talking in groups, some with raised voices and expressive hand gestures, and others whisper. There is no laughing, nor joy but a nervousness makes the tension in the air so thick one could cut it with a knife. You do not have to be a clairvoyant to feel something is wrong.

Hundreds of people are lining up at the transit counters, below large displays listing numerous cancelled and delayed flights. The atmosphere is grim. Utter grim. I grab hold of someone in an Emirates Airlines uniform and ask her what is going on. She answers: “Have you not heard? The US started bombing Afghanistan a few hours ago. They closed the airspace above Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and all Gulf countries. No civil plane will be flying anymore for a while!”.
For a moment, I feel like the ground is pulled away from beneath my feet. “The US started bombing Afghanistan… This, we have feared since 9/11, a month ago. Retaliation. The beginning of the turmoil in the region, which will last for years. What will happen with Pakistan? How will the government react, how will the people react?”, thoughts flash through my mind as the lady explains the airline has booked hotel rooms, and buses are waiting outside.

I act like a robot: I walk through immigration, pick up my bags, and walk outside. The heat, humidity and mere mass of people crowded at the airport exit cuts off my breath. I get onto the bus and let myself fall into a free seat. I look at the crowd, the stuck traffic,…
- “Not flying tonight, are you?”, a voice says. I wake up from my reverie and look at the guy next to me. American accent.
- “No, apparently not!”, I mumble.
- “Harry”, he says as he holds out his hand.
- “Peter”, I answer, “where were you supposed to fly to?”
- “Oh, I was supposed to fly to Uganda”, he says, “my wife works there.”
- “Oh, really”, I answer, “I worked there too, left two years ago”. I try to make conversation, killing the time waiting for the bus to leave..
- “Really? You work for the UN?”
- “Yes, I do, for WFP”.
- “Oh, my wife works in the same building.. Cathy Ashcroft, maybe you know her!”. It turns out Harry is the husband of Cathy I know since years, the same Cathy I helped setting up the OCHA office in Kampala. We engage into a vivid conversation of Kampala, life in Africa, relief work and of course come back to the subject of the US bombing campaign.

After checking into the hotel, Harry and I walk to the night club, the only place we can still get a drink. In the mean time, it is already 1 am. A few men and a couple form the meagre audience, spread over a dozen tables. A small live band is playing without much enthusiasm. We take a seat in the back, and order a drink. I really really need a drink.
I tell Harry about how we feared for the retaliation, how we feared how the whole region was going to react. No matter how much everyone hated the Taliban, it was still an attack on a sovereign country. A Muslim country. Would countries in the region now choose sides? Be forced to choose sides? Above all, it would mean that masses of people would be killed. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands would start moving within the country, trying to find refuge. It could possibly cause an exodus into all countries around Afghanistan: Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Iran,… Working for a front-line humanitarian organisation, I know what this would mean for us: we would go and provide aid, close to the line of fire. I think of all our national staff who is still in Afghanistan.
All of a sudden the band changes beat and a belly dancer starts her act. There is something wrong with this picture… A war has started tonight. A big one. And here we are in a dark bar, watching a belly dancer…

I find no joy, pay for the drinks, say good-bye to Harry, and walk outside. Sitting on a bench near the hotel entrance, I lit a cigarette. I close my eyes, and imagine the infernos of fire, explosions, shrapnel in the black night around Kabul, Jalalabad and Kandahar. All places I have visited in Afghanistan. I can see families trying to seek refuge in their homes. I can see their fear not knowing what is going on, how long it would last, and what this would mean for them, and their livelihood. I can smell their fear even where I was sitting.
I look up. The night sky is clear. I imagine the Tomahawks launched from war ships close by. I imagine war planes rushing overhead, ten miles up in the sky. The pilots looking down at Dubai, this city of light and splendour, as they bank left and turn the direction of Afghanistan.

Postscript.
I was blocked in Dubai for three days. Spent the whole time in my hotel room, on email and telephone, coordinating with my team in Islamabad and with my counter parts in Rome. After three days, the air space was re-opened. I got onto the first plane that flew from Dubai to Islamabad. People were so anxious to get back home, they started a fight while boarding.
One month later, I landed in Kabul. As the Taliban retreated, they suffered quite some losses. People took the turbans from the bodies and threw them up in the trees. The turbans unruffled and for months long strips of shiny turban cloth were weaved in between the branches, floating in the wind.

It made me think of the start of the war and the belly dancer. The same contrast I found in dead bodies and their turbans floating in the wind, dangling from a tree. There is nothing poetic about the horrors of war. I understood what Marlon Brando meant in “Apocalypse Now”.

Pictures courtesy theme.cc (bombing), CNN (Tomahawk), umami.co.nz (Duty free zone)

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Wild Cannabis
You needed to pass a security checkpoint next to the building before being allowed to drive onto the parking lot. This caused a bit of traffic jam in the morning, when everyone was coming to work. Next to the checkpoint was a piece of bare land, with different billboards from the UN agencies and NGOs based in ‘The Tower’. Sometimes the weeds on the bare field were growing that high, they would almost cover the view of the billboards. As I was sitting in the car, queuing up one morning, I thought at first, I was mistaken. But no, the wild cannabis was growing that high, it almost covered up the UN Drug Control Program’s billboard. I thought it was quite symbolic. How to control the drugs in a country where hash grew in the wild, uncontrolled.

The Orange Bearded Guards
After the car check entering the parking, you had to pass through another security check at the entrance, where the local guards body searched you. They were a friendly bunch. Most of them old ex-army guys. Many were hiding their grey hair by washing it with henna, which turned their hair and long beard bright orange/red. I mean *real* bright. A European punk-age kinda red. It was funny to see sometimes.. They hardly spoke any English and always had a real apologetic smile on their face when they body searched us, the foreigners… As if to say ‘Really sorry, but my boss told me to do so’. The check was always more for the show than anything else. Certainly for me, as I always wore my safari jacket, filled with goodies that would set off their handheld metal detector. When something beeped, they pointed at it to ask what I had in my jacket there. I always said what it was, but most of the time, their English was so poor, they did not understand it anyway. They just nodded and smiled… And we all played along in the daily security slapstick.

Oh Baby!
Saudi Pak was a tall square building. The offices ran along the outer wall, creating a huge open space, stretching all the way vertically in the centre of the building. This helped the air circulation, and gave a special flair to the building. It also create quite a bit of noise, though, as any sound would travel many floors up and down. One night, I was working really late, and forgot all about the ‘mega amplifier’ effect from the central hallway as I was sucked into processing the backlog of hundreds of Emails. I had left the door leading into the centre hall open, just to get a bit of fresh air in. I played my music real loud, with a good sub-woofer bass. Little did I realize how the music must have echo-ed all through the building. Soon enough all guards from the ground floor had come up to my office to stick their head through the door, checking what the racket was all about. None of them spoke English, so I put my thumb up with a question mark on my face, and they nodded, thumbs up. It was OK. It was more than OK. To show me they really liked it, they started swinging slowly, and mumbling along with the tune… It was a lovely picture: half a dozen elderly guards, all with their henna-dyed bright red-orange hair and beard, in uniform, standing shoulder to shoulder, with their AK47 machine guns in their hands, swinging slowly side to side, as if listening to divine music, on the slow tunes of “Let’s make love tonight” by Faith Hill:

Let’s make love,
all night long !
Until all our strength is gone!
Hold on tight,
just let go!
I want to feel you in my soul
Until the sun comes up…
Let’s make love !
Oh, baby, baby

Yep, oh, baby, baby!
I guess this was the living proof that music sooths all spirits. Guess the US should try that with the Taliban..

Picture courtesy cannabisculture.com (cannabis plant), Zootstar (bearded man)

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Just as 9/11 happened, we were giving a training for our Afghan staff here in Islamabad. Last night, we took some out for dinner. We picked them up from their hotel, and took them as a treat to one of the fanciest restaurant in town, in the Marriott hotel. As we drove up through the entrance of the Marriott parking lot, there was actually a traffic jam of the small local taxis, each with a huge satellite dish strapped onto their roof rack. Stickers on them for the big news networks. CNN, BBC, Sky, AFP, Fox, Al Jazeera, ITN, ITV, RAI… The hotel’s roof was engulfed in bright floodlights as the anchor speakers were ‘Reporting Live From Islamabad’, with the city lights in the background..

No more denial that our lives were going to take a sharp turn for the worse.. We were going to be in the midst of all the action… And the reactions of the people in the meeting was taking a twist today: from denial to a slight state of panic. The tone of the meeting is definitively much more nervous than the previous days.

Yawn…
My thoughts are running off. I am thinking of the Afghan staff at dinner last night. They were worried about their families left back home in Mazar, Kabul, Faizabad, Jalalabad… Would the Taliban go nuts, and start murdering and plundering? Or empose an ever stricter regime? They wondered how each of them was going to get back home, as we evacuated all international staff from Afghanistan the day after 9/11. We also suspended the UN flights from Islamabad into Afghanistan…

Somewhere, a change of tone in the conversation draws my attention. A lady from one of the agencies starts talking in a low voice. I concentrate again.
She is leaning forward and whispers slowly:

I stand up, cough, raise my hand. The lady stops talking and looks at me as if she sees a ghost. She starts pointing her trembling finger at me. She does not say anything.. Just points at me and after a few seconds, starts blushing.

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Anyway, that is besides the point, also besides the point is that I got this ‘ead at a party the Islamabad staff threw for me the evening before I was to fly to my new duty station. That was just before Martin and Robert thought it would be a good idea to have a ‘last one’ in the Islamabad UN club, and they introduced me to a bottle of “Skone Aquavit”. I could not remember much anymore after that. I do remember, I missed my plane the next morning, and had the worse hangover ever! I went back to the office. Martin and Robert looked at me with a real wide grin, and C. turned her head away… I must have had a look with question marks on my face, as Robert said “You don’t remember anything anymore, do you?”. Well I did not. Apparently, we got pretty jolly, started to dial everyone who was so unlucky to have their number stored on my mobile phone. ‘Last numbers dialed’ revealed we called all over the world. Once again my public apologies to all!!! I know it must have been late in Sydney, and early in California! And sorry if I said anything to offend you!
During that ‘dark’ period, we seemed to have run into C. plus husband who had a late dinner in the club. I must have made a disgrace of myself, as since then, C.’s husband does not want to talk to me anymore.
Martin also told me that the traffic cop did not think it was funny when we stood at the crossroad on the way back home, and I pulled out a whistle from my pocket too as I claimed to do a better job than him.
I think that was the last time I got drunk.

When I arrived in Pakistan, there was not much to do in the evenings, but to sit in the guesthouse, read a bit or watch TV. It struck me I would regularly get a test picture on the TV screen, you know, the colour patterns. Like there was some kind of technical problem at the TV station.

Sometimes, hours would go by, and all was fine, and other times, the test picture would appear every couple of minutes. It would happen seemingly at random, no matter if it was a movie, a TV series or a documentary they showed.. It was a mystery to me.

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This was one of the saddest days in my life. Mats called me ‘Our headquarters in Baghdad was bombed a few minutes ago. A truck full of explosives flattened most of the building’. Mats and I talked with Robert in a conference call later that day. It was bad. Robert said most of our staff was accounted for, but several of them were badly injured from falling debris, shrapnel or glass flying around. Ghis had a window frame hit his head. Michael’s face was badly cut by glass. Diya was evacuated with severe cuts in his arm and hands. Dozens of people had died. The pictures on television looked horrific. I was shocked. And felt endlessly guilty. Guilty as I had recruited these people. I had sent them in harm’s way. Guilty as no matter how good the security precautions we had taken, no matter how many times we had stressed to them all to be careful, still they, the people from my team, got hurt. It cut deep inside me. I felt guilty as I was not there to help. I should have been there with them.

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