Common Language Project: Multimedia that Matters

Letting the Terrorists Win

By Sarah Stuteville April 17, 2009

It’s late in the day. Nearing evening actually, and I’m nervously checking the clock on our taxi’s dashboard as we bounce on the rocky dirt road past the crumbled mud remains of Afghan homes, the last refugees that occupied this forgotten feeling landscape. We don’t have permission to be here and had promised ourselves we’ll be back on the road to Islamabad by 5 pm. Which was now fifteen minutes ago.

Pale columns of smoke are rising from a sea of blue tents stretching into the distance of the flat khaki plain that is Jellozai, a refugee camp eight miles outside of Peshawar, home to an estimated 43,000 people fleeing violence in the tribal regions not far from here.

My head is covered; I’ve wrapped a large powder blue scarf tightly around my face and body so as not to publicize the arrival of American journalists in this region considered dangerous for any foreigners. But our new car is attracting attention and it seems that I’m making direct eye contact with every person in the crowd as we lumber through a busy evening market.

“Um, how safe do you think this is?” I ask our guide.

This is a ridiculous question to ask at this point and I laugh at myself. Everyone back home said it was too dangerous to travel to Pakistan, everyone in Karachi said it was too dangerous to travel to Peshawar, and our contacts in Peshawar melted away at the mention of this visit to Jellozai, instead keeping us cosseted in their offices for hours trying to describe the realities we couldn’t see for ourselves just miles away.

It is dangerous to be here. I know it, my colleagues know it, and the cab driver clearly knows it as his eyes flicker meaningfully at me in the review mirror.

Full of bluster, a quality that is not particularly reassuring in situations like this, our guide announces, “If you will be killed, I will be killed first, okay?”

I know he is referring to Pashtunwali, or the code of hospitality in these regions that promises that guests will be protected by their hosts, but his cavalier attitude falls flat in the tense atmosphere of the backseat.

“No, that is not freaking okay” I angrily mutter to my window, watching the late long sun glint off sequined shrouds covering chalky white graves—small pyramids of tomatoes and cucumbers piled in carts having given way to a crowded cemetery on the side of the road.

My anger is obviously misplaced; I’m the one that asked him to take us here. Against all insinuated and explicit advice our multimedia team of three has insisted on seeing the human manifestation of the mind boggling numbers we’ve been hearing—as many as 600,000 people displaced in the past eight months. But numbers are one thing, and the reality that we are pulling up to in Jellozai is something else entirely.

In the past few weeks in Pakistan, my experience has been largely defined by wealthy people. There have been a lot of meetings in air conditioned offices, a lot of dinner parties and heavily chaperoned visits to schools and NGO projects in areas deemed “secure enough.”

This isn’t paranoia. In our first few days here a series of militant attacks sent this country reeling, and recent raids of secret militant houses in Karachi and bomb threats in Islamabad have brought the encroaching civil war here ever closer to Pakistan’s urban centers.

As one Pakistani journalist friend—a usually sober and understated guy—put it, “These are terrible times Sarah, this is a war and anything can happen.”

In short, we had become cloistered away by good intentions. And that’s why I’m here, stepping cautiously onto sewage soaked mud, weaving through high white-tarp “purdah walls” put in place by the UN High Commission for Refugees to provide these deeply traditional people with some modicum of privacy, breathing the yeasty smell of crowded unwashed human bodies that is familiar to almost all refugee camps I’ve visited.

The first few people to notice us, men in tan wool hats that are typical of Pashtuns, but to American eyes are part of the Taliban dress code, appear shocked at our arrival. A few children playing in a nearby spigot run up tugging at my clothes, alternately open mouthed curious and blushingly shy.

I can physically feel the news of our arrival rippling outwards through the camp, and the crowd swells quickly.

I’ve met these people before. When I was in Pakistan three years ago I traveled to the earthquake affected areas in the north; we sat together outside of US donated tents that had become their schools and homes. They served me rose water and cookies and we talked about America, what it could do to help them, how we might follow up on the emergency aid and build bonds between our countries.

We sat for hours, watching the light die behind the snowy peaks and crags that encircled their high mountain homes and I was moved by their hospitality, by their eagerness to talk politics by the open friendliness we managed to achieve.

I wrote about that visit, chastising myself and other Americans for criminalizing their culture. I remember saying that the way “the terrorists would win” would be if Americans fell to an ignorant fear of these simple villages and humble people if we cast them as militants and security threats instead of the most important front line in the war on terror.

Today I’m looking into the same kind, curious, weather-lined faces, desperate and displaced, so far from their proud villages, and my hands are trembling at my notebook. I’m noticeably flinching each time our guide bellows out our nationality, my stomach is cold, my back and neck feel vulnerable and exposed in a memory of instinctual childhood fear.

Suddenly, despite all of my desire to hear from the people most affected by violence here, the only narrative I can pull out is my own, and it is a narrative of reckless naivety.

Islamabad is on high alert and the US consulate is shut down, the crowd is growing and the single security guard, armed with a thin switch, seems overwhelmed by our arrival. The taxi driver is pacing nervously in the middle distance and disgusting images from the Taliban training videos our host in Peshawar had us watch earlier that day are careening in my head as I wonder if I can even convince an editor back in the US to take a story about these refugees.

I feel myself succumbing to the same sense of fear and futility that has kept many western journalists away from places like Jellozai. After twenty minutes of barely translated stories of bomb attacks (both from the government and the militants) that tumble over complaints of conditions in the camp all wrapped in the dense anxiety--that needs no translation--of people that have been separated from their homes with no seeable promise of return, I’m creeping away.

Within sight of the car, a little child’s hand shoves at my ribs, his reddish black hair is up on end, his shy smile revealing more gaps than teeth and on his outstretched palm sits a pile of flour. He pinches the white dust and lets it sprinkle back to the meager little mound—I imagine his Mom, somewhere behind a sagging purdah wall sending him out to show us this, the food they have to eat—I touch the flour too, trying to convey a sense of attention and reverence despite the cringing guilty truth; I’m scared…I shouldn’t have come here in the first place…I just want to leave.

I look up from the flour, the sun is going, and the clear pink light that has settled on the camp, on the boy with the flour and the father cradling a chubby baby in a seat he made of his arms and the bent old man trying to push through the pimply teenagers seems so unfairly beautiful—it seems impossible that this scene, these people, could hide the danger so many have warned me of here.

Suddenly a voice is at my shoulder, “I am the chief of police here,” he says quietly as I twist from the crowd to hear his demand, “there is nothing for you to see and you should leave immediately.”

He seems timid, I’m sure I could ignore his request. Behind me the teenage boy wants to go to America and is asking me if it is possible, the father sets down his child to show me the latrines and the old man gestures to his tent, but it’s too late, my back is turned on them and I’m walking away.

Back in the car, doors locked, cloud of dust growing behind us, our disappointed guide’s cell phone blares and a one-sided conversation in rapid Pashto fills the stiff silence. When he hangs up I feebly hope that the call had nothing to do with us, hope he’ll just leave me to me alone with my self-referential fear.

“They want to know why you left,” he says turning in his seat and glowering at me, “they think you were afraid a suicide bomber was coming.”

The sense of failure swept me like a sudden sickness. I hadn’t given the people in the camp –people who are victims of terror we Americans only fantasize might someday affect us – a chance to be human --not for me or any audience I could write for. They remained, just as faceless as any number-heavy news story, a human shield for terror, a poisoned people that could not be defined but for the worst among them.

On the three hour ride back to Islamabad, we furiously justified our leaving the camp and we all agreed that we’d made the right and the safe decision, and even went as far as congratulating ourselves for our bravery over Pizza Hut later that night.

But the failure has stuck with me, embedded alongside the memory of a group of men and boys collected in the dusty sunset of a refugee camp, their faces eager to tell their stories to yet another person who is walking away.

Though I’m sure these people, whose hometowns are now casually being referred to as the most dangerous places on earth--are used to people walking away.

While everyone claims to be fighting for them; the militants, their government, our government, all they’ve seen so far is their families killed and their villages destroyed. And the journalists and aid groups that have picked up their cause have done so from safe distances while falsely empathetic elites fret at how to keep these security risks out of their cities.

At the end of the day, for all our talk of ending the horrible violence ripping through northwestern Pakistan, we all can get in the car and drive home congratulating ourselves for the hard work we’ve done. At the end of the day, we all get to walk away.

And I’m sure the people in Jellozai would too, if only they could.