|
I don’t know about you, but I’m not very good
at mornings. I don’t do them, in fact, as Garfield might
say. But if there’s one thing that sticks in my mind
about my mission to Tajikistan it is the unearthly hour at
which I had to surface practically every day. I’d been
on mission for the ICRC a few times in Africa, and there too
we would all be up with the lark, but at least there you got
to bed at a reasonable hour.
Here it was different - I had been put in charge of an ICRC
convoy bound for Khorog in the east of Tajikistan. It wasn’t
far as the crow flies, but the fighting and the treacherous
mountain passes obliged us to take an enormous detour through
Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, rising at 4 a.m., sometimes even
earlier, and driving literally all day, often until late at
night.
We set off from Dushanbe on the first day, bound for Samarkand:
three juggernauts, two of them with trailers, and a LandCruiser,
carrying medical supplies, blankets, mattresses and food.
I shared the driving of the LandCruiser with Pavel, the photographer
who had accompanied me on my mission. We had initially been
sent to cover the ICRC’s operation in Tajikistan for
fundraising purposes, and what better way, enthused Thomas,
the ICRC head of delegation in Dushanbe, to get first-hand
knowledge of the action than by taking a convoy to Khorog
and then heading on up to Khalai Khum and Sagir Dasht, where
we were assisting people displaced by the fighting? It’ll
probably take about three days, he lied. It took more than
a week.
The obstacle course began at the border with Uzbekistan,
with the first of what turned out to be six (yes, six) border
crossings. Pointing to the large red crosses on our lorries
and waving a sheaf of official documentation, we eventually
managed to squeeze our way through each of them. It took more
than four hours. But this was just a foretaste of things to
come: all along the road to Khorog, whether in Uzbekistan,
Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan, we were stopped time and time again
at checkpoint after checkpoint, not just at borders but at
regular intervals all along the road, and the whole procedure
of registering the entire convoy would recommence. After a
while I began to wonder if they had been set up as an elaborate
job creation scheme.
On one occasion we were stopped for the requisite paper inspection
at a checkpoint in the middle of nowhere. It was very cold
and the military were all standing around watching this improbable
procession of shiny white vehicles emblazoned with red crosses.
Responding to the call of nature I walked down a grassy bank
at the side of the road and into a meadow. Nobody stopped
me. It was spectacularly beautiful: snow-covered mountains,
dwarfed by the vast expanses all around. Most were well over
6,000 metres, but they might as well have been a third of
that from our viewpoint on the plain, itself above 4,000 metres.
It was the height of summer but it was freezing. Silence reigned.
The wind was the only sound we heard.
As the days progressed, the by now habitual 18 hours on the
road were taking their toll. In a matter of days we had gone
from a blistering 43 degrees in Dushanbe to altitudes of 4,500
metres and snow along the Chinese border. Up and down we went,
one mountain pass after another, past the horsemen of the
mountain plains and their myriad yurts which dotted the landscape,
the twisting, climbing roads showing us no mercy as we half-dozed
through the constant bumping of the potholes.
“Brake!” I yelled suddenly to Pavel. Sure enough,
ahead of us on the road, without warning, lay a break in the
road. A gaping hole about five metres wide and two metres
deep to be more precise - it was more than your average pothole
and enough to comfortably swallow our LandCruiser. We radioed
to the other vehicles just in time for them to leave the road
and drive round. Later on, we came across a solitary signpost
saying, rather belatedly, something along the lines of “Caution
potholes”. In this case, the potholes in question were
barely visible.
After a stopover in Khorog, at the ICRC office, we continued
on to Khalai Khum and Sagir Dasht, close to the front line
in central Tajikistan. On the way we drove along the Afghan
border, on a hair-raising road which followed the river separating
Tajikistan from its neighbour. I shuddered to think what it
would be like in wintertime. One of the drivers laughed as
he told me how a colleague had been stuck in snow drifts for
days before he was dug out. It struck me then as it had on
previous missions that our convoy was neither the first nor
the last to come this way and that the delivery of humanitarian
assistance is often not only difficult but also dangerous,
and my admiration grew for those who devote their lives to
it.
From time to time we would see signposts pointing towards
Dushanbe, highlighting the ludicrously short distance that
separated us from our point of departure, a couple of hundred
kilometres away. We had journeyed over 2,000 kilometres to
come full circle.
But once we had arrived in Khalai Khum and in Sagir Dasht,
I saw what made it all worthwhile. Crammed together in schools
and in the homes of local people were the families whose lives
had been destroyed by the conflict. Many had lost everything
- their homes, their land, even the ones they love. With the
arrival of our convoy, these displaced people were going to
have mattresses to sleep on, a little more food to eat and
access to some basic medicines that could possibly save lives.
It really put all the little discomforts of our own trip into
perspective.
On the long way back to Dushanbe, as we stopped at the umpteenth
checkpoint, I remembered it as the place I had walked into
the meadow and felt so small in the scheme of things. It was
then that I noticed a small and almost invisible signpost
close to the side of the road and a shudder ran down my spine.
Written in Cyrillic was one – seemingly innocuous –
word: “Landmines”.
When I finally left Tajikistan, I thought to myself how sad
it is that so many beautiful parts of the world are torn apart
by war. I thought of the incredible force of nature and how
only man with his guns and landmines can destroy it. I thought
of the lucky escape I’d had in a minefield. I thought
how wonderful it would be to get a decent night’s sleep.
But most of all I thought of the people there, of their ongoing
distress and of how they too were entitled to sleep peacefully
at night. |
