[Peace] Where is John Pilger Article?

[C. G. Estabrook]

On Wed, 2 Jan 2002, parenti susan rose wrote:

> About a month ago John Pilger wrote an account of being beaten up in
> Afghanistan by the (justly) enraged Afghans. I'd like to send this
> article to Mark Enslin and Patch Adams, as they'll be in Afghanistan
> in the middle of this month. I can't find the article. I've searched
> through the Peace-discuss archive, but can't seem to locate it. Does
> anyone still have it? If so, could you send it to me? thanks, Susan

In fact, Susan, it was another (equally good) Brit journalist, Robert
Fisk. (Come to think of it, Pilger is Australian.)  The article follows.
Regards, CArl

	*	*	*

My beating by refugees is a symbol of the hatred and fury of this filthy
war

Report by Robert Fisk in Kila Abdullah after Afghan border ordeal

10 December 2001

They started by shaking hands. We said "Salaam aleikum" – peace be upon
you – then the first pebbles flew past my face. A small boy tried to grab
my bag. Then another. Then someone punched me in the back. Then young men
broke my glasses, began smashing stones into my face and head. I couldn't
see for the blood pouring down my forehead and swamping my eyes. And even
then, I understood. I couldn't blame them for what they were doing. In
fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah, close to the
Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or
any other Westerner I could find.

So why record my few minutes of terror and self-disgust under assault near
the Afghan border, bleeding and crying like an animal, when hundreds – let
us be frank and say thousands – of innocent civilians are dying under
American air strikes in Afghanistan, when the "War of Civilisation" is
burning and maiming the Pashtuns of Kandahar and destroying their homes
because "good" must triumph over "evil"?

Some of the Afghans in the little village had been there for years, others
had arrived – desperate and angry and mourning their slaughtered loved
ones – over the past two weeks. It was a bad place for a car to break
down. A bad time, just before the Iftar, the end of the daily fast of
Ramadan. But what happened to us was symbolic of the hatred and fury and
hypocrisy of this filthy war, a growing band of destitute Afghan men,
young and old, who saw foreigners – enemies – in their midst and tried to
destroy at least one of them.

Many of these Afghans, so we were to learn, were outraged by what they had
seen on television of the Mazar-i-Sharif massacres, of the prisoners
killed with their hands tied behind their backs. A villager later told one
of our drivers that they had seen the videotape of CIA officers "Mike" and
"Dave" threatening death to a kneeling prisoner at Mazar. They were
uneducated – I doubt if many could read – but you don't have to have a
schooling to respond to the death of loved ones under a B-52's bombs. At
one point a screaming teenager had turned to my driver and asked, in all
sincerity: "Is that Mr Bush?"

It must have been about 4.30pm that we reached Kila Abdullah, halfway
between the Pakistani city of Quetta and the border town of Chaman;
Amanullah, our driver, Fayyaz Ahmed, our translator, Justin Huggler of The
Independent – fresh from covering the Mazar massacre – and myself.

The first we knew that something was wrong was when the car stopped in the
middle of the narrow, crowded street. A film of white steam was rising
from the bonnet of our jeep, a constant shriek of car horns and buses and
trucks and rickshaws protesting at the road-block we had created. All four
of us got out of the car and pushed it to the side of the road. I muttered
something to Justin about this being "a bad place to break down". Kila
Abdulla was home to thousands of Afghan refugees, the poor and huddled
masses that the war has produced in Pakistan.

Amanullah went off to find another car – there is only one thing worse
than a crowd of angry men and that's a crowd of angry men after dark – and
Justin and I smiled at the initially friendly crowd that had already
gathered round our steaming vehicle. I shook a lot of hands – perhaps I
should have thought of Mr Bush – and uttered a lot of "Salaam aleikums". I
knew what could happen if the smiling stopped.

The crowd grew larger and I suggested to Justin that we move away from the
jeep, walk into the open road. A child had flicked his finger hard against
my wrist and I persuaded myself that it was an accident, a childish moment
of contempt. Then a pebble whisked past my head and bounced off Justin's
shoulder. Justin turned round. His eyes spoke of concern and I remember
how I breathed in. Please, I thought, it was just a prank. Then another
kid tried to grab my bag. It contained my passport, credit cards, money,
diary, contacts book, mobile phone. I yanked it back and put the strap
round my shoulder. Justin and I crossed the road and someone punched me in
the back.

How do you walk out of a dream when the characters suddenly turn hostile?
I saw one of the men who had been all smiles when we shook hands. He
wasn't smiling now. Some of the smaller boys were still laughing but their
grins were transforming into something else. The respected foreigner – the
man who had been all "salaam aleikum" a few minutes ago – was upset,
frightened, on the run. The West was being brought low. Justin was being
pushed around and, in the middle of the road, we noticed a bus driver
waving us to his vehicle. Fayyaz, still by the car, unable to understand
why we had walked away, could no longer see us. Justin reached the bus and
climbed aboard. As I put my foot on the step three men grabbed the strap
of my bag and wrenched me back on to the road. Justin's hand shot out.
"Hold on," he shouted. I did.

That's when the first mighty crack descended on my head. I almost fell
down under the blow, my ears singing with the impact. I had expected this,
though not so painful or hard, not so immediate. Its message was awful.
Someone hated me enough to hurt me. There were two more blows, one on the
back of my shoulder, a powerful fist that sent me crashing against the
side of the bus while still clutching Justin's hand. The passengers were
looking out at me and then at Justin. But they did not move. No one wanted
to help.

I cried out "Help me Justin", and Justin – who was doing more than any
human could do by clinging to my ever loosening grip asked me – over the
screams of the crowd – what I wanted him to do. Then I realised. I could
only just hear him. Yes, they were shouting. Did I catch the word "kaffir"
– infidel? Perhaps I was was wrong. That's when I was dragged away from
Justin.

There were two more cracks on my head, one on each side and for some odd
reason, part of my memory – some small crack in my brain – registered a
moment at school, at a primary school called the Cedars in Maidstone more
than 50 years ago when a tall boy building sandcastles in the playground
had hit me on the head. I had a memory of the blow smelling, as if it had
affected my nose. The next blow came from a man I saw carrying a big stone
in his right hand. He brought it down on my forehead with tremendous force
and something hot and liquid splashed down my face and lips and chin. I
was kicked. On the back, on the shins, on my right thigh. Another teenager
grabbed my bag yet again and I was left clinging to the strap, looking up
suddenly and realising there must have been 60 men in front of me,
howling. Oddly, it wasn't fear I felt but a kind of wonderment. So this is
how it happens. I knew that I had to respond. Or, so I reasoned in my
stunned state, I had to die.

The only thing that shocked me was my own physical sense of collapse, my
growing awareness of the liquid beginning to cover me. I don't think I've
ever seen so much blood before. For a second, I caught a glimpse of
something terrible, a nightmare face – my own – reflected in the window of
the bus, streaked in blood, my hands drenched in the stuff like Lady
Macbeth, slopping down my pullover and the collar of my shirt until my
back was wet and my bag dripping with crimson and vague splashes suddenly
appearing on my trousers.

The more I bled, the more the crowd gathered and beat me with their fists.
Pebbles and small stones began to bounce off my head and shoulders. How
long, I remembered thinking, could this go on? My head was suddenly struck
by stones on both sides at the same time – not thrown stones but stones in
the palms of men who were using them to try and crack my skull. Then a
fist punched me in the face, splintering my glasses on my nose, another
hand grabbed at the spare pair of spectacles round my neck and ripped the
leather container from the cord.

I guess at this point I should thank Lebanon. For 25 years, I have covered
Lebanon's wars and the Lebanese used to teach me, over and over again, how
to stay alive: take a decision – any decision – but don't do nothing.

So I wrenched the bag back from the hands of the young man who was holding
it. He stepped back. Then I turned on the man on my right, the one holding
the bloody stone in his hand and I bashed my fist into his mouth. I
couldn't see very much – my eyes were not only short-sighted without my
glasses but were misting over with a red haze – but I saw the man sort of
cough and a tooth fall from his lip and then he fell back on the road. For
a second the crowd stopped. Then I went for the other man, clutching my
bag under my arm and banging my fist into his nose. He roared in anger and
it suddenly turned all red. I missed another man with a punch, hit one
more in the face, and ran.

I was back in the middle of the road but could not see. I brought my hands
to my eyes and they were full of blood and with my fingers I tried to
scrape the gooey stuff out. It made a kind of sucking sound but I began to
see again and realised that I was crying and weeping and that the tears
were cleaning my eyes of blood. What had I done, I kept asking myself? I
had been punching and attacking Afghan refugees, the very people I had
been writing about for so long, the very dispossessed, mutilated people
whom my own country –among others – was killing along, with the Taliban,
just across the border. God spare me, I thought. I think I actually said
it. The men whose families our bombers were killing were now my enemies
too.

Then something quite remarkable happened. A man walked up to me, very
calmly, and took me by the arm. I couldn't see him very well for all the
blood that was running into my eyes but he was dressed in a kind of robe
and wore a turban and had a white-grey beard. And he led me away from the
crowd. I looked over my shoulder. There were now a hundred men behind me
and a few stones skittered along the road, but they were not aimed at me
–presumably to avoid hitting the stranger. He was like an Old Testament
figure or some Bible story, the Good Samaritan, a Muslim man – perhaps a
mullah in the village – who was trying to save my life.

He pushed me into the back of a police truck. But the policemen didn't
move. They were terrified. "Help me," I kept shouting through the tiny
window at the back of their cab, my hands leaving streams of blood down
the glass. They drove a few metres and stopped until the tall man spoke to
them again. Then they drove another 300 metres.

And there, beside the road, was a Red Cross-Red Crescent convoy. The crowd
was still behind us. But two of the medical attendants pulled me behind
one of their vehicles, poured water over my hands and face and began
pushing bandages on to my head and face and the back of my head. "Lie down
and we'll cover you with a blanket so they can't see you," one of them
said. They were both Muslims, Bangladeshis and their names should be
recorded because they were good men and true: Mohamed Abdul Halim and
Sikder Mokaddes Ahmed. I lay on the floor, groaning, aware that I might
live.

Within minutes, Justin arrived. He had been protected by a massive soldier
from the Baluchistan Levies – true ghost of the British Empire who, with a
single rifle, kept the crowds away from the car in which Justin was now
sitting. I fumbled with my bag. They never got the bag, I kept saying to
myself, as if my passport and my credit cards were a kind of Holy Grail.
But they had seized my final pair of spare glasses – I was blind without
all three – and my mobile telephone was missing and so was my contacts
book, containing 25 years of telephone numbers throughout the Middle East.
What was I supposed to do? Ask everyone who ever knew me to re-send their
telephone numbers?

Goddamit, I said and tried to bang my fist on my side until I realised it
was bleeding from a big gash on the wrist – the mark of the tooth I had
just knocked out of a man's jaw, a man who was truly innocent of any crime
except that of being the victim of the world.

I had spent more than two and a half decades reporting the humiliation and
misery of the Muslim world and now their anger had embraced me too. Or had
it? There were Mohamed and Sikder of the Red Crescent and Fayyaz who came
panting back to the car incandescent at our treatment and Amanullah who
invited us to his home for medical treatment. And there was the Muslim
saint who had taken me by the arm.

And – I realised – there were all the Afghan men and boys who had attacked
me who should never have done so but whose brutality was entirely the
product of others, of us – of we who had armed their struggle against the
Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then
armed and paid them again for the "War for Civilisation" just a few miles
away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called
them "collateral damage".

So I thought I should write about what happened to us in this fearful,
silly, bloody, tiny incident. I feared other versions would produce a
different narrative, of how a British journalist was "beaten up by a mob
of Afghan refugees".

And of course, that's the point. The people who were assaulted were the
Afghans, the scars inflicted by us – by B-52s, not by them. And I'll say
it again. If I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdullah, I would have done
just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other
Westerner I could find.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

© 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd