Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  In Kandholhudhoo, a densely populated atoll in the north of the Maldives, we witnessed the helplessness of residents in the face of the inundation of their homes and businesses. Every fortnight, they were flooded by tidal surges, and the force of the waves had recently punctured a three-metre hole in the atoll’s concrete defences.

  Climate change had made obsolete a centuries-old weather guide called the Nakiy used by local fishermen, and two-thirds of the local residents had volunteered to evacuate the island over the coming decade. It made sense to leave now and rebuild elsewhere, because the islanders were certain to face mandatory evacuations in the years to come.

  All this produced strong material for our ‘world in environmental peril’ day – these kinds of theme days were becoming very popular in television news – even if the power of our reports was dented a little by the fact that I appeared live from a low-lying atoll in Bermuda shorts looking as if I were presenting a holiday program or trying to flog Maldivean time-share. Still, though heavily outnumbered by the torrent of abusive emails sent by envious colleagues in London, there was praise from the president’s office. He was delighted that we had shone a spotlight, however briefly, on his stricken land.

  So appreciative was he of our efforts, in fact, that, as we waited in the departure lounge at Malé Airport to board our flight the next morning, one of his minions rushed up to us with three exquisitely crafted mahogany boxes embossed with the gold presidential seal. All of us immediately thought it was diamond-encrusted Rolex time, and we started to wonder how we could explain away these gifts both to the suits in London and customs at Delhi Airport. Then, our BBC consciences kicked in – that sense of incorruptibility enshrined in the rule that correspondents should never accept gifts. Here, though, I hope you will forgive me for breaching this diktat, for in that felt inlay box I saw another trophy for my office back in Delhi. It was irresistible bounty: six cans of tuna marinaded in tomato sauce.

  The bus was ready now to leave – or the ‘caravan of peace’, as the Indians preferred to call it. Miraculously, all 24 of its passengers were prepared to risk the journey, despite being the targets of the attack on the tourism centre the previous afternoon. At Srinagar’s cricket oval, where in the early 1980s local crowds cheered the visiting West Indians rather than the Indian national team – an act of disloyalty that foreshadowed the insurgency against Delhi – hundreds gathered to see them off.

  In celebration, chefs prepared a traditional Kashmiri feast. The Indian Army deployed a bagpipe band, wearing Highland berets and tartan. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appeared with a Formula One-style chequered flag to wave the bus on its way. In Muzaffarabad, the administrative capital of Azad Kashmir – Free Kashmir, as the Pakistanis called it – the departure was less formal but more boisterous.

  To mark ‘the day of the bus’, crowds clogged the streets, men clambered onto the rooftops, and garlands and rose petals were showered on the passengers as they stepped onto an air-conditioned coach painted with a special green and yellow livery. ‘Today is the day that another Berlin Wall will come down,’ shouted Waqar Amer, who now worked as a tour operator after serving for decades as a colonel in the Pakistani Army. All along the 62-kilometre route between Muzaffarabad and the Line of Control, well-wishers came out to cheer, whistle, clap and sing. ‘Long live peace!’ they shouted. ‘Long live friendship. Kashmir is one!’

  The Muzaffarabad bus was the first to reach Kaman Post, the steel bridge that marked the crossing between Indian-and Pakistan-administered Kashmir – the Peace Bridge, as it was called. That week, Indian soldiers had painted its steel girders in the saffron, white and green of the Indian tricolour but then had been forced by the Pakistanis to redecorate in a more neutral white. The Indians had also constructed a grand ceremonial arch on their side of the bridge that was far more imposing than the Pakistanis’ more modest gateway.

  This was much more than the usual South Asian one-upmanship. Primarily, it was intended to show that the Line of Control should now be seen as a border, fixed and immutable, and that Indian-administered Kashmir would never be part of Pakistan.

  To drive home the point, the Indians had built a reception centre, with a manicured lawn, ornamental garden furniture, antique Victorian-style lamp posts that looked like they had come from the set of a Sherlock Holmes film and what were being touted as the best public toilets in the entire subcontinent. As the status-quo power, the opening up of the bus route unquestionably favoured the Indians. It explained why the Indian official delegation in Srinagar included not only Dr Singh but also Sonia Gandhi, and why not a single Pakistani official had travelled to Muzaffarabad to wave off the bus.

  Whatever the diplomatic ramifications, the prime beneficiaries were the Kashmiris, who walked slowly across the bridge. People who had not seen their relatives for 35 years. Brothers and sisters who had been separated at birth. Grandparents who had never cast eyes on their grandchildren, or even heard them speak or laugh. Now, as they reboarded their coach on the other side of the Peace Bridge, they were within 160 kilometres of meeting them. Ever since the first Kashmir war in 1947 – the year of partition – the road to Srinagar had been laid with anti-tank mines to repel a Pakistani incursion. Now, the mines had been cleared away, and the Indian Army stood at the side of road, in 50-metre intervals, to protect the coach from being turned into a coffin on wheels. Panicky rumours of a jihadist ambush proved to be just that, and while the militants did manage to explode a grenade, it went off without causing any injuries.

  Srinagar was in near darkness when the bus finally arrived, since shops and businesses had shut down for the day because of a strike called by Kashmiri separatists in protest at the restoration of the bus link, which they had interpreted as a sign that Kashmir would remain forever divided. Yet there was still a mood of jubilation at the convention centre on the edge of Dal Lake, where the bus disgorged its passengers and the family reunions unfolded. In the embrace of his brother for the first time since the late-1960s, Shah Ahmed could not contain his emotions. ‘I have waited so long for this moment,’ he cried, as he held a bouquet of flowers with one hand and hugged his brother with the other. ‘Thank you, Pervez Musharraf. Thank you, Manmohan Singh. You have united a family today.’

  A definite watershed moment, the bus trip fuelled hopes of a less violent future in Kashmir, but other corners of South Asia were aflame. In Sri Lanka, where the ceasefire survived in name only, the Tamil Tigers had effectively resumed their armed struggle. In August 2005, they had even been audacious enough to assassinate the country’s foreign minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar. An ethnic Tamil who had always been a hate-figure for the rebels, he was killed at his private residence – shot four times in the head and chest at the side of his pool after finishing his Friday-evening swim. So expert was the sniper attack that it had the feel of the opening of a Robert Ludlum thriller. More ominously for Sri Lanka, it also had the feel of the resumption of all-out war.

  Nepal, meanwhile, was in the throes of revolution. More than a year after King Gyanendra had declared a state of emergency, he was confronted not only by the Maoist insurgency in the countryside but also by tens of thousands of demonstrators on the streets of Kathmandu burning effigies and shouting ‘Hang the king’. Still able to command the loyalty of his army, Gyanendra had adopted the tactics of embattled autocratic monarchs down the ages, which was to order his troops to fire live ammunition on his subjects.

  Conversely, the mob had also learnt the lesson of successful revolutionaries: to march towards the gunfire. Gyanendra was holed up in his royal palace – a modern pale-pink building in the centre of Kathmandu with architectural echoes of a southern Californian mega-church – fending off appeals from one-time allies, such as America, for the restoration of democracy.

  His son, Crown Prince Paras, was rumoured to be touring the capital in a helicopter, issuing shoot-to-kill orders to the troops down below. As the civil unrest escalated, the king turned his palace into a bunker and imposed a stri
ct shoot-on-sight curfew in the capital. If anyone stepped onto the streets in the centre of the city, they risked being killed by his troops. Instead, the protesters amassed outside the curfew zone on the carriageway encircling the capital in what had the makings of a Ring Road Revolution.

  Because the rules of the curfew also applied to the media, covering the demonstrations was fraught. The security forces had started blockading hotels used by international journalists, to prevent us from filming the army slaughtering its own people. To outwit them, we had to switch hotels continuously, sometimes in the middle of the night.

  We also refused to abide by the rules of the curfew, thinking, hoping and occasionally praying that the army would not risk the diplomatic fallout of turning their guns on us. This was a tricky call, for neither the Royal Nepalese Army nor the Kathmandu Police were known for their media savvy or self-restraint. On the first morning of the shoot-to-kill curfew, our tactic was to venture out from the hotel into the empty streets a few metres at a time, a so-far-so-good strategy that initially worked well. But its first real test came when we edged towards our first group of soldiers, who were dressed in full combat gear.

  In these situations, boldness is the only option – readers who have marched brazenly into the reception of a luxury hotel to make use of the toilet facilities with a feigned sense of belonging might recognise the feeling – and we neither deviated nor slowed down. The soldiers looked at us, and we at them. We kept on edging forward. More glances. A few more steps. No response. Then we walked past the soldiers, with their guns remaining at their sides.

  Emboldened, we returned to our hotel, jumped into our four-wheel drive and drove through the abandoned streets in search of a demonstration. At a crossroads close to the city centre, there was a stand-off between security forces and protesters. As soon as we got out to film, the police started manhandling us. In situations like this, Paul, our bureau editor, would come into his own. A black-belt when it came to wrestling with pig-headed South Asian public officials, he spent ten minutes sparring over the semantics of the curfew. A clever ruse. It provided just enough time and commotion for my cameraman and I to slip away to film the protesters through the police lines, and to get a sense of how many Nepalis had bravely defied the curfew.

  Clearly, it was thousands. Once Paul saw we had gathered the shots we needed – the sequence ended with a policeman smothering our camera lens with his riot shied, which was pretty much what we had hoped for – he brought the argument with the commanding officer to a speedy and surprisingly cordial end. Then we were ordered off the streets. At this point, the police expected us to drive away, but a kindly resident beckoned us over and offered us refuge in his house. Even better, he had a rooftop with an aerial view of the disputed intersection and a patio from which to angle our laptop-sized satellite dishes into the sky and start broadcasting to London.

  The police commander was temporarily flummoxed. No longer on the streets, we were adhering to the strict letter of the curfew. But although he could do little to punish us, his officers started threatening our hosts. Not wishing our hosts harm, we decided to leave. As we went down the narrow stairway and out onto the streets, a riot policeman tried to arrest one of our Nepali fixers and started dragging him towards a police van, where he no doubt would have received a beating, or even worse. Fortunately, in the tug of war that followed, your correspondent came out on top. With the team still intact, we beat a slow retreat, furtively filming tracking shots out of the windows as we crawled back to the hotel. By piercing the media blackout, we had achieved a smallish victory, but to us it felt much larger.

  After that first morning of the shoot-to-kill curfew, the police and army could not control journalists any more than they could contain the demonstrators. With the protests swelling in size, and with well-dressed, middle-class Nepalis taking part, we had free rein. There were even times when the army was spooked by our presence. On one afternoon, when a wall of protesters pushed its way around the ring road, a truckload of troops took up position, with rifles cocked like a firing squad. With their commanding officer barking out orders, it looked as if we were about to witness a horrible massacre. They had the firepower to mow down dozens of protesters, and this had the feel of a make or break moment. How ruthless were the military prepared to be? What sort of sacrifices were the protesters prepared to make?

  When we jumped out of our vehicle to start filming, however, the troops immediately became camera-shy. With the demonstrators now within brick-and bottle-throwing range, the commanding officer first ordered his men to lower their weapons. Then, he shouted instructions for them to leave. On these kinds of moments, revolutions can turn, and the way was now clear for the demonstrators to surge even closer to the royal palace.

  The following afternoon, at another main intersection along the ring road, the riot police were helpless again as the protesters ran amok. Now, they trashed an apartment belonging to a police officer, hurling its entire contents from the balcony onto the streets and then dousing them in petrol. Next, they ransacked a government tax office on the other side of the road, tossing its files into the air and again setting them aflame.

  Just two days earlier, we would have thought twice before following the protesters into the courtyard of the government buildings, fearing the army would corner us all and then open fire. By this stage, the army and police had killed 15 protesters. But now the protesters were rampant. Amidst the bedlam of that courtyard, there was even just enough time to record a piece to camera, and, at the very moment we started filming, a protester hurtled into frame wielding an iron bar and started smashing up the tax office. He displayed such demented fury and exquisite timing that it looked as if we had primed him to do so. Those 15 seconds of footage also neatly encased the havoc of Kathmandu. The king remained on his throne, but the mob was in the chair.

  Once his staunchest backers, the Americans started distancing themselves from Gyanendra. The US ambassador even raised the spectre of a Saigon-style escape, with the king suffering the humiliation of being airlifted from the ramparts of his palace. Faced with so much hostility on the streets and now more reluctant to fire indiscriminately into the crowds, army chiefs also called for the restoration of democracy. With the demonstrations entering their third week and a massive rally planned for the next day, the king became so alarmed by the tumble of events that he appeared on television close to midnight to finally back down. Following a script virtually dictated by the army, an ashen-faced Gyanendra agreed to restore democracy. It was an extraordinary sight. A king and living Hindu god was begging the forgiveness of his people.

  The following morning, shops reopened, the streets were full again of rush-hour traffic and the police turned their attention to scolding errant drivers rather than beating protesters with their bamboo batons. In a central park, not far away from the royal palace, a rave-like victory party erupted, while elsewhere in the city, as the lilac blossom started sprouting on the trees, the residents of the capital could once again enjoy the blooming of the Kathmandu spring.

  Then, as we all looked forward to a respite after two weeks of dodging rubber bullets and worse, a call came through on Paul’s mobile from Colombo. A female suicide bomber had carried out an attack on the army headquarters in the heart of the city, badly wounding one of the country’s most senior military chiefs. Straight away, we were checking the flight connections from Kathmandu to Colombo, for another corner of South Asia would doubtless soon be aflame.

  On a coastline made ghostly by the drifting palls from funeral pyres and the attendance of so much death, the Suryakumar family huddled together on the brick-strewn ground where their beachside house had stood. When the Asian tsunami had hit Velankanni – a pilgrimage town close to India’s southernmost tip – on Boxing Day 2004, they had lost four children in as many seconds. One had survived and been taken to the local hospital. Now, the family had just received word that she, too, had died.

  Sarita, the young mother, thumped her forehead wi
th her open palm, out of misery and in self-reproach. When the waves had hit, she’d raced into her home and grabbed hold of her two youngest children. But she had not had the physical strength to hold on. ‘I remember the look on their faces as the waves swept them away,’ she told us. ‘No mother should ever have to go through this.’ With that, her fragile body gave in to a violent spasm of grief, and she buried her head in the lap of her elderly auntie, whose sari muffled her wails.

  The old lady wept, too, her head jolting from side to side. Then she admonished her niece. ‘You gave birth to them,’ she cried. ‘You should never have let them go.’

  This was a community where the waves had taken an entire generation. Along a stretch of coastline just a few miles long, 1500 children had been killed.

  Now, bodies decomposing in the airless humidity littered the shores. Crows picked on the remains. Smoke from the bonfires covered wrecked houses in a grey film of ash. Fishermen stared blankly at their broken boats, many of which had been tossed hundreds of metres inland. Others tried to salvage and repair their nets, which were entangled in the concrete slabs and jagged bricks strewn throughout their communities. Some just peered vacantly out to sea, traumatised by the idea of ever venturing out again. Of the 15,000 fishing boats in the town of Nagapattinam – one of southern India’s worst-affected communities – just three were seaworthy.

  Having lost his two sons, his house and his fishing boat, Gopal knew he would be the last in a long line of fishermen from his family. All he had left was his daughter, a cheery little girl who tried constantly to rally her father even though both her eyes had been injured by the waves and were now wholly bloodshot. ‘Unless I get government aid, I might as well kill myself and what’s left of my family,’ Gopal cried.