#11
Toronto Sun
October 28, 2001
A final dispatch from the front
In his farewell submission to the Sun, our globetrotting correspondent
introduces us to one last unforgettable character
By MATTHEW FISHER (74511.357@CompuServe.com)
Sun Columnist at Large
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- I have never wanted to be anything but a foreign correspondent. Or a hockey player. Becoming a journalist working overseas was a little easier to achieve. The greatest thing to me about being one is that it provides a ringside seat, or, at least, a seat in the gods, for some of the events which have shaped our turbulent, uncertain times.
Watching my hero, Nelson Mandela, emerge from the shadows or Mikhail Gorbachev and his grey cohort implode was, literally, the stuff of history.
So was walking alongside the rioters who stormed the Russian White House; witnessing the horrors of the Rwanda genocide so close that I could smell, taste and feel it; joining an aerial armada of more than 1,000 warplanes over the margins of Iraq; landing, MacArthur-style, on the beaches of Timor, being trapped in the crossfire of the Romanian revolution; hearing the scream of a man or woman being beaten or raped in the night in Somalia; seeing kids and pensioners only a few hundred metres away getting ripped apart by an artillery shell in Chechnya; watching, transfixed by the level flight of a cruise missile navigating the streets of Belgrade; surrounded by Hindu kids gleefully stoning an elderly Sikh man to death in Old Delhi hours after Indira Gandhi died; or arriving breathless at the Pentagon soon after a Boeing 767 had torn through the fabric of our comfortable world.
HORROR AND HUNGER
This collection of memories is unique to me, but there is nothing unique about them. The planet is mostly a rotten place. My generation of North Americans, with our SUVs, chicken wings, designer jeans and NHL tickets, forgot this or never knew it until a few weeks ago. But horror and hunger are the daily routine for hundreds of millions of others who we share this space with. Thankfully, there is another, much better world, that co-exists with the first.
This is my farewell column. I was terminated on Oct. 22, one of about 500 Sun Media employees axed in the past half year. I asked to write this column and another which appeared two days ago on a Canadian running Medecins Sans Frontieres' Afghan program because two fine people had already given me their time and I thought readers might wish to hear their stories.
To save money, I took a room in a comfortable little guest house in a leafy suburb when I arrived here from Washington five weeks ago. The staff have been friendly, generous and well-intentioned, even if my fish steak turned out to be a slab of overcooked beef. The residents - there are never more than a dozen - could populate a Graham Greene novel.
As near as I can tell, seven of my fellow travellers are elderly American spooks brought out of retirement because of their experience during the days when the U.S. last played the "great game" 20 years ago. One guest runs Sweden's Save the Children operation in Pakistan. Another is a charming Greek diplomat flown in for an undisclosed assignment.
My immediate neighbours were an Italian doctor who leads the World Health Organization's tuberculosis program and his wife, an Irish doctor who embraced Islam 14 years ago and has dedicated her life to helping Afghan women refugees in the wild Pakistani border town of Peshawar.
GLAMOROUS AND MULTILINGUAL
Dr. Mary Harte is 55. She speaks Gaelic, English, Italian, Spanish and Farsi and so-so Pushto and French. When I asked her about her life, she was elegantly dressed in a gold and blue pajama suit tailored in the Afghan style, but without the veil. A glamorous blonde and a tropical medicine specialist, she unfolded her willowy frame on a chesterfield in our living room, chain-smoked her way through a pack of cigarettes and talked and talked.
"I stopped going to the Catholic Church when I was 18 because I didn't believe in the Trinity,'' Harte said, an abridged version of her Koran on the table before us. "When I found Islam it was a totally mystical conversion. It's hard to explain. I was reared in Ireland in a very strict society. When I got here it did not feel so different."
If she was away from Islamabad, Dr. Harte dressed conservatively and wore the veil "to have freedom of movement in all areas and to avoid being harassed.
"Women here like their men to be protective and jealous. Women feel very protected by this jealousy. It is considered very desirable, but every home I've ever been to, it is the women who really rule the roost," she said, laughing at the thought. "Wearing a burka (a dress which covers a woman from head to toe) allows the imagination to run riot."
For all that, even though she has adopted some conservative Islamic customs, Harte was a western-oriented Muslim. It was her view that the millions of Afghan refugees who have camped out in Pakistan for as much as 20 years "had ruined the country, although the people of Pakistan still care a lot about what happens to their neighbours. In the 1980s the people were much more westernized. When I returned in 1996 after being away for a while, I was amazed. I couldn't believe the change. I think it comes from the poverty. The people of Peshawar have suffered terribly. The middle class has become poor. There is simply too much competition for resources so people do not find the West as attractive as they used to. They admire its cars and CD players, but they find it very amoral."
TOUGH PLACE TO LIVE
Harte, from Dublin, had made her life for many years among the Pashtuns of the border area who are still called Pathans by those influenced by the literature of Kipling. "City Pathans are very civilized and undoubtedly the best friends in the world you could possibly have,'' she said. "But this is a tough place to live. If a child survives to be 5, drinking the water and swimming in the canals, only a bullet can save them. That's what they say here."
Harte has a married daughter in Wales who wants her to come and live there. But she said this was unlikely. She was selling her home in northern Italy. Most of the money she gets from that will be used to support her work with Afghan women here which she has always done for free, mostly with about 2,000 widows whose husbands were among the 40,000 men beheaded by Afghanistan's Taliban regime after they retook the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.
"A lot of the women are still afraid to talk because they are afraid of the Taliban here," Dr. Harte said.
"I have heard some extraordinarily bad things that it would be impossible to write about. I know of a woman whose five sons were beheaded and who is as mad as a hatter. I know of girls as young as 10 or 11 who were taken away as wives."
Of the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan, Harte was unequivocal. "I understand that the U.S. has to respond somehow, but I'm not for bombing. As a doctor I am against anything that harms women and children. I think the Americans are getting into some very deep water here. The bombing campaign was an invitation to war ... that invitation has been accepted."
So our afternoon went, as Harte's lyrical lilt and her tales of life on these hellish margins filled the room. As we bid each other goodbye, this amazing woman said to me: "God bless. Everything will be all right."
