I thought - This is how it happens, this is how I die

10 Dec, 2001 06:29 AM8 mins to read

ROBERT FISK tells how he barely escaped with his life from angry refugees.

QUETTA - They started by shaking hands. We said, "Salaam Aleikum" - peace be upon you. Then the first pebbles flew.

As young men broke my glasses, smashed stones into my face and head, even then, I understood. I couldn't blame them. If I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdulla, by the Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.

What happened was symbolic of the hatred and hypocrisy of this filthy war: a growing band of destitute Afghan men who saw foreigners - enemies - in their midst and tried to destroy at least one.

Many of them, 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.

It must have been about 4.30 pm when we reached Kila Abdulla, halfway between Quetta and the border town of Chaman: Amanullah, our driver, Fayyaz Ahmed, our translator, and Justin Huggler and I from the Independent.

The first sign of something wrong was when the Jeep stopped in the middle of the narrow, crowded street, a film of white steam rising from the bonnet. A constant shriek of car horns and buses and trucks and rickshaws protested at the roadblock we had created. All four of us got out and pushed the Jeep to the side of the road.

Amanullah went off to find another car, and Justin and I smiled at the initially friendly crowd that had already gathered round our steaming vehicle. The crowd grew larger, and I suggested to Justin that we move into the open road.

A child had flicked his finger hard against my wrist, and I persuaded myself it was an accident, a childish moment of contempt. Then a pebble whisked past my head and bounced off Justin's shoulder.

Another kid tried to grab my bag with passport, credit cards, money, diary, contacts book and 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.

Some of the smaller boys were still laughing, but their grins were transforming into something else. The foreigner 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 Jeep, unable to understand why we had walked off, could no longer see us.

Justin reached the bus and climbed on board. 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, my ears singing with the impact. I had expected this, though not so painful or hard or 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 still clutching Justin's hand. The passengers were looking out at me and then at Justin. But no one wanted to help.

I was dragged away from Justin, then there were two more cracks on my head, one on each side. 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.

I was kicked. On the back, on the shins, on my right thigh. Another teenager grabbed my bag and, looking up suddenly, I realised there must have been 60 men in front of me, howling at me.

Oddly, it wasn't fear I felt but a kind of wonder. So this is how it happens.

The thing that shocked me was my own physical sense of collapse, my growing awareness of the liquid beginning to cover me. I've never seen so much blood.

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 which slopped down my pullover and collar, 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 remember 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 stout men trying to crack my skull.

Then a fist punched me in the face, splintering my glasses. Another hand grabbed at the spare pair round my neck and ripped them from the cord.

I guess at this point I should thank Lebanon. For 25 years, I covered Lebanon's wars and the Lebanese taught me, over and over, 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 holding it. He stepped back. Then I turned on the man on my right, the one holding the bloody stone, and bashed my fist into his mouth.

I couldn't see much - my eyes were not only short-sighted without my glasses but were misting over with a red haze - but I saw the man cough and a tooth drop from his lip and 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 couldn't 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 my tears were cleansing my eyes of blood.

What had I done, I kept asking? I had been hurting and punching and attacking Afghan refugees, the very people I had been writing about for so long, the dispossessed, mutilated people whom my own country - among others - was killing along, with the Taleban, just over 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 remarkable happened. A man walked up, very calmly, and took me by the arm. I couldn't see him very well for all the blood running into my eyes, but he was dressed in a kind of robe and wore a turban and had a white-grey beard.

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 pushed me into the back of a police truck, but the policemen didn't move. They were terrified. They drove a few metres and stopped until the tall man spoke to them again. Then they drove 300m farther.

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 a vehicle, poured water over my hands and face and began bandaging my face and head.

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 he was now sitting.

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, who bandaged me, and Fayyaz, who came panting back 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, whose brutality was entirely the product of others - of we who had armed them 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 kilometres away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them "collateral damage".

- INDEPENDENT

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