A Life Half Lived by Andrew MacLeod

Author:Andrew MacLeod [MacLeod, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2014-08-14T22:00:00+00:00

 8.

Pakistani Military: Building Bridges With My Father

I

got on particularly well with two of Farooq’s children – his son Ibrahim and his daughter Rasti. I first met Rasti one Sunday. She was then a precocious 13-year-old who had accompanied her father into work that day. The government of Pakistan had held a formal closing ceremony back in March 2006 to mark the end of the relief effort and shift the focus to recovery. President General Musharraf conducted the ceremony that took place at the same time as the Commonwealth Games were being held in my home town of Melbourne. Musharraf is a squash player and Pakistan has one of the world’s best field hockey teams.

While we were at the ceremony I asked General Farooq to introduce me to the President.

I asked him “Are you watching the squash at the Commonwealth Games?”

“I was, and you Australians are winning too much,” said the President.

“Then you won’t be watching the hockey!” Australia had just defeated Pakistan 3-0.

While the other generals looked nervous, Musharraf laughed and asked, “Do you like sport?”

“Yes, I love it.”

Musharraf said to Farooq, “you must make sure this man goes to the Shandur Festival”. Held in the second week of July every year since 1936 and irregularly for centuries before that, the Shandur Festival pits the towns of Chitral against Gilgit in a game of old world polo on the highest polo ground in the world in the Shandur Pass.

Chitral and Gilgit are cut off from each other for much of the year as snow closes the Shandur Pass. Traditionally, during the summer months when the snow clears, these two towns fight it out just below 4000 metres, where the altitude takes its toll on both horse and rider. It takes two and a half days to get there from Islamabad and the journey takes one along some of the world’s most remote but spectacular roads, in the far northwest of Pakistan just below the Afghanistan border.

At around the same time as the ceremony closing the relief effort in Pakistan, an earthquake hit Lorestan in Iran. There should be better collaboration between India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran for natural disaster response. Each of the major earthquake fault lines runs east to west, often having an impact on those countries. Major weather patterns also run east to west. Jan Vandemoortele had asked me, on behalf of the United Nations, to look at a tri-nations natural disaster program to see if we could organise better collaboration between Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. India would be ideal to include in the mix, although politically impossible, given the state of tension between India and Pakistan.

Even though the Iranian government has a particularly good mechanism for earthquake preparedness and response, they are always willing to learn and invited Farooq and I to address an earthquake management conference to be held late in June. This allowed three things to happen. Firstly, Farooq and I got to know each other a lot better on long flights (there is no direct flight from Islamabad to Tehran let alone Lorestan, so one has to go via Dubai).

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