Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (58 page)

“Five days before, I was at university in England. Now I was suddenly thrust into a camp of thirty to forty tribesmen, fully armed, speaking a language I didn’t know. It was like sitting in the movies. It was like meeting Martians. I had not mentally prepared myself for the shock of this meeting. That first night I was given a gun and put on sentry duty. Five days before, I was at university in England. They killed a goat to celebrate my arrival. We had meat that night with a lot of fat, very rich meat. It made my stomach run. And going to the toilet in the bush, as it were, was also initially difficult.”

A reading of Turgenev would not have prepared him for Baluchistan, but it might have prepared him imaginatively, as a revolutionary, for this meeting with Martians.

What Shahbaz had got to was a training camp. There was as yet no war; that was to come three years later, after the training. The Baluchi leader in the region, Shahbaz’s field commander, was a clan chief. There were tribes among the Baluchis, and clans within the tribes; rivalries between clans and tribes made it hard for Shahbaz and the other outsiders to have an overall picture of what was going on. There were five outsiders in the training camps. A few others were in the cities, to see to supplies and money matters.

For the first three years Shahbaz and the others were “integrating.” (There appeared to be a technical term for everything a guerrilla did. This would have been reassuring for some beginners, who, now that they were in the field, in the vastness of Baluchistan, might have begun to feel small, and perhaps even idle.) So they integrated for three years. They learned the language and set up social services for the tribesmen. The tribesmen were
nomadic. Life was not easy for Shahbaz when they were on the move. He lived on dry bread and slept on the ground, on a shawl spread over grass. In the summer they built shelters and slept in the open. In the winter they lived in caves with an overhang of rock. In the winter the outsiders slept in sleeping bags. Shahbaz also had a radio and a typewriter and books. He and the others had stored a lot of books in caves, but when the camp was moving about he could carry only two.

Life was hard, but Shahbaz and his friends felt “incredibly creative.” They were among nomads. In England when they were talking about revolution they had talked about workers and peasants. These Baluchis were certainly not workers, and they weren’t at all like Punjabi peasants, who were the peasants Shahbaz knew. These nomads were people whom the modern world had never touched. That was why they had seemed to him like Martians at the beginning. He knew it was not the way a revolutionary should feel. But in this period of integration he had thought of what Mao had said: that the peasants were a blank page, and that whatever you wrote on that page the peasant became. That was how he had grown to think of his nomads; though, as an intelligent and fair-minded man, he worried that as a revolutionary he was being vain and perhaps even cruel, thinking that he could bring up these people any way he chose.

Twenty years later he excused himself. He said, “You really felt you were on the cusp of change in the life of a nation.”

Shahbaz was a man of generous spirit. It was said in Pakistan that Pakistanis, because of their uncertainty in the wider world, always tried to bring their fellows down. Shahbaz wasn’t like that; he readily offered admiration to Pakistanis as well as to other people. Perhaps his isolation in England and his time in the English public school had given him both a need for other people’s approval and a capacity for hero worship. Just as he had surrendered to the South African in London, so now in Baluchistan he surrendered to the clan chief who was his immediate commander.

The clan chief was illiterate, a shepherd from a family of nomads. He had fought in the 1963 Baluchi uprising against the Pakistan military government. Shahbaz was enchanted by his humility, his moderation, his calm, his gift of language. The clan leader had the illiterate’s unclouded instinct for the character and mood of people, and he knew in every situation how people needed to be talked to. He was a natural leader, and Shahbaz and the others had hopes that he would be the Mao or Ho Chi Minh of the Baluchi, and perhaps also Pakistani, revolution.

So they began, as they thought, to educate him politically, to educate him, as Shahbaz was to say twenty-five years later, in the ways of the world
and the politics of revolution. His response was all they could have wished. It was a proof—this time in far-off Baluchistan—of the rightness and universality of Marxist revolution. It washed away any doubt they might have about their mission. Shahbaz thought the Baluchi clan leader took to his education “like a duck to water”; though Shahbaz, if he hadn’t been so anxious for an admired man to respond well, to pass this critical test, might have paid a little more attention to the illiterate man’s sense of what was required of him.

Shahbaz said, “We didn’t see ourselves as leaders. We saw ourselves as creating leaders for the people.”

Shahbaz’s Marxism and longing for revolution was “emotional.” The South African was different. He wanted power, Shahbaz thought. Perhaps he wanted (this was my idea rather than Shahbaz’s) to be in Baluchistan what, as an Indian, he couldn’t be in South Africa, in or out of the African National Congress. And Shahbaz appeared, in his generous way, to think that the South African’s wish for power was all right, because he was “leadership material.” Power, in this argument, was something the world owed the South African.

There was another outsider whom Shahbaz admired and felt especially close to. This was a Christian boy from Karachi, the son of a senior air force officer. He had been part of the London group; and he had given up his accountancy studies to join the revolutionaries. He was emotional like Shahbaz; he was intelligent, and well read; he cried easily, like Shahbaz. He cried for the poverty and injustice he saw. This boy, as a Christian in Pakistan, had spent much of his life as an outsider; he might have been (though Shahbaz didn’t make the comparison) as much an outsider as Shahbaz had been for many years in England. This boy had a great sense of humor, and Shahbaz remembered his “fantastically loud laugh.” Shahbaz remembered him as very thin, very dark, very Bengali-looking.

Shahbaz, when he spoke of this boy, became filled with the mood of elegy. This boy was killed six years after he had got to Baluchistan, in the third year of the insurgency. He had gone to a small town to meet someone he trusted, and was betrayed by this person to the army. He was captured with his deputy, a tribesman. The army said nothing at all about his capture; so the insurgents never got to know. They learned later that he was interrogated and tortured for many weeks and then thrown out of a helicopter. It tormented them that they didn’t know when he had been killed. Shahbaz, though he spoke of this boy in elegy, never thought to look for his family afterwards.

The revolution began, after three years of preparation, with dozens of uprisings all over the wastes of Baluchistan. And, quite miraculously (for someone so emotionally attached to the idea of revolution), the area in which Shahbaz had been moving around (and having a hard time) became, in technical guerrilla language, a liberated area. The leaders of the revolution were clan chiefs, like the one Shahbaz admired, who had become guerrilla commanders. The war was scattered, reflecting the divisions of tribe and clan. There were five or six separate fighting groups in the tribe to which Shahbaz was attached. He was running a camp for one of those groups. His camp had from fifty to two hundred fighters. His business was not fighting. It was to educate the people in his area, to train them in medical skills, to adjudicate in disputes, and (curiously, for a public school man) to deal with matters concerning farming and the flocks.

But there were two sides to the war. It soon became clear that, after the secession of Bangladesh, the government of Pakistan, under Mr. Bhutto, was going to deal with the Baluchis and their tribal chiefs with extreme severity. Shahbaz thought that at one time one hundred thousand troops were in Baluchistan. In London the South African had dazzled them with the name of Lin Piao and with his theory, from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, that guerrilla war in the countryside would swamp the cities. What they hadn’t expected, what no Marxist primer or revolutionary handbook had prepared them for, was this: a well-trained professional army moving with overwhelming strength to flatten the frail social structures of a nomadic people.

Shahbaz’s misgiving or bewilderment on the very first day, at his sight of the “Martians” of Baluchistan, had something in it after all, however much, with the help of the thoughts of Mao, he had rationalized it away later. The nomads were not the workers or peasants of Marxist literature, rooted people. The nomads were wanderers; they traveled light; they could be brushed away.

Shahbaz, telling the story, didn’t say a great deal about this. I felt there was more to say about the brushing away of the nomads, and when I went to see him some days later I asked him.

He said, “People were dying all around you. People had lost their livelihoods and their families. The economy of a nomadic family is so fragile. It depends on flocks. All you have to do is to destroy the animals. Which they did. They shot them, rounded them up in big sweeps, thousands and thousands
of sheep and goats and so on. And once you do that, people have nothing to live on.”

The army didn’t move in the summer; the heat was too great. The army moved in winter, and at the end of the second winter the revolution in Baluchistan was more or less over. All the partying and love-making in London, all the discussion of sacred revolutionary texts with sexy Latin American girls, all the preparation and education in Baluchistan, had come very quickly to nothing.

Shahbaz was for some time in one of the few liberated areas holding out. Soon as an administrator he was on his own. The South African had left not long after the actual fighting had begun. This hadn’t worried Shahbaz. He still had faith in the South African, and he knew that the South African was going to Europe to do important work: to raise funds (from Russia, Germany, and India, though Shahbaz didn’t say this), and to plant stories about Baluchistan in the left-wing press. The South African kept in touch, but he never came back.

Such publicity as Baluchistan got abroad was because of the South African, but it was very little. Baluchistan never became one of the big international left-wing causes. One reason might have been the quick collapse of the revolution; another reason would have been the silence in Pakistan about the uprising and the army operations. The government said nothing; no Pakistan newspaper printed anything; and journalists who wrote about Baluchistan were jailed. The revolutionaries in the cities did put out a little clandestine bulletin, stylishly called
Jabal
(a Baluchi word meaning “mountain”), but it was rough and cyclostyled and it came out once a month. It would have looked a little too much like what it was, a voice in the wilderness, and its message didn’t carry.

At the end of the second winter of the army’s operations the Baluchi clan chief—in whom Shahbaz and the others had seen a possible Ho Chi Minh or Mao of the Baluchi revolution—decided to leave Baluchistan, and to take some of his abandoned and derelict nomads on an unusually long walk across the border to Afghanistan. There were at one time about twenty-five thousand of these refugee nomads, Shahbaz said; many of them were women and children who no longer had men to support them.

The winter after that, the Christian boy from Karachi, who had the “huge smile and huge laugh,” and wept for the poor, and had been studying in London to be a chartered accountant, was captured and tortured and dropped from a helicopter.

The army was now pressing very hard. Shahbaz said, “Terrible. Massacres. Starvation. Bombing. Seeing many of the people you had raised up
and trained die in front of you.” But he never doubted the cause. “No. The disasters made me wiser.”

He had constantly to decide what to do with various groups of non-combatants, whether to send them north to Afghanistan or east to Sindh, or to keep them where they were. It was important not to send everybody away, because a depopulated area ceased perhaps to be a liberated area.