Open Letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Your Excellency,
Allow me to apologize to you for not being able to be
present during your address to civil society at the hallowed campus of
Government College University in my beloved city of Lahore. Much as I would
have wanted to benefit from the wisdom of your analysis and foresight, I could
not make the journey quickly enough from the remote town of Chilas where I was
in consultation with the proponents of a major dam which shall displace 32,000
people and submerge 32,000 ancient rock carvings if and when built. Allow me to
further explain that since flights were cancelled from the nearest airport in
Gilgit, a tedious five hour journey on the Karakoram Highway, I was compelled
to take the road journey over the Babusar Pass situated at an altitude of
14,000 feet above sea level, travelling a total of eighteen hours to Islamabad.
Your Excellency, it was during this eighteen hour journey
through some of the most desolate yet spectacular landscape of my country that
I imagined speaking to you, being unable to join the privileged few who were
invited to hear you speak both in Lahore and in Islamabad. As the vehicle
carrying us made its way carefully over open culverts fashioned by the able
engineers of the China Construction Company, as it slid over six inches of
freshly falling snow, as it dipped into crevices swirling with glacial melt,
and as it glided smoothly over the bits of tarmac which have survived the
devastation of the 2005 earthquake which killed 70,000 people in these remote
parts, I spoke to you, imagining that you were truly interested in what I, an
ordinary citizen of this, my beloved, blighted country had to say.
But before I put those words down on paper, Your Excellency,
allow me to welcome you to my country, this broken jaw of your kingdom. Allow
me also to congratulate you, belatedly, on your appointment as Secretary of
State of the most powerful nation on earth. That President Barak Obama had the
prescience to see a woman in this commanding position is also a move worthy of
appreciation. That you were his opponent in the Democratic Party’s primaries
shows the objectivity and wisdom in President Obama’s selection. That you are a
woman signifies the possibility that you will bring sanity to the White House,
and by extension, to the Pentagon. For if the world was to be run by women,
Your Excellency, it is quite possible that today we may not be mourning the
brutal deaths of millions killed in the many wars over the past many centuries.
Your Excellency, it was at the outset of the second Gulf War
in March 2004 that I resigned from my honorary position as Goodwill Ambassador
for the United Nations to which I had been appointed by Dr. Nafis Sadiq, then
the Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund. For five years I
had tried to bring to the attention of my department the fact that the issue of
population, poverty, and peace cannot be addressed without empowering women to
deal with all of these. It was, and still is, my firm belief that women will
not choose war over negotiating peace, that given a choice, they will not
produce children who must go hungry, that they are the backbone of a nation’s
economy and cultural articulation, and that they hold the key to the myriad
conflicts which rage like an uncontrollable conflagration, destroying a world
built by men and predicated on inequity and injustice.
It is unfortunate that I was unable to convince my
department of the value of the genuine empowerment of Pakistan’s women, beyond
the provision of services and family planning counselling. It is equally unfortunate
that I was being seen as the face of the United Nations at a point when this
esteemed organization was totally impotent in the face of your country’s
insistence on invading Baghdad. My protest at this incapacity led to my
resignation, something I have never regretted and would do time and time again,
for protest is my right, and practically the only thing left to me to use with
clarity, dignity and purpose. And it is through this fissure that I hope to be
able to insert these words, Your Excellency, through the cracks in the daunting
security which surrounds you during your visit to my country.
Your Excellency, before me, wrapped in a piece of fabric
stained with grime and fragile with wear, lie the gifts I received from the
family I recently visited in the hamlet of Thor which straddles a glacial
stream rushing down the majestic Karakoram mountains. This parcel was given to
me by the woman whom I met while conducting a Cultural Heritage Impact
Assessment for the proponent of the Diamer Basha Dam. It contains what she had
gathered in the fading light of autumn from the forest surrounding her stone
hovel which she shares with eight children, her husband, several goats, a cow,
two dogs and a ginger kitten with a broken leg. Lying inside this piece of fabric
were a couple of pomegranates, some dried mulberries, and a handful of apricot
kernels.
When I shook out the piece of cloth containing these
precious gifts, I realized that it had been carefully embroidered with
intricate designs resembling the motifs I had seen etched into the dark surface
of the igneous rock which lies scattered across hundreds of miles of this
desolate landscape, described as the “abomination of isolation” by the British
who wished to consolidate the far reaches of their empire in the nineteenth
century. That this family lived just besides the 19th century British-built
rest-house, perched on a cliff over-looking the thundering rivulet running down
from the melting snows, appeared to me a fitting irony: rampant poverty living
in the shadows of the greatest empire of the modern world.
I listened helplessly as my host explained in a language
unknown to me that her husband was being threatened by the powerful land-owners
of the area to give up his little patch of land on which his family eked out a
meagre existence. This patch of land shall not be submerged by the 100
kilometre long reservoir of the proposed dam, but before the river is dammed,
this family, and many like them, shall be damned to displacement,
dispossession, and the absolute disarticulation of everything they have known
for centuries: their music, their songs, their stories, their way of life.
There shall be many like them, “collateral damage” in the path of progress of a
country starved of energy and full to the brim with contradictions which flame
the fire of terror.
Why do I tell you this simple story, Your Excellency? Why
should you be concerned about the lives of an obscure family living in some
remote region of a country considered to be the pariah of nations for its involvement
in the breeding of terror? Why should your mind be cluttered by the details of
the lives of ordinary Pakistanis who struggle to survive all sorts of neglect
and deprivation? After all, the simple mantra chanted by your government and
those before it is that by bringing democracy to these conflicted lands, the
world shall be a safer place. And democracy is what supposedly describes the
dispensation in our Parliament today, and even for the several years before
that, despite the fact that the self-appointed head of state was nothing but a
military despot wearing the disguise of well-cut suits.
I tell you this simple story for the simple reason that
perhaps the problem lies in the details, Your Excellency, in the details of
ordinary lives. The problem itself is simple, and the solution is not as
simplistic as American foreign policy would like us to believe. The problem,
Your Excellency, is the wilful and malevolent perpetuation of a universal state
of inequity and injustice – a state of dangerous contradictions poised to
implode despite the many hasty and ill-thought out designs to alleviate the
burden of poverty and privation. Today I see you standing before a computer,
accompanied by a permanently beaming President and a stately Minister who gives
away money to the needy, once a month, as long as the needy are defined by a
certain parameter.
Your Excellency, apparently you are to push a button on the
computer which shall randomly select a winning family which shall benefit from
the munificence of a government functioning almost entirely on the rhetoric
generated by martyrdom. That this family is then to return the awarded amount
while those in government have loans worth millions of dollars written off is
an irony as sharp as the fact that the family in Thor Nallah had never heard of
this benevolent scheme, nor have they ever received the benefit of electricity
which could possibly power a computer on which their names could be listed.
Your Excellency, I had worked with my mother in the region
of Gilgit Baltistan for thirteen years before her untimely death in the region
she had come to love. For most of the people of this region, as for most of the
people of the four provinces of my beloved country, such schemes have remained
inaccessible, much like gainful employment, health care, education, land, and
the most ubiquitous of all rights: justice. It is ironic that those who have
denied the people of Pakistan these essential rights are the ones you are now
accompanied by: the grinning and ingratiating folk who surround you on your
visit. Your Excellency, how can we possibly be anointed with the ink of
Democracy when the parchment we have been writing on is brittle with conflict,
fragile with prejudice, and infested with a feudal ethos which eats into the very
fabric of democratic principles? How can we, ordinary Pakistanis, believe that
those with whom you do business are truly representing our interests, the
interests of the family in the Thor Nullah and countless others like them in
Awaran, in Badin, in Zhob, in Gwadar, in Dir, in Bakkhar?
Your Excellency: I am not trying to dissuade you from your
noble mission to inform us of what is already written in blood, the blood of
men and women and children killed in a war we did not create. As I write this,
news filters in of the deadly bombing of the heart of my father’s beloved city
Peshawar. Tonight the sound of mourning, of women wailing for lost children, of
babies seeking lost mothers, shall fill the sky above my country. Can you hear
that song, Your Excellency, that lament of despair, that elegy to a nation
defeated by those who sold it for another song, a song of greed and a malignant
lust for power? That is not a song anyone would willingly want to hear, and
unless you and those in positions as significant as yours are willing to hear
that elegy, I fear that very soon, too soon perhaps, there shall be no space
for further burials in this beloved, blighted country of mine.
In closing, allow me to offer you the lines of the wonderful
British poet who made America his home:
I am moved by fancies that are curled /
Around these images, and cling: /
The notion of some infinitely gentle /
Infinitely suffering thing. (T.S. Eliot – Prelude)
Yours most sincerely,
Feryal Ali Gauhar
