In Peshawar, Pakistan, it sometimes is easier to make a telephone call across the world than drive across town. San Diego Union-Tribune photographer Nelvin Cepeda, who arrived in Pakistan on Sept. 20, called home and transmitted photographs thanks to technology available to Americans and much of the world — telephones and laptop computers.
Cepeda, in Pakistan for about three weeks with Marcus Stern, Washington, D.C.-based Copley News Service managing editor, was in frequent contact with San Diego. The two were scheduled to leave Pakistan over the weekend. Last week, as Union-Tribune reporter James Crawley and photographer Earnie Grafton were en route to Bahrain to board San Diego-based Navy vessels participating in the attack on Afghanistan, I asked Cepeda what it was like in Pakistan.
While Crawley and Grafton will be concentrating on the military, Cepeda and Stern filed photos and stories about anti-American demonstrations and refugees. They also went to a madrassa, one of a network of religious schools that Stern wrote “spawned the Taliban,” Afghanistan’s ruling party.
Though they were based in Peshawar, a border town with a heavy concentration of Afghan refugees, they also went to Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital; Quetta, just across the border from an Afghan stronghold; Michni Post, a militia post located in the Kyber Pass, and to Darra Adam Khel, the Asian version of a Wild West town where arms are easily available.
In Peshawar, they were in a four-story Western hotel that Cepeda said was the base for foreign journalists. To move around the country, Cepeda and Stern rented a sports utility vehicle; the rental included a driver. They also hired an interpreter. A journey by SUV from Peshawar to Quetta — a distance of about 400 miles — took 30 hours to complete. They returned by air.
Cepeda said they began their trip about 4 a.m. After miles and miles of travel on the one-lane road and frequent stops for trucks and other vehicles, they arrived 18 hours later in a town called Loralai. “The drivers had to stop and get some rest,” Cepeda said. Word of their presence in the town spread quickly, Cepeda said. They were told later that some residents accused their escorts of harboring CIA operatives.
In Loralai, they rented four hotel rooms, one for each person in their party. The bill came to the equivalent of $1.30 each. (In Peshawar, where rooms at their hotel usually go for $50 a night, journalists were being charged $200-$300 a night, Cepeda said.) They were back on the road at 4 a.m., arriving in Quetta six hours later.
The landscape along the way offered incredible sights to a Westerner. Cepeda said he was fascinated by the Gypsies on camels who no doubt were armed. “I would have loved to stop and photograph them, but it was not permitted.”
In Quetta, the scene of the most violent anti-American demonstrations, he said their party was accompanied everywhere by an armed guard. Security was tight. Cepeda, whose photos from Quetta appeared in the Union-Tribune Oct. 1 and 3, found it intimidating to be at anti-American demonstrations, especially when asked where he was from.
“While you’re proud to be an American, you act like you don’t speak English or say you’re from Chula Vista, which is where I’m from. When it’s really tense, you say you’re from the Philippines or Canada, because the crowd can quickly turn on you.”
Cepeda was photographing a demonstration when a U.S. flag was burned; he managed to duck out of the reach of demonstrators caning a puppet of President Bush later burned in effigy.
When they went to refugee camps, Cepeda worked in teams with other photographers. “Sometimes they want you to be their guests,” he said of the refugees. “The minute they find out you’re a journalist, a crowd gathers. Half want you to stay, half want you to leave.”
A photographer in Pakistan has to be “mindful of their traditions and customs,” he said. Women cannot be photographed without permission. Usually, if a woman is out on the street in Pakistan, she is a journalist, most likely an American or a European.
“The interpreter said women are treated like second-class citizens. They take a back seat. Men socialize at lunch and sit and have tea together. If you see a man and a woman, it’s usually in a restaurant, or on the way to a wedding.” Men and women are separated even at weddings, he explained. Women in one room, men in another. Even at a protest that attracted 3,000 people, there were no women.
Although the hotel is geared to Westerners, once out on the street, it’s a different world, according to Cepeda. “It’s very hot, very, very dusty. At times you can’t even navigate downtown on foot because the car pollution is so bad. Roads are shared with cars, carts being pulled by donkeys and water buffaloes, motorcycles, bicycles. Everyone honks their horn here. I have yet to see an accident, so maybe it’s a good thing.”
