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When the Pakistani soldiers opened the black gates of the Army Public School to us last Wednesday morning, my first impression was of the uncanny silence that hung over the grounds of what used to be a thriving establishment, educating more than a thousand boys and girls on its sprawling site.
Instead, as BBC cameraman Usman Zahid and I walked up the path leading to the school buildings, there was only the sound of birdsong — the soldiers who had been clearing the site of bodies and explosives now stood silently by, watching us pass. On the broad flight of stone steps beneath the main school auditorium was the first evidence of the terrible events of Tuesday, December 16 — bloodstains on the ground —and from then on, every step I took showed me more of what its students and staff went through on that dark day when 132 children and 16 teachers died. Chairs turned upside down, blood-spattered school books on the floor, lone shoes, broken spectacles, and then further inside, the burnt-out offices where the final stage of the assault took place. Pakistan is a country that is close to my heart.
It was home to my parents before they came to live in the UK, somewhere that I spent many happy holidays as a child and an adolescent, and later somewhere that became a part of my professional life. I have been dispatched there by the BBC at short notice on several occasions — the coup that brought former president Pervez Musharraf to power in 1997, the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007, the killing of Osama Bin Laden in 2011. But last week’s journey was unlike any other, revealing a new depravity, where children were not only caught up in violence but directly targeted at close range in a place where they should have felt safe. As I stood inside the school with the Pakistan Army spokesman, General Asim Bajwa, I asked him about the ease with which the gunmen, all wearing suicide vests, appeared to have entered the premises. “This is not an army institution,’’ he said. “This is a school run by the army for the children of its soldiers and of civilians. They were all our children.’’
General Bajwa described how the relieving commandos steered the militants towards one area — the central administrative block — in order to contain them there. This was the location of the worst damage, with one wall blown away and others punctured with bullet holes and craters probably caused by ball bearings exploding out of the bombers’ vests. The office of the headteacher, Tahira Qazi, was a blackened shell, a mass of charred papers and possessions on the floor. Over the next two days I was able to piece together what I saw of the school with the accounts I heard from survivors and witnesses.
Erum Asad, a mother-of-two who teaches at a nearby school, rushed to the scene when she heard the gunfire, thinking first of the children from her own extended family enrolled at the army school. What she saw were children as young as three running out, begging her to save them and call their parents. She rescued at least 14 children, including her niece, getting them into vehicles and to safety. But two older nephews died and when we spoke she was clearly afraid at the prospect of her own children returning to school. “The politicians aren’t the ones affected by violence,’’ she said. ‘’It’s people like us who pay the price.’’ Her city, Peshawar, the fabled gateway from the Indian subcontinent into Afghanistan and Central Asia, had already paid a heavy price even before this attack, with previous targets including the airport, hotels, a church, and the historic Qissa Khawani or storytellers’ market.
Steeped in legend
Few westerners now come here, which is a great loss because Peshawar is steeped in legend. ‘’The history of Peshawar is the history of empires,’’ says the Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie, whose most recent book, A God in Every Stone, celebrates its old city and the original ancient settlement of Caspatyrus. What I witnessed in present-day Peshawar was a wave of revulsion against the Taliban, as the horror of the school massacre became clear. The chants on the streets were not about the West but avenging the attack on Peshawar’s children — “blood for blood’’ — and support for the Pakistan Army’s anti-Taliban operations.
When I was last in Pakistan, recording a series of reports for the Today programme in March, the seeds of the current military operation in the tribal areas were being sown. A new army chief was in place, and when we went to interview officers and cadets at the military academy in Abbotabad, they spoke of wanting to ‘‘finish’’ the Taliban. There was always the risk of reprisals in urban parts of Pakistan, but no one could have imagined the terror that would be unleashed on the Army Public School in Peshawar, because of what the Taliban called the killing of their women and children by the military.
A further cycle of violence is what many in this country now fear, but vengeance is a powerful emotion. On our second morning of broadcasting from Peshawar, we watched a group of young men approach the school in smart green blazers and ties. They were students, who knew that their school was closed, but who wanted to make a statement by turning up at the gates in their uniform. ‘’We are not scared,’’ Aakif Azeem, 18, told me. ‘’You can take away our teachers, you can take away my friends, but you can’t take away my identity. This school is my identity.’’Aakif is in his final year of school and had the narrowest of escapes on Tuesday. In the early stages of the assault, one of the gunmen shot at but didn’t hit him.
Aakif calmly described how he ducked under a wall and then hid in a classroom with other pupils, before realising that his younger brother was in the auditorium that was being sprayed with gunfire. He had to be held back by one of his teachers and only discovered much later that his brother was one of the few survivors of the auditorium, where the bodies of 100 children were found. “We want our revenge,’’ Aakif said. “They killed innocent children who had nothing to do with the war on terror. I saw bodies everywhere. We were breathing in blood.’’ No human being, let alone a young person or a child, should have to live through something like this. But Aakif has grown up in post-September 11 Pakistan, in a troubled city where violence is a daily threat. “When I heard the gunshots,’’ he told me, “I knew what to do.’’ It is that sentiment that for me underscores how far removed today’s Pakistan is from the country I used to know. In this Pakistan, security is one of the few businesses to have thrived in the last decade, few foreigners live here with their families and western diplomats barely have a chance to see anything of the country they are supposed to experience.
And yet — the old Pakistan is there, too. It’s there in the hospitality, the generosity in even the poorest homes to feed and look after guests. It is there in the charity work that supports the needy in the absence of a state safety net. And I think — I hope — it is also there in the emotions I witnessed in Peshawar — the desire among Pakistanis to consign this terrible era of terrorism into the past, and to reclaim their country.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2014
Mishal Husain from BBC Radio’s Today programme was the first journalist to enter the shattered army school.