For over three weeks, Pakistan Air Force C-130 transport planes evacuated stranded foreigners, government officials, ‘down country’ and ‘local families’ daily from Gilgit Town to Islamabad. At the beginning of the flooding, my family and I would stand watching from the lawn of our summer home as upwards of three flights a day took off from Gilgit’s airport, the camouflaged plane rising steeply and gaining altitude as it flew past the bare rock face of the mountains surrounding town. The smallness of the plane against the nearby mountains was testament to the enormity of Gilgit-Baltistan’s rugged, mountainous landscape.

Over the first few weeks of the crisis, my husband and I began to plot our ‘escape route’ home to Lahore. With the Karakoram Highway (KKH) south utterly devastated in several key places by landslides and torrential flooding, Babusar Pass closed to traffic, the road to Ghizer and thereafter Chitral blocked in numerous spots, and the KKH north to China now submerged under the rising waters of the lake that formed after the January Attabad landslide, it was clear leaving would not be easy. Because of roadblocks, the slides, the floods and the absence of effective relief supplies, the deprivations that imperiled everyday life in Gilgit were unabated.

Pakistan International Airways’ Gilgit-Islamabad run has always been ‘overbooked,’ and this summer was no exception as thousands of stranded residents, visitors, government officials and businessmen tried to leave for Pakistan’s urban centres. Despite my best efforts to secure PIA seats for my family, by the time my research finished and the start of classes in Lahore was imminent, it was apparent that leaving by a comfortable – and highly scenic – flight on PIA was impossible. Heated phone calls with PIA’s call centre in Karachi went nowhere.

On the advice of my research partner, we went first to the home secretary, then the chief secretary, then the secretary for tourism in order to add our names to the passenger manifest for the Pakistan Air Force C-130 evacuation flights south. This process alone took several days, and in each place I was reassured that as a foreigner my departure was guaranteed, although it took only a quick look at the other nervous faces of fellow applicants in each government office to realise that the journey out was far less certain for Gilgitis and their families. And with a passenger wait-list of over two-thousand, the C-130s were now even more ‘overbooked’ than the PIA flights that came and went three times a day – weather permitting.

After receiving paper boarding passes for the C-130 flight leaving on August 19, my family and I excitedly packed our bags. But because of Army stipulations that the departure or arrival time of incoming flights were not to be announced, for fear perhaps of a terrorist attack, we left our hotel for the airport early on August 19 uncertain of whether we would catch one of the several flights said to be coming that day. As our car rounded the end of Gilgit’s airport, we caught sight of the large, green C-130 parked on the left side of the runway, its engines quiet. Encouraged by a government attaché, who stood just inside the well-guarded gates, we shuffled and waded through a small crowd of passengers hoping to board this first flight of the day. Handing over my passport and our boarding passes to the attaché, we were ushered inside. For an anxious moment, the gate was slammed shut between my husband and I as the guards attempted to keep other bystanders from forcing their way inside.

As we entered the main passenger lounge, it was announced we had missed the cutoff for passengers on the first flight by mere minutes. “No worries, the second flight will come soon,” an Army officer assured my husband.  However, it was only a matter of a few minutes later that it was announced on the loudspeaker that the flight had been cancelled. Once again, and hauling our numerous bags behinds us, we trudged back out of the airport and returned to the hotel in which we’d sought refuge a week earlier because of a total lack of water and power. After settling the children, I went with a friend to have our boarding passes re-validated by the secretary of tourism – but only after we’d tried futilely to locate more petrol for the small car we had rented. Even as we scrounged about and called various filling stations looking for black market petrol, I knew we were in a better position than the vast majority of fellow Gilgitis. We could still summon the resources to buy petrol at its current asking price of Rs 200 per litre.

At the secretary of tourism’s office, the attaché I had met earlier in the morning warned me to get my family to the airport as early as possible the next morning. He then cautioned that because Prime Minister Yusuf Gilani was planning to fly by C-130 to assess the flood damage in Gilgit the next day, we should be prepared not to fly at all.

Friday morning dawned grey and still; the sun seemed slow to rise. Heavy cloud cover, with wisps coating the Rakaposhi and Dumoni’s peaks, seemed to forebode the flight’s cancellation. But as I stood trying to assess if the C-130 would be able to make the treacherous flight through clouds and around Nanga Parbat, the biggest obstacle in the flight’s southward routing, I heard the engines of the first incoming PIA flight of the day. Grabbing our bags, we raced – once again – back down to the airport where we were greeted by a much larger crowd of awaiting passengers than the day before. Across from the airport’s entrance, the C-130 passenger manifest for August 18 and 19 had been pasted to a wall in-between some shops. My husband asked some friends, members of the Gilgit Police force, if they knew if the Prime Minister was coming. No one knew.

The clouds had, by this time, cleared and Gilgit was bathed in brilliant, clear sunshine. The heat also began to rise. By 10 am, we left the airport because the children were crying from hunger and refused to eat the fresh apples and pears being sold by roadside vendors near the airport. I had left our cell phone number with the attaché, who promised to call if the situation changed and the C-130 – or Prime Minister Gilani – were en route. Fifty minutes later, the attaché called urging us to return to the airport as the flight had left Rawalpindi and was due to arrive in Gilgit within forty minutes. We quickly reached the airport, where the crowd had increased in size. It was while I was sitting with my children at the side of the road across from the airport entrance, unsure if it was time to start gathering at the gate reserved for civilian C-130 passengers, I heard the sudden thundering roar of the C-130’s engines as it landed on the tarmac just past the terminal. At this point, the scene became frenzied.

Women carrying babies, with smaller children clinging onto the hems of their dupattas, and men carrying heavy bags – some filled-to-bursting with potatoes, onions, tomatoes – moved forward quickly, all-at-once against the gates surrounding the terminal. One soldier stood by the gate and indicated with a pointed finger to the onslaught of passengers rushing toward him, that it was locked from the inside. At the same time, the attaché spotted me and gestured for me to come forward to the gate to be let in. Feeling guilty about my ability to bypass so many other waiting passengers, but panicked nonetheless as the thought we might remain stuck indefinitely in Gilgit, I tried to gently push my way through women and men in order to pass my passport and boarding passes to the attaché through the gate.

It then became clear that, as much as the attaché wanted to usher us inside, no one had a key for the lock. Moreover, and with the heat between the crush of bodies increasing by the minute, and with nary a breeze to help cool us off or provide much-needed oxygen, an Army officer told us through the locked gate that we should anticipate waiting for an additional half-hour as soldiers, their dependents and other ‘entitled persons’ – as they were described – entered the airport through a separate gate not more than fifty feet away from where we stood. Upon hearing this, there was obvious panic among the women behind and around me. Many were already exhausted from holding infants and heavy luggage for most of the morning, while most babies and small children were hungry, hot, bothered and some obviously quite sick. From time to time, the group of women surrounding me surged and pushed forward in waves, closing in tightly around my 9- and 6-year old sons. Using hard jabs and shoves, I worked hard, and not without a considerable degree of fear should things get more rowdy, to keep my children and I from being pushed onto the ground or crushed. I tried with all my might to maintain some distance between the children and the gate, should the crowd behind me suddenly move forward and pin the boys against the bars. With the sun falling hot and hard on our heads, everyone was sweating profusely.

When it was pointed out that there were far more ‘entitled persons’ entering the airport than the 20 per cent that were thought to be allotted for each C-130 flight, rage and frustration increased exponentially at the ‘civilian’ side of the airport gate.

Next, Evacuation from Gilgit – II

*Pictures were taken by the author outside the airport in Gilgit town.

Dr Emma Varley is a Killam Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Bioethics (Dalhousie University) and a visiting professor, Dept. of Humanities & Social Sciences (LUMS).

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.