The day of the oil spill, the town spilled over. First came the rumour of an oil tanker bound for Afghanistan toppled off the road, spreading like wildfire through the trusty small-town grapevine. Then came men speeding to the scene on motorcycles, chequered chadors billowing in the wind, turning riders into butterflies as they sat precariously balancing several empty gallons in both hands. And scrambling children, holding on to pots and gallons as they negotiate the furrows of a biblical landscape where the only evidence of modernity is electricity poles and cars - forlorn specks of color floating in a vast, monotonous sea of dun marked by mud houses and compounds.

The rugged, dusty town of Chaman - the border-post from where 30 percent of the NATO supplies enter Afghanistan, the remaining 70 percent going through Torkhum in the north-west - reacts to the news of spill like a village to a fair. The baked, deserted streets disgorge men, women and children who bring blue and yellow plastic gallons in wheelbarrows, donkey carts, bicycles and in case of Levies – the border police that is supposed to protect the NATO supplies to Afghanistan – flat bed trucks. A desolate landscape blooms with colour and commotion.

To the uninitiated, it appears the town has struck water – Chaman after all is thirsty place, water made scarce by decades of drought and sharing with Afghan refugees. Only, you realise, it is gold, as the heady odour of petrol hits you. An oil tanker upended along the rutted road as it makes the arduous journey through the mountainous Khojak Pass brings a cargo of 60,000 litres of oil. This day, there have been two. From villages along the road, poor labour turned shrewd oil prospectors are the first to arrive. Oil tankers tipping over frequently in folds along the road have put the locals wise to the fruits of accidental fortune in the absence of opportunity and employment. They come in droves. And when they run out of gallons to fill, they bring pots and pans.

At the spill-scene, it is a beehive. A circle of influence surrounds the toppled tanker. On the outer limits are theweak, at a pool of glistening sludge - oil mixed with mud where a stream of petrol flows into a hollow in the ground. Children, their baggy pants hitched up to their knees, young boys and girls bend down to fill cups of greasy hands with the slush and pour it into pots. They eerily resemble children forced into forsaking gold in distant lands. A young man glistens from top to toe, his clothes soaked, his hair matted with gasoline. He fiddles with a tap on an aluminum canister that he has somehow managed to fill.

The Pashtuns in Chaman – sharing blood ties with the same ethnic group across the border in Kanadahar – live as joint families with an average size of 20. When a tanker turns over occurs, a frequent occurrence along the narrow incline of the road as it unwinds precariously into the plain, the entire family rushes to the scene. “In the beginning, people didn’t care much when a tanker turned over till they realised they could make good money out of the accident by collecting oil and selling it”, says Matiullah Jan, a journalist based in Chaman.

A family of 20 people can easily make Rs 10,000 ($120) from a spill when wages from labour hardly amounts to Rs 3000 ($36) a month. With three spills happening a month on the average, returns from selling oil are a windfall for a family in a town where local economy is fueled by cross-border smuggling. “The people use oil as fuel but mostly sell it”, says a thickset middle-aged man as he pours oil from a gallon into a big barrel. “It brings good money. A gallon sells for about Rs 500 ($ 6).”

Close to the tanker are men, strong and determined to have their gallons filled. Here the oil is pure, compared to the mud-mixed sludge of the pool. It gushes, all sparkling silver, out of spouts of the upended tanker. Men are glued to the body of tanker in a tight knot - like iron-shavings to a magnet they cling to the spouts in a heaving mass. In the confusion of push and pull, more oil is spilled than filled. And then the inevitable happens. Limbs fly as a fight breaks out, men bristling and shoving. But just as quickly, bodies disentangle and return to the more pressing business of filling pots. “When there is a fight in the Chaman bazaar, it goes on for a while,” laughs my host, a local man. “People get involved. It takes fifteen men to separate two fighters who keep coming at each other with murderous intent even when pulled apart. Here, no daggers are drawn or guns pulled even when a man has a broken head. ”

When the road tanker crashed that afternoon, there was no breach to the hull, just oil spilling through cracks in the inlets. Before district authorities and levies could reach the scene of accident, the spill- prospectors had sent out the word through mobile phones for everyone to converge at the scene. And what an efficient network it is too. By the time the levies turn up, there is an edgy, clamouring swarm of people buzzing at the site. The prospectors are generous with their calls because more people at the scene makes it hard for authorities to disperse a crowd.

 

The Chaman dwellers won’t invade Iraq for oil but a crashed oil-tanker is fair game. When news of the spill is reported on TV, it says “Chaman folk make fortune out of oil spill”. Nothing is said about the manner in which the “fortunes” are secured. “The brake-pipe broke around the bend where the road is has ditches”, says a dazed Sarwar Khan, the driver of the tanker. “Instead of helping me out of the crash, the people just opened the outlets and started filling gallons.” He limps around the place, ashen-faced and shocked at the loss.

The tanker –drivers are men of meager means. Taking fuel from the port-town of Karachi in Pakistan to Kandahar in the landlocked Afghanistan for American and NATO forces, they make Rs 10,000 ($120) a month. The war is a gas-guzzler – It takes 100 tankers or 6 m liters of fuel to keep soldiers fighting for a day. Besides running the risk of crash on mountainous roads, the perilous 700 km journey often brings attacks from Taliban that have intensified in recent months. According to the Frontier Corps Balochistan, some 27,000 trucks passed through the border-post of Chaman into Kanadahar, a quarter of them carrying fuel. On the average, three trucks a week are destroyed in such attacks.

At the spill-scene, levies (the border police) stand by helplessly – they know better than to stop or mess with the tribes. Drawn from the tribes themselves, the Levies know of tribal revenge should they fall foul of the unwritten but fiercely enforced tribal codes. In the afternoon, the Levies men sat patiently in their mobile truck, gallons and barrels waiting in the flat-bed, for people to clear out. The Levies use the salvaged oil to fuel lanterns and stoves in the cold, dark outposts in the remote border regions where they enjoy little by way of creature comforts. However, the local whisper, the Levies and the district authorities often claim the entire tanker if they reach the crash before people do, firing in the air and scaring the villagers away.

That appears to be the case in of the spill in the evening – very close to the one in the afternoon - where another truck turned over in a similar fashion on the bad road. The Levies, already present at the afternoon spill, quickly took control of the tanker. That didn’t keep the people away. They surged in a wave of limbs and gallons, blocking the road, filling buckets from oil pools in the ground. In the presence of the press, the Levies are restrained, not hitting or firing in the air but brandishing batons that they wave with intent to use them. When they hit, they aim for the gallons instead of the men holding them. Bang, bang, bang goes the baton on empty, hollow gallons.

There are petrol fumes in the air. When a journalist takes a picture of the crowd, the flash illuminates a constellation of vapors catching the light like hundreds of fireflies glowing against the night’s black shroud. What if someone lit a cigarette or a match? It is quite a possibility, for these people are heedless, my host tells me, not mindful of the possibility of potential hazard in the manner an unthinking mob is. He tells me of the 2009 airstrike in Kanduz, Afghanistan. American jets, called in by German forces after the Taliban allegedly captured two oil tankers, bombing the site and killing over a 100 civilians. The fact that there were civilians at the scene indicates that it was spill like the one in Chaman. An act of terrorism or sabotage could turn this place into a raging inferno. Suddenly I want to go home.

The night, cold and windy, is as festive as the day with excitement and a hint of danger should someone get up to a mischief. Along the roadside, people form a teetering wall, getting restless in their ranks. Some start beating the barrels and gallons like war drums. Boom, boom, boom, echoes the night. The Levies are agitated, the people persevering in a clamouring presence at the scene, not leaving. A man running away from Levies’ charge slips and stands up all glistening, soaked in oil. I shiver at the sight, cold seeping in my bones. On a hilltop, the assistant commissioner sits in pick-up truck, speaking into his phone about the accident. On the other side of the road, cranes pull up the tanker-truck that crashed in the day. Afghanistan bound trucks, containers and tankers with NATO supplies roll in and out of the dust and chaos, negotiating the rutted road, honking and blinking lights at the crowd to clear the road. In the day, word comes that the Levies were able to dispel the crowd and claim the tanker with the cargo intact.

There are rumours of theft on part of the drivers and the companies that provide transport for the fuel and material, mentioned also by journalists in Chaman and Quetta. It is said that along the 700 km (534 miles) journey from Karachi to Kandahar, there are several points where drivers, sometime in connivance with the company and sometimes forced by dacoits, empty the tankers of most of its cargo while they are parked. Only a little is left that on a deliberate crash along the way is spilled, to be pilfered by the people. The drivers are known to call news networks and publications to ensure the story appears in press. They take the news clippings to the officials responsible for safe transit to substantiate their claims that the cargo was laid waste due to accident and pilferage.

In Chaman, the responsibility to protect the NATO traffic rests with the district administration. Other than responding to the road accident, the authorities mostly focus on safeguarding Afghanistan bound cargo against attacks. “The police, the Anti-terrorism Force and the Levies have been working to protect the NATO traffic”, says the Assistant Commissioner at Chaman. “(In view of the long route that encompasses tribal and the governed lands) we have divided the areas into sections. The forces take care of the sections assigned to them. We are also considering to jointly police some of the more sensitive sections along the path.”

The road to Chaman – bone-breaking to begin with but made worse by heavy traffic of vehicles loaded with tons of cargo – is a hazard for the semi trailers and tankers, far too big and heavy to negotiate the narrow gullies, ditches and bottlenecks. In the last ten years, the road that is the country’s link to Afghan border has deteriorated considerably due to the manic NATO -supply traffic that allows little time for repairs. In 2003, the Asian Development Bank funded a project to develop roads in Balochistan including the strategic Quetta-Chaman road but it remains one of the worst travel experiences one can have.

“The NATO supplies transit through Pakistan is a goose that lays golden eggs,” says Matiullah Jan, the journalist at Chaman. “The logistics companies benefit from it, the drivers benefit, the people benefit and even children. They stand at the road threatening to throw rocks at the windshields as the trucks roll through villages and towns. Drivers have to throw out a rolled Rs 100 note to them or else end up with a shattered windshield that costs a lot more than the money offered to keep the little urchins at bay. This happens even on the road back from Kandahar when the containers and tankers are empty.”

The logistics company has to pay the Levies who in the last ten years have started charging heavy fee at check points. There are three check points in and around the town and one at the border where Levies used to stay for days without hardly any rotation. Now, according to a local journalist, the duty officials rotate frequently and the Topadar – a Levies official – who brings in more fees enjoys posting at a coveted point. The fee at these checkpoints for NATO tankers and containers ranges from Rs 500 ($ 6) to Rs 2000 ($ 24).

When tankers and containers come through the rugged Khojak Pass in the Suleiman mountain range, the truck engine often stalls as the cargo is far too heavy for an uphill road. Last year, a truck fell into a ravine while negotiating a turn, killing the driver and three people. But assistance is now at hand to help drivers maneuver the hazards of the route. At perilous turns, Chaman residents stand ready to lend a hand with tractors, pulling the tankers up the hill. While the tankers negotiate the road safely, for the tractor owner the two to three kilometres tow up the hill brings money. One estimate puts the number of families engaged in the business of shouldering the burden of NATO supplies with tractors at 20. “The road used to have thin traffic with the occasional truck stalling now and then”, says a Chaman based journalist. “There was only one tractor helping it pull through. With the NATO traffic now, there are more than 30 tractors along the route to offer help trucks traverse the heights.”

Aurangzaib Khan is a senior award-winning journalist based in Peshawar and has also worked extensively in the development and uplift sector in KP and FATA.