Riding with Raza Khan

Posted by Tim McGirk Tuesday, May 12, 2009 at 11:13 am

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Photos by John Stanmeyer/VII

Nothing is more valuable to a reporter than a good driver and a fixer, someone who can get you into a dangerous place and get you out –-fast. In the pantheon of world-class driver/fixers there was hardly anyone better than Raza Khan from Peshawar who drove a battered Toyota taxi with a cracked windshield, had quick darting eyes that (I thought) never missed a trick, and a roguish charm. Raza died last week in a car crash, ferrying two photographers on the insanely scary road from Peshawar back to Islamabad. They survived the accident; Raza didn't.
Raza was a sort of Pakistani national treasure. You passed his phone number on to friends who wanted entry to the forbidden borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Raza knew everybody: bureaucrats who could be caged into issuing a rare-as-gold travel permit for the off-limits tribal area, gunsmiths, antiquities smugglers, holy men and thieves. Raza was clued in on which Pashtun tribes were pro-Taliban and likely to kidnap you, and which would offer you a cup of tea. Raza may look like a pirate, I'd say by way of an introduction to my fellow journalists, but I trust my life with him. And I often did.
Raza was a Pashtun, and the Pashtun code of honor requires that they protect the life of anyone, even a total stranger, who comes seeking sanctuary. Once Raza took you on, he assumed full responsibility for your hide. He was intrepid and curious, a match for any journalist with crazy ideas about finding Taliban or al-Qaeda training camps along the mountainous Afghan border. He ran film and supplies across to Tora Bora while bombs fell, and often used his wiles to slip journalists past angry tribesmen or arresting officers.
He loved his beat-up old car like a first-born son, but his dear friend Time photographer John Stanmeyer twice talked Raza into leaving his wheels behind, once to go trekking with me up into the Kashmir mountains searching for villages hammered by an earthquake--these two photos were taken during that assignment-- and once to travel by slow train through Sindh, one of the hottest recorded places on Earth. He never strayed too far from his Toyota's air-con after that.
Raza could also be a rascal. He was always trying to sell me ancient Greek coins, fakes of course, that he swore had been dug up near his village. But he was a failure as a con artist. Just when he was on the verge of getting away with something outlandish, he'd crack a broad smile and reveal himself like a mischievous kid.
Raza was a Muslim; and like every good Muslim, he wanted to make the haj to Mecca. The difference was, Raza wanted to see the lights of Paris first. And he did. The barely-educated driver from Mohmand tribe actually saw Paris. Raza's exuberance often made the impossible come true. He also had a fine, intuitive sense of balance, navigating flawlessly on Pakistan's crazy roads and in perilous situations that were usually of the journalists' own making. Raza was philosophical about death. “It's in Allah's hands, so why worry about it?” he'd say. I can't believe that on the Peshawar-Islamabad road, which he had driven a thousand times, death finally caught up to Raza Khan.

Comments welcome from anybody who rode with Raza.

by Tim McGirk/Jerusalem

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