July 14, 2002

Isabel Hilton arrived in Karachi on June 14, the day a bomb exploded in front of the American Consulate General, next to the hotel she was to stay in. That was an exciting introduction to the country she was visiting to write a cover story for the New Yorker. As she made her way to the hotel from the airport, she encountered road blocks on the way and, not knowing what had happened, was perturbed. But when she was escorted to her room with shattered window panes and was told about the bomb blast, the journalist in her took over.

An international print and broadcast journalist working now as lead writer for the New Yorker, and a regular presenter on Radio 3’s art programme, “Night Waves”, Hilton is also a writer. She has had two books published — thus realizing the dream deep in every journalist’s heart.

Her seminal work is The search for the Panchen Lama which took her to Tibet to gather information on a subject which is not generally known internationally. The tenth Panchen Lama had stayed back in Tibet when the Dalai Lama had fled to India in 1959. Beijing hoped that they could use him in the absence of the Dalai Lama to win over the Tibetans to Chinese rule, but the tenth Panchen had ended up in prison after pointing out the devastating effects of Chinese policies to the Chinese leadership. He had been released in 1978 and died in 1989.

Hilton was fascinated by the race that was then in progress between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama to find his reincarnation. “I wanted to find out more about this ambiguous figure,” Hilton wrote in the Guardian. The book, which was published in 1999, is the story of how this boy became the innocent prize in a battle between the Chinese regime and the Dalai Lama. Hilton met the Dalai Lama in his headquarters at Dharamsala, India. What struck her was his sense of humour, his serenity and his laughter.

Armed with an introduction by him she travelled through the all-but-inaccessible monasteries and villages in the Himalayas in 1994-95. According to her, Lhasa is the wild west for the Chinese. There is an overwhelming sadness in the city where the people struggle under the old-fashioned colonization by China.

Hilton’s book is considered to be a groundbreaking and authoritative study on Tibet. Few Westerners knew about the Panchen Lama as the Dalai Lama’s counterpart before her book appeared.

While every aspect of Tibet’s story is tragic, the plight of the young Panchen Lama is particularly wrenching. The Dalai Lama tried to keep him safe, but he has either been imprisoned or killed. Hilton’s exacting and compassionate expose will safeguard what is known of the truth.

Hilton’s search for the truth about the Panchen Lama took her to Xining, the borderland where ethnic Tibet began to shade into other cultures. She received little encouragement to explore the legacy of the two Lamas and it was not an easy journey for her. But Hilton managed to get her story and her book.

Hilton’s passion for Tibet springs from her extensive study of China. She is an expert in Chinese affairs, having obtained a masters degree in Chinese from Edinburgh University and has undertaken post-graduate work in Chinese literature at Edinburgh. She was given scholarships to study at the Peking Language Institute and Fudan University in Shanghai in the 1970’s. This was China at its political extreme and a time when the ‘campaign to criticize the unlikely trio of Confucius, Beethoven and the Italian filmmaker Antonioni (who had been invited to make a documentary but fell into disfavour when some of his shots annoyed Mao’s wife Jiang Qing) was at its height’.

Hilton saw and felt the dogmatism and came away with absolutely no romantic notions of Mao’s cultural revolution. She has gone back frequently and felt the change. There is a marked absence of political superstition. But the great leap forward had damaged the cities and its historical sites. The Ming Dynasty wall around Beijing had been replaced by a ring road and the old Ming city had been barbarized and replaced with modern, tall, high-rise buildings and ugly billboards lining the roads

Earlier Hilton had co-authored The fourth reich: Klaus Barbie and the neo-fascist connection (1984). This is a biography of Nazi Klaus Barbie and shows Barbie’s connections with the US Army’s counter intelligence corps and neo-Fascists in Germany, Italy and Bolivia. It is the first complete account of Barbie’s fifty-year career in international crime. It is also a brilliant case study of how the Nazi ideology and techniques were exported throughout Latin America after the war and how this activity was abetted by the Western democratic powers, particularly the United States.

She has made several documentaries notable among which are “Petra and the General” (BBC 1994) which is an investigation into the life and death of Petra Kelly, the founder of the Greens Party in Germany and a peace activist. Petra Kelly’s assassination remains a mystery to this day.

Hilton’s documentary “The caravan of death” (BBC 1996) is based on the case against Pinochet, “In November 2000 I returned to Chile to retrace the route of the caravan of death, the subject of our film and the basis of the case against Pinochet.” Talking to the families of the victims, most still crippled by grief, 27 years later was a harrowing experience. “Condemned to live” (BBC 1999) is a report on the after-effects of mass rape and genocide in Rwanda. However Isabel Hilton admits to not being as fond of making documentaries, as of writing. “The film takes away the personal touch, there is no ownership of the ideas or its grammar,” she observes.

Hilton began her career as a reporter for Scottish television in the mid 1970’s. In 1986 she joined The Independent, and was in fact among the founding group which left The Sunday Times when Rupert Murdoch took over and there was a decline of standards.

Her contribution to the Granta book General about the Paraguayan General Alfredo Stroesner was quite a scoop. Nobody had ever got through to the “General”, who, until deposed in 1989, was one of the world’s longest reigning dictators. Nobody had ever got an interview: nobody, that is, until Hilton following the suggestions of the General’s former mistresses, tracked him down to his hiding place in Brazil. She has also co-authored The Falklands war (1982). The book came naturally as she had reported on it extensively from Buenos Aires. She is also a contributor to The best of Granta travel and The best American travel writing.

Hilton was in Cuba researching for her next book when 9/11 occurred. The events that followed took her away from her book to report on Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and the Taliban. “There is no excuse for the savagery that occurred during the prison revolt [of Mazar-i-Sharif]. We know how the prison revolt ended, — with the deaths of hundreds of Taliban fighters, many of them dismembered...It’s much neater that the prisoners are dead, “victims of their own desire for martyrdom. ...Whose war is this and who must take responsibility for the war crimes that have been committed?” she asks.

Writer’s email: masoodm@emirates.net.ae

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)