Columnist EAS Bokhari writes about an amazing person who records the horrors of the anti-personnel land mines in paintings and sketches.

When I first met Mr Gittoes — the Australian artist of land mines, along with an Australian businessman in a guest house in Islamabad the other day, I took him for a hard-nosed businessman. A crewcut middle aged man, he was all the time in a hurry, and our short session was broken many times due to the calls which he was incessantly making, and fixing up a meeting with UN Office in Rawalpindi in connection with some work related with land mines.

He even showed, and perhaps cherished a desire to see Gen Pervez Musharraf in connection with his work, but I had to tell him that such impromptu meeting cannot be arranged and have to be processed through the Foreign Office or through the Australian High Commission, and can take some time.

I am a bit of a mine buff, especially the land mines which are such a great societal issue the world over, and nearly all civilized countries have shown support for the ban of these creations of the devil, who show up with their nasty work after the hostilities have ceased, and when the civil population starts going back to their homes and hearths, with the hope of expeditious resettlement.

We discussed mines as if we were talking cars under a lamp post, and I came to know that he had put up an exhibition in support of the Australian Network to ban land mines which was a highly successful exhibition and projection of the cause.

Mr. George Gittoes, the artist of the grotesque, it appeared to me, had been to almost all the major countries where there are land mines (especially the anti-personnel ones), and had a good look at the mine victims, and at times had detailed discussions with the victims, and recorded his empathy in the form of paintings and sketches.

He had promised to send me a complete album of his works but I have not yet received that. All the same, he gave me some pages (perhaps out of the same album), and which are representative of his work. These mostly concern Cambodia and Afghanistan, and the bordering belt of Pakistan (Bajaur territory.) It appears that recently he had been to Rwanda too, and there he worked with Corporal Geoff Fox of MINURSO, a UN Force working in the Western Sahara in connection with his pursuit.

Gittoes is an artist, photographer, and film maker all the three bundled in one person and had studied art in the University of Sydney, where the Olympic Games 2000 are to be held from 13 September 2000. He also studied art in New York in 1968. He has worked for the UN, and his United Nations work in the form of exhibition ‘The Realism of Peace’ is currently touring Australia in Army sponsored exhibition. He has won many prestigious awards including the Wynne and Blake Prizes.

He is a painter of the aftermath of war, or rather a civil war, and it is always painful, dangerous and nothing short of grotesque. William Shakespeare had said:

O Virtue-Com’st thous smiling from

The world’s great snare uncaught?

Mr Gittoes work in Rwanda which was supported by Australian Army Public Relations is more related to the horrendous effect of the civil war, than anti-personnel land mines only, but there are overlapping sections of the two. But his work in Cambodia and Afghanistan is more concentrated on land mines and their crippling effect, the human empathy and stoicism being the centre pieces of his work. Some of his paintings and sketches have copious notes taken by him and printed on the sketches ‘in situ’.

I should say the whole album appears to be a collection of horror, and shows what human beings can bear if it must be ordained. George Gittoes confronts us with some of the crippled mine survivors of the affected countries and shows us the heart rending sufferings of the people, the devastation of land and the challenge of hope against hope. He has in fact caught “the extraordinary courage of the survivors ...These survivors are ordinary people, mainly civilians — men, women, and too many children, some now without arms, or legs or eyes, but all with trauma and aftermath of horrific injury, the struggle to rebuild their lives. The paintings, photographs, stories and artifacts reveal the human spirit that calls the human community to act with determination for a total and global ban on anti-personnel mines...”

Surely the exhibition cuts across some of the cultural barriers hindering commitment to such a global ban because it draws on human compassion. This compassion is not always comfortable, not always popular, but is necessary for the promoting of peace and the rebuilding of lives.

The minefield exhibition surely strengthens commitment to a global ban on anti-personnel mines, and it is hoped that it will help build commitment among those countries, and communities that have not yet acceded to the Ban Convention signed in Ottawa in 1997.

Some remarks made by the Honourable Alexander Downer the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Australia on the works of Mr Gittoes are significant. His message says...“George Gittoes art project ‘Minefields’ communicates across cultural and language barriers to inform the people of the world the global tragedy of land mines ... Produced over several years, these drawings and paintings, with the artist’s personal observations, give us new insights into the humanitarian disaster... The Australian government was one of the original parties to the Ottawa Landmines Ban Treaty, and our defence forces, under our obligations to the treaty have now destroyed their stockpiles of land mines, four years ahead of time.”

Contact with the mine victims is an emotional experience and the artist had a plenty of this experience and the language needed to express this experience encompasses horror, pain, loss, spirit, more palpable than the disfigured surface form of the physical victims.

Some of the recent works of the artist like the ‘Yellow Room’ and ‘What is Left’ may be considered classics, and are closer to articulating both the visible and the invisible of the experience, and in this quest the artist has been clearly influenced by such classicists as Gericault, Goya, Rembrandt, Velasquez, El-Greco and Caravaggio.

His painting cum drawing with his notes i.e. ‘What is Left’ is reproduced for the readers to see for themselves the genius of Mr Gittoes.

It is never easy to paint predicament, and misery and in this way to arouse empathy, and perhaps indirectly inject confidence in the incapacitated and victims of the unwanted misery which is lifelong in most cases.

The artist is not very hopeful that the misery will ever diminish, as the human race is quite capable of recreating grotesque environments. In the words of George Gittoes “As an artist, sadly these minefield works will continue to be part of an ongoing process. I cannot imagine ceasing to go to minefields, collecting the stories of their victims, and showing what I have witnessed, while new minefields are being laid and the arms industry is continuing to manufacture these mindless, undiscriminating seeds of such destruction, pain and death.”

The fact is that as long as Man is on this planet Earth, there will be wars, and of course a resort will be made to all types of weapons, including mines for war fighting.

Is it just to maim the civilians who have not taken part in a war after the war, even if the war was ‘just’, the question for an artist is “what is it to be human?”

According to Gittoes “For me land mines are the most damning proof of man’s inhumanity to man, while the moments spent with mine victims have given me some of the most encouraging proof of the strength of the human spirit.”

Some of the living examples of the indestructible human spirit will be found in the following case studies of AP mines’ victims.

Here are the stories of some of the victims, whose zest for life has not dimmed in spite of the minefield catastrophe. I have just chosen a few paintings/sketches from Cambodia and Afghanistan which appear to be the most frequent haunts of the artist, and where he seems to have gone again and again.

“The Legless Bike”, is a confidence giving story related pictorially about Ta Brung and his family 1993 through 1999. And again in the words of the artist “... I looked away from their slow motion movements, two were wrestling over the bottle of Bailey’s, and saw the legless bike whisk by, for the first time (It was 20 June 1993.) For a moment I could not comprehend what I was seeing, it was a pale blue tricycle, which a legless man was both pedalling and steering with his hands.

He was keeping up with the heavy motorised morning traffic. In fact he went past so fast that I did not have time to either draw or photograph him. I felt I had missed something important and cursed myself for my slow reflexes.”

Over the next few weeks the artist kept on seeing him for short periods in busy traffic. And then one day the artist saw a bike repairman on the side of the road, and found that he was legless. He had his tools of the trade in front of him, and had kept his pale blue tricycle behind a tree. The man was using his arms in place of his legs and was a master repairman.

The artist’s next encounter with the legless cyclist was in July 1999 when the artist went to Siemreap to see him. By now the legless cyclist had built a house of his own. His wife had given him five children in the last six years.

“The Blind Guitarist”, is yet another sketch made at Angokor Wat, Cambodia, and the person sketched is So Sem, the blind guitarist. Angkor Wat is generally not accessible to tourists, but the artist somehow made his way there and listened to the blind guitarist. According the companion of the artist who was conversant with Khmer, the blind guitarist sang ballads about the events of the last two decades in Cambodia, which could be compared to earlier Bob Dylan or Jackson Browne’s stuff.

The artist rightly thought of Homer, as the songs of war are invariably sad, even if he did not understand the blind guitarist much. His young son was nearby, and conveyed to him how his songs were received by those who listened to those.

And then again in July 1999, the artist visited Angkor, and found the guitarist in his haunt, i.e. the same place, and still playing the charming music. He had been re-united with his wife whom he had presumed as dead. They had found each other after good 11 years.

One of the more forbidding and horrendous picture in Herat (14 August 1999) is captioned “The Yellow Room”. This was as a result of the artists’ visit to ICRC’s Centre where limbs were fitted to the handicapped, and he was advised to see a badly injured 12-year-old boy.

The ‘Yellow Room’ had a somewhat sunny surroundings outside the grim room in which Abdul Qadir stretched out like a living skeleton on a steel bed. He emitted a yellow light. According to the artist he had not seen anyone so emaciated as Abdul Qadir, since his last sojourn to Somalia, but the Somalians were almost on the death bed. Abdul was very much alive with clear penetrating eyes. He had horrific scars from a stomach wound, and was paralysed. He was not on a drip and his mother Sarah was nearby looking after him.

Two months back (19 June 1999) he and his older brother were leading a donkey loaded with wheat when it trod on an anti-tank mine. His brother and the donkey exploded into small pieces before his eyes. Abdul was blown through the air to find himself crumpled, unable to move, with his intestines spilling out.

The horrific scene is well painted by the artist and it is worthwhile quoting his comments on this grotesque scene. “... Never before have I felt the drawing of a subject’s physical likeness to be so totally inadequate as a means of communicating their presence. In that room the door between life and death was wide open, his bed suspended above an abyss, Abdul clinging to life, his spirit floating inches above his body unable to draw away, while his mother’s prayers keep him suspended between realities...” This was in Herat Afghanistan.