Imran Khan - 2006
He shot to fame as a playboy cricketer but now, Imran Khan is a politician on a mission. He explains his frustration with the Musharraf government.
“There’s a fear America is about to destroy our way of life”, Khan states. “There is a radicalism going on in reaction to what is happening.” He blames Musharraf for being a “poodle of George Bush” and condemns levels of government corruption. But so far, Khan has struggled to transform the people’s adoration into votes.
ABC Australia - Ref 3135
Journeyman Pictures is your independent source for the world's most powerful films, exploring the burning issues of today. We represent stories from the world's top producers, with brand new content coming in all the time. On our channel you'll find outstanding and controversial journalism covering any global subject you can imagine wanting to know about.
Transcript
LLOYD: In the mountains of Kashmir, they’re clamouring to greet Pakistan’s favourite son. Fourteen years ago he won the World Cup for these fanatical cricket lovers. Given the fervour you’d think it had only just happened. Imran Khan still strides forth as the country’s most recognised man.
MAN IN CROWD YELLING: Long live Imran Khan!
LLOYD: But for all the affection and goodwill, he’s haunted by the spectre of personal and professional failure.
IMRAN KHAN: I had everything. I mean I still have everything. I think I’m one of the most fortunate people who whatever he wanted in life he got.
NAJAM SETHI: I would like to see Imran as the moral conscience of Pakistan. I think he could do enormous good if he were to do that.
LLOYD: The story of life after cricket for Imran Khan is a saga of ambition set in the subcontinent. Not content with fame and sporting glory, Imran has set his sights even higher. He’s declared that he wants to run this country but this is Pakistan, where tough opponents play by their own rules and he’s up against a dictator with friends in Washington.
Pakistan’s far north - a spectacular landscape of jagged mountains and deep valleys. Last October saw a huge natural disaster, an earthquake that killed more than seventy five thousand people. The epicentre, Balacote town, was reduced to rubble. Also badly damaged was the reputation of the military, Pakistan’s most pervasive national institution. It receives as much as one third of the national budget and yet failed to act quickly during a time of crisis.
IMRAN KHAN: It was total chaos. There was no direction you know, there was no central … what the government should have actually done was to direct this relief effort.
LLOYD: Imran Khan was a high profile face of Pakistan’s civilian response. His charity organisation raised millions of dollars worldwide to provide shelter and clothing to victims left stranded by the State.
IMRAN KHAN: He says as far as the government goes there’s darkness. There’s nothing to look forward to, says we don’t know at the moment what can happen.
LLOYD: Are you the light?
IMRAN KHAN: Once I get into power. That could be a while.
LLOYD: These people had their lives turned upside down by catastrophe but on this day they’re honouring Imran Khan with a cricket match – whether he likes it or not.
IMRAN KHAN: I have left cricket way behind. You know for me it’s part of my past and I never look back in my past. It’s a sort of character trait. When I left school I never wanted to go back. I left university, never wanted to go back. When I stopped playing cricket I never wanted to play cricket again.
LLOYD: The fielding was a lot smoother than the pitch. Fireworks and a crowd invasion signalled the end of the match and the start of wild celebrations. For Imran Khan, cricket is both a blessing and a burden. It brought him fame and recognition but he wants to be known for much more.
IMRAN KHAN: When I became the cricket captain, I couldn’t speak to the team directly I was so shy. I had to tell the manager, I said listen can you talk to the, this is what I want to convey to the team. I mean early team meetings I use to be so shy and embarrassed I couldn’t talk to the team and here am I now, I stand in front of thousands of people and I make speeches and so I change my character to suit my mission.
LLOYD: His mission is politics. Imran Khan launched his self-style Justice Movement ten years ago. He was elected as its sole parliamentarian in 2002 but he’s never found a way to convert the public’s adoration into votes that would put his party in the political big league.
In a country that’s been ruled by a succession of dictators and corrupt feudal dynasties, there’s very little room for political outsiders, especially champions of radical change.
IMRAN KHAN: [Addressing crowd] Musharraf is sitting here, and he licks George Bush’s shoes! And one more toady is sitting over there – Hosni Mubarak is sitting in Egypt, and on the right side there is Hamid Karzai sitting in Kabul. They are the puppets sitting on the Muslim world.
IMRAN KHAN: We want a sovereign Pakistan. We do not want a president to be a poodle of George Bush. We want him to you know lead this country and give us pride and self respect and dignity. Number two, we want rule of law in Pakistan. We do not want the ruling elite to be above law. At the moment there’s only one issue, to get rid of military dictatorship.
LLOYD: Imran wasn’t always so concerned about democracy. He was vocal in support of General Pervez Musharraf who deposed an elected leader nearly seven years ago.
GENERAL PERVEZ MUSHARRAF: The people were seeing darkness all around. We have now shown them light.
IMRAN KHAN: The main thing was that he wanted to finish “sham democracy” and bring in genuine democracy for Pakistan so here we were thinking here’s a hero you know who wants to bring democracy in Pakistan. We all supported him.
LLOYD: Imran claims he was offered a plum job, Musharraf’s Prime Minister.
Why did you turn it down?
IMRAN KHAN: Because I asked myself a very simple question. Will all these, the coalition of crooks, will they ever allow a judiciary to be independent? Would Musharraf allow a judiciary to be independent? The answer is no and what does he do about accountability of corrupt politicians? He aligns himself with the biggest crooks in this country. I mean these are not just crooks, they are icons of corruption.
NAJAM SETHI: [Editor, Daily Times] The perception is largely true that if Musharraf when Musharraf seized power, if Musharraf had offered him the prime ministership of this country, he would have taken it.
LLOYD: Well Imran Khan says he did.
NAJAM SETHI: He did what?
LLOYD: Offer him the prime ministership.
NAJAM SETHI: Well you have to ask Musharraf whether he did or not, so you can’t really take his word for it. Musharraf certainly says this that he’s angry with me because I didn’t give him what he wants.
LLOYD: Pakistan’s political system may not be all that counts against Imran Khan according to one of the nation’s most respected political commentators.
NAJAM SETHI: People in his own party who worked with him and then left him say he’s autocratic, he doesn’t listen and he has a clique of people around him who are chums and buddies. He listens to them but he doesn’t really interact with his own party members. A lot of the Imran Khan story is about backtracking on a lot of things he said earlier, which is why this doesn’t inspire people.
LLOYD: His biggest about face was in his private life. After vowing to marry a Pakistani woman and keep her at home, Imran Khan’s choice of bride shocked many. Jemima Goldsmith was the socialite daughter of one of Britain’s richest men and her Jewish heritage didn’t sit well with many in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
IMRAN KHAN: My personal life you know suffered and I think it was probably even tougher for my ex-wife because Jemima really suffered because you know they went for her. She became the soft target.
LLOYD: Is it difficult not to be bitter about that?
IMRAN KHAN: I strongly believe that you know in marriages you have to go through the ups and downs together as a husband and wife. You struggle together. This was one aspect why my marriage suffered. The other aspect was of course that you know in a cross cultural marriage, it’s always difficult to, you know when some other person comes to live in your country, to expect them to live there, it’s a big challenge.
LLOYD: This is the private domain of Imran Khan’s family. His marriage to Jemima ended two years ago. She now lives in Britain. These days sons Qasim and Suleiman only come to dad’s house in Pakistan during holidays.
IMRAN KHAN: It’s only been a year since they’ve had any interest in cricket otherwise if I... on television, if we were sitting you know in front of the TV and if cricket came along, I would have a chorus either side ‘not boring cricket again!’ so I had to flick the channel again.
LLOYD: These days the world’s greatest all rounder only plays the backyard game.
IMRAN KHAN: They love it here, the open spaces. In London it’s not really, it’s not the best place for children to grow up in the sense that it’s not a very outdoor life and here you know it’s perfect for them.
LLOYD: Khan says he faced a dilemma and made a brutal choice – career ambition over marriage.
IMRAN KHAN: In the sense that I was torn, you know trying to make my marriage work and you know trying to give time to politics and that it got divided. Certainly if I wasn’t married I would have been able to give much more time to politics.
LLOYD: Nowadays this is a typical day at the office. He’s come to remote, rural Pakistan to meet his constituents. These men are complaining to Imran about television reception but their local member has his eye on the bigger picture. Most Pakistanis resent President Musharraf for supporting America’s so called war on terror. Not far from this community, Pakistan’s military has been striking hard against suspected al Qaeda and Taliban hideouts.
The campaign is causing a backlash, a shift in the national mood from secularism to religious conviction by those who believe the war on terror is a war on Islam and Imran Khan is one of them.
IMRAN KHAN: Because of this war on Islam and the siege mentality coming in, this fear that the United States is about to destroy our way of life which is sweeping across everywhere and the bombing of Afghanistan had a big impact. Afghanistan is very close from here so it had a big fallout here. That has led to most people going to mosques more, reverting back to you know so as to speak closing ranks but the worst thing is that it is radicalising our society. There’s a radicalism going on in reaction to what is happening.
LLOYD: It’s a bizarre transformation. A one time heart throb setting himself up as a defender of the faith and the madrassa system of religious schools. Imran claims it fills a void left by a crumbling state education system. Pakistan spends less than 2% of its national budget on public schooling.
IMRAN KHAN: So you know for the poorest of the poor and let me say that almost 40% of the population is below the poverty line, so for them this is the only way to have at least their children read and write.
LLOYD: Imran Khan is not afraid to keep company with people labelled as radicals and he’s sympathetic to the resurgent Taliban movement in neighbouring Afghanistan. It’s made him a political target.
Is it a source of frustration that, that many people who criticise you say well Imran’s becoming a fundamentalist?
IMRAN KHAN: The reason why they call me a fundamentalist I think is because they don’t know my religious views so it’s clearly not on what I believe in. It’s on my political views and my political views are nationalist. I do not believe your country should be boot licking some superpower. I believe in self respect and dignity. What has that got to do with fundamentalism or so on? You in Australia have extremists. You have racist people who want to get rid of coloured people like us. You know they want white only people. You have extremists. It’s like concentrating in the United States on the Ku Klux Klan and saying all Americans are like that. It’s exactly what’s happening in the Muslim world. They concentrate on the fanatics and then brand a whole 1.3 billion people with the same brush.
LLOYD: The playboy to puritan U-turn left many people scratching their heads in wonder. Imran credits a spiritual reawakening towards the end of his cricketing career.
That popular perception which is probably about to make you cringe about being the playboy - were you like that before you went through this process?
IMRAN KHAN: You know, I mean I was a bachelor. I was playing cricket. I loved life. I still love life. What it does is that it sort of gives you something incredible. It gives you inner peace, contentment, which I actually never had before.
LLOYD: It might be military run but there’s still plenty of free expression in Pakistan. Sprouting anti Government rhetoric isn’t hard when most people think their President is doing the wrong thing siding with the US.
NAJAM SETHI: [Editor, Daily Times] Who isn’t trying to be anti Musharraf in this country?. It isn’t you know a novel idea. He’s still happy sitting with the religious parties because they think they’re anti American but he wont share the platform with the main stream moderate parties because he thinks that they were corrupt so you know…
LLOYD: He’s right isn’t he they are corrupt?
NAJAM SETHI: Sorry?
LLOYD: They are corrupt.
NAJAM SETHI: Everybody’s corrupt – even the religious parties are corrupt. Even the military’s corrupt. Who isn’t corrupt in politics? Politics is all about corruption to a greater, lesser extent. Some is more transparent, some is less but at the end of the day, all power is corrupting. So now if Imran Khan is going to get into politics, then he’s got to learn to live with the fact that there is a trickle down corruption effect everywhere.
LLOYD: Imran Khan may have missed his mark in politics so far but this is where he’s truly at home. We’ve come to the hospital that Imran built in a desperately poor nation short on quality medical care. In a country of 166 million people, it’s Pakistan’s only facility devoted to cancer treatment. Most of the people here are poor and will be treated free of charge. It takes 15 minutes just to get in the front door.
Is it always like this?
IMRAN KHAN: Yes. You know the thing is you can only take about, every day seven new patients. There are thirty to forty new patients, which arrive every day.
LLOYD: And all those cases outside, all overwhelming, compelling cases?
IMRAN KHAN: Well we have to take a decision that which are the patients we take so we take only patients which are in the first stages of cancer. You know who we can, who we have a better chance of curing.
LLOYD: Imran travelled the country on a fund raising campaign to build the hospital driven by an experience that changed his life.
IMRAN KHAN: Well my mother died of cancer. You know, actually I was playing for New South Wales then way back in 1985 and it’s then that I discovered you know, when she was ill that there was no cancer hospital in this country so whereas people like us could afford to take our relatives abroad for treatment, for people like this, there was nowhere to go.
LLOYD: The hospital has an international reputation as a cancer research centre. Another is planned for Pakistan’s biggest city, Karachi.
IMRAN KHAN: This has a good sort of prognosis, yeah so you know…
LLOYD: That’s good news.
IMRAN KHAN: Yeah, yeah actually most of the children are, we think, we think, we think they will all survive. Now that’s, that is the good news. It’s not actually that depressing because in children it’s you know you have very good results here.
LLOYD: Pakistanis may embrace Imran Khan, the charity worker and sporting hero but they’ve shown a reluctance to support his political ambition.
In cricket one of the things that you were known for was your discipline and knowing when to quit. If politics isn’t working for you, when is the time to walk away? When do you decide that you can quit?
IMRAN KHAN: There’s no question of quitting. This is a struggle for life. I mean when I came into politics I had decided that I would go to achieve my goals whatever it took and I have no fears you know? I have no fear of dying, of failure of anything so that means that for my opponents I’m very dangerous.
LLOYD: But the danger for Imran Khan is that in a country dominated by patronage, politics and the military, it’s likely he’ll never be more than a celebrity outsider.
MAN IN CROWD YELLING: Long live Imran Khan!
LLOYD: But for all the affection and goodwill, he’s haunted by the spectre of personal and professional failure.
IMRAN KHAN: I had everything. I mean I still have everything. I think I’m one of the most fortunate people who whatever he wanted in life he got.
NAJAM SETHI: I would like to see Imran as the moral conscience of Pakistan. I think he could do enormous good if he were to do that.
LLOYD: The story of life after cricket for Imran Khan is a saga of ambition set in the subcontinent. Not content with fame and sporting glory, Imran has set his sights even higher. He’s declared that he wants to run this country but this is Pakistan, where tough opponents play by their own rules and he’s up against a dictator with friends in Washington.
Pakistan’s far north - a spectacular landscape of jagged mountains and deep valleys. Last October saw a huge natural disaster, an earthquake that killed more than seventy five thousand people. The epicentre, Balacote town, was reduced to rubble. Also badly damaged was the reputation of the military, Pakistan’s most pervasive national institution. It receives as much as one third of the national budget and yet failed to act quickly during a time of crisis.
IMRAN KHAN: It was total chaos. There was no direction you know, there was no central … what the government should have actually done was to direct this relief effort.
LLOYD: Imran Khan was a high profile face of Pakistan’s civilian response. His charity organisation raised millions of dollars worldwide to provide shelter and clothing to victims left stranded by the State.
IMRAN KHAN: He says as far as the government goes there’s darkness. There’s nothing to look forward to, says we don’t know at the moment what can happen.
LLOYD: Are you the light?
IMRAN KHAN: Once I get into power. That could be a while.
LLOYD: These people had their lives turned upside down by catastrophe but on this day they’re honouring Imran Khan with a cricket match – whether he likes it or not.
IMRAN KHAN: I have left cricket way behind. You know for me it’s part of my past and I never look back in my past. It’s a sort of character trait. When I left school I never wanted to go back. I left university, never wanted to go back. When I stopped playing cricket I never wanted to play cricket again.
LLOYD: The fielding was a lot smoother than the pitch. Fireworks and a crowd invasion signalled the end of the match and the start of wild celebrations. For Imran Khan, cricket is both a blessing and a burden. It brought him fame and recognition but he wants to be known for much more.
IMRAN KHAN: When I became the cricket captain, I couldn’t speak to the team directly I was so shy. I had to tell the manager, I said listen can you talk to the, this is what I want to convey to the team. I mean early team meetings I use to be so shy and embarrassed I couldn’t talk to the team and here am I now, I stand in front of thousands of people and I make speeches and so I change my character to suit my mission.
LLOYD: His mission is politics. Imran Khan launched his self-style Justice Movement ten years ago. He was elected as its sole parliamentarian in 2002 but he’s never found a way to convert the public’s adoration into votes that would put his party in the political big league.
In a country that’s been ruled by a succession of dictators and corrupt feudal dynasties, there’s very little room for political outsiders, especially champions of radical change.
IMRAN KHAN: [Addressing crowd] Musharraf is sitting here, and he licks George Bush’s shoes! And one more toady is sitting over there – Hosni Mubarak is sitting in Egypt, and on the right side there is Hamid Karzai sitting in Kabul. They are the puppets sitting on the Muslim world.
IMRAN KHAN: We want a sovereign Pakistan. We do not want a president to be a poodle of George Bush. We want him to you know lead this country and give us pride and self respect and dignity. Number two, we want rule of law in Pakistan. We do not want the ruling elite to be above law. At the moment there’s only one issue, to get rid of military dictatorship.
LLOYD: Imran wasn’t always so concerned about democracy. He was vocal in support of General Pervez Musharraf who deposed an elected leader nearly seven years ago.
GENERAL PERVEZ MUSHARRAF: The people were seeing darkness all around. We have now shown them light.
IMRAN KHAN: The main thing was that he wanted to finish “sham democracy” and bring in genuine democracy for Pakistan so here we were thinking here’s a hero you know who wants to bring democracy in Pakistan. We all supported him.
LLOYD: Imran claims he was offered a plum job, Musharraf’s Prime Minister.
Why did you turn it down?
IMRAN KHAN: Because I asked myself a very simple question. Will all these, the coalition of crooks, will they ever allow a judiciary to be independent? Would Musharraf allow a judiciary to be independent? The answer is no and what does he do about accountability of corrupt politicians? He aligns himself with the biggest crooks in this country. I mean these are not just crooks, they are icons of corruption.
NAJAM SETHI: [Editor, Daily Times] The perception is largely true that if Musharraf when Musharraf seized power, if Musharraf had offered him the prime ministership of this country, he would have taken it.
LLOYD: Well Imran Khan says he did.
NAJAM SETHI: He did what?
LLOYD: Offer him the prime ministership.
NAJAM SETHI: Well you have to ask Musharraf whether he did or not, so you can’t really take his word for it. Musharraf certainly says this that he’s angry with me because I didn’t give him what he wants.
LLOYD: Pakistan’s political system may not be all that counts against Imran Khan according to one of the nation’s most respected political commentators.
NAJAM SETHI: People in his own party who worked with him and then left him say he’s autocratic, he doesn’t listen and he has a clique of people around him who are chums and buddies. He listens to them but he doesn’t really interact with his own party members. A lot of the Imran Khan story is about backtracking on a lot of things he said earlier, which is why this doesn’t inspire people.
LLOYD: His biggest about face was in his private life. After vowing to marry a Pakistani woman and keep her at home, Imran Khan’s choice of bride shocked many. Jemima Goldsmith was the socialite daughter of one of Britain’s richest men and her Jewish heritage didn’t sit well with many in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
IMRAN KHAN: My personal life you know suffered and I think it was probably even tougher for my ex-wife because Jemima really suffered because you know they went for her. She became the soft target.
LLOYD: Is it difficult not to be bitter about that?
IMRAN KHAN: I strongly believe that you know in marriages you have to go through the ups and downs together as a husband and wife. You struggle together. This was one aspect why my marriage suffered. The other aspect was of course that you know in a cross cultural marriage, it’s always difficult to, you know when some other person comes to live in your country, to expect them to live there, it’s a big challenge.
LLOYD: This is the private domain of Imran Khan’s family. His marriage to Jemima ended two years ago. She now lives in Britain. These days sons Qasim and Suleiman only come to dad’s house in Pakistan during holidays.
IMRAN KHAN: It’s only been a year since they’ve had any interest in cricket otherwise if I... on television, if we were sitting you know in front of the TV and if cricket came along, I would have a chorus either side ‘not boring cricket again!’ so I had to flick the channel again.
LLOYD: These days the world’s greatest all rounder only plays the backyard game.
IMRAN KHAN: They love it here, the open spaces. In London it’s not really, it’s not the best place for children to grow up in the sense that it’s not a very outdoor life and here you know it’s perfect for them.
LLOYD: Khan says he faced a dilemma and made a brutal choice – career ambition over marriage.
IMRAN KHAN: In the sense that I was torn, you know trying to make my marriage work and you know trying to give time to politics and that it got divided. Certainly if I wasn’t married I would have been able to give much more time to politics.
LLOYD: Nowadays this is a typical day at the office. He’s come to remote, rural Pakistan to meet his constituents. These men are complaining to Imran about television reception but their local member has his eye on the bigger picture. Most Pakistanis resent President Musharraf for supporting America’s so called war on terror. Not far from this community, Pakistan’s military has been striking hard against suspected al Qaeda and Taliban hideouts.
The campaign is causing a backlash, a shift in the national mood from secularism to religious conviction by those who believe the war on terror is a war on Islam and Imran Khan is one of them.
IMRAN KHAN: Because of this war on Islam and the siege mentality coming in, this fear that the United States is about to destroy our way of life which is sweeping across everywhere and the bombing of Afghanistan had a big impact. Afghanistan is very close from here so it had a big fallout here. That has led to most people going to mosques more, reverting back to you know so as to speak closing ranks but the worst thing is that it is radicalising our society. There’s a radicalism going on in reaction to what is happening.
LLOYD: It’s a bizarre transformation. A one time heart throb setting himself up as a defender of the faith and the madrassa system of religious schools. Imran claims it fills a void left by a crumbling state education system. Pakistan spends less than 2% of its national budget on public schooling.
IMRAN KHAN: So you know for the poorest of the poor and let me say that almost 40% of the population is below the poverty line, so for them this is the only way to have at least their children read and write.
LLOYD: Imran Khan is not afraid to keep company with people labelled as radicals and he’s sympathetic to the resurgent Taliban movement in neighbouring Afghanistan. It’s made him a political target.
Is it a source of frustration that, that many people who criticise you say well Imran’s becoming a fundamentalist?
IMRAN KHAN: The reason why they call me a fundamentalist I think is because they don’t know my religious views so it’s clearly not on what I believe in. It’s on my political views and my political views are nationalist. I do not believe your country should be boot licking some superpower. I believe in self respect and dignity. What has that got to do with fundamentalism or so on? You in Australia have extremists. You have racist people who want to get rid of coloured people like us. You know they want white only people. You have extremists. It’s like concentrating in the United States on the Ku Klux Klan and saying all Americans are like that. It’s exactly what’s happening in the Muslim world. They concentrate on the fanatics and then brand a whole 1.3 billion people with the same brush.
LLOYD: The playboy to puritan U-turn left many people scratching their heads in wonder. Imran credits a spiritual reawakening towards the end of his cricketing career.
That popular perception which is probably about to make you cringe about being the playboy - were you like that before you went through this process?
IMRAN KHAN: You know, I mean I was a bachelor. I was playing cricket. I loved life. I still love life. What it does is that it sort of gives you something incredible. It gives you inner peace, contentment, which I actually never had before.
LLOYD: It might be military run but there’s still plenty of free expression in Pakistan. Sprouting anti Government rhetoric isn’t hard when most people think their President is doing the wrong thing siding with the US.
NAJAM SETHI: [Editor, Daily Times] Who isn’t trying to be anti Musharraf in this country?. It isn’t you know a novel idea. He’s still happy sitting with the religious parties because they think they’re anti American but he wont share the platform with the main stream moderate parties because he thinks that they were corrupt so you know…
LLOYD: He’s right isn’t he they are corrupt?
NAJAM SETHI: Sorry?
LLOYD: They are corrupt.
NAJAM SETHI: Everybody’s corrupt – even the religious parties are corrupt. Even the military’s corrupt. Who isn’t corrupt in politics? Politics is all about corruption to a greater, lesser extent. Some is more transparent, some is less but at the end of the day, all power is corrupting. So now if Imran Khan is going to get into politics, then he’s got to learn to live with the fact that there is a trickle down corruption effect everywhere.
LLOYD: Imran Khan may have missed his mark in politics so far but this is where he’s truly at home. We’ve come to the hospital that Imran built in a desperately poor nation short on quality medical care. In a country of 166 million people, it’s Pakistan’s only facility devoted to cancer treatment. Most of the people here are poor and will be treated free of charge. It takes 15 minutes just to get in the front door.
Is it always like this?
IMRAN KHAN: Yes. You know the thing is you can only take about, every day seven new patients. There are thirty to forty new patients, which arrive every day.
LLOYD: And all those cases outside, all overwhelming, compelling cases?
IMRAN KHAN: Well we have to take a decision that which are the patients we take so we take only patients which are in the first stages of cancer. You know who we can, who we have a better chance of curing.
LLOYD: Imran travelled the country on a fund raising campaign to build the hospital driven by an experience that changed his life.
IMRAN KHAN: Well my mother died of cancer. You know, actually I was playing for New South Wales then way back in 1985 and it’s then that I discovered you know, when she was ill that there was no cancer hospital in this country so whereas people like us could afford to take our relatives abroad for treatment, for people like this, there was nowhere to go.
LLOYD: The hospital has an international reputation as a cancer research centre. Another is planned for Pakistan’s biggest city, Karachi.
IMRAN KHAN: This has a good sort of prognosis, yeah so you know…
LLOYD: That’s good news.
IMRAN KHAN: Yeah, yeah actually most of the children are, we think, we think, we think they will all survive. Now that’s, that is the good news. It’s not actually that depressing because in children it’s you know you have very good results here.
LLOYD: Pakistanis may embrace Imran Khan, the charity worker and sporting hero but they’ve shown a reluctance to support his political ambition.
In cricket one of the things that you were known for was your discipline and knowing when to quit. If politics isn’t working for you, when is the time to walk away? When do you decide that you can quit?
IMRAN KHAN: There’s no question of quitting. This is a struggle for life. I mean when I came into politics I had decided that I would go to achieve my goals whatever it took and I have no fears you know? I have no fear of dying, of failure of anything so that means that for my opponents I’m very dangerous.
LLOYD: But the danger for Imran Khan is that in a country dominated by patronage, politics and the military, it’s likely he’ll never be more than a celebrity outsider.
© 2013 Journeyman Pictures
Journeyman Pictures Ltd. 4-6 High Street, Thames Ditton, Surrey, KT7 0RY, United Kingdom
Email: info@journeyman.tv
Journeyman Pictures Ltd. 4-6 High Street, Thames Ditton, Surrey, KT7 0RY, United Kingdom
Email: info@journeyman.tv
Imran Khan - 2006
Reviewed by Uncle Sam
on
06:12
Rating:
Reviewed by Uncle Sam
on
06:12
Rating:
No comments: