FEATURES
New life in a land of death
Radek Sikorski sees the transformation
one warlord has brought to a part of Afghanistan devastated by the
Soviets in 1987
I had long wanted to return to Kushk-e-Serwan, a small Afghan village
at the narrower end of the Hari Rud river oasis, between the Hindu
Kush and Iran. The first time I went there, I was travelling with
Ismael Khan, the leader of the Afghan resistance in Western Afghanistan.
Most days bombs fell on places where we had stayed a day or two
before, as soon as Communist spies could report our whereabouts.
We arrived in the vicinity on the morning of 11 August 1987, and
while I was there with his men, a couple of Soviet jets arrived
too. Afghan houses look impressive, but the mud brick turns to dust
at the slightest impact. The valley darkened as the bombs fell and
the dust dispersed. I spent the next couple of hours watching villagers
dig out their dead, mostly women and children. They laid the bodies
on the floor of the village mosque, 54 people in all.
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Suffocated by the
dust: Afghan victims of Soviet bombs in 1987
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While I photographed, the villagers kept digging,
hoping that someone might have survived in an air pocket. I heard
cries from a neighbouring compound and rushed to see what had happened.
The men stopped to behold an amazing sight. Under an arch made of
mud bricks, a veiled woman with two children by her side sat peacefully,
her hands extended horizontally as if she were reaching out to her
rescuers. A veil covered her face; her embroidered dress stood out
against the dust. One of the children, his hands also outstretched,
was smiling. There was no blood but none of the family moved. They
had been suffocated by the dust.
Mujahedin parties made my photograph of the Afghan mother with two
children killed by Soviet bombs into posters, and it became one of
the defining images of the Russo-Afghan war. It haunted me for years.
In the panic of the rescue and the anticipation of more bombs — which
killed scores over the next few days — I did not establish the woman’s
name. And why was she veiled inside her own house? Did she know that
death was coming and, in her last conscious act, observed proprieties
to prevent strange men from seeing her face? Now I wondered whether
anybody would remember that bombing raid, 17 years earlier. It had
been a tragic day, but one of many during that war.
There is no proper road to Kushk-e-Serwan, and pebbles hit the suspension
of our pick-up truck on the dirt track between the green belt at the
bottom of the valley and the desert. But in the local town, Pashtoon
Zargun — just a street with a line of miserable shops and a police
station — one of the policemen, a former mujahed, smiled when he saw
me. ‘You are Rahim, aren’t you, you came here during the jihad with
the Soviets?’ He correctly identified my former nom de guerre, bestowed
upon me by Ismael Khan’s men.
I needn’t have worried about finding Kushk-e-Serwan. Five more minutes’
drive within narrow alleys and we came to a patch of rough ground
with jagged mud walls protruding from the ground. It was exactly as
I remembered it, the precise spot where the bombs fell. The houses
had not been rebuilt.
We went to the mosque where they had gathered the bodies. It was unchanged
except for an ugly concrete balcony and the green algae at the bottom
of the ablution pool. The area was even poorer than it had been during
the Soviet war. The river, the ponds, the irrigation canals which
used to give us such good, if wet, protection from the bombs, were
now dry as dust. Crops had failed for several years in a row.
Within half an hour, several villagers gathered inside the mosque
around a copy of my book, with the war photographs, which I had brought
along to jog memories. One man claimed it was his wife and children
on the photograph, but he was overruled. The other villagers reached
a consensus: the photograph showed the wife of Ibrahim. Ibrahim was
originally also listed as dead but in fact survived. He spent much
time praying at the cemetery where sticks with green flags marked
the graves of those killed in the war. I met him the following day.
He was a man in his sixties, very thin, wearing shoes made of old
tyres and a neat turban. He showed me a folded piece of paper that
he always carried on his person: an old poster displaying my photograph.
His wife’s name was Bibi Gul and she was about 40 years old on the
day she died. The family had been having a reunion that day, and when
they heard the aeroplanes they all gathered in the strongest room
in the house. That’s how Ibrahim lost his entire extended family:
21 people in all, including all children and grandchildren. His wife
had been veiled, he said, because she was praying when disaster struck.
Ibrahim now lived in a small room on the charity of his neighbours.
Could I help him in his misery please? More than anything else, he
wanted to get married again. But in Afghanistan you have to pay. ‘Can
you help me buy a wife,’ he pleaded, ‘so that I have some light in
my life? Not a young wife for sleeping with, but an old one, just
for cooking. It’s only $2,000.’
Kushk-e-Serwan interested me for other reasons too: it’s part of the
Herat region, an area of Western Afghanistan which is ruled, in effect,
by Ismael Khan, my guerrilla leader friend, now turned governor. He
had been the leader of the original anti-communist uprising in Afghanistan
in the city of Herat in 1979, and liberated it after years in the
saddle in 1992. Captured by the Taleban, Ismael Khan escaped from
Kandahar jail in a daring raid; his legs were peppered with shrapnel
wounds, acquired when the jeep he escaped in exploded on a mine near
the Iranian border.
Although Ismael Khan is a war hero by any definition, I was worried
about whether I could still be proud of my friendship with him. Making
the transition from a war leader to a peacetime politician is hard.
Instead of secretiveness, single-mindedness, courage and ruthlessness,
you need openness, trustfulness and the ability to build coalitions.
In Central Europe, only Vaclav Havel managed it gracefully. Would
Ismael Khan not succumb to temptation and become a tyrant? Like other
former mujahedin leaders he is now often referred to as a ‘warlord’,
and the warlords are usually thought of as the largest obstacle to
a permanent peace in Afghanistan.
But Herat does not look like a warlord’s den. The airport road, which
I crossed in 1987, terrified of the Soviet tanks whose tracks had
turned it into a series of potholes, is now covered in asphalt, and
illuminated by working street lights. It is lined with freshly planted
pines, and has a central reservation with a lawn. The western suburbs,
where I spent several weeks in 1987 dodging Soviet bombs and rockets,
used to be called ‘little Hiroshima’. Today, it’s a busy commercial
area, with a new ring road along the ancient city walls.
Until a year ago Ismael Khan channelled money from Herat’s customs
terminal — trucks from Iran and Turkmenistan have to pass through
the city — into public parks, a monument to the Soviet war, and new
roads. It’s quite something, in this dry country, to see women in
burkas riding pedal boats in Herat’s municipal water-park, as well
as a lunatic asylum and a drug rehabilitation clinic in a country
not known for its social infrastructure. Land in Herat has been set
aside and houses built for the widows of fallen partisans. I visited
several girls’ schools. They were located in tents, and operate in
shifts, but they are schools nevertheless. One evening I stood on
the terrace of a restaurant that overlooks the city from the cooler,
northern hills, in the company of a group of Afghan university rectors
who had gathered there for a conference. We watched the sodium street
lights light up all over the city. ‘This is not like Afghanistan!’
exclaimed one of the Afghans. This was the highest compliment he could
think of. Thanks to the light, families picnic in the parks until
midnight on Friday nights — unthinkable anywhere else in the country.
For a warlord, Ismael Khan seems like a hard-working and shrewd administrator.
I followed his schedule for some days, sitting in on meetings with
local police chiefs, Kabul military commanders, and the odd Uzbek
diplomat. A crowd of petitioners — cripples, favour-seekers, women
asking for permission to divorce — crowded the anterooms. Like the
Doge of Venice, Ismael Khan personally empties sealed suggestion boxes
that have been set up at main points in the city: blue boxes for complaints
against officials, white boxes for disputes between citizens. As a
rule, officials are dismissed after two complaints are received against
them. The street lights were connected in the poorest areas first.
But Ismael Khan’s rule is more than just one man’s quest to rebuild
a city he clearly loves. It is perhaps the first experiment in Islamist-style
modernisation, at least in Afghanistan. Against the backdrop of communist-forced
secularisation and then the Wahabi-inspired fanaticism of the Taleban,
moderate Islamists like Ismael Khan are the functional equivalent
of conservatives. Reform and modernisation, they say, must come from
within the philosophical roots of their own society and should gain
religious sanction in order to be palatable and permanent. Even at
the height of the war with the Soviets, I watched him argue with villagers:
‘Why don’t you set up a school? The Prophet, peace be upon him, taught
that in search of knowledge we must go as far as China.’ More recently,
I heard him denounce men who drive their wives to suicide by keeping
them locked up inside their houses. ‘You must give education to your
daughters, so they can be helpful to your children. And what kind
of men are you to rely on marriages arranged for money!’ If the provincial
villagers who were listening are to accept radical changes at all,
they are more likely to do so from a local Islamic leader than from
some UN do-gooder.
True, local television broadcasts Ismael Khan’s overlong speeches
in full, which does not inspire faith in the freedom of the press
in Herat. Even his own bodyguards — the most faithful of the faithful
from his mujahed days — seem bored with the repetitiveness of his
message. Ismael Khan is a conservative in a conservative city and
will not, for example, shake hands with women. On the other hand,
I could not confirm the operation of a religious police in the city
and the women I met in a private house by private arrangement told
me that ‘Now that the Taleban have left, we are free.’ Ismael Khan
is slow to disarm his old fighters under the UN plan but there is
a reason: last time he did it, he found himself with no troops to
resist the Taleban. Like everywhere else in Afghanistan, drug cultivation
is no doubt spreading.
Back in Kushk-e-Serwan, a village as remote and destitute as any in
Afghanistan, all the children, boys and girls, are at school for the
first time ever. Everybody is registered for the forthcoming presidential
and parliamentary elections — women as well as men. I detected little
trace of the anti-Western feeling which is detectable among urban
Afghans. They seemed glad to be rid of the Taleban, whose rule they
remembered chiefly for searches and arrests. When the Taleban called
a council of mullahs to decide what to do with Osama bin Laden in
the wake of 9/11, the local mullah voted to have him expelled. Perhaps
more to the point, they were extremely pleased with the only manifestation
of Western presence in the village: an EU-funded, Danish-built, shiny,
zinc-coated manual well, which relieved the women from having to draw
water in buckets.
It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a lot in Herat. Ismael Khan’s
enlightened paternalism has made the region more optimistic than it’s
been since the Timurid rule in the 15th century. For the moment, I
am still proud to call Ismael Khan my friend.
© 2004 The Spectator.co.uk
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