HAPPY BIRTHDAY WILLIAM !

Today is my little brother’s birthday - I remember William when he looked like a squirming little beetroot in the bath with me, and when we dressed him up as Father Christmas and let him loll around in the fireplace.

But now William is an accomplished author, who has penned many spine tingling tales in his youth, but more recently turned to comedy. He starred, together with black Labradors Humphrey and Dora, in the grisly horror film “The hounds of Hell”.

He is celebrated for having written the history of Yutlin Island, for which he also drew the first maps, and conducted a study of its people in great detail, down to the uniform worn by the police of this little known island. Indeed, William for many years has had a strong interest in law enforcement, quite eclipsing his earlier fascination for burglars, and at some stage wished to be a riot policeman.

William is an epicure, privileging quality over quantity when it comes to food: while uncertain about the point of many vegetables, he adores truffles and is fond of fine dining in exclusive restaurants.

His taste in music is decidedly catholic, as although I believe his all-time favourite is still J.B. Bach, he also sees the merits of 50 Cent and Iron Maiden. William is also a consummate musician, and plays both the piano and the violin to the great delight of his rather less musical family.

Perhaps William is more of an intellectual and artist than a sportsman, but this does not mean that he and I have not engaged in deadly kickboxing sessions on the lawn.

With such qualities, who could blame me for missing him? Can’t wait to see you, William – and Happy 13th Birthday!

Security, archaeology

Well, I had my laugh about security warnings.

Yesterday a suicide bomber attached one of the bases of the Afghan National Army, just as a graduation ceremony was being held for the new recruits, and at least twelve people were killed.

This morning, Ed received a call from his young archaeologist friend to say that the parliamentary candidate who was employing him has just been assassinated.
Neither of these events make me feel that my personal safety is any more in jeopardy than it was, but they are grim reminders of the challenges faced by the courageous people fighting for a peaceful, honest future for their country.
RZ, the young archaeologist, is one of our best friends in Afghanistan and an extraordinary person.

My first contact with him was through the presents that he gave Ed to celebrate our marriage, before I had met him. He gave us a rather charming plaster cast of the Madonna and Child (unexpected!), a very colourful poster of a sinuously loving couple in Shahnameh style surrounded by riotous flora and fauna, and a beautiful sample of his calligraphy, one of his many talents.

RZ is a tireless and effervescent young man who was born and brought up as a refugee in Tehran, and travelled to Afghanistan for the first time last year. He has settled with his family, like most of the new returnees, in an exposed patch of land on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif.

He has no formal training in archaeology – a subject which it would have been a great luxury to pursue in the circumstances, indeed his undergraduate degree in engineering was interrupted when he was obliged to leave Iran. But he is extraordinarily knowledgeable and well-read, having combed the ancient remains in and around Mazar and read everything he could find about Afghanistan’s past. He has written four books (unpublished, as yet – but I am sure that will change when his luck does) on the history of Balkh province, the Bactrian empire and so forth.
All his books are written out by hand, and illustrated with his careful drawings of Bactrian coins and transcrubed insciptions.

He has been employed by the Ministry of Culture, despite his youth and lack of qualifications, and is responsible, I think, for the Museum in Mazar, or possibly for Historic Monuments in general. The Ministry of Culture appears to be a somewhat fluid and mysterious organisation. RZ largely supports himself though by running calligraphy classes for girls and boys in Mazar.

Doubtless because of his great energy and flair, RZ was employed by one of the candidates in the parliamentary elections to organise his campaign and write his speeches.

He worked extremely hard in the run-up to the elections – sometimes all night, it seemed, but he was very reserved in speaking to us about this, and he did not tell us the candidate’s name. He told us only that the candidate was a very rich man (with several large cars, as I recall), and a good man, and that he hoped he would receive some help if the campaign was successful. Knowing RZ, I can imagine that the help he hoped for would be something in the nature of better funding for architectural preservation, or a more concerted effort to combat the ongoing plunder and defacing of the monuments, which distresses him so.

Now it seems that this man is dead, and RZ is badly rattled. Without knowing the details, I can only assume that this candidate was perceived to be a threat to the interests of the powerful drug trafficker / warlords who control Balkh province (of which Mazar is the capital), a focal area for opium production and conveniently located on the border with Uzbekistan (which has a rocketing heroin problem).

One of my main goals before I leave Afghanistan is to help RZ to get a fully funded place on an archaeology degree, preferably at UCL or Chicago University. All offers of help and advice gratefully received as always.

security warning

It can be nervewracking to live in a city with so volatile and threatening a security environment as Kabul.

Today, for example, all NGO and international workers billeted in Kabul found the following security warning in their inboxes:

"Please be aware of demonstration conducted by a small group of people with disabilities.
According to the information a group of people comprised of 60-80 people have came together on Shah Mahmood Ghazi Watt and demonstrating for better Remunerations. The exact location of the demonstration is reported to be between the Ministry of economic (former Ministry planning) and UNDP compound. The demonstration is reported to be peaceful, but ANSO advise NGO community not to drive on Shah Mahmood Watt."

ANSO is the Afghanistan Non-Governmental Organization Safety Office, and we rely on them for these regular bulletins, to brighten our mornings.

Kabul election posters 

Rubbish

Kabul is so dirty. I went out for a short walk yesterday, just as far as Chicken Street, where the closest DVD shop is, and the sight of the fetid piles of rubbish littering the streets and clogging up the ditches put me in a bad mood for hours afterwards. Needless to say, it is not only the sight of such mounds of rubbish is noisome, the smell is enough to make me gag, too – especially near the butchers’ areas.
I really cannot understand why it is so much dirtier than every other city I have been in, including ones that have an otherwise comparable socio-cultural environment, such as Iranian and Tajik cities.

Of course, Kabul city administration probably does not have enough resources to deal effectively with rubbish collection and disposal, but I think this is only part of the problem. After all, Tajikistan is just as cash-strapped and receives less international aid, but Tajiks do not seem to litter so conspicuously, and regularly take the initiative to burn the piles of rubbish outside their homes – which may cause air pollution, but I’d still rather a few hours of black smoke to relentlessly growing mounds of stink. Tajik students engage in more or less voluntary clean up operations on a regular basis, round town and the universities - a Soviet practice (the subbotnik) that seems to have survived the meltdown.

Kabulis on the other hand don’t seem to have too much civic pride – surely understandable after years of war and uncertainty, but I wonder how it will change.
Tin cans whizzing out of moving cars are a common sight, the Kabul river is a stinking trickle of dark filth wending its way past rusting barrels and car parts, and mounds of rubbish obstruct the entrance to shops and houses. Sometimes, in a stomach churning variation to a bucolic theme, a plump flock of sheep can be seen grazing on the rubbish mounds, nosing aside the plastic bottles to unearth the juicy morsels beneath.

Perhaps understandably, Afghans do have a great love of picnics in natural beauty spots, and wax lyrical at the drop of a hat about the clean air and pure mountain water of Afghanistan, but they stop short of taking home the litter from their picnics or taking a long, hard look at what makes the rural picnic spots nicer than Kabul (for now).

I think part of the problem is that, such mounds of trash must have caught Kabulis unawares. During the years of war, before the main roads were repaved, it must have been much harder to import the consumer goods that are such plentiful sources of rubbish, with their bubble wrap, cellophane and other non biodegradable claptrap. With peace, have come vast quantities of comprehensively packaged Chinese electronics, air conditioners, and a multitude of soft drinks in mixed plastic, hard to recycle containers. Once you have finished drinking a cola, there’s nowhere to throw the bottle but the ditch – and even if you do go to the trouble of bringing it home and putting it in the trash can, that will only be emptied into some other, larger ditch elsewhere.

Living in Kabul only really brings home the worldwide problem of rubbish disposal, as of course there is nothing uniquely selfish or reckless about the Afghan approach. The mounds of rubbish are much larger in richer countries – and getting larger all the time, but discreetly tucked away in underground cement lined chambers, giving nothing the chance to rot, but also (we hope) minimising the chance of toxic spillage. Last I heard, the British government was having trouble finding sites for waste dumps (strangely unpopular with the locals) and was looking at the idea of paying poorer countries to ‘dispose of’ British rubbish. How’s that for a sustainable solution?

Beard, beard

In Afghanistan, facial hair can be endless topic of conversation, much as the weather is in England. This is because facial hair is so common and so varied - but almost noone is entirely lacking. I amused myself in the run up to the parliamentary elections by scanning the posters portraying the candidates' faces, which by the final week plastered every wall, truck side, water tank and even tree trunk in the city centres, looking for the one with least facial hair.
Many had the full Taliban-style beard and moustache, neatly combed but otherwise unpruned, and glowered fiercely at the electorate from under their turbans.
Indeed, I began to think that affecting a smile for the camera must be perceived as a sign of unwonted frivolity and lack of dignitas on a par with being clean-shaven. It is difficult to take the clean-shaven seriously, as a rule – my husband shaves quite regularly, but he does have large sideburns.
There were those candidates whose facial hair was hennaed, or elaborately topiaried, whose beard covered only a central patch of chin, and even those audacious enough to shed the beard altogether – leaving only a large moustache. Those latter ones had usually also discarded Afghan dress in favour of a Western suit.
There were, of course, women candidates running for election too, but generally speaking their posters were of rather inferior quality – printed in black and white, in a very grainy texture that would have hidden any downy upper lips, and may also have rendered them hard to recognize on voting day.
[As so many of the electorate is illiterate, each candidate’s name on the ballot sheet is accompanied by a very small mug shoot]. The female candidates also looked almost unremittingly grim.
A luminous exception to this rule was provided by the posters of a young woman photographed tilting her head to one side and smiling warmly, against a pale yellow background, in a light coloured headscarf tied loosely enough to avoid the danger of headaches. I hope she gets through – and I know of at least one man who voted for her, the chap who sold me a SIM card the other day.
He also asked me whether I had been to school. I felt rather insulted by this somehow, and haughtily replied that I had a degree, too – then of course felt extremely sheepish when he explained placidly that he himself was undereducated, and picked up what he knew about mobile phones (most of it in English), after leaving school at 10. He had a moustache.
I have since been told that there is only one facial hair configuration that one must always beware of, unless it is on the faces of very old men – and that is the flowing beard with shaved upper lip. Such men are invariably narrow minded in the extreme, or so I am told.

Bemani

NEWSFLASH! Remember the girl I wrote about a few weeks ago who was badly injured when her house in Kabul was bombed? I wrote many emails on her behalf to specialist medical organisations and hospitals in the UK, only to be met by several weeks of resounding silence.
Today, at last, I was contacted by a hero of a doctor, a maxillofacial surgeon and expert in facial trauma in London, who has offered to operate on her for free. He even seems to be interested in establishing further contacts with HAWCA (Humanitarian Assistance to the Women and Children of Afghanistan), the organisation who has supported her and for whom I am volunteering.

I am very happy – now all I have to do is work out a way to raise enough money to cover the 350 pounds that the hospital will charge for every day the patient stays there. Having grown up in countries with basically free healthcare, I think I have been taking hospitals for granted – I certainly had no idea they cost as much as that!
Still, it’s very good because if we succeed, it means that our patient will be able to travel to London for treatment at a time when, as it happens, HAWCA’s director will also be in London studying for a Masters.

Our patient – whom I will call Bemani, after the heroine of a Dariush Mehrjui film, who is also badly burnt but survives to find happiness – is coming to the HAWCA office tomorrow so I have a chance to see her. Bemani means "Live!" or "To stay alive".

Sayyaf MP?

Here is a short extract from the HRW report I mentioned earlier, which serves to illustrate why some Afghans feel so strongly that some of the parliamentary candidates had no right to stand for office. In Paghman district, just west of Kabul, the election posters on display showed the face of only one man, Abdul Rabb al Rasul Sayyaf. In his previous incarnation, he was the leader of the predominantly Pashtun Ittihad party, supported by Saudi Arabia.

Human Rights Watch interviewed a Pashtun man who, despite his Pashtun ethnicity, was held by Ittihad forces in the summer of 1992 because of a non-ethnic dispute with troops. The man said he was put in detention, and […] that night, as fighting raged outside, the man said that the Ittihad forces brought in Hazara civilians: “Sayyaf’s forces brought thirty or forty Hazara civilians. . . . They were not fighters, but civilians, old and young. […] [T]he fighting got severe. We could hear the artillery. There was a lot of shooting. I could hear these people, Sayyaf’s people, talking about retreating. And at one point, one of them said to Commander Tourgal, “What should we do with these prisoners?” They were speaking in Pashto, and the Hazara people couldn’t understand them. But I could understand. Somebody said, “Go and shoot them.” I was near the door. When I heard this, I hurried away and hid away from the door, in the corner of the room [on the side of the room with the door]. A person came, and opened the door, and shot all over the room with his kalashnikov, on automatic. He just fired randomly all over the room. About ten people were killed, immediately, and four were wounded. . . . After, no one moved. We [who were still alive] were trembling with fear. The fighting outside was serious—the commander called on this guy to come back to fight at the windows with them, so the man left, to go back to fighting.”

It is hard not to agree with HRW, that, having allowed such men to compete for seats in the new parliament, this election represents somehow a lost opportunity for the Afghan people to pursue a future of peace. Arezu agrees: “If only the government had had the courage to exclude these warlords, these murderers! Do you know how many people would have voted then? Millions, and millions more than voted yesterday”.

Post votem

Why was turnout so low in the Afghan parliamentary elections? This morning we frail and vulnerable ex-pats were allowed out of our compound for the first time in four days, so I was able to explore a little. Over the last few days, BBC World had been feeding us a lot of feelgood pap about how the democracy-besotted Afghans were bravely and happily skipping off to the polls in their millions. I wanted to believe it – it is such a heart-warming tale, and as we were driven to the office I delighted in the myriad images of parliamentary candidates festooned in the trees, on the sides of water tanks and plastered on every wall of Kabul.

At the office, I asked all the Afghans I bumped into, and everyone gathered round the lunch table, to show me their index fingers, and they were all ink-free. None of them had voted – none of the educated, English-speaking staff that the NGO employees.

In the afternoon I had the opportunity to ask my favourite source Arezu, of HAWCA, for her thoughts. For one, she does not think the security situation is to blame. On her way to cast her vote, she met two men, a young man and an older man carrying a child in his arms, and she asked them why they did not wish to vote. The young man said that he did not see the point: many people had turned out to vote in the presidential elections, and yet the government did not seem to be doing enough to help the people of Afghanistan. If the parliament was just going to be more of the same, why bother to vote. The older man was more insightful, in Arezu’s opinion: “when I see the huge posters of the warlords and criminals who are standing for elections, I am disgusted. In Kabul, the very city that still bears the scars of the violence these men instigated, they are standing for election in parliament. To take part in an electoral process that has not excluded such people, would be a shame and an affront to the people of Kabul who have suffered so much. Let those who want such people to remain in power vote for them”.

And what of the majority of candidates for this election, who have no direct links to the bloodshed of recent history? Ah, but while the likes of Qanooni are allowed to stand, what would be the point of voting for any of the others, some people ask. “It would be like voting for an ant, who would find himself in a parliament with the elephants”.

The figures for vote turnout will not be available for some days, but Arezu confidently predicts that turnout will prove to be lowest in Kabul city itself – despite the greater security threats and lower literacy rates elsewhere. This is because, she explains, most of the notorious warlords and criminals who have escaped disqualification have gravitated to Kabul to stand for election – the city which also saw some of the most terrible fighting and atrocities committed (see the excellent report from Human Rights Watch ‘Blood-Stained Hands: Past Atrocities in Kabul and Afghanistan’s Legacy of Impunity’). This is enough to discredit the nascent parliament in the eyes of some – while others are put off by the distance they would have to travel to vote[1], would rather take advantage of the holiday to spend time with their families, or are not even registered to vote.

But Arezu voted, in Kabul, collecting her registration card from a mosque in the area of her office, and proudly displays her inky forefinger. So did her mother and two sisters, who travelled to Nangahar province to cast their vote – they took a picnic and made a day of it.
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[1] As these are local elections, voters are only allowed to cast their vote in the area where they are registered as residents, creating problems in a country which has seen so much internal displacement, and entails long and arduous journeys across the country

Chashma in Nofin

Ed and I had been walking all day when we reached the village of Nofin, by the shores of the fourth lake in the chain of seven. We were very thirsty, and delighted when these two girls in the picture (the older ones) befriended us and showed us the way to the spring. The water was delicious, and freezing.
These two girls are wearing the modern, very fashionable, version of Atlas silk, which is very traditional and highly prized fabric in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The patterns and colours on their dresses are traditional, but unfortunately these days most of them are made of synthetic materials.
It is especially traditional for new brides to wear "Atlas" dresses - and these girls are 19 and very recently married when we met them. They were very giggly about it, and about the fact that they can't be bothered to wear the traditional 'flowerpot' style hat under their headscarves to show their married status.
They both had a few gold teeth, another good thing to get done before you get married.

the minstrels 

ripples 

water of the first kul 

as we set off on our first day of walking 

a rare chance to pose for a photo 

Haft Kul

From Penjikent we took another taxi to Rashna, a village in the Fan mountains which surround the Zerafshan valley, and our driver made sure we found a nice family to spend the night with before leaving us. He even took the precaution of buying our hosts a watermelon as a gift, on the way.
We chose to head for Rashna because we had heard that the Haft Kul, or Seven Lakes, that begin just above the village, are very beautiful, and so they are.
We walked as far as the fourth kul on our first day of walking, which started at about 11 am, much to the surprise of our host family, who had been waiting about for us to emerge and eat breakfast since about 5 am.
Nonetheless, we strode off manfully with our picnic in our rucksack, and were duly delighted by each new kul that we came across. There must have been earthquakes and landslides going a long way back, because the series of seven lakes, each of which flows into the next further down the mountain, were created by huge rock falls that blocked off the mountain stream that feeds them at successive points.

the young villagers of Nofin catch sight of us 

corner of a susani, Penjikent Museum 

susani in Penjikent museum 

Tajik interlude

Ed and I took off for a long awaited holiday in Tajikistan on Wednesday 31 August – the first day we made it as far as Kunduz, a small city near the Amu-Darya (Oxus) river. The next day we travelled to Dushanbe and were reunited with many dear friends. On Saturday morning before dawn broke we were most unusually vertical, and on our way to the long haul taxi rank. We found a man eager to take us to Penjikent in no time, but it was only sometime later that we actually set off, after locating our other two travelling companions, and having a breakfast of fried eggs and tea. The journey up and over the mountains into the Zerafshan valley, were Penjikent is, was really spectacular, so much so that I didn’t mind the bumps and curves in the road, and the choking dust.

After stopping in a roadside restaurant for a quick bowl of grimly familiar mutton fat soup, we continued our journey, arriving in the town of Penjikent in the middle of the afternoon. We surprised our driver by asking to be dropped off at the Museum, where I fell into rapt admiration of the beautiful susani collection lining the walls of one room. The susani is an embroidered wall hanging traditionally made by women in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, to form part of dowry chests. I took lots of photos of them.

the Varzob pass