The Sewing Circles of Herat Page 12
Zahir Shah’s security had been stepped up at that time, but it was since the war on terrorism was launched that his house had been turned into a prison. Considered a prime al Qaeda target, the king was under round-the-clock guard, no longer allowed to travel downtown to the café on Via Veneto or even go for his daily walk around the estate. Carabinieri with Uzis were everywhere, outside the front gate, in a Portakabin in the garden, and even inside the house and I was body-checked before entering. Searchlights swept across a lawn denuded of trees and bushes, and helicopters flew over every hour. The Japanese family living next door found it so disruptive that they had moved out.
Inside, a slight man with a grey walrus moustache was sitting on one of the two cream sofas and rose to greet us. The former monarch was not wearing pyjamas as threatened but dressed impeccably in a dark suit with a grey shirt, silk Hermès tie, and shiny black Italian shoes, and was extremely courteous. He held out a pale elegant hand marked with liver spots, and apologised for all the police. ‘I’m a prisoner in my own home,’ he said in French, which used to be the language of the court in Kabul.
A Filipino butler brought green tea in china cups and a silver dish of tiny buttery pasticcerie decorated with chocolate and cherries, and I looked around the room. The four-bedroomed villa was not particularly palatial. Apart from the old red, green and black Afghan flag draped over the banister, it looked barely lived in, like a rental property one does not stay in long enough to make one’s own, with wipe-clean wooden floors, a few plants, a modern CD player and some coffee-table books. The only personal touches were some of the king’s landscape photographs and several framed black and white engravings of robed and turbaned ancestors including Ahmad Shah Abdali.
Unlike the ambitious Ahmad Shah, Zahir Shah had never wanted to be king and was only nineteen when the throne was thrust upon him, just four years after unexpectedly becoming crown prince. He was born into a side-branch of the Durrani dynasty in November 1914, a time of particular turbulence in Afghanistan which prepared the ground for many things that were to happen later. His father General Nadir Shah was commander in chief of the forces of King Habibullah, who was said to have taken a wife or concubine from each region as a way of keeping all the different ethnic groups under control, and had more than thirty-five sons. When Zahir Shah was five, Habibullah was assassinated, murdered in his sleep while on a hunting trip to Jalalabad. Nadir Shah was arrested in the initial round-up but then released and again made commander of the Afghan army by his distant cousin Amanullah, one of Habibullah’s sons, who had taken the throne and many believed had plotted his father’s murder, spurred on by his ambitious mother.
King Habibullah.
Once King Amanullah had quelled various tribal revolts around the country, in May 1919 he declared war on the startled British, provoking the Third Anglo-Afghan War, with the aim of securing complete independence and recovering the lands between the Durand Line and the Indus that had been part of Afghanistan. The advantage of surprise meant that Nadir Shah’s forces at first scored several victories, particularly as many Pashtuns in the Khyber Rifles and Frontier Scouts deserted to join the Afghans. But then the British escalated the war and sent RAF pilots2 flying First World War warplanes over the high mountains of eastern Afghanistan to drop bombs on Jalalabad and Kabul.
It was the first time the country had been bombed, and after one bomb hit the tomb of his grandfather Amir Abdur Rahman, an outraged Amanullah sent a cable to Lord Chelmsford, the Viceroy of India, complaining: ‘It is a matter of great regret that the throwing of bombs by Zeppelins on London was denounced as a most savage act and the bombardment of places of worship was considered a most abominable operation while now we can see with our own eyes that such operations were a habit which is prevalent amongst all civilised peoples of the West.’
Just as the Taliban were to find years later, Amanullah’s forces had no chance against this lethal new weapon. But nor did the British have any eagerness to take on these martial people in their impenetrable mountains once more, particularly so soon after the First World War when the British units stationed in India had lost most of their experienced men. Both sides initiated peace moves and the result was the Treaty of Rawalpindi, which ended the control Britain had long exercised over Afghanistan’s external affairs. An Afghan delegation immediately travelled across the Oxus to Moscow and entered into an agreement of mutual assistance with the Bolsheviks. The Treaty of Friendship was the start of the Soviet-Afghan relationship, sealed with a gift of planes, pilots and telegraph operators, and over the next few years the Russians laid phone lines to link Herat, Kandahar, Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif.
Calling himself a ‘revolutionary king’, Amanullah was a fervent admirer of Ataturk, whom he hoped to emulate by trying to forge a modern nation from Afghanistan’s warring tribes and ethnic groups. As a first step he began building a national army, bringing in Turkish military advisors, much to Nadir Shah’s irritation as their advice such as reducing pay only demoralised the troops. An arrogant man, Amanullah had no time for critics so in 1924 his cousin was relieved of his command and dispatched to Paris as ambassador, then shortly afterwards retired to the South of France because of ill-health.
Afghan rulers have a tendency to be out of step with the times. While the Taliban yearned to turn the clock back to the medieval era, in Amanullah’s case he was much too far ahead. In December 1927 he travelled to Tehran and Istanbul from where he embarked on an eight-month Grand Tour of Europe visiting all the major capitals from Rome, Paris, Berlin, Brussels to London where he and his doe-eyed queen Soraya were entertained so lavishly that he became obsessed with westernising Afghanistan. On his return he announced the opening of co-educational schools, instituted a minimum age for marriage, scrapped the veil for women – dramatically removing that of the queen in public, and insisted that everyone in Kabul wear western dress in public including a European hat. His opponents began a campaign condemning him as anti-Islamic and spreading rumours that he had brought back from Europe machines to make soaps out of dead bodies.
Eventually, in 1929, tribesmen in Jalalabad, angered more by new taxes than by modernisation which had little effect on them, began a revolt. It quickly spread and when Amanullah sent his army to crush it, most of his soldiers joined the rebels, leaving Kabul open to invasion. As the tribal forces advanced from the east, Amanullah abdicated in favour of his eldest brother Inayatullah and fled in his Rolls-Royce to Kandahar, discovering that it was hardly the best vehicle for cross-country travel on mud roads when he got stuck in the snow.
Inayatullah’s reign was to last just three days. Bacha Saqqao, an illiterate Tajik bandit-leader in the north whose name meant ‘son of water carrier’, saw his chance amid all the confusion and captured the throne. Amanullah’s attempt to gather tribesmen and retake Kabul failed dismally and he fled again, this time to British India from where he went by ship to Italy. On his Grand Tour the previous year, King Victor Emmanuel III had somewhat foolhardily presented him the Order of Holy Annunciation, one of Italy’s highest honours which among its privileges allowed the recipient to call himself the king’s cousin, so had little choice but to give him asylum. Amanullah lived there till his death in 1960.
As soon as he heard what had happened, Nadir Shah sailed back to India and joined forces with some of his brothers in Peshawar, setting up base in Deans Hotel. The Pashtuns loathed being ruled by a Tajik, particularly as Bacha Saqqao had formed a government of Tajik friends and relations most of whom were also illiterate and spent their time engaged in murder and plunder, so the brothers were easily able to enlist an army of Pashtun tribesmen. Their first two attempts on Kabul failed, largely because the tribesmen were too busy settling blood-feuds between themselves but they collected a third army and gathered support within the capital by launching an underground newspaper, Islah, which later went on to become the official state newspaper. On 10 October 1929, after only nine months in power, Bacha Saqqao was overthrown.
Most A
fghans expected Nadir Shah to restore his deposed cousin Amanullah to the throne. Instead, he declared himself king then executed Bacha Saqqao by firing squad. Finding that the Tajiks had emptied the treasury and needing what little money he had to buy off Amanullah’s supporters, he let his tribal army loot Kabul and they left with their booty.
With no army, no money and no one he could trust to help him govern, it is not surprising that he became an autocratic king. In January 1931, Richard Maconachie, the British Minister to Kabul, sent a despatch back to London that could have been written today: ‘Throughout the country the advantages of anarchy seem to have been better appreciated than its drawbacks and the tribes are asking themselves why they should resign the freedom which they had enjoyed the past year and submit again to a central authority which would inevitably demand payment of land revenue, customs duties and bribes for its officials and possibly the restoration of arms looted from government posts and arsenals.’
Kipling wrote, ‘trust a snake more than a prostitute and a prostitute more than an Afghan’, and Afghan history involves so much killing and betrayal, that I could see why the shy, studious Zahir Shah might not have rejoiced in suddenly becoming crown prince. He had spent most of his youth in Paris, where he had lived with the family of a member of the French Chamber of Deputies and studied at Lycée Pasteur and Collège de Montpelier, acquiring a lifelong passion for the works of Molière and Dumas as well as an interest in parliamentary democracy, often going to the gallery of the chamber to watch debates. After his father became king, he returned to Kabul to attend military college, and on 8 November 1933 was at the Arg attending a ceremony at the Dilkusha or Heart’s Delight Palace, which had been designed for Habibullah in 1900 by a British architect. Nadir Shah had recently reopened the high schools and was handing out awards to the best students. To the prince’s surprise, the king called ‘Zahir, come to me, my son’, and held him so close that he could smell Tabac, his father’s favourite cologne. ‘My son I am so proud of you,’ he said. ‘You have been a good son to me.’
Arm-in-arm, father and son then walked together across the lawn onto the podium to the sound of a military band. As they took their seats, three shots rang out. To start with the prince did not realise what had happened; then he saw the crimson drops of blood on his father’s glasses as he sank into his chair. Zahir flung himself at his father’s feet until one of his uncles, his father’s youngest brother Shah Mehmud, slapped him, saying, ‘Zahir, this is no time to cry. It’s time to save your country.’
At 4.30 p.m. that afternoon the Kabul cannon sounded over the city to announce that a new king had been crowned. Successions have rarely been smooth in Afghanistan and the prince’s uncle must have been tempted to take power himself. As it was he controlled things for the first two decades of Zahir Shah’s reign. For the new young monarch it was a difficult time. Used to living in the West and spending his days painting miniatures and reading French classics, he had little idea of how to govern this country of warring tribesmen.
‘I never wanted to be king,’ he told me, and by all accounts his forty-year reign was not a glorious period in Afghan history. ‘The most difficult thing in Afghanistan has always been to keep a balance between the tribes, keeping them in harmony and out of trouble.
‘The other big problem historically is our geo-strategic position. In the north we have the Soviet Union or now the newly emerged Central Asian states, in the east China, in the south Pakistan and in the west Iran. Afghanistan is a very small country but very proud. Yet these neighbours all try to interfere. Take the Taliban, for example, they were not really Afghans but Pakistanis and Arabs. Because of these foreign hands, pursuing our independence and freedom has always been enormously important to our people.
‘Of course we have been helped in that by our peculiar topography which is so mountainous as you British know only too well.’ We laughed with the shared respect of hundreds of years of warfare with much bloodshed on both sides. ‘Ours is an impenetrable land with many, many hiding places where people can hide for years then regroup. Look at bin Laden, one of the world’s most famous faces yet the most powerful army on earth cannot find him. In our mountains and valleys it is like looking for a needle in a haystack.’
He referred to the famous retreat from Kabul in 1842 in which 16,000 British troops and their families were killed, and continued, ‘Our terrain is so difficult that when you British sent in conventional armies with all their batteries and cannons to fight Afghans sitting on the tops of the hills and cliffs who knew the land, every rock and every stone, it was an easy pick. It almost became like a hunt. That is the problem when outsiders come into our country.
‘We have always kept a balance so if one power intervened another came to our rescue. That’s why my most difficult decision was during the Second World War when the Allies gave Afghanistan a forty-eight-hour ultimatum to give up our neutrality and support them and hand over the German diplomats or like Iran be invaded. We had always fiercely safeguarded our neutrality and had remained neutral in the First World War so I called a loya jirga for the people to decide and the jirga decided we should stay neutral whatever the threats. It is a matter of principle for Afghans that when you have guests in your country they should be protected so we would not hand over the Germans or their archives but we asked them honourably to scale down their mission.’
Only when he reached middle age did King Zahir Shah start taking any significant decisions on the administration of his country, and after convening another loya jirga in 1963–4, he introduced a kind of constitutional monarchy with freedom of speech, the right to form political parties, guaranteed primary school education for girls and boys, and allowed women to vote. ‘We had human rights, equal rights, women’s rights, women in government,’ he told me. Ariana airlines employed unveiled women as airhostesses and receptionists; there were female announcers on Kabul Radio and a woman delegate sent to the United Nations, much to the fury of religious leaders.
But he was a very cautious man, a procrastinator, disliked by the Americans who described him as ‘furtive’. A cable from the US political attaché Charles Dunbar to the State Department after the unveiling of his new constitution, referred to him as ‘the foremost obstacle to economic modernisation’. Disillusioned with the lack of real reform, in 1965 a group of student activists and writers formed the country’s first Communist party, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which quickly split into two groups: Parcham, the Standard (or Flag), under Barbrak Karmal and Khalq, the People, under Nur Mohammed Taraki. As the economic situation worsened, student demonstrations and strikes as well as clashes between religious and Marxist parties repeatedly brought the capital to a halt, and a three-year drought meant that by 1971 there was widespread famine.
‘Looking back I realise it was a mistake allowing the training and education of young Afghans in the Soviet Union,’ said the ex-king. ‘They were inexperienced, so easily indoctrinated in Communism, then came back and found themselves rejected by the people of Afghanistan and reacted by themselves rejecting everything.’
Moreover an unwise clause in Zahir Shah’s new constitution had made a powerful enemy of his cousin and former Prime Minister Prince Mohammed Daoud Khan. Article 24 prohibited any member of the royal family from holding a government ministry, which meant that the only way for a royal to exercise any power was to seize the throne. When Daoud sent an emissary to sound out American reaction to a possible coup, it was made clear that Washington cared little who was in power in Kabul.
On 17 July 1973, Zahir Shah’s reign ended abruptly when Daoud took advantage of his absence in Italy to seize the palace and take over with just a few hundred troops. Some of the former king’s advisors, including Homaira’s father, believed Zahir Shah should have mobilised his own forces rather than abdicate but, a lifelong pacifist, he said at the time, ‘I wanted to avoid a bloodbath.’ Having assumed power at the time when Hitler was ruling Germany and Mussolini Italy, perhaps he rea
lised he was of a different era.
In his villa in Rome, the king lived on almost forgotten and kept a low profile, mostly staying in, playing chess and cards – ‘He cheats terribly,’ said Homaira. Meanwhile as the years passed, back in Kabul one after another of the successive inhabitants of the royal palace were brutally killed.
First, in 1978, Daoud was murdered with most of his family in a coup, battling inside the Arg until the end as air strikes were launched against him by his own military. His successor Taraki, one of the PDPA’s three founder members, set about trying to replace Allah with the Communist party, changing the Afghan flag with its green stripe representing Islam for a solidly red one, throwing thousands of professionals and clergy in Pul-i-Charki jail, and introduced a personality cult with himself as the ‘Great Teacher’. Most Afghans were horrified but the first real response came from Herat where approximately a hundred Russian advisors and their families were publicly hacked to death, prompting Moscow to send in planes and tanks to pulverise the city, killing thousands. In October 1979, Taraki was found dead, suffocated by a cushion.
His replacement, Hafizullah Amin, managed to survive an ambush as he arrived at the palace and at least two KGB-sponsored coups before, on Christmas Eve 1979, an elite Soviet battalion secured Kabul airport for a massive airlift of troops which Amin apparently thought were coming to help him. But to the north, thousands more were crossing the Oxus river and on December 27th, the first tank-shell hit Amin’s headquarters. After surviving a farcical attempt to poison him, he was ‘disappeared’ and Barbrak Karmal, the final member of the founding trio, installed as President, backed by 85,000 Russian troops. Moscow’s claims that it had been invited in by the Kabul regime were treated with derision and worldwide condemnation. Karmal survived until 1985 when he was sent to the Soviet Union for ‘medical treatment’ and never came back.