The Sewing Circles of Herat Page 21

  When the hastily assembled Avenging Army marched on the Bala Hissar in retaliation a month later, their commander General Sir Frederick Roberts described finding ‘the floors covered with bloodstains and amidst the embers of a fire we found a heap of human bones’. He set up a commission of inquiry offering rewards to those who came forward with information, which meant many Afghans used the opportunity to settle old scores, then hanged more than a hundred protest-leaders and tribal chiefs including the mayor, from gallows erected in its courtyard. The following spring the British troops demolished it altogether in what General Roberts called ‘a lasting memorial of our ability to avenge our countrymen’.

  They then handed the throne over to Dost Mohammed’s grandson Abdur Rahman. But the war was far from over. Ayub Khan, the ruler of Herat and Abdur Rahman’s cousin, decided he would drive the infidel British from Afghanistan and seize the throne. He marched on Kandahar, then occupied by a small British garrison. At Maiwand, on the plains just west of Kandahar, the British suffered one of their worst-ever defeats in Asia, losing more than 1000 men. Once more General Roberts mobilised his forces for revenge and marched from Kabul, taking sips of champagne to keep up his strength as his 10,000 men inflicted a decisive victory on Ayub Khan’s Afghans with just thirty-five British losses.

  The last British troops on Afghan soil marched from Kandahar in April 1881, leaving Abdur Rahman in charge of his country though he agreed to accept British control over his foreign policy in return for being able to call on their help against foreign aggressors. He was fascinated by Britain and constantly quizzed British envoys about monogamy, eventually announcing that it must be because of the damp climate that British men could only manage one wife.

  ‘My life as king was not a bed of roses,’ he wrote with wonderful understatement in his autobiography, ‘here began my first severe fight against my own relations, my own subjects, my own people.’ During his twenty-one-year reign he crushed over forty revolts by non-Pashtuns, usually in the most brutal manner involving wholesale executions, and he became known as the Iron Amir. According to Frank Martin, an Englishman who worked as the king’s chief engineer, even his bookkeepers were made to sign declarations to say that if they interfered with his papers they would have their hands cut off. His punishments were so severe that when a married man and married woman who had run off together were brought before him he told the man ‘as you are so fond of the woman you should have her as completely as possible’, then had the woman thrown alive into a huge cauldron of boiling water and boiled down to soup which the man was forced to drink before being hanged.4

  It was Abdur Rahman’s grandson Amanullah, declared king in 1919 after the murder of his father King Habibullah while hunting in Jalalabad, who came up with the idea of building a new capital. His Grand Tour of Delhi, Tehran and Europe in 1927–8 made him realise the backwardness of his own country; he became determined to modernise it.

  French and German architects were commissioned to construct his new capital and told to make it ‘monumental’. Ornate European villas were built for the ministers and noblemen who would live there, as well as the vast white Dar-ul Aman Palace set in formal gardens that was planned to house the parliament. German engineers were brought in to build a narrow-gauge railroad to connect Dar-ul Aman and the centre, open trolley cars running the six-mile journey three times a day on the only railway in all of Afghanistan.

  Not satisfied with building a new capital, King Amanullah also decided to transform one of Babur’s favourite places, the nearby village of Paghman in the foothills of the Hindu Kush, into a hill-station based on Simla. Swiss-style chalets and Italian villas were built among its pine-wooded glades along with bandstands, an ornate theatre, a red mosque, a victory arch modelled on the Arc de Triomphe, and a racecourse for elephants.

  The gardens of Paghman were modelled on those King Amanullah had seen in Europe.

  Years later, after the Russian occupation, both Paghman and Dar-ul Aman became battlegrounds between factions during the mujaheddin fighting. Paghman was the base for the forces of Sayyaf, one of the seven mujaheddin leaders, and was flattened apart from the arch, its population of 40,000 fleeing to leave just five families. Dar-ul Aman changed hands several times and though the Dar-ul Aman Palace remained standing, it was a charred skeleton of what it had once been and the blown-out windows and jagged rocket holes in the walls and domes gave it a haunted appearance.

  Across the road from the ruined palace stood Kabul Museum which still had the opening hours on the gate even though the whole of the west wing had collapsed, the roof had caved in and the ground all around was covered by expended ammunition shells. The door was padlocked but as I approached three men appeared. One with a white beard and sad gentle face under a rolled cream pakol hat introduced himself as Umar-akhan Masoodi, the director, whom I had arranged to see.

  ‘Our museum was one of the great museums of the world,’ he said as he took a large iron key from a chain around his waist and opened the padlock. ‘We had probably the best collection of Central Asian art and artefacts. But as you will see it is now one of the great tragedies.’

  As Mr Masoodi pushed open the door and waved me into the entrance hall it was evident what he meant. On either side of the stairs leading up to the museum was an empty stone plinth and on the wall to the right the smashed remains of what had once been a large wall cabinet. On one of the plinths there were a few pieces of rubble and a small black and white Polaroid sellotaped to the wall showing an impressive Gandharan statue of a warrior. ‘This was a statue from the second century, of Kanishka, one of our great Kushan kings,’ he said pointing at the photograph, ‘and that was a Kushan princess.’ He pointed at the other empty plinth and then to the cabinet. ‘In this cabinet were two giant stone birds not like anything you ever saw and as tall as you or I. When these things were made Caesar was ruling Rome and the Han emperors ruling China. That’s how old they were.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘The Taliban,’ he replied, shaking his head with a sigh. ‘A high-ranking delegation led by Qadratullah Jamal, the Minister of Culture, came last February, with an authorisation from the Ministry of Vice and Virtue. I wasn’t here because I had quit my post as deputy director of the museum when the Taliban took over and I saw what kind of people they were. I couldn’t be witness to the breaking of our history so I stayed at home. I didn’t care about not having money for food. But Mr Khalilullah here, one of our curators, was present and saw it all.’

  A man in a belted black leather jacket took over the narrative. ‘There were about sixteen of them with armed guards and they started breaking statues with hammers and axes. They were happy and laughing like children.’ Pointing at the Polaroid of the Kushan king, he said, ‘The minister himself who is from the Popolzai tribe broke this one. The statue was very big and hard to break so he tied his shawl around it to pull it down to the floor then smashed it with an axe. After that they came every day for three months, smashing things until there were no more statues. Some of the statues were solid marble so they brought big pick-axes like those used for breaking rocks in the mountains. It was a few weeks after they started coming here that they blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas.’

  ‘What did you say when you saw what they were doing?’ I asked.

  ‘We were employees and we just had to watch it all because it was dangerous to protest. The order had come from Mullah Omar himself and was announced on the radio. Nobody could question it. By Allah all we could do was pick up and save the pieces.’

  We walked up the steps, past a large stone urn, and down a long corridor with all its windows blown out and most of the roof missing. ‘It was not just the Taliban who destroyed the museum,’ said Mr Masoodi. ‘This area was the centre of fighting between the Northern Alliance and Hekmatyar’s men and it became very dangerous to be here. In 1993 a rocket came through the top floor and burnt the entire area. We managed to save a lot and box the things up. Then the warlords started looting. First we fitted
padlocks, then steel doors but still they came. Even huge things they took, bigger than a man. We kept hearing about parts of our collection being sold in Islamabad, London, Paris and America, and one of our archaeologists even saw an artefact he had dug up on display in a case in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, but what could we do? By the time the Taliban came we had already lost seventy percent of our collection.’

  He told me that he had worked twenty-five years in the museum, all his working life, and I asked which had been his favourite piece. He looked at me like a parent asked to choose between his children. ‘We used to have so many things, prehistoric tools of flint found in Badakshan, fifteen-thousand-year-old inscribed stone tablets from Ghazni, one of the world’s largest coin collections with first-century Greek silver coins, ivory panels from India, Alexandrian glassware, Buddhist statues, the Hindu Venus, the Bactrian gold … all of them were special …’

  Buddhist sculpture in Kabul Museum, photographed before the years of the Taliban’s regime. Kabul Museum once had one of the most impressive collections in Central Asia.

  The arrival of the Taliban in Kabul in September 1996 with their insistence that the depiction of live creatures on paintings or in stone promoted idolatry and was un-Islamic, proved catastrophic for the museum.

  ‘It was our most vulnerable time,’ said Mr Masoodi. ‘We had managed to hide some things from the warlords in the basement of the Culture Ministry but of course when the Taliban came with their ideas against faces and animal forms they destroyed them. Here in the museum we tried to fool them by turning things upside down so they would not realise that they were figures but in the end they just destroyed everything. Come, you’ll see.’

  The tour took less than five minutes. Founded by King Amanullah in 1924, the museum had once boasted a collection of more than a hundred thousand items reflecting the many different cultures and invaders who had passed across Afghan soil over the centuries. The Bactrian gold alone, discovered only in 1979, consisted of around twenty thousand gold artefacts dating from the first century. Of all these many treasures, all that was left to see was one nineteenth-century marble door, a wall frieze from Helmand, and the large Kandahari urn inscribed with squiggles and swirls. ‘They left this because these are Islamic phrases,’ explained Mr Masoodi.

  I asked him how he had felt when he came back after the Taliban had fled and saw the destruction. ‘I cried,’ he said simply. ‘This museum was so precious and now we’ve lost everything. Of course all things fashioned by artists are precious and valuable but the oldest things cannot be replaced.

  ‘They wanted us to be a faceless land with no history,’ he continued. ‘Pakistan was responsible. They thought they had captured Afghanistan through their Taliban puppets and wanted to destroy our history and culture because they are a land with neither. They ordered this and as far as I am concerned what they did is an international crime and should be punished as such.’

  I followed him as he walked through a doorway which had obviously only recently been unbricked, took another key from his waist and unlocked a door into a storeroom.

  ‘This is the real museum now,’ he said.

  On the floor and on shelves, laid out as if in coffins in numerous labelled wooden boxes, were the rescued fragments of various statues. A few pieces were large enough to be identifiable as parts of a hand or a face but the majority were as pulverised as if a bulldozer had run over them. Some of the boxes had black and white photographs or museum guides open at pictures of the figures and scenes that they had once been. Thousands of years of history smashed into bits by a few men with beards and axes intent on cultural genocide.

  ‘These are all the pieces we saved,’ said Khalilullah proudly, ‘we hid them from the Taliban and now we will try to reconstruct them.’

  The page open next to one box of rubble showed a marble chariot drawn by two horses guided by the charioteer Dawn and bearing the Sun God Suriya which had been part of a fifth-century Brahmanic temple. I couldn’t imagine how you would start to reconstruct such a thing but there was a look in Khalilullah’s eyes that stopped me from saying more.

  The Taliban, led by the Culture Minister, had smashed centuries of history into smithereens.

  ‘We have pictures and documents and UNESCO has promised to help,’ he said.

  We walked back to the entrance and I felt Mr Masoodi’s hand lightly on my shoulder. Tears were running down my face and I felt foolish that after all the death and tragedy I had witnessed in this land I should cry over broken statues and pots.

  ‘Don’t be pessimistic about the museum,’ he said. ‘We can restore it again. You know twenty-three years of war is a long time and it’s difficult to cry all that time. Every family in Afghanistan has lost people and yet we’re still optimistic. My brother who was strong and handsome was injured in a rocket attack and paralysed. That’s just a small example. Maybe we have lost our past but it’s the future that matters now.

  ‘You know we still have a few objects we managed to hide. Now they say peace has come but we don’t tell anyone where we have hidden the things, even the ministers. If they ask we just say “under the sky”. Some of the people who were shooting the rockets before are now running the government.’

  Bidding me farewell at the entrance, Mr Masoodi cupped his right hand to his ear.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘have you noticed?’

  I strained my ears but all I could hear was distant rumbling of heavy guns in the mountains. Then I realised what he was listening to. Across the road on top of the charred stump of a tree in the ruins of the palace gardens, a bird was singing.

  Mr Masoodi smiled. ‘For years there have been no birds in this city. When I was a boy this was a place of many trees, cherry trees, mulberry trees, poplars. The city smelled of trees. But first the Russians cleared them to get rid of cover for the mujaheddin. Then the people cut them down for firewood. I guess there was nowhere for the birds to go.’

  He disappeared back into the forlorn ruins of his museum with its missing roof and windows.

  Just that morning I had been reading Alexander Burnes’ description of Kabul on his first visit in 1832 when he likened it to Paradise. ‘There were peaches, plums, apricots, pears, apples, quinces, cherries, walnuts, mulberries, pomegranates and vines all growing in one garden’, he wrote. ‘There were also nightingales, blackbirds, thrushes and doves and chattering magpies on almost every tree.’ He was so captivated by the birdsong of Kabul that an Afghan friend later sent him a Kabul nightingale which he named ‘the nightingale of a thousand tales’.

  In the taxi on the way back I realised that I had never asked Mr Masoodi about the origins of Kabul. Maybe he was right. In a land where the past had always been everything, people’s lives governed and destroyed by the feuds of their forefathers, it was the future that mattered now.

  That future depended on my old friend Hamid Karzai. He had been named leader of the interim government which had been chosen by Afghan delegates meeting in a castle in Bonn under pressure from the international community as well as the Teutonic hotel management, who needed it to be wrapped up quickly as they had hired the place out to a conference of dentists. Hamid was to be sworn in the following Saturday and had been flown into Kabul from Kandahar. He was already installed in the Arg, the old Royal turned Presidential Palace, where so many of his predecessors had been brutally murdered, and he had invited me over for supper.

  As I arrived at the palace gate, the city was echoing with the rattle of machine guns and barrages of anti-aircraft fire. The mullahs had announced the sighting of the crescent moon, which meant that it was finally the end of Ramadan. The guards at the gate, clearly all former mujaheddin, dressed in camouflage but with open sandals which must have been freezing in the below-zero temperatures, stopped firing into the sky and lowered their Kalashnikovs, to regard me with suspicion.

  ‘What do you want?’ their captain demanded.

  ‘I’ve got an appointment to see Mr Karzai,’ I repli
ed.

  ‘You’re a journalist. No journalists allowed. Come back tomorrow morning.’

  ‘No, I’m a friend,’ I insisted, ‘he’s expecting me for dinner.’

  ‘We don’t know anything about that. You look like a journalist. Go away.’ He spat noisily onto the ground and walked off.

  Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan, in the palace where so many of his predecessors were killed, December 2001.

  I was shocked. It was the first time anyone had been rude to me in Afghanistan and I stormed after him.

  ‘I think you will find that Mr Karzai will be extremely angry if I am not shown in. Please radio him immediately.’

  ‘We don’t have a radio,’ said one of the other mujaheddin. All of them had bloodshot eyes and I guessed what they were chewing and spitting was opium paste.

  ‘Anyway Mr Karzai is not anybody yet and we are President Rabbani’s guards.’

  Burhanuddin Rabbani, as head of the Northern Alliance had declared himself President of Afghanistan immediately after his forces had liberated Kabul and was not at all happy about the meeting in Bonn that had led to Hamid being chosen as leader. It was Rabbani’s liking for power which had sparked off the destruction of Kabul such as that at Dar-ul Aman, because of his refusal to relinquish the presidency at the end of his agreed term in 1992 when all the mujaheddin leaders were supposed to take turns at six months in power. I had had no idea that the two men were now sharing the Presidential Palace.

  We were at a standoff with the guards refusing to let me in and laughing at my insistence that I would not move from the gate, when the headlights of a car approached from inside the compound. The driver was one of Hamid’s cousins who had met me back at the house in Quetta. It was just in time.