Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium

by Tim Bonyhady

  The treatment and clothing of women—largely ignored or explained away by westerners in the early 1980s in their eagerness to support the mujahideen against the Soviets—became symbolic of the differences between Najibullah and the mujahideen. A draft constitution framed by mujahideen leaders required strict observance of purdah. Supporters of Najibullah claimed that mujahideen had distributed night-letters in Kabul threatening that women who continued working and failed to wear the chadari would be the target of acid attacks. ‘They will try to put us back in chadari. We know this. Like in Iran with Khomeini,’ declared one Kabuli.

  The only prominent woman within the mujahideen was Sayyid Ahmad Gailani’s daughter, Fatima, who became the European representative of the National Islamic Front—a position only possible because her father was the Front’s leader and she was based in England, not Pakistan. In Kabul, Najibullah stripped Anahita Ratibzad of her official positions, but elevated many other women. Suhaila Siddiqi, a Soviet-trained doctor and director of Kabul’s 400-bed army hospital, became Afghanistan’s first female general. Saleha Farouq Etemadi, who was the Women’s Welfare Association’s president through much of the 1960s and 1970s, became Minister of Social Security. Masuma Esmati Wardak, who was one of the four women parliamentarians elected in 1965, presided over the Women’s Council of Afghanistan.

  Many other women enjoyed new opportunities due to the government’s commitment to improving their status and because the war resulted in women taking over many civilian jobs once filled by men. In 1988 twenty per cent of the government’s employees were female. A couple of years later, the figure was fifty per cent—and fifty per cent of university students and forty per cent of doctors were also women. As Kabul became a city where posters of Madonna adorned the occasional shop window, more women than ever wore high heels, jeans, lipstick and occasional miniskirts. Their school-age daughters derided chadaris as ‘storage sacks’ and ‘bottles’. George Arney of the BBC thought the university could be ‘a campus anywhere in the world’, observing that students ‘loitered in groups, chatting, carrying books, holding hands and making rendezvous’. Ignoring all that had occurred since 1959, Masuma Esmati Wardak maintained the war had given women ‘their first taste of freedom’.

  Wardak recognised that women ‘would have a difficult time under the fundamentalists’ if the mujahideen prevailed, but was confident they would be able to continue working since Afghanistan could not ‘improve without the participation of women’. ‘If the situation goes backward…we can fight with the Mullahs through the Holy Qur’an,’ she declared. ‘I will never again put on the chadari.’ Others disagreed. When Steve Coll of the Washington Post visited a girls high school, the students asked why the United States was funding fundamentalists ‘intent on keeping them out of universities and offices’ and locking them ‘into lives of domestic, religious isolation’. Nancy Dupree predicted that mujahideen rule would have little consequence for rural women but that educated urban women would ‘take ten steps backwards’.

  CHAPTER 17

  A Fact of Life

  Two Australians, Alexandra and Leigh Copeland, were among the first westerners to visit after the Soviets sent in their forces. They had begun buying rugs when returning through Afghanistan from Europe in 1972, then financed another trip in 1974 by buying more for friends. Soon they had a shop in Melbourne and were visiting Kabul three or four times a year. As they had already bought tickets for a trip via Delhi at the end of 1979, the Copelands flew to India, expecting to have no chance of going further. However, they secured seats on the first Ariana flight to Kabul, on 30 December, and were welcomed by Afghan officials who remembered them. Their trip was exceptionally successful because local dealers had been struggling for months and feared their businesses would collapse with the Soviets’ arrival.

  The Copelands continued to visit, as did a number of other western rug dealers. They had to report each morning and evening to the KhAD, and were followed by an agent as they went about, but could do much as they wanted. The Copelands felt so safe that in 1981, when their son Rafiq was eleven weeks old, they decided to take him, only to find no visa for him in Delhi. As an official at the Afghan embassy recognised, the Copelands’ situation was novel. They were the first westerners to want to bring a child into Afghanistan since the Soviets sent in their troops. Because it would have taken too long for a visa to arrive from Kabul, the official created a new rule: when a baby travelled with his mother, no visa was required. In 1983, when Rafiq was eighteen months, the Copelands took him again. When they decided to alternate in making these trips, so one of them could stay with Rafiq in Melbourne, Alexandra travelled to Kabul by herself.

  Swiss dealer Reto Christoffel, who drove overland in his Renault 4 in 1968, then returned several times by air in the late 1970s, also visited Kabul regularly. His speciality was antique rugs, which he exhibited at his house outside Zurich. But on one of his trips in 1981 he arrived to find that his local agent had acquired a striking new rug from one of Herat’s leading dealers, Sufi Abdul Wahid, who also had a store in Kabul. This rug had been woven outside Herat in Ghurian, a centre of pictorial rug-making since the 1960s. This one was dominated by images of tanks and helicopters, the main weapons of the Soviets and the Afghan government. It may have been an expression of hatred of the communists, especially since residents of Ghurian played a key role in the Herat uprising in March 1979. It may have been a celebration of communist power—consistent with a government textbook that identified its tanks as ‘a symbol of freedom of the people’. Excited by its imagery, Christoffel bought the rug and reproduced an image of it on the invitation for his next exhibition.

  Such rugs were few at first because they were a new art form and rug-making in Afghanistan was generally in decline as many weavers had fled and those who remained were often prevented from working by the chaos and fighting. But from the mid-1980s, rugs depicting weaponry became increasingly common. Families who had made just an occasional rug for sale made many more as the conflict stopped them earning income in other ways. The emergence of these rugs was facilitated by weavers being accustomed to making pictorial carpets with political subjects and having at least some experience of developing new designs. The creation of these rugs was also part of a culture in which, for all Kabul continued much as usual, the signs of war were commonplace.

  Graves of mujahideen were dotted across the countryside. Their markers were thin poles topped with triangular flags, sometimes white but often Islamic green, bearing religious texts including the Shahada, the Islamic creed. The flags marking the graves of government dead on the hill outside Kabul known as the Mountain of Martyrs bore the same Islamic texts but sometimes also depictions of weaponry. The 1988 grave of a pilot carried a red flag embroidered by his mother. It showed the pilot’s helicopter being hit by one of the heat-seeking Stinger missiles that the Americans supplied to the mujahideen from 1986 and made the Soviets’ aircraft much more vulnerable. Its text was: ‘Glory be his, he died face to face with the enemy.’

  Children also depicted the fighting. ‘They paint what they feel is their lot, what they see every day—war, soldiers on barricades, aircraft and helicopters fighting in the sky,’ a government magazine observed. ‘They…do not want to draw either flowers or dancers or fragrant gardens with fabulous birds.’

  The new rugs became known in Kabul as ‘tankys’ not only because tanks were one of their recurrent motifs but also because ‘tank’, written very prominently in Dari, was the text on two designs that found a big market. In Switzerland they were called ‘Kriegsteppiche’, leading them to become known as ‘war rugs’. Especially in the first years of the war, their weavers displayed great skill, subtlety and imagination. At any time, these rugs would have represented a remarkable cultural flowering, but this creativity was all the more extraordinary during a war that would leave about one million Afghans dead.

  The weavers primarily depicted tanks and helicopters, the communists’ prime ground and air weapons. Whil
e rug makers elsewhere had occasionally depicted the bloodiness of war, including beheadings, amputations and torture, the Afghan rugs rarely did so. Some adapted old designs. For example, makers of the long, thin rugs known as runners depicted trees of life, a common Baluch motif, within borders of helicopters, jet fighters and tanks. Others created new designs that were often dominated by weaponry but, in one case, juxtaposed tanks with water ewers, a traditional symbol of domesticity and hospitality.

  The origins and meaning of these rugs have been the stuff of much speculation. One early writer contended that weavers began making them in response to commissions from Soviet officers. Later writers have suggested that, as part of the larger corruption of the Soviet military, which saw soldiers sell their uniforms and equipment to Afghan dealers in a bazaar called the Brezhnev, soldiers sometimes exchanged their weapons for war rugs. Because these rugs have generally been assumed to be anti-communist, it has also been claimed that the Soviets tried to stop their export, forcing dealers to smuggle them into Iran and Pakistan or to secrete tiny numbers in large bales of traditional rugs. Yet there is no evidence that Soviets commissioned the first war rugs and most rug designs were not obviously anti-communist, so the Soviets had no reason to stop their export. Nor does it seem they tried to do so. Zia Amini, who was in Kabul from 1978 until 1988 when his family’s company ABC Oriental Carpets was one of the biggest exporters of Afghan rugs, recalls that ABC Oriental Carpets regularly sent containers to Europe, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly. These containers generally included only a few war rugs, but that was because these carpets constituted only a small portion of total production.

  Soviets were among their purchasers. They were drawn to them as part of their larger appetite for shopping in Kabul, which offered a wealth of goods unobtainable in the USSR because the communists were unable to sovietise the Afghan economy. While stories continued to proliferate about Soviets always being at risk in the city, attacks were few. Some bought Japanese stereos, tape recorders and cameras. Others acquired second-hand western clothes, as the biggest Afghan dealers continued to make buying trips to the United States and sell their stock in Kabul where, communist rule notwithstanding, the bazaar was occasionally referred to as the Reagan after the new US president. The trade in new clothes, especially in American jeans, yielded Afghan traders and their Soviet customers great profits—the Soviets could sell these jeans for five times what they paid on returning home.

  Had officialdom been all-powerful, there would have been no Afghan carpets in Soviet homes. The Kremlin’s ideal was modern apartments, free from the ‘old bourgeois’ culture. It was appalled that most Soviet households in the 1970s featured handwoven rugs, usually from the Soviet’s Central Asian Republics but sometimes Afghanistan. Kabul’s rug dealers still struggled in the early 1980s. Small dealers in antique carpets were particularly vulnerable because they could not send consignments to Europe unlike bigger dealers who sold new rugs. But as Soviet officers and officials patronised Chicken Street in increasing numbers, many dealers erected Cyrillic signs.

  Soviet soldiers also acquired war rugs as part of a larger appetite for memorabilia related to the war. A Lithuanian who served at the Bagram air base was one of many who returned with small propagandistic posters issued by the Afghan government with texts in Dari or Pashto. Others bought war rugs which, Italian journalist Edgardo Bartoli reported, were very popular among Soviet residents of Microrayon in 1988. Senior officials probably bought these rugs as neutral documents recording the fact of war, influenced by how rug dealers in Kabul presented them. ‘The villagers are seeing these things of war every day,’ one dealer observed of a rug replete with weaponry. ‘Now they sometimes show it in their carpets.’

  1985 was a key year in the spread of the rugs, triggering several stories about them. Peter Renz, a rug dealer from Schramberg on the eastern edge of Germany’s Black Forest, was at the forefront. After he encountered one in the Pakistani city of Lahore and returned with it to Schramberg, the local Schwarzwälder Bote carried a short piece about the emergence of this new form of carpet telling ‘the sorrowful story of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, with Soviet tanks and helicopters replacing traditional designs’. Almost immediately, the story was picked up by the Deutsche Presse-Agentur, and then by Associated Press, leading to its publication as far afield as Calgary in Canada and Houston in the USA.

  The editors of Free Afghanistan—a magazine published in London ‘to keep the plight of Afghan people in the forefront of the minds of the British people’—were amazed in 1985 by another war rug obtained by a Dutch dealer. ‘Look closely,’ Free Afghanistan advised. ‘You will notice tanks, Russian soldiers with hands behind their backs, and mujahideen freedom fighters with flowers in their hands.’ This rug was one of a growing number included in consignments of Baluch carpets sent via the USSR to Europe, where ABC Oriental Rugs was typical in pricing these rugs according to the density of knots and number of mistakes rather than their imagery.

  When one of Switzerland’s foremost art critics, Fritz Billeter, heard in 1985 that rugs with weaponry were arriving at ABC Oriental Rugs’ Zurich warehouse run by Bashir Amini, he went to see them, talked to Reto Christoffel to learn more, then wrote about them. Billeter’s piece in Zurich’s Tages Anzeiger, which featured Christoffel’s carpet bought in 1981, was the first extended account of these rugs and the first sign that they could appeal to westerners interested in contemporary art. Oblivious to the rapid changes in rug-making in Afghanistan since the 1960s, Billeter was ‘surprised and fascinated’ that ‘a craft whose design rules had been fixed so strictly for over a thousand years, should be able to take up and work through what must have been catastrophic experiences of a technological war’.

  Billeter identified the rugs as worth collecting, but his article did little to increase demand, so Bashir Amini did not raise the price of war rugs. Since Reto Christoffel still had no buyer for his rug, he donated it to the Bibliotheca Afghanica outside Basel, the one European institution to specialise in Afghan material. When Karin Knauer, an ethnology student in Freiburg im Breisgau in south-western Germany, became fascinated with war rugs in 1987, she found that some dealers recognised the rugs’ interest but made few sales, while interior design shops rejected them as ‘too gloomy’. Despite weavers in Afghanistan depicting almost nothing of the horrors of the war, their imagery still proved objectionable to many buyers. Knauer asked: ‘Who wants to have war in their homes?’

  American collector Fred Balling did. When he first encountered a war rug at a house sale in Connecticut in 1987, he was so astounded by the replacement of traditional border patterns such as leaves and tendrils with contemporary weaponry that he wrote to George O’Bannon’s new bi-monthly magazine, the Oriental Rug Review: ‘Volumes have been written on the gradual transformation of design motifs among oriental weavers: how through time a cloud becomes a dragon, or how a dragon becomes a snapdragon. Little work has been done on rapid alterations of motifs. Here we have a study sample. In a matter of perhaps three years, traditional renditions of standard motifs have been adjusted to present contemporary references.’

  Tatiana Divens, who wrote the first extended account of war rugs in English for O’Bannon’s Oriental Rug Review, was similarly excited when she discovered a dealer’s display in upstate New York. Having spent the previous twelve years as an officer in the US army, Divens was entranced by the weaponry depicted. She thought one rug a particular ‘marvel’ because of its female content. It showed a Baluch woman in tribal dress holding a mortar shell, which Divens identified as being ‘complete with fin stabilisation, probably 81 millimetres’, and another woman holding what appeared to be a G881 fragmentation grenade.

  The first recorded Afghan response came from Mushtaq Barakzai, a refugee carpet dealer in Canada, who received a war rug as part of a ‘pot-luck’ shipment selected by his Afghan agent. Barakzai thought this rug so remarkable that, like Peter Renz in Germany, he turned it into a news story. In January 1
987, he told the Toronto Star that he had never seen such a ‘drastic change’ in Afghan rugs as this depiction of ‘tanks and machine guns with notches on their barrels that leave little to the imagination’. Presuming its maker was male, Barakzai observed: ‘The person who sat down to weave this carpet had experienced these things. His own anguish. His inner thoughts created the design.’ When Indian journalist Shekhar Gupta encountered war rugs in Kabul in 1989, he identified them as ‘a painful but accurate statement of the tragedy’ that had ‘changed everything’ for Afghans.

  Their most avid collector was Luca Brancati, a young Italian who began dealing in Baluch carpets to support himself while studying computer science in Turin. Because the duty-free warehouses in Zurich were the closest source of cheap rugs, Brancati bought most of his stock there. When he discovered war rugs in 1985, the nineteen-year-old Brancati had no Afghan friends, had not been been to Afghanistan and had paid little attention to the war. But he had a sharp eye for novel, exciting imagery and was soon making repeat visits to Bashir Amini’s warehouse so he could go through all the Baluch piles. At first, he bought every war rug but, as supply increased and his purchases grew, Brancati became more selective. He also began buying from other dealers in Europe and asked Amini to secure more textiles with war imagery from Kabul. The result was two consignments bought by Brancati relying on rough descriptions—gambles that paid off. He particularly prized a group of cushions, storage bags and mats called sofrehs spread on the floor at meal times. Because weavers typically intended these textiles for local use, they confirmed that their makers did not just depict war to please foreign buyers.