by Tim Bonyhady
If this ‘backlog’ existed, it was never cleared, at least for murders. But in January 1998 the Taliban used the stadium for one execution, two amputations of the right hands of thieves and ‘light but symbolic’ lashings of four women accused of premarital sex. In February there were three amputations and another ‘light’ lashing of a woman—she was hit one hundred times for walking with a man who was not her relative, which the Taliban took as evidence of premarital sex or adultery. In March there were three executions. Over the following months there were many more punishments for an increasing array of offences ranging from drinking whisky to taking bribes.
The greatest number took place one Friday in January 1999. Seven thieves had limbs amputated within the stadium. Outside it, the Taliban punished a man accused of sodomising a boy. As they had done in Kandahar a year before after convicting three men of sodomy, they invoked a saying attributed in medieval times to the prophet Muhammad that a wall should be thrown down on homosexuals. In Kandahar, they especially constructed a mud wall, then had a tank push it over the men, one of whom survived. In Kabul, the Taliban constructed a stone wall outside the stadium, then a tank pushed it over the man, who died.
The one mass public execution took place in Herat where the Taliban admitted to hanging eight Hazaras following an attempted uprising in May 1999, while Hazaras put the figure at twenty-seven. In Kabul, after the amputations that January, public punishments ebbed. During the rest of 1999, there were four executions, thirteen amputations and two lashings at the Ghazi Stadium, with weeks and sometimes months in between. In the first half of 2000, there were no public punishments in Kabul despite the number of robberies in the capital reputedly increasing. In the second half of the year, there were punishments on only two Fridays, including one when the Taliban hanged two of Massoud’s men from the stadium’s goalposts, before hanging them again from cranes in Ariana Square. In 2001, the one punishment in the Ghazi Stadium was the lashing of a couple accused of premarital sex.
Women were sometimes able to walk away in ‘no apparent pain’ when lashings were imposed more to humiliate their victims than to inflict physical injury. But one woman died within a few days of her punishment, perhaps killed by her father, perhaps a suicide out of shame. When murderers were to be executed, the victims’ families could accept financial compensation but they rarely if ever took it. Instead, they administered the punishment—usually shooting the accused with a Kalashnikov, sometimes cutting his throat. When amputations were complete, the Taliban would hold up the severed hands and feet, then carry them through Kabul or hang them from trees or lamp posts.
Journalists with western news services initially put the crowds at 30,000, even 35,000, which meant the stadium was packed. Vendors of pistacchio nuts and green tea were abundant. By April 1998, crowds had fallen to about 10,000, only to rise to 20,000, drop as low as a few hundred, then occasionally rise again in the following months. Initially, the audience was limited to men and boys, but from March 1998 up to a hundred women began attending in a special enclosure. The interval between punishments and soccer match was short, as the British journalist Jason Burke noted. Half an hour after two amputations and an execution, ‘twenty-two men from local teams were warming up for the five-o’clock football match’.
Attendance at these punishments did not mean support for them. When a man convicted of a triple murder was hung from a crane in Herat’s stadium, some of the crowd tried to rush the crane in protest but were forced back by Taliban guards firing in the air. Others sought the exits, only for the Taliban to shut the doors and use rubber straps to repel them. A group of men who tried to flee the first execution in the Ghazi Stadium was ‘beaten and forced to watch’. At another execution, the crowd shouted, ‘Let him live’. When four thieves had their hands severed, several spectators left after the first amputation because ‘they couldn’t bear to watch more’. When a young woman was flogged for adultery, dozens of women reportedly wept—though given they were in chadaris in their segregated stand, one might wonder how the male journalist knew.
Other attendees at the stadium watched happily, despite the Taliban announcing, ‘You are not here to enjoy yourself.’ Some came looking for entertainment. ‘There isn’t anything else to do on a Friday,’ remarked a man at one execution. Others agreed with public punishment. ‘Everybody should learn such crimes are evil,’ a man declared. At one amputation ‘women jumped from their seats…and the male spectators stormed onto the field for a better look’. At another amputation Taliban guards used sticks ‘to whip back a pitch invasion by spectators eager to catch a glimpse of the bloodied body’.
The stadium itself became a site of crime where thieves stole the bicycles of spectators, prompting the Taliban to put more guards on duty. The stadium also became a site of conflict over the Taliban’s edict that soccer games stop for prayers and spectators line up on the pitch facing Mecca to pray. While such prayers had been staged at half time during the annual buzkashi tournament in Kabul as long ago as the 1970s, participation had been a matter of choice. When the Taliban required it, some spectators refused to comply because they did not want the games interrupted. Others objected to the Taliban’s compulsion.
This edict triggered the greatest civil disobedience against the Taliban. At a game in July 2000, spectators shouted obscenities, attacked Taliban officials and chased them out of the stadium, only for the Taliban to return and make several arrests. At a game that August, the crowd clapped instead of shouting ‘Allahu Akbar!’, just a few thousand came onto the pitch to pray and, when officials with whips entered the stands, most of the spectators retreated to other parts of the stadium rather than comply. A few weeks later, some threw themselves ‘on the ground in mock prayer before being chased away with wild swings of the strap’. To stop this dissent, the Taliban rescheduled the games so they did not take place during prayer times.
When members of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan began recording some of the punishments, they were probably the first Afghan women to try to use the camera for political effect. After an amputation in 1998, they photographed a member of the Taliban walking through the city with two hands and a foot tied to one of his own hands with fabric so he did not have to touch them. Before another amputation, women smuggled a camera into the stadium and, taking advantage of the dearth of Taliban scrutiny of the women’s sections, photographed a Taliban official holding up two amputated hands for all to see. In addition to publishing these photographs in its magazine, RAWA posted them on its website, which opened: ‘Welcome to the website of the world’s most oppressed women.’
RAWA decided to do more in November 1999 when the Taliban announced the execution of a woman called Zarmeena who was alleged to have killed her husband with a mallet. Whether she had killed him was later put in question. If she had killed him, journalists suggested an array of explanations if not justifications. But at the time of her execution none of this was public knowledge.
An Iranian group had attracted international attention in 1998 by circulating a covert video of the public stoning of four men in Tehran. RAWA attempted the same, though it had just a day between Radio Sharia announcing Zarmeena’s execution on a Monday and it occurring on the Tuesday to organise this filming. By the time RAWA’s members had secured a video camera otherwise used to film weddings, in defiance of the Taliban, they had only an hour to learn how to use it without being discovered. On the Tuesday afternoon, several members of RAWA went there, with the camera hidden under one of their chadaris. Forty years after Afghan women had attended the Ghazi Stadium for the unveiling, a member of RAWA filmed the execution through a hole in the fabric of her chadari.
Jason Burke was there for the Observer, along with Amir Shah of Associated Press and a representative of Agence France-Presse, as the Taliban had invited journalists as usual. Burke and Shah wrote that the stadium was ‘packed with thousands of lookers’, ‘thicker than normal for an execution’, but RAWA’s video showed the stan
ds largely empty. A woman with small children hurrying to reach the stadium told Shah: ‘This is the first time a woman has been killed. I wanted to see.’ A man collecting wood said Zarmeena ‘deserved to die because she must have killed her husband while he was sleeping, otherwise it’s not possible’. While RAWA later maintained that the family of Zarmeena’s husband was ready to spare her for payment, Burke reported there was no offer of money.
Abdul Bari, the cleric who officiated, identified Zarmeena as the daughter of Ghulam Haznat of Parma Province and the mother of seven children. He announced that, in the five months since she killed her husband Alauddin, her death sentence had been upheld by three courts, consistent with the Taliban’s commitment to swift punishment for crimes. In fact, as Associated Press and Agence-France Press reported, Alauddin had died two if not three years before. In other words, his killing was part of the ‘backlog’ identified by Mullah Manan Niazi in 1998, and Zarmeena had been in jail with her two youngest children since Alauddin’s death. In standard fashion, Bari announced that she had confessed ‘without any pressure or torture’. He also cast her execution as part of the Taliban restoring order. ‘There is no thieving and your women are now safe,’ he declared, ignoring how that was not true of Zarmeena.
RAWA’s video showed Zarmeena in the back of a pick-up with two policewomen, all in blue chadaris. After they got out, they walked a short distance to the edge of the penalty box where a man with a Kalashnikov was waiting. The policewomen had Zarmeena sit on the penalty line, she turned towards the man with the Kalashnikov, then turned away and the man shot her in the back of the head. There was then the sound of a second and possibly a third shot which RAWA’s video operator did not capture on film, perhaps because she was inexperienced and filming covertly, perhaps because of her shock. But she filmed Zarmeena’s body on the ground, her blue chadari staining red and one of the policewomen pulling it down to cover her better. A pick-up parked next to her; members of the Taliban lifted her into it.
RAWA’s video had no impact when first posted on its website because RAWA had almost no international profile. But early in 2001, after RAWA’s Zoya appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, there were 300,000 hits on the association’s website which also included a video of the corpses of two men hanging from goalposts in the stadium, then hung again from cranes in Ariana Square and a video of the execution of a double murderer whose throat was slit by the brother of one of the victims. RAWA was still frustrated by its inability to secure a greater audience for the video of Zarmeena’s execution. According to one contemporary report: ‘No news company will buy or air the footage. RAWA is wondering how best to show the world what is happening in their country.’ One of RAWA’s members recalled that the BBC, along with CBS and ABC in the United States, responded: ‘The footage is very shocking, Western viewers can’t bear it so we are very sorry that we can’t air it.’
Hardcash, an independent British documentary maker, changed that. When its founder David Henshaw saw a still of Zarmeena being shot, he asked director-producer Cassian Harrison to research it. After looking at RAWA’s website, Harrison secured permission to use its footage as part of a documentary about the Taliban which could include the execution because this documentary was not being made for the BBC. Harrison recruited one of Britain’s foremost war-zone cameramen, James Miller, who had filmed the Taliban’s first march on Kabul in 1995. He also hired Saira Shah, who had not only covered conflicts in Iraq, Kosova, Colombia and the Sudan after her stint in Peshawar but also visited Kabul in 1992 following Najibullah’s fall and then returned during the civil war in 1996. By presenting the documentary, which Harrison called Beneath the Veil, the thirty-six-year-old Shah became the third generation of her family, following her grandfather Sirdir Ikbal Ali Shah and father Idries Shah, to play a significant role in revealing Afghanistan to the world. Harrison constructed Beneath the Veil as a personal journey by Shah, exploring her origins by attempting to visit Paghman, her family’s homeland outside Kabul.
As usual with accounts of the Taliban’s public punishments, Beneath the Veil presented the Taliban as a case apart. It ignored that Saudi Arabia was staging many more public executions for the same range of crimes, and that women were much more often the victims of these beheadings. It did not acknowledge that over two hundred people had watched on closed-circuit television the recent killing by lethal injection of the Oklahoma City Bomber, Timothy McVeigh, or that, as executions by the Taliban in Kabul had become a rarity, there were many more in Texas.
Beneath the Veil begins with Shah identifying the punishments in the Ghazi Stadium as ‘medieval barbarity that the country’s rulers want to keep hidden’, ignoring the Taliban’s invitations to foreign journalists. It has Shah declare of the Taliban, ‘Most of all, they want to keep out journalists like us.’ Yet the Taliban had admitted 150 journalists from twenty-two countries the year before, including prominent British documentary maker Sean Langan, who made two programs screened by the BBC early in 2001. The Taliban had also granted visas to Shah, Harrison and Miller. When they arrived in Kandahar, Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, a television regular, was there to be interviewed. In Kabul, the Taliban’s chief of intelligence showed them around the city.
After returning to Peshawar, Shah made a second trip into Afghanistan ‘undercover’, posing as a returning refugee wearing a blue chadari, escorted by two members of RAWA who took her to Kabul where they had a safe house for her to stay. As she moved around the city, where she visited a covert girls school and an illicit beauty parlour, Shah sometimes had a camera in her bag as well as another under her chadari. While her main guide did much of the filming using another hidden camera, Shah did some too. If caught, she knew her British passport was a route to freedom. As she later put it, she could say, ‘I’m foreign. Get me out of here.’ There was no need. After five days, RAWA returned her to Peshawar.
Beneath the Veil starts with the execution, but omits the section of original footage showing the stadium largely empty. Instead, footage from another occasion shows the stadium filled with spectators. Shah suggests that it is particularly shocking that the Taliban had ‘turned sports grounds into execution grounds’, despite it being common since World War II for such grounds to be used for detention, torture and executions. ‘In peace time they are sports venues; in war they turn into concentration camps’, the Polish writer Ryszard KapuŚciński wrote of stadia in his celebrated essay, ‘The Soccer War’.
The documentary moves to the girls school and then the beauty parlour where two women are having their nails polished and faces made up. While Harriet Logan had already photographed such a scene for London’s Sunday Times, film was more powerful. Shah explains how extraordinary it is to see women risking punishment for a beauty usually hidden by their chadaris. She identifies this parlour—not the school—as ‘the most subversive place of all’. The women are among a small group ‘still holding on to their dignity’ and ‘trying to keep life normal in a world gone completely mad’.
Beneath the Veil was screened in Britain on Channel 4 in June 2001, then twice in the United States by CNN that August, and in Australia that September by the ABC. ‘Saira Shah risked her life to go literally undercover’, ‘A triumph of undercover reportage, not least as it was so dangerous to film’, were typical responses. But News of the World’s television critic recognised that Beneath the Veil’s rhetoric of ‘risky penetration and forbidden sights’ was ‘undermined’ when the Taliban took Shah and Harrison ‘on a filming tour of Kabul’. Others were sceptical because Beneath the Veil screened in England six months after Sean Langan’s two documentaries which also featured him going ‘undercover’ to visit a covert school for girls. ‘Downtown Kabul must be packed to the minarets with Western journalists secretly filming the going-on there. One suspects that half the people covered from head-to-toe in veils, lurking in ramshackle marketplaces and on street corners, are actually camera crews and intrepid reporters,’ the Guardian quipped. ‘Are y
ou, too, beginning to wonder if Afghanistan’s Taliban is maybe only pretending to make life awkward for foreign film crews?’ the Times asked.
The response to the footage of Zarmeena’s execution was uniform: ‘disturbing’, ‘chilling’, ‘horrific’, ‘stomach-turning’, ‘stunning, in the worst sense of the word’. London’s Daily Express thought it ‘very difficult to watch, and not think: ‘“It’s straightforward. We’ll bomb the swine.”’
CHAPTER 27
The Famed Shot
In October 2001, the United States launched a massive bombardment of the Taliban, supplemented by cruise missiles fired partly by British submarines. Washington also sent some of its special services into Afghanistan. But, as in the 1980s, it used a proxy to do its ground fighting, employing the ‘Northern Alliance’ of the forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud and Abdul Rashid Dostum, despite their record of rape, torture, abductions, executions, pillaging and drug-trafficking.
The catalyst was the attacks of 9/11 by hijackers trained at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. When the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, the US attacked al-Qaeda’s camps and the Taliban’s forces as part of President Bush declaring a ‘war on terror’. But RAWA’s footage of Zarmeena’s execution also played a part. In the wake of 9/11, the ‘very shocking’ footage that no major television station would screen in 2000, became, as Larry King of CNN put it, ‘the famed shot of the execution’, used to emblemise the Taliban’s treatment of women and to provide another justification for their removal.
Bin Laden understood the power of film, and enjoyed appearing on it. He was also aware of how the camera could be put to deadly uses. When Peter Jouvenal filmed him outside Kandahar for a CNN documentary in 2000, bin Laden required Jouvenal to use al-Qaeda’s equipment for fear that Jouvenal’s own might contain a bomb. Ahmad Shah Massoud, who also enjoyed and exploited film, did not share this fear. While careful to vet visitors to his headquarters near the Tajikistan border, he allowed in two members of al-Qaeda masquerading as television journalists. On 9 September 2001, in Afghanistan’s first suicide bombing, they assassinated Massoud using explosives hidden in their camera.