Human Cargo

by Caroline Moorehead

  The Hazaras have been hard at work rebuilding West Kabul. Along the road leading out to the weavers’ school, timber and brick merchants are doing a brisk trade. If the city buildings are still shells, their jagged walls in ruins, the side streets are by contrast full of builders and carpenters. The reconstruction of the capital is said to be in the hands of wealthy returnees, or warlords and their commanders, eager to control the money and the patronage all these projects entail. Aziz, the energetic young Hazara who is much involved in his people’s return, had come to the airport to meet me and the friend with whom I was traveling, Frances D’Souza. He said that some 300,000 Hazaras have already returned to West Kabul, where his school now has 870 pupils, studying in two shifts, and that it has moved to a new compound, a series of classrooms built of cinder block, an innovation brought back with returning refugee builders from Pakistan and judged greatly superior to the old Afghan mud and straw. More than half his pupils, Aziz said with pride, are girls, and in the evening, when the rooms are given over to classes in literacy, he could fill his center six times over with women queuing for the education denied them by the Taliban. Aziz notes these numbers with delight. “People have come home from Pakistan and Iran believing that education is their passport to a better life.” He is teaching humanism and human rights and what he calls a benevolent interpretation of the Koran to his top class, tightly packed rows of serious young men and women.

  In the alleys behind the school, in among the building sites and timber merchants, the carpet trade is booming. Aziz believes that there are at least six hundred factories, some employing as many as five hundred weavers, mostly working in their own homes, the patterns drawn out by young apprentice draftsmen on graph paper and quickly memorized by the children at the looms. The work is slow: five to six hours weaving every day except Friday, precise, meticulous work that needs small fingers and affects the eyes and lungs, but brings in enough money to support the entire family. The looms stand in the cool, under the pomegranate bushes and the vines. It takes four months for a family to weave a carpet three yards wide and four yards long. In Aziz’s school, the children talk of their futures as doctors, teachers, and engineers.

  Not all the foreign experts who have made Kabul their base— there are said to be over a thousand registered NGOs alone—are as sanguine as Aziz about the country’s future. In February 2003, four months before my return, a Brazilian working for the International Committee of the Red Cross was stopped on a busy road outside Kandahar by a militia group. The commander, recognizing the Red Cross painted on the front of the Land Cruiser, pointed to his false leg and thanked the Brazilian for having saved his life during an earlier skirmish. A Red Cross team, he told him, had been on hand and had amputated his leg; otherwise he would surely have died. Then, taking from his pocket a mobile telephone, the commander called his warlord. He spoke, listened, came back, drew out his gun, and shot the Brazilian dead.

  Incidents like this have made foreigners wary and no one, now, feels safe. Within the UN compounds, behind the razor wire and the concrete pillars, there is talk of how much can be achieved for Afghanistan and how quickly, before the money runs out and with it the political will to restore such an ailing country to a semblance of democratic rule. Only, they add, it is of course not so much a question of restoration as of imposition. Afghanistan never was a democracy; it was, and is, a loose federation of tribal fiefdoms, ruled over by powerful warlords, and thus it seems set to remain. Andrew Wilder is a British academic who has lived in Afghanistan off and on for many years. Early in 2002, he arrived in Kabul with a small monitoring unit, funded by the Swiss and the Swedes, and a remit to do something seldom done in UN circles: analyze data on the spot. Wilder is not happy with what he sees around him. Over fourteen months, he has watched the UN agencies bicker over priorities and chains of command, nongovernmental organizations proliferate and go their own ways, and more attention and money go to the easier and more visible problems than to the more difficult and crucial ones. Sitting in a prefabricated hut on the grounds of a former prime minister’s residence, Wilder fears for the future. The theories behind development and the delivery of aid have become more complex and sophisticated all the time, he points out, but they are not matched by performance; disillusion and disappointment fester over how few expectations have been realized. Security, argues Wilder, was always known to be the major issue in Afghanistan: how to make the country safe from the warlords and free of weapons? “Everyone, from Karzai down, knew that security should be addressed first. So what did we do? We provided assistance first, with the assumption that security would follow. It hasn’t.”

  On my first day back in Kabul, I found a driver and went out to the Shomali plain, to see how Haji Kamal and his family had survived the winter. The dog roses were out along the hedgerows and the fields around Logar were full of men working at the grapevines, now watered and primed and sprouting once more. The UN tent had gone. In both Haji Kamal’s compound and that of his cousin Amar Jan, there were signs of building. Seven rooms had been finished, long whitewashed rooms with windows and rafters donated by a foreign aid organization, now furnished with felt carpets and lined with pillows in reds and greens. From the cool of Haji Kamal’s main room, which he has painted a bright blue wash, visitors can look out over pomegranate bushes and chickens pecking in the dirt. There is a new outside bread oven, and a second cow and four sheep have appeared. He told me that all his children and grandchildren who can walk half an hour there and back are at the village school, and he and Amar Jan have planted tomatoes, radishes, potatoes, eggplants, and onions. Along the avenues of mulberries destroyed by the Taliban, new shoots are growing from the stumps of the trees.

  Of Logar’s forty original families, all but six have come home. Haji Karnal, the former member of the mujahedeen, is a man of peace now: he talked of his new orchards, of the apples and plums and almonds from which he expects a first crop in three years’ time, and of the lessons he gives his grandchildren about the unexploded mines, still plentiful across his land. But he is pleased, every day, to be home. Not long ago he turned down the offer of a job for his eldest son in Dubai, saying that he no longer wished to have his children live away from him. He fears only the weakness of the central government in Kabul, and the power of the warlords, grown strong and lazy from looting and extortion. “What do I miss from my years in Pakistan? Nothing. There is nothing to miss. I have no single good memory of exile.”

  • • •

  ON MY FIRST visit, it had been too dangerous to move far outside Kabul; this time I planned to go to the Hindu Kush to see for myself how the people returning from exile to the high mountain villages had fared during the long snowy winter. I knew that the numbers coming home dropped during the cold season, but that the refugees were again arriving, by bus and truck, over the passes. They worry that unless they come soon, their homes and lands will be occupied by others.

  Nancy Dupree wrote her guide to Afghanistan back in 1972, before the Russians arrived, when foreign visitors still came to sightsee and fish for trout in the high mountains. She traveled up into the I lindu Kush to visit the valley of Bamiyan, where a Buddhist sect in the fourth century cut two immense Buddhas out of the mountain face, and a third smaller one in a niche between them. For the journey, she described two roads, not paved but decent. Neither the one that crossed the 12,000-foot Hijigak pass, nor the one that skirted the lower Shibar mountain, the watershed between the Oxus and the Indus, would take longer than seven hours, and either would offer a delightful and memorable journey. The journey remains delightful in many ways, but twenty-six years of neglect and fighting have reduced the roads to little more than riverbeds, pitted with huge craters and strewn with rocks; the few cars and trucks that make the journey prefer to travel in convoy, for fear of breakdown or attack.

  Eleven hours of painful bucketing over the stones takes the traveler through some of the most dramatic scenery in the world, the bald peaks of the Hindu Kush, tinged for m
ost of the year with snow, stretching forever into the distance in shades of beige and ocher and purple, against a sky of deep, pure blue. There is a constant sound of water, from the snowmelt down the riverbed. The million or so Kuchi nomads, who once regarded the highlands of the Hindu Kush as their summer pasture, have not returned to their grazing lands, for they have lost their herds to fighting and drought; there were no animals to be seen. In any case the Hazaras, who occupy this part of Afghanistan, do not want the Kuchis back, for the Kuchis famously sided with the Taliban in their battles, and many Kuchi leaders became Taliban commanders whose savage ways are remembered all too well. The summer grazing, say the Hazaras going home, will be excellent for the herds they now intend to build up for themselves.

  Long before the traveler starts the long climb toward the pass, having left Kabul along a brief but very smooth stretch of tarmac, a legacy of the Taliban years, you come across a first long, lush valley, with a racing river to irrigate orchards and plantations of poplars. In the fields grow potatoes and wheat; in neat rows between the crops and trees, in plots of their own, are the poppy fields, white and pink against the bright surrounding green of the grass, the rocky mountains, and blue sky above. From far away, the poppies look like wild flowers, growing in profusion in this green and fertile valley; from close to they look like rows of tulips, their petals large and firm. They have a festive air. The nearest laboratories capable of transforming the poppies into heroin lie far to the south, around Kandahar. In the Hindu Kush, poppies are smoked as opium, though all but a very small part of the crop is sold to traders in Kabul. Before the Taliban came, Afghanistan was the world’s main producer of heroin. The Taliban, for a while, curbed production. When the UN arrived, in the winter of 2001, it offered grants to farmers willing to substitute their most profitable cash crop for any other. But today Afghanistan is again at the top of world heroin production, the farmers having understood that by growing poppies they cannot lose: they are paid equally well to dig them up or to sell them to warlords and their middlemen. Along with much else that the refugees are bringing back from their years in Iran and Pakistan is a taste for drugs, especially, so it is said, among young Hazara men.

  I wanted to see Bamiyan, because I had heard that Wadad Jafa, the young Hazara teacher from Aziz’s school in West Kabul, was now working with the UN in the Hindu Kush; and because Bamiyan, which once lay on the silk route between Samarkand and Kabul, is a place of return for the internally displaced, refugees who did not have the money to make the expensive journey across the border into Iran or Pakistan and so had remained in Afghanistan, exiles in their own land. These internally displaced Afghans, like IDPs the world over, are not eligible for the dollars and the bars of soap going to those coming back across the mountains. UNHCR is doing what it can for them, but in a country of such overwhelming want, the ambiguities of the IDP stories do not lend themselves to easy bureaucratic assistance. In Bamiyan, I hoped the predicament of the displaced would become clearer.

  Had the Taliban ruled for very much longer, the Hazaras claim, their people would have been wiped out altogether. The Taliban considered them inferior and hostile. Finding them weakened by the Soviet and mujahedeen years, they persecuted them with particular ferocity, and nowhere more than in the province that is traditionally home to most Hazara. Finally the Taliban brought to Bamiyan and its valley the heavy artillery with which to destroy their Buddhas. The valley of Bamiyan itself, with its escarpment running down the middle, is faced along one side by a long and sheer sandstone cliff, perhaps three miles from end to end. The sky and the light, at this altitude, are startlingly bright and clear. The air is pure and sharp. I tried to imagine the Taliban fighters laying the mines, then lining up the tanks that now lie scattered, rusting and broken, around the escarpment, positioning their heavy artillery, then giving the order to fire shells that boomed out in the silence, until the two great Buddhas, standing well over a hundred feet tall in their sheltered niches, with the faded touches of their once red-and-blue-painted robes, modeled out of mud and straw, crumbled and fractured into the valley below.

  In the caves and grottoes that surround the Buddhas, pitting the rock face like the holes inhabited by the swallows that flit through the valley, there once lived a community of yellow-robed monks, said to number over a thousand people at its peak in the seventh century. In the summer of 2003, the cliff caves sheltered those coming home to Bamiyan, who had sat out the Taliban savagery in the high secluded valleys of the Hindu Kush where the Taliban seldom ventured. Though not regarded as refugees, they were exiles nonetheless; when they returned in the spring and summer of 2003, it was to homes looted and burned by the departing Taliban, to fields long since gone wild. Like the poppies in the green valleys lower down the mountain, their bright clothes—vermilion, turquoise, and many shades of yellow and purple—stand out dramatically against the dull rock face, as they flit up and down the perilous tracks cut by the monks through their mountain monastery. From the caves, the view over Bamiyan is sad: the old bazaar lies far below, destroyed to rubble when old scores were paid off and the handsome buildings that once dotted the valley, surrounded by magnificent gardens, were razed.

  By the time I reached the valley, early in July, 260 returning families were said to inhabit the caves, six or seven people sharing holes once occupied by a single monk. The caves are cool in the summer, but damp and cold when the snows come to Bamiyan in late October. Inside, the frescoes of flowers, griffins, ducks, and musicians that once covered the walls and ceilings have long since been blackened by cooking fires. All but a very few of the cave dwellers are Hazaras, farming families who once lived in some comfort and prosperity on their lands in the valley, growing wheat and potatoes and raising small flocks of sheep and goats. Many of them are single mothers, their husbands and fathers having been killed by the Taliban as they fled. As Amir, one of the older men, explained, as the cave dwellers gathered around to talk, the children solemn and staring, the women breaking in to add their own memories, the final flight for most of them took place in the winter of 1997. The snow was already deep and the winds bitter, and they had put off leaving too long, hoping that the Taliban’s attention might turn elsewhere. “Then the day came when we knew that we could not wait any longer. We hid what we could, carried a few necessities with us, like quilts and cooking pots, but there were many small children to help. The old people came with us, but many did not survive the journey. We don’t know quite how many died, simply giving up in the high mountains and dying quickly of the cold. We dug mass graves for them at the foot of the mountains. When we found safety in the distant valleys, where the Taliban never came, the farmers there helped us, by giving us flour and shelter. We survived, but that is all.”

  It was from the women in the caves that I first heard a story that would come to haunt me.

  Mira is an energetic, handsome, wiry woman, tall and blackhaired, in a purple dress with much embroidery. She has a son of six, a jaunty child with cuts and bruises from falls along the cliff face, and two older girls, silent, pretty, and watchful. Mira’s husband, the father of the children, was taken away by the Taliban in 1997, as a hostage after a Hazara attack. She has had no news of him since that day. When her neighbors decided that flight could no longer be put off, she gathered up her four children, the youngest a girl of six months, and followed her friends across the fields. It was soon clear that she could not keep up with them while carrying on her back both a baby and a child too young to walk. “We got to a road, and I knew I couldn’t go on.” Mira told her story briskly, without emotion. I began to dread what I knew must follow. “It was snowing lightly and dark. I wrapped the baby up in all the clothes that we could spare, and I put her down by the edge of the road, propped up against a rock. Then I picked up my son and, pulling my daughters behind me, I went on with the others to look for shelter for the night in the mountains. Later, I left the children with my neighbors and went back down into the valley to look for the baby. I found her qui
ckly, still propped against the rock. But she was dead.”

  Mira is not the only woman to have left a child by the wayside in her flight from the Taliban. Talking quickly, pointing to surviving small boys and girls, other women begin to talk of babies set down and never found again, or discovered dead from exposure when they went back to get them. They had no choice, they said. They always picked the youngest, the one who could not stray and whose cries would be the least loud. I became obsessed by this image of small, silent babies, freezing to death alone in the dark and the snow.

  As it became clear that the Taliban had left Bamiyan, in the winter of 2001, and that many of their men had disappeared forever, executed in the closing weeks of fighting, the survivors made the journey back over the mountains, better prepared this time, leaving no children or old people behind. They returned, however, to destitution; some of the women have lost five and six sons to the Taliban and are now caring for their grandchildren; the husbands of others were mutilated in the fighting. Some of the other returnees are children on their own. There are many small orphans in the dank holes in the cliff.

  By the time of my visit, the people in Bamiyan’s caves were living in a curious vacuum, an existence that they have grown used to and that many believe will never end. They send the fitter young men to work in the new bazaar in the plain far below, visible from the caves, where they pick up a little money as porters, and the young girls to make the daily trek to bring water from the river almost a third of a mile distant. The younger children are dispatched to collect firewood in the mountains. Because of the sheer cliff face, each small child requires a constant minder, and it is usual to see babies and small children who are starting to walk harnessed and bound to the older girls.