Rock and Hard Places

by Andrew Mueller

  But I still don’t understand how security is abetted by forcing women to drift silently about looking like pantomime ghosts.

  “The burqa is the rule of Islam,” says Abdul. “The rule of Mohammad, Jesus and all the messengers is that women should be covered.”

  I take the sort of deep breath you take before arguing with armed fanatics on their own terms. According to my Penguin translation, the Koran says that “the wives of true believers should draw their veils close round them.” It doesn’t say that they have to cover themselves totally. It certainly doesn’t rule them out of work, education and life the way the Taliban have.

  “The burqa is the rule of Islam,” repeats Abdul, though the news that I’ve read the Koran cheers him up a bit. “I must ask if you are concerned about the years you have wasted in preparing for the next world.”

  I change the subject. When the Taliban took power, they made extravagant fulminations against the drug trade: evil, corrupting, the ruination of us all, etcetera and amen. In 1997, according to the UN Drug Control Programme, 200,000 Afghan farmers grew 58,000 tonnes of opium, mostly on Taliban-controlled land. The British government estimates that 95% of the heroin in Britain is grown in Afghanistan’s poppy fields. Afghanistan is also the world’s biggest exporter of hashish—those who consider their narcotic recreation a victimless crime may care to contemplate whose wages they’re paying.

  Now, the Koran doesn’t explicitly forbid making a fortune shipping smack to the infidel, but . . .

  “The purpose of Islamic law,” intones Abdul’s friend, “is to protect life, property, religion and the brain. Heroin is forbidden.”

  So why not forbid it?

  “We cannot stop the poppy from growing.”

  Yes, you can. Get some flamethrowers in amongst all those poppy fields I saw alongside the Jalalabad-Kabul road. It’d be a start.

  “It is not our people who consume it. It is yours. In the West, society is riven by drugs and prostitution. In the Islamic environment, young people have more love for Islam.”

  It’s odd, then, that they find it necessary to beat people for failing to attend prayers.

  “If a person does everything in accordance with Allah, then everything will be good. If not, we must implement the will of Allah by any means.”

  Eyes beginning to glaze, desperate to hear an answer that doesn’t invoke Allah, Mohammed or the Koran, I ask Akbar to ask them who they fancy for the World Cup.

  Abdul doesn’t blink.

  “In accordance with the teachings of the Holy Koran, no human being knows the future, only Allah almighty.”

  Oh, come on. Brazil? France? Argentina?

  “Only Allah . . .”

  Okay, okay. What do you do for fun?

  “To relax, we recite from the Koran.”

  The depressing thing is that I believe him. If I thought there was the slightest chance that, as soon as I’d gone, Abdul was going to turn to his mate and go, “There’s another dopey gringo sold on the gimlet-eyed holy warrior tip, you go and round up some birds and I’ll get some cans in for the match,” I’d be a lot less worried about Abdul and his mate and the country they’re running.

  When I get up to leave, two strange things happen. The first is that Abdul stands as well, clasps my hands in his and asks Akbar to ask me to stay in Afghanistan, become their brother and join their jihad. The second is that while I’m trying to think of a polite way to decline this kind offer, the room starts shaking. At first, I think it’s just me—nobody else notices, or if they do, they don’t care. After a few seconds, with the shaking growing more violent, and things starting to come off shelves, I ask Akbar what’s happening.

  “Abdul wants you to join the Taliban,” he says, wobbling.

  This isn’t what I’m worried about; I’m thinking that maybe Massoud’s rocket batteries have lost interest in the airport and are trying out a new target. Or that Abdul really does have friends in high places.

  “Oh,” says Akbar. “I think it’s an earthquake.”

  I will later learn that a few hundred kilometres north, 5000 people have just been buried alive. Funny, in a country so forsaken by God—scenery aside—that people should be so keen on Him.

  WONDERING IF AN older head might prove more reasonable, I drop in on the mayor. Mullah Abdul Majid, even by Afghan standards, is an imposing figure. He has one severely mangled hand and one missing leg, legacies of his time as a Mujahedin commander—a common CV among senior Taliban figures. He begins by welcoming me to his city “in the name of Allah, the compassionate and merciful,” and pours me the first decent coffee I’ve had in two weeks. An elderly secretary beside him writes down every detail of our conversation, so that it may be broadcast to an enthralled nation on Radio Shariat (I listen to the daily English-language bulletin that night, hoping to hear that “His Excellency the Mayor today briefly tolerated some scruffy hack from The Face,” but I can’t make out a word through the static).

  “It is our religious duty to implement the basics of Islam,” he explains. “No other country has shed so much blood. We must ensure that we have a result for the price people paid.”

  He deflects questions about women (“The burqa is not new to Afghanistan, just to the outside world”) and drugs (shrugs). He only gets excited when I raise foreign reaction to the Taliban—nobody but Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates has recognised the Taliban as a legitimate government.

  “Five years ago,” he glowers, “the world was wondering how to bring peace to Afghanistan. The Taliban did, and world still recognises robbers like Massoud.”

  Laughing Boy at Estekhbarat had said the same, and it’s a hard point to argue with. It’s not like the world doesn’t do business with human rights black holes like China, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Maybe the Taliban are suffering for being too honest or too artless or too thick to dress up their regime as anything other than mediaeval barbarism. But maybe if they moderated their approach, the embassies might start reopening.

  “You cannot,” says Majid, “moderate the will of God.”

  THE ONLY MODERATING influences on the Taliban are Kabul’s aid agencies, or non-governmental organisations (NGOs). They are doing what they can to drag this hopelessly poor nation into the current century. Afghanistan’s poverty is best illustrated not by per capita wages as percentages of gross domestic product, or anything like that, but by a uniformed policeman who accosts me one afternoon in Kabul’s market.

  “You are very rich,” says the cop. “I am very poor. Give me some money, please, so I may spend it.”

  You’re supposed to arrest me first, I tell him.

  This destitution exists despite Afghanistan’s situation astride one of the most lucrative trade routes on earth—unfortunately, the kind of merchants who’ll shift crates of Pepsi across places this politically unpredictable and riddled with landmines are not the kind who pay import duties. It also seems incompatible with Afghanistan’s glorious natural beauty, which, given a few years of peace, tourists would happily pay enormous sums to see. The only ones I meet are a pair of dour French passport stamp-collectors, in Afghanistan only because it’s the fifth-last country they haven’t been to. They ask me if I know anything about getting visas for North Korea, and if the Taliban will hassle them much.

  The few hundred other foreigners in Kabul all do far more useful things than checking off place names in their atlases, or asking nonplussed secret policemen who’s going to win the World Cup, and the Taliban hassle them a lot. The NGOs do the things governments are supposed to do—pave roads, build bridges, heal the sick, educate the young—while the Taliban pursue such crucial concerns as caning taxi drivers for carrying women unaccompanied by male relatives (this happened to ten cabbies the week I was there), or drafting ludicrous visa regulations (having spent a week in Peshawar getting a visa to get into Afghanistan, I have to spend a day in Kabul getting another one to get out—the Talib who signs off on my exit visa lectures me about irregular ver
bs and asks me to make sure that I tell my readers how nice the weather in Kabul is compared to Peshawar). The Taliban are at pains to tell me how grateful they are for the work the NGOs do. NGO workers say they’re sure the Taliban would run them out of town if they thought they could afford to, and make me promise not to mention them or their organisation.

  To justify their paranoia, one NGO worker shows me a memo, dated May 24, 1998, from my perpetually absent friend Qalamuddin at Vice & Virtue. It refers to a much-gnawed bone of contention—employment for women. The Taliban are not keen on the idea, though they’re less keen on healthcare for women being provided by men. So, compromises allowing local women to work in this area have been made, and broken, and made, and . . .

  “Inspectors have been ordered to identify and arrest such people. Offenders will be treated in accordance with Sharia law. You will have to bear any further responsibilities in this regard.”

  “This,” I am told, “is what we’re up against, every day, about every damn thing.”

  The same NGO worker tells me about a local woman, formerly employed by their NGO, who’d come in one day tearful because she was an hour late. The reason was that her twelve-year-old son had refused to come with her. Women who leave home unaccompanied by a male relative do so at their own very real risk.

  “Can you imagine a twelve-year-old boy having that kind of power? That’s what worries me, that people are already accepting this as normal.”

  Wandering around Kabul the last few days, though, I’ve been wondering if the women of Afghanistan are beaten yet. Oppressed people, consciously or not, will reach for whatever means of rebellion are available, however trivial, and beneath many of Kabul’s shambling burqas are expensive-looking, open-topped leather shoes with high heels. Given Kabul’s chronically potholed streets, shrapnel-ravaged footpaths and open sewers, that’s as fine a definition of heroism as you could want.

  I HAVE TO leave Afghanistan by road, as well. I hadn’t been able to get in on the Red Cross shuttle flight between Peshawar and Kabul because of Massoud’s rockets, and I can’t fly out because the airport is closed by rain (there’s no radar, no air traffic control, and an awful lot of mountains—if pilots can’t see, they can’t land). I find a lift back to Peshawar with a truck-load of European doctors, all trying to connect with planes and choppers heading up to the earthquake zone. It takes us just short of two days, via Jalalabad—the roads are not improved by rain.

  It’s only after we’ve crossed the border, collected our armed guard for the Khyber drive, that I can identify the single strangest thing about the Taliban’s Afghanistan. It’s something that wasn’t there, rather than something that was, and I encounter it blaring from a tinny speaker outside a roadside tea shop. It’s one of those regrettable hybrids of Asian folk and European pop, it’s got a beat that sounds like a washing machine with an unbalanced load, an arrangement that suggests the contents of a tool kit being emptied down a lift shaft and a vocal apparently recorded by a cockatoo with one wing in a wringer but it’s. . . music.

  3

  BALKAN AFTER MIDNIGHT

  Sarajevo’s rock’n’roll scene March 1996

  THIS TRIP WAS a penance, of sorts. I have few meaningful regrets, but among them is a failure to make more of an effort to write more about the war that beset Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s (that regret is, of course, tempered significantly by the knowledge that Bosnia-Herzegovina was, at that time, the kind of place in which a young and clueless interloper could very easily have ended up dead—and that, of course, is at least part of the reason why I didn’t make more of an effort). The failure of the civilised world to act decisively to halt a genocide in the heart of Europe struck me as an atrocious and inexcusable dereliction then, and seems even more so in retrospect. The spectacle of Muslims being slaughtered with impunity, for year after unnecessary and avoidable year, was a viciously radicalising catalyst for more than a few angry, vindictive and malevolent souls: the route to 9/11 leads through Sarajevo and Srebrenica.

  I did end up making one visit to Bosnia’s war, almost by accident, which is described elsewhere in this book, but I didn’t get to Sarajevo until after the war had (more or less) ended, and I still feel pretty bad about that. Not that I imagine my presence would have made any difference to anything, but it’s a stand I would like to feel I’d taken when it counted: on the side of a city with a tradition of amiable plurality, against the forces of bigotry and backwardness seeking to destroy it—and, not insignificantly, against the agents of ignorance and indifference, possessed though they were of air forces big enough to put a stop to the nonsense in an afternoon, who watched Sarajevo burn for a little over four years.

  What follows is what I felt I could do—which, at the time, was write about rock music, quite a lot of which, I’d heard, had been made during the siege. I secured a tentative commission from a now-extinct magazine called Blah Blah Blah. I rustled up some phone numbers from some friends at an aid organisation called The Serious Road Trip, whom I’d got to know in London. I flew, via Frankfurt and Zagreb, to the Croatian port of Split, where I cadged a lift with a French NGO as far as Mostar, who handed me over to another NGO who took me to Zenica, from where the Road Trip drove me to Sarajevo in a hot pink Land Rover with flames painted down the side.

  As it turned out, showing up in a war zone and writing about rock’n’roll was easier and more rewarding than I’d anticipated. Sarajevans were, not unreasonably, bored sideways with war as a topic of conversation, and once word of what I was doing spread among local musicians, my days and nights filled up profitably and agreeably. I was assisted above and beyond the call by Jim Marshall, a splendidly laconic Scot who had suffered none of my qualms and spent most of the siege in Sarajevo as an aid worker. He’s still there today, and provides the following updates of the characters you’re about to meet. Enis from C.I.A. became a DJ, spent some time in Berlin, but is now back in Sarajevo. The members of Z.O.C.H. have been spotted, it seems, “hill-walking and pushing baby strollers.” Pedrag “Paja” Pasic still runs his football school. Zelimir Altarac-Cicak is a radio personality, and has a Sarajevo music website every bit as excellent as his haircut at www.cicak. ba. And Sikter are still going, as well—www.sikter.com.

  The image, or idea, that has stuck with me hardest from this trip was that of the kids gathered in the club called Obala, urging the DJ to turn it up so loud that they couldn’t hear the explosions of the shells landing outside. I’ve often wondered since if that isn’t the reason that human beings have always made and listened to music: to obliterate reality, and to replace it with something beautiful, or at least with something that makes some sense to us at those moments when little else does.

  ALONG THIS STRETCH of the south bank of the Miljacka River, the front lines were so close that, with a following wind, it would have been almost possible for the Bosnians defending their city to spit on the Serbs besieging it. Near the bitterly contested Jewish cemetery, the barricades are still in place, separated by a no man’s land which is the width of an inner-city street, because the no man’s land is an inner-city street. A few blocks farther along the river today, history is being made. Grbavica, the last of Sarajevo’s suburbs still held by Bosnian Serb forces, is being handed back to the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina under the terms of the four-month-old Dayton Peace Agreement.

  Myself, a veteran Scottish photographer and aid worker called Martin Kennedy and a young rock’n’roll band called C.I.A. are picking our way through what were, less than six months ago, Bosnian army positions. We’re looking for suitably dramatic backdrops for photographs for our story about Sarajevo musicians, and we’re spoilt for choice. Film studios spend millions to create this kind of picturesque destruction.

  On an inside wall of one half-destroyed house that had functioned as a Bosnian army sniper post, there’s a lurid, hand-painted cartoon portrait of Dr. Radovan Karadzic. Karadzic is the retired psychiatrist, useless poet, convicted fraudster and nationalist maniac who,
as leader of something amusingly called the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), presided over the attempted murder of Sarajevo. The anonymous artist has perfectly captured Karadzic’s hooded, punch-drunk eyes, mean, lopsided mouth and extravagant, blow-dried bouffant, and made his opinion still clearer by ramming a sickle through the good doctor’s ears, jamming a hammer, handle-first, into the top of Karadzic’s fussily-coiffed head and dubbing the picture with the caption “CCCP Koza.” CCCP was what the Soviet Union used to call the Soviet Union. “Koza” is Bosnian for goat.

  Outside, a section of the street has been dug up and turned into a trench. It is still littered with banal testaments to the urban nature of Sarajevo’s war: crushed soft drink cans and soggy pizza cartons. I wonder if the soldiers picked up their take-outs on their way to battle, or if they radioed their orders in from here, and if so, how much extra it costs to get a deep pan with added anchovy delivered to an active front line.

  Martin thinks he’s found his spot, and starts organising C.I.A. into something that looks like a photograph. He’s just about to raise his camera when Enis, the ponytailed one of C.I.A.’s two vocalists, waves to stop him.

  “Excuse me,” says Enis.

  Martin sighs the sigh universally deployed by photographers whose subjects have started having ideas of their own.

  “I was wondering,” continues Enis, “if we could do the pictures in that trench over there.”

  “I suppose so,” shrugs Martin. “Any particular reason?”

  “Well,” says Enis, apologetically, gesturing at his bandmates, “that’s where we met.”

  ESCAPE HAS ALWAYS been the most precious of rock’n’roll’s renegade imperatives. As soon as the first guitar was electrified, it was identified as an ideal weapon with which to vent dissatisfaction with the world, as noisy as a gun, nearly as dangerous and almost as likely to get you arrested. Young people ever since have been forming rock’n’roll bands to escape homes, hometowns, families, expectations, tedium, frustration, poverty, the prospect of having to work for a living, or even just a vague, incoherent ennui which they have a hard time explaining, man.