by Sally Cooper
‘WHAT-IS-YOUR-NAME?’ shouted my young friend once we had cleared the crowd.
‘Miss Sally,’ I said. I had been in the Ghan long enough to add the ‘Miss’ to my name.
‘I-AM-ABDUL!’
‘Nice to meet you, Abdul. How old are you?’
‘TEN!’
‘Why aren’t you at school?’
‘IT-IS-HOLIDAY.’
‘Oh.’
‘WHERE-FROM-YOU?’
‘Australia.’
‘AUSTRALIA-GOOOD,’ he nodded, though I wasn’t entirely sure Abdul knew where Australia was.
‘Where are you from?’ It was always my favourite question.
‘MAIMANA,’ he said with a frown, as if my query confirmed the stupidity he’d suspected when I paid an astronomical sixty dollars for the carpet.
‘YOU-HAVE-HUSBAND?’
By now I thought Abdul was getting a little forward, certainly beyond his station in life, so I told him my husband was in Kabul, a concept which seemed to leave him speechless – though maybe it was the weight of the carpet. We continued half a block to my guesthouse, where I paid him for his efforts and he disappeared, shouting further offers of assistance should Miss Sally need them.
‘With earplugs,’ I muttered as the guard picked up my sack and carried it up the stairs.
That night, Ann and I went out for dinner. With the exception of the lunchtime kebab shops and chaikhanas, all serving an exclusively male clientele, there were no restaurants, and our destination was the guesthouse of another NGO, home to three of the fifteen foreigners based in Maimana. I had nothing but respect and admiration for my colleagues who worked in the field … and a little envy. Kabul was easy street compared to the provinces, even more so for those for whom places like Maimana were only a base, with most of their time spent travelling to even smaller towns and villages.
Over a prized bottle of carefully smuggled merlot, I listened as they discussed their work. Tales of well-intended development projects gone awry were endemic in these parts, as elsewhere. According to one of my companions, one international organisation had recently built a pristine Western-style toilet block for a school where classes were still held in tents. The toilets, with disability access, had yet to be used because no-one wanted to mess them up. Worse was the story of another toilet block, erected while the school for which it was intended was built somewhere else.
Somewhere near Maimana, in the middle of the parched rocky hills, surrounded by nothing but the occasional passing goat, stood a toilet block of enviable quality … Somewhere in an aid agency far, far away, someone ticked a box on their Excel spreadsheet and moved on.
40
Democracy or Bust
On 18 September 2005 I sat on the Chez Ana sofa and watched as many episodes of Sex and the City as my couch sores and chocolate supply allowed. Outside, millions of Afghans were participating in one of the most important events of their lifetime: the first parliamentary elections in this fractured country for almost forty years. I am able to recount first-hand what happened in Sex and the City. I can’t say the same for this day in Afghan history. As on all big days in the new Afghanistan, the UN was in lockdown. My housemates, on the other hand, most of whom were either reporting or working on the election, missed out on Carrie Bradshaw’s long-awaited reunion with Big, though I doubt they regretted it.
The election for the Wolesi Jirga (the lower house of parliament) and local councils had originally been scheduled to take place before now. But this was the Ghan and things didn’t always go as planned. Last year’s presidential election was small fry by comparison. Instead of eighteen candidates, this time around there were more than five thousand, almost three thousand of whom were running for the Wolesi Jirga, where the Ghan’s thirty-four provinces would serve as constituencies. Kabul, the most populous province, was fielding three hundred and ninety candidates on a ballot paper that ran across a bewildering seven pages.
Democracy had once again arrived in Kabul, bigger, better and more colourful than before. As in the previous year, the most noticeable sign was the campaign poster. Posters were plastered over every spare surface of this dusty, fractured city. Cheery-faced candidates smiled for the camera while others gazed thoughtfully into the distance as if single-handedly planning the construction of the new Afghanistan. They were everywhere: on walls, fences, donkey carts, taxis and trucks, carcasses of bombed-out tanks and even high up in the branches of trees. Some had been cheekily defaced – moustaches added to women’s faces – while other posters had been ripped off and fresh candidates plastered over them. The big players had big posters, the smaller candidates were less visible.
But everyone had a poster and on that poster was a symbol. Because so many Afghans cannot read or write, in the absence of being able to decipher the candidates’ names, remembering a face might help, but what it all came down to was the symbol. Symbols included shoes, pens, televisions and hats. Perhaps surprisingly for the Ghan, they didn’t include guns, knives, grenades or burqas. Because of its size, symbols ran into the multiples for the Kabul ballot, some candidates being issued two shoes, three horses or two pens.
The Chez Ana was owned by renowned Swiss-American journalist Eddie Girardet, chronicler of the mujahideen wars. Eddie didn’t return to Kabul much anymore but, like the neighbouring Gandamack, the Chez Ana had been home to many a journalist passing through town. Some, like the correspondent from Time magazine, were worthy practitioners of their craft. Of the rest, no-one was quite sure, and Jane, Tim and I regularly compared notes on the outrageous statements delivered daily by our resident representatives of the Fourth Estate. One evening, a reporter from an American east coast newspaper, who had never been to the Ghan before and had spent almost all of her time on the back verandah of the Chez Ana, confided to me over dinner that she’d spent the day phoning people and gathering quotes for stories she’d already drafted before she set foot in Kabul.
On the morning of election day, as Afghans began to assemble at polling stations across the country, three rockets were fired into the UNOCA compound, a few kilometres beyond the main Elections compound on Jalalabad Road. A warehouse-like counting centre had been built next door to UNOCA, and it didn’t take Butch and Sundance to tell anyone that this had been the likely target. Over breakfast, an American journalist who, unlike his colleagues, chose not to get an early start, told me the rocket had landed at the Elections compound.
‘No, it landed at the UNOCA compound,’ I corrected him.
‘No, it was Elections,’ he insisted, pouring maple syrup onto his French toast.
‘Elections is a few kilometres up the road. The counting centre is next door to UNOCA,’ I explained.
‘It’s the same thing,’ he barked dismissively, banging on the maple syrup bottle as the last of the Chez Ana’s supply dolloped onto his plate.
I left the table, wishing him a good day’s reporting and pondered whether IRIN should be offering media training in the US.
Because of the size of the field and the enormity of the task, the election results weren’t expected for some weeks – at which point, many anticipated, the disputes would start. Regardless of the outcome, there was no parliament building and nowhere to house parliamentary offices, though the Indian government had committed to building the former. Even if the infrastructure had been in place, few future MPs had any grounding in parliamentary democracy and what being a parliamentarian really involved. Many candidates ran as proxies for those who may or may not have been warlords, may or may not have been responsible for war crimes, and may or may not have made their fortunes growing poppy. A number were ultimately disqualified – though, by the time parliament came to sit three months later, most Afghans agreed that the number wasn’t enough.
Women voted for whoever their male relatives told them, villagers voted for whoever the local shura (council) told them and Kabulis voted for anyone they knew. Campaign promises were rarely heard, if ever formulated. Parties were banned from runni
ng but it was generally thought that those who won without the benefit of allegiance would quickly come under the wing of one of the big players and no doubt prove a thorn in the side of the Karzai government.
The parliamentary elections were a key component of the Bonn Agreement, the international community’s 2001 pledge to rebuild Afghanistan. The UN was a lead player, though one might have questioned exactly how the world body had been passing its time. Flicking through a copy of Dubai’s Khaleej Times I found lying idle on the breakfast table of the Chez Ana, I came across an interesting quote. ‘We have been encouraged to take R and R, but it’s not mandatory,’ a UNDP communications associate told the Associated Press. ‘For those who remain behind, there’ll be minimal movement. They won’t be able to go to restaurants.’
I was tired. Tired of being cooped up, tired of having to follow an ever-expanding list of rules that made little sense beyond keeping me within the confines of high walls and air-conditioned cars. Most of all, I was tired of not being in Afghanistan. I missed the simplicity of my life in Bamyan; the Afghans I worked with, the Friday football match, the evening gatherings at the Zuhak Hotel and the gentle kindness of the townsfolk who greeted me each time I walked down the street had made me believe that anything was possible in this country. I had returned to Kabul seventeen months earlier because of the promise of my earlier stint, yet that Afghanistan seemed to have slipped away from me as much as it had from everyone else. Afghans no longer trusted foreigners, foreigners didn’t trust Afghans. Compound walls got higher, Land Cruisers drove faster, goatees proliferated and twenty-five-year-old boys from California went shopping for AK47s at the bazaar. And here I was, on one of the most important days in the Ghan’s recent history, sitting on a sofa watching Sex and the City. When it all came down to it, I had given up my Kenyan sofa for an Afghan one. What was the point?
A few weeks before the election, the UN security office had issued an advisory warning staff to avoid the roads around the British, American, German and Japanese embassies, all in the centre of town. As was often the case on the morning commute, I once again changed our route to work.
Mahmood’s morning routine was always the same. He collected Ismail first, then Faheem and then me. Mirwais lived in Macrorayon, between the city and Jalalabad Road, and was always the last to be collected.
When travelling with the lads, I relegated myself to the back seat directly behind Mahmood, where I felt less conspicuous and less exposed. Ismail, in his role as ‘uncle’, sat in the front, allowing him access to two of his favourite pastimes: monitoring Mahmood’s driving and tuning the car radio to Arman FM.
Ismail wasn’t a morning person, but a piece about Condoleeza Rice on the radio had stirred his curiosity and I was giving him a brief précis of black American history.
‘But she’s African.’
‘Yes, but she’s American.’
‘How can she be American if she’s African?’
In the space of three Kabul blocks, I managed to cover most things from the slave trade to the difference between Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, apart from just the dress. Some time ago, I’d had a similar conversation with Ismail about women pilots. I’d recently returned from ‘outside’ and commented that the pilot on one of my flights had been a woman.
‘A woman? Flying a plane?’ Ismail was incredulous.
‘Yes. Women can do these things.’
He raised his eyebrows. Ismail was one of the most broadminded Afghans I knew, but even he struggled with the idea of a woman in a pilot’s uniform.
Because of the change in route, we drove in the opposite direction to usual to collect Mirwais. He was rarely late and usually waited for us by a police post at the side of the road. Just as we approached, a loud boom shook the car.
‘Where is it?’ I said to no-one in particular. It had happened in a split second. All four of us twisted around in our seats, necks craning.
‘There, it’s there.’ Ismail pointed to the road ahead of us. A small cloud of dust and smoke was billowing out in front of a group of cars not far from where we normally collected Mirwais.
I didn’t know what had happened and I didn’t stop to dwell on it. All I knew was that we had to get out of there fast, before the crowds gathered or another bomb went off.
‘Turn around. Mahmood, turn the car now,’ I said. Mahmood didn’t hesitate; the Big Green Car swung into a U-turn and took off down the street.
‘Call Mirwais,’ I told Faheem. ‘Make sure he’s okay.’
Faheem made the call and confirmed that Mirwais was fine. Shaken, but fine.
‘He said it was a small explosion but he’s okay,’ reported Faheem.
The security announcement, heralded by the familiar ‘break, break, break’, came on the Big Green Car’s two-way radio as we drove along Jalalabad Road, comparing notes on what had just happened. The bomb had been a small one and I doubted anyone had been injured but the blast had blown out the windows of a passing UN vehicle. Had I not changed our route, it would have been our car. While my heart was pumping, I looked down at my hands and noticed they weren’t even shaking.
After we got to the office, I sent Mahmood back to collect Mirwais. I made myself a cup of tea, turned on my computer and began my day. In June last year, the first of the suicide bomb warnings had invoked absolute terror in me. Fourteen months later, a roadside bomb was a minor inconvenience. Had I become so immune to the violence and pain around me that it no longer even registered?
Two weeks after the parliamentary elections, I stood up from my desk.
‘I’m going to get a coffee,’ I told Ismail, picking up my wallet and my phone. I walked out the door and into the bright sunshine of the car park.
I stared absentmindedly at my phone, a standard Nokia that had, by now, seen better days. Dust had managed to work its way into every crevice of its touchpad. The screen was cracked and the numbers almost illegible after eighteen months of constant use.
I took a deep breath and called IRIN headquarters. I told them I had had enough.
41
The Earth Moves
Although my days in the Ghan were now numbered, I wasn’t entirely sure what number they were so I’d stopped short of telling anyone else. The successful completion of the parliamentary elections marked the end, on paper at least, of one of the key planks of the West’s commitment to building the new Afghanistan. In reality, the foundations had barely been laid, but donors were moving on – and taking their money with them. Like all sectors, media training was affected. IMPACS, whose project was funded by the Canadian government, would finish its work on 31 December.
IRIN’s role as a training outfit was now more imperative than ever. I told Nairobi I would stay on until the appointment of my successor. I had spent eighteen months building up our project into a highly regarded training outfit. Like an overanxious parent, I wasn’t about to leave it unsupervised, not even for a few short weeks. What I didn’t tell Nairobi was that I was having trouble going cold turkey on the Ghan.
Kunduz is a small town in the north-east of Afghanistan not far from the border with Tajikistan. I knew little of the town’s recent history but assumed much as the UN plane skirted across the rice fields and came in to land at what could loosely be described as Kunduz airport. Metres below me was a recently deceased military aircraft. As our sixteen-seater bumped along the tarmac, I looked out the small oval window and saw the fuselage of what was once an Ariana passenger plane, pointing upwards as if taking off, though at that angle it was more likely to reach the moon than any earthly destination.
Post-conflict Kunduz could best be described as a German enclave. For the most part, the Provincial Reconstruction Team was made up of German soldiers with the occasional Austrian thrown into the mix. There were more German NGOs operating here than anywhere else in the country and, best of all, there was a German restaurant specialising in German food and beer.
Faheem and I were in Kunduz to work with the staff of Radio Zohra (R
adio Venus). Like its sister stations, Radio Sahar in Herat and Radio Quyaash in Maimana, it had been established by IMPACS and was run by women. Its dedicated staff had made Radio Zohra one of the best of the many independent radio stations that had sprung up in the Ghan in the last four years. By late 2005, USAID, the donor agency of the US government, had funded the establishment of more than thirty radio stations across the country.
Radio Zohra was housed in a slightly decrepit old garage on a nondescript, tree-lined street. A line of blue burqas hung from hooks inside the front door, a reminder that while these women may have been doing something never thought possible five years ago, they still did it in burqas. Downstairs was a small office crammed with sofas, a coffee table and a large wooden desk. Up a small, cramped staircase of questionable engineering was the studio, a long narrow room whose walls were covered in a bright floral print, masking the foam mattress lining its walls.
Although an IRIN workshop was, by now, a well-oiled machine, ‘humanitarian’ news was still a difficult thing to define for Afghans. In many ways, it’s a Western word with decidedly Western connotations. For the purposes of our work, I broadened it to include ‘reconstruction’ news but even then it remained problematic. Almost four years after the fall of the Taliban, few Afghans could accurately distinguish between the work of an NGO, a UN agency and military reconstruction activities. It was a sad indictment on an international community that continued to set itself apart from the people with whom it was supposed to be working. Radio Zohra was eighteen months old and staffed by some of the smartest journalists I’d met in the Ghan, but few of them had spoken to any international NGOs or UN agencies. Kunduz was a sizeable provincial centre, much bigger than Maimana, and with a large development presence. But NGOs and UN staff told the women they weren’t allowed to speak to the media, an edict that came from information offices in Kabul and beyond, a world away from Radio Zohra and its listeners.