Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium

by Tim Bonyhady

  Brancati’s collection was exceptional because he started it early and bought on an unparalleled scale. It was the only collection limited to the Soviet era of the war and the only one confined to rugs woven in Afghanistan. These rugs are notable for all being made of fine Afghan wool by experienced weavers and for their restrained imagery. Like most other war rugs, their abundant weaponry is rarely depicted in use. Just one has Kalashnikovs with bullets coming out of them. Another depicts an aircraft dropping a bomb and the bomb falling and exploding but, even then, depicts nothing of the consequences.

  The most considered reflection about these rugs came from Ewa Kuryluk, a Polish art historian and self-declared ‘pioneer of ephemeral textile installation’ teaching at Manhattan’s New School. In an article in New York’s Arts Magazine, Kuryluk wondered whether the rugs’ highly ordered, decorative appearance sanitised their subject. She concluded that by maintaining an old, familiar set of colours and balanced, well-structured designs, rug makers had avoided the uncontrolled emotion that so often characterises war art resulting in either propaganda or kitsch. These rugs were works of art that conveyed the weavers’ stoicism and vitality but tamed the horror of war, presenting ‘the banality of evil…as a fact of life’.

  CHAPTER 18

  Kalashnikov Culture

  Bazaars have famously been settings for storytelling, sources of rumour and sites of political power, intrigue and dissent, as well as domains of trade. They have rarely been thought of as places where an artist might go to discover what is for sale and respond by innovating. Yet like art galleries and museums, bazaars have sometimes played this role, as happened in 1987 when Safer Ali, a Hazara rug maker, who had just fled to Iran from Herat, first visited Mashhad’s main carpet bazaar. When he saw a group of fellow refugees examining a rug, Safer Ali initially could not understand why these dealers paid it particular attention. Then he saw that, instead of conventional geometric, botanical or zoological patterns, guns and helicopters filled its central field.

  This experience recurred time and again as people around the world saw war rugs for the first time. They would not realise they were looking at anything novel, then be amazed to discover they were. The question was: would they embrace or reject it? As Safer Ali watched the dealers in the Sa’id Bazaar, he ‘had the feeling that they were insecure, they didn’t quite know what to make’ of the guns and helicopters. Some found the rug ‘interesting and admired it’. Others were ‘less enthusiastic, even angry about the barefaced divergence of the motifs’. Safer Ali, an experienced weaver of Turkmen rugs, was so excited that he decided to make war rugs too. While many other refugees in Pakistan and Iran simply replicated designs from Afghanistan, Safer Ali was among those who chose to develop new ones that tended to be clearly partisan, supporting the mujahideen.

  We know of Safer Ali because of Masoud Farhatjar, who left Herat before the Saur Revolution to complete his schooling in Copenhagen, then moved to the German city of Freiburg im Breisgau where he attended university and became a rug dealer. When Farhatjar acquired his first war rugs, he showed them to Eva Gerharts, the director of Freiburg’s Ethnographic Museum, one of several such institutions in Germany to recognise the rugs’ significance while others in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands fixed on Afghan children’s art. Gerharts responded by becoming the first museum director to buy war rugs and, at Farhatjar’s suggestion, staged an exhibition in 1994, curated by German ethnologist Karin Knauer.

  Farhatjar and Knauer were exceptional in interviewing weavers to discover their motivation and identifying war rugs, wherever possible, as the creations of named individuals rather than anonymous makers. On one of his regular trips to Iran, Farhatjar bought three of Safer Ali’s war rugs for the Freiburg museum, questioned him about his work and photographed him at his vertical loom. On another trip to Pakistan, Knauer interviewed women weavers and Farhatjar interviewed men.

  By then, many war rugs were being made in response to market demand. Some weavers were copying designs not their own, unaware of their meaning. When interviewed by Knauer and Farhatjar, several weavers explained that they made war rugs because they sold better than traditional designs. But Knauer and Farhatjar did not want to reveal this commercial motivation. They selected Farhatjar’s interviews with Safer Ali and a refugee in Pakistan called Hadschi Karim because their rugs began as a form of political expression. By including them in the Freiburg exhibition catalogue, Knauer and Farhatjar ensured the voices of war rug makers were heard for the first time, albeit with a skewed selection.

  At the time, refugee society in Mashhad was tightly controlled by two mujahideen groups, vetting much of what was said and published. But Safer Ali was free to decide the imagery of his rugs and was soon doing so in his own workshop together with a group of other young refugee men. While Safer Ali recognised that some women were much more accomplished weavers, he maintained that war rugs in Iran ‘were invented by us men’ because ‘we had to fight and we had a direct experience of war’. His standard composition had a border of helicopters, tanks, military trucks and ambulances surrounding a central field divided into three or four bands depicting different forms of combat. For Safer Ali to develop this design was a challenge since, for all his skill as a weaver, he was not used to drawing. He also took a big economic risk for a refugee in need of income. While demand for Turkmen rugs was strong, the market for war rugs was much less certain, but Safer Ali did not care. He ‘did not think about selling at the start’.

  Many Afghans in the 1980s looked on both the Soviet Union and the United States as enemies ‘guilty of harm to the Islamic world’ who wanted ‘to control and manipulate the Afghan people for their own imperialistic ends’. But the Soviets were the only enemy in Safer Ali’s rugs. He depicted members of the mujahideen in their mountain strongholds firing on Soviet helicopters and jet fighters and occasionally bringing them down. He showed devastation wrought by the communists—houses in ruins and blood-stained dead in the streets—while one or two fighters equipped with hand weapons sought to repel the tanks that had caused this death and destruction.

  Safer Ali’s goal was ‘to show something of the war, in the hope that long after, people will be touched by it, and won’t simply forget it’. He wanted children ‘to learn that such a war has no victors’. He saw his rugs as explaining the reasons for his flight. Yet had Safer Ali been a more skilful draughtsman, he would have liked to picture his experiences ‘in an even more intelligible and concrete way, for example how I had to leave my village, what it was like for me to look back on my village as I departed and see it for the last time, how I was on the road for days without knowing what would happen to me, and finally how I arrived in Mashhad, a refugee without hope’. He wanted ‘to show how we Afghans had to suffer’.

  Hadschi Karim, whom Farhatjar also interviewed and photographed with his family, came from near Kandahar. When the women of the family had made rugs, most had been for personal use, since they were primarily farmers. But as refugees in a camp outside Peshawar, agriculture was impossible, so they made more rugs on a rudimentary horizontal loom. When Hadschi Karim first saw war rugs while visiting relatives in a neighbouring camp in 1984, he asked the women in his family whether they could weave them too. Before long Hadschi Karim was designing them. He ‘got ideas from everywhere’. He ‘didn’t really know how to weave an aeroplane’ until he ‘spotted a model on a box of matches’. He and his family began making these rugs because they wanted to show ‘the war, the fight of the mujahideen, that our neighbours want to divide Afghanistan up amongst themselves’; then continued because they sold well.

  Many other refugees who fled to Pakistan also turned to rug-making because it was one of their few means of earning money. At the end of the 1980s, about one-third of Turkmen refugees were making carpets. About seven in ten weavers were women, and women often also dyed the yarn, chose the designs and did the first clip of the finished carpets.

  Demand for embroidery was far smaller. Alighie
ro Boetti remained one client. Because he found it too difficult to continue having his Mappe embroidered in Afghanistan, he employed refugees in a camp outside Peshawar until he died in 1994, aged fifty-three.

  Carpet-making was generally an unhealthy occupation but the conditions for refugees in Pakistan were particularly bad. Children, who sometimes started aged five and were fully trained at ten, were employed in workshops in Peshawar where their spines became deformed from crouching over horizontal looms, their eyesight became impaired due to poor lighting, and their lungs were damaged from inhaling the fibres and noxious dyes. The refugee camps were often worse, as men encouraged, if not forced, women to weave for longer each day than ever because their families had no other income. In the late 1980s, they worked six to fourteen hours a day, six days each week and, beyond that, still had to satisfy the expectation that they cook and clean. ‘There is no work/leisure trade-off as the concept of leisure does not exist,’ Dr Saiyeda Zia Al-Jalaly, an assistant professor at the University of Peshawar, wrote of these women in a 1989 report to the Refugee Studies Centre in Oxford. ‘Even the time needed for rest is not available.’

  That was not all. As men took more than their share of the inadequate rations issued to the refugees and mothers short-served themselves to benefit their children, women were particularly ill-nourished. Their carpets—including war rugs— fetched little as they were sold in a buyer’s market and refugees had limited capacity to negotiate. A few years later, another report found that in small carpet factories, boys interrupted their weaving to attend school, but girls usually could not, and men were paid up to fifty per cent more than women despite being inferior weavers. By their mid-forties, women typically had to abandon weaving because of chronic back pain and damaged eyesight.

  Afghan rugs had long been sold in Peshawar, but the war transformed the city into their prime sales centre. As refugees came to dominate the trade, they occupied three big depots where dealers stored and sold their carpets, and they lived, ate and slept in one-room shops. While most refugees were from Kabul, one depot was the domain of Tajiks from the north. Some sold small rugs, others specialised in large carpets. Their opportunities to acquire antique rugs were exceptional. As many refugees were forced to sell their heirlooms to survive, some dealers employed ‘pickers’ who worked the refugee camps, acquiring very valuable old rugs from desperate new arrivals at little cost.

  The market for war rugs was particularly strong in Peshawar as so many foreigners involved in the war lived or visited there. It was the headquarters of most international aid agencies engaged with Afghanistan. It was a key point on the arms pipeline to the mujahideen that grew to include mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns and Stinger missiles funded by $200 million from Washington in 1984, $250 million in 1985 and $630 million in 1987, while the Saudi government and Islamic charities, mosques and private donors gave even more. Peshawar was where most western journalists covering the war were based and it remained their usual starting point for journeys into Afghanistan.

  If these westerners wanted mementos, they could acquire Soviet belt buckles, enamelled cap badges, hats and caps. But if they wanted something Afghan, war rugs were the thing to buy, and many did. So did some of the Arabs who came to fight in Afghanistan in increasing numbers facilitated by Osama bin Laden, whose Saudi family had made its fortune in the construction industry. Between taking part in the fighting himself, bin Laden funded recruitment, transportation and training of other foreigners, paid these ‘volunteers’ a monthly salary, aided their widows and orphans, and founded what would become known as al-Qaeda or ‘the Base’. Just as Washington welcomed the other foreigners who came to fight the communists, so it welcomed bin Laden as a ‘Saudi benefactor’.

  Hans Werner Mohm, a German engineer from the Saarland who ‘lost his heart’ to Afghanistan when he first visited in the 1970s, was the first major collector of war rugs in Peshawar. When he first saw them in 1985, Mohm bought six. Over the following years, he acquired many more, recognising they offered a novel opportunity to show German audiences an Afghan response to the war. English dealer Graham Bacon, who started out as a sound and light engineer for rock and roll bands, was another enthusiast. In 1981, he went to Peshawar to buy rugs sold by refugees forced to give up their heirlooms and was so successful that he began visiting Pakistan twice yearly. In 1985 he also discovered war rugs and began buying them in Peshawar and Quetta as well as from London’s big carpet warehouses.

  Italian collector Luca Brancati rejected the refugees’ work. He thought it ‘unnatural’ for Turkmen carpetmakers to embrace a Baluch form of weaving. Other westerners dismissed the rugs as inauthentic because of their novel imagery. But some considered them a powerful expression of the refugees’ plight. After a stint in Peshawar, BBC journalist George Arney wrote: ‘They are locked inside their tents with only their memories of relatives and friends killed and maimed to keep them company. The psychological scars appear in unexpected places, like the Kalashnikovs and MiG fighter jets which the refugees now weave into rugs.’ English rug dealer Graham Bacon observed: ‘It’s a way to exorcise the trauma of the war, the trauma of weaponry. They have to let it out somehow. So they express their fears and dreads in carpets.’

  Afghans saw the rugs in much the same way. For Sayyid Ahmad Gailani, leader of the National Islamic Front, war rugs exemplified the ‘terrible violation’ of Afghanistan, which had seen ‘a whole generation’ grow up knowing only war. He elaborated: ‘Even as recently as ten years ago, people embroidered them with camels. Today, there are only tanks, military planes, and bombers.’ Psychiatrist Dr Mohammad Azad Dadfar, who founded the only clinic for traumatised refugees in Peshawar after he himself was imprisoned and tortured by the communists in Kabul, explained that the rugs were an ‘emotional reaction’ to the ‘catastrophe of war’. According to Dadfar, the refugee community endorsed their imagery. ‘All things related to war have now become acceptable,’ Dadfar observed. ‘Something for beauty’s sake is no longer acceptable.’

  Through these years, the only writer of Afghan descent to reach an international audience was Idries Shah, whose father Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah had written about King Amanullah and Queen Soruya. Born in India but brought up in England, Idries Shah became renowned for his Sufism. Kara Kush, his one novel, which was published in London and New York in 1986, then translated into French and Swedish, expressed his ardent support for the mujahideen. Doris Lessing, a follower of Shah’s form of Sufism, acclaimed it as ‘the best war novel’ she had read. Most critics dismissed it as ‘addicted to cliches’, ‘threadbare’, ‘disjointed’. A prime part of Shah’s advocacy was the mujahideen’s need for better weaponry, which saw him dismiss Lee Enfields as ‘ancient rifles…next to useless, almost as bad as muzzle-loaders when faced by really modern weapons’.

  The most striking camp rugs were testimony to the success of this argument. These rugs were small mats with unusually extensive texts occasionally in Arabic, responding to the Middle Eastern appetite for these rugs, sometimes in Dari or Urdu, like the war rugs made in Afghanistan, but usually in English, a clear indication of their main audience. While the mats depicted an array of weaponry, including helicopters, tanks, grenades, pistols and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and featured an array of traditional motifs, such as combs, birds and vases of flowers, a single Kalashnikov almost always occupied their full length. In keeping with this dominance, the only object usually identified by the texts of these rugs was the Kalashnikov, which gradually replaced the Lee Enfield as the mujahideen’s standard weapon.

  The Kalashnikov appealed to the mujahideen because of its firepower. It also enabled their financiers to engage in ‘plausible deniability’. Washington and Riyadh could claim the mujahideen acquired these weapons from Soviet or government soldiers they killed or captured, though most were copies produced in China and bought with American and Saudi money. In 1981, American journalist Jere Van Dyk described mujahideen carrying them ‘as proudly as an
American Indian might have once worn a scalp’. Some adorned their guns with crude green tape symbolic of Islam or stickers emblazoned ‘Allahu Akbar!’ Others acquired embroidered covers for them. A particularly elaborate example was made of pink silk, with whirligig patterns embroidered in orange chain stitch and the hole for the trigger sewn in Islamic green.

  The Kalashnikov mats were made primarily by Turkmen weavers who, apart from occasional portrait rugs, had rarely produced pictorial carpets before. While they were made in many camps, their prime centre of production was the Faisal camp outside Peshawar, which was home to 5000 weaving families. While the Turkmen were generally set on maintaining their separate society and identity, they were prepared to try new designs and colours to secure more sales. Some adopted Pakistani or Caucasian designs; others looked to Afghanistan and followed the Baluch in making war rugs.

  Many Kalashnikov mats were made by novices with poor materials, but their powerful imagery and strikingly bright synthetic dyes more than compensated for the crudity of their making. The earliest were woven in 1986. A year later, there were still few. By 1988 they were prominent in Peshawar’s bazaars; in 1989 even more so. A series of photographs published in Soldier of Fortune, the arch-conservative American ‘Journal of Professional Adventurers’, which established an ‘Afghan Freedom Fighters Fund’ to assist the mujahideen, showed Kalashnikov mats hanging outside shops in Peshawar and on their floors. In one photograph, a Kalashnikov mat was under a display of Soviet army badges—revealing how these mats were marketed in Peshawar as a form of militaria. They were also sold as novelties and cheap souvenirs. ‘Greetings from Afghanistan’—a common message on Afghan postcards, still used by Soviets in Kabul in the 1980s—was the text woven into one mat.