Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium

by Tim Bonyhady

  These mats were just part of the larger ‘Kalashnikov culture’ or ‘Kalashnikovisation’ of the region. Already in 1979, Steve McCurry had photographed a Nuristani boy holding a toy Kalashnikov and another holding his father’s gun. Within a few years, child soldiers were posing with their own Kalashnikovs. After fleeing to Peshawar, Uzbek poet Abdul Ahad Tarshi produced a collection of verse with a cover design dominated by a minaret and an upraised Kalashnikov in keeping with its title, From the Sparks of Anguish to the Rage of Faith. For some horrified observers, the Kalashnikov symbolised Pakistan’s ‘anarchy in arms’.

  A new generation of school texts, funded by the US government through the University of Nebraska, with their contents determined in Peshawar by the main mujahideen groups, played a part. These texts, used from 1986 in refugee camps in Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan controlled by the mujahideen, celebrated violence in the name of Islam on every second page. Polish journalist Radek Sikorski recorded their impact after meeting two village boys in 1987. ‘Five Kalashnikovs—they pointed at an illustrated equation in the book—plus seven Kalashnikovs equals twelve Kalashnikovs. Three times five bullets is fifteen bullets.’

  The Kalashnikovs in the camp rugs might be thought of as an ambiguous symbol because the communists used and reified these guns too. A stamp issued by the Karmal government depicted an Afghan woman dressed in red with a dove on her shoulder, clearly aspiring for peace, but with a Kalashnikov in hand, ready to defend herself, her children and the nation. The Association of Afghan Writers, established by the communists, had a pen and a Kalashnikov as its logo. Members of the government’s women’s militia carried Kalashnikovs. A girl in Kabul played wth an unloaded one for an Associated Press photographer. Russian writer Alexsandr Prokhanov wrote of Soviet soldiers repulsing a mujahideen attack while singing ‘our Kalashnikovs fiercely roared’.

  German anthropologist Jürgen Wasim Frembgen has suggested that the Kalashnikov mats woven by refugees simply symbolised ‘preparedness to defend against the external enemy’, consistent with one of the prime interpretations of Jihad as having a defensive character. Yet the cult of the Kalashnikov among the mujahideen was that of a weapon used to attack and to kill, and the guns in the camp rugs were clearly intended as those of the mujahideen—a profound contrast to all the rugs made within Afghanistan dominated by the tanks and helicopters of the Soviets and the Afghan government. For all their bright colours, seeming naivety and creation by children, the Kalashnikov mats were the rugs made during the Soviet era that most glorified the war waged by the mujahideen.

  War rugs found a small market in Peshawar among successful refugees such as Alighiero Boetti’s middlemen, Jalili and Shawalili, who had his designs embroidered, contributed ever more partisan, polemical texts to them accusing the ‘bloodshedding and murderous Russians’ of ‘poisoning’ Afghanistan through chemical warfare. In 1988, the walls of Jalili and Shawalili’s office were hung with two versions of a mat that showed mujahideen using anti-aircraft guns to bring down Soviet helicopters and identified Afghanistan as ‘The Land of Islam. The Land of Muslim Warriors’. Western aid workers in Peshawar also bought rugs as wall decorations, but the majority were immediately shipped abroad. Many went to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emerites and Yemen. Most went to the West. While the fable spread that members of the mujahideen and their families made Kalashnikov rugs to fund their fight against the Soviets, the bulk of the profits went to dealers.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Misery of the Afghans

  The most prominent Afghan artist from 1980 was Ghausuddin, who painted in many different western modes including naturalism, cubism, expressionism and abstraction. As chair of the Artists’ Union established by the Karmal government in Kabul, Ghausuddin inaugurated painting competitions, presided over openings and participated in the National Fatherland Front, which Babrak Karmal initiated in a bid to attract more support. His paintings filled two rooms in the new National Gallery in Kabul from 1983. He featured in a 1984 book about Afghanistan by Indian communist D. R. Goyal, who quoted him at length lauding Karmal. In 1985, after fleeing to Pakistan, he excoriated the communists in an interview that human rights group Helsinki Watch published in one of its reports and the New York Review of Books then took to a much bigger audience.

  Born in 1912, Ghausuddin’s first significant success came with images of war. When a salon was held in Kabul in 1946 in emulation of the famous Parisian exhibitions, Ghausuddin won a prize with a pair of oil paintings depicting Genghis Khan’s capture and destruction of Bamiyan. In the late 1960s, the tourist market for his watercolours of weathered old Afghan men in turbans and similar subjects enabled Ghausuddin to become one of a small group of artists who opened galleries in the Shahr-e Naw. He also attracted royal patronage and contributed to international exhibitions, prompting his identification as an Ustad, a master artist. But he achieved most status under Karmal, who, Ghausuddin told Goyal, visited his studio to examine his work and encouraged him to paint ‘more of the realistic scenes of Afghan life’.

  As the local Times reported, Ghausuddin emphasised the need to satisfy ‘the spiritual requirements of the masses’ and to ‘support the Saur Revolution relentlessly’. He declared that Karmal would ‘succeed in building a new society, a new life, a new Afghanistan’. But when interviewed in Islamabad by Helsinki Watch, he stated that he had refused to chair the Artists’ Union. He contended that he ‘never liked’ Karmal because he led a Soviet ‘puppet government’. He fled, he maintained, because of the government’s killing of innocent villagers and torture of political prisoners. Before leaving, he claimed to have spoken out in Kabul at the funeral of a friend’s son killed by mujahideen after being conscripted into the Afghan army.

  Helsinki Watch and the New York Review did not bother to check Ghausuddin’s claims—at least partly because Ghausuddin told them what they wanted to hear. ‘You know, when writers write, it affects some people who are educated and know how to read, but paintings affect the educated and the uneducated,’ the seventy-three-year-old Ghausuddin observed. ‘My final desire as an artist and an Afghan is to show the people of the world in painting…how a poor country is fighting a powerful country’. He wanted to depict ‘the misery of the Afghans’, caused by the Soviets.

  If Ghausuddin continued painting after settling in California, his work had scant impact. But many other artists, working in a wide variety of media, depicted the war. Peshawar, as usual, was pivotal. Painted rickshaws in the city featured an array of military subjects including Soviet helicopters raiding mountain villages in Afghanistan. Posters with simple portraits of the leaders of the main mujahideen groups were commonplace. So were posters with much more complex, compelling imagery influenced by those of revolutionary Iran. Some were pasted up on Peshawar’s streets. Others were designed for political demonstrations. Still others, made for sale, found their way into bazaars and private homes. They integrated the pious, military and political—showing the most important Islamic sites in Mecca and Medina, fighters and tanks, and mujahideen leaders.

  The Internal Islamic Front of Afghanistan was exceptional in being based in Rawalpindi rather than Peshawar. It also was not aligned with any of the main mujahideen groups, so it did not promote their leaders. Its output was unusually great. It published a monthly newspaper Heart of Asia, which was edited by Sayyed Mahmood Farani, Sabahuddin Kushkaki and then Ahmad Shah Siddiqi, who had all been prominent journalists in Kabul. It also produced about 350 different cartoons, printed separately from the newspaper, along with about eighty matchbox designs featuring miniature versions of some of these cartoons and an array of other propagandistic material including calendars, stickers and headbands inscribed ‘Allahu Akbar!’

  Heart of Asia was distributed in Afghanistan to fuel opposition to the communists, as were many of the cartoons, but about half of each print run went to refugees in Pakistan, and small numbers were sent to Europe and the United States to build support for the mujahideen. Already in 1985
, one of the foremost British writers about the war, Anthony Hyman, devoted a booklet to the Front’s cartoons because of the exceptional power of their imagery. A few must have reached India. Refugee students in Delhi protesting the start of the ninth year of Soviet troops being in Afghanistan, in December 1987, carried big posters reproducing a Front cartoon from a few years before.

  One or two of the Front’s artists seem to have been Afghan refugees who had studied at the Institute of Fine Arts at Kabul University. Another, remembered only as Iftikhar, was one of several Pakistani artists to produce powerful anti-Soviet images from 1980. These poster makers were as accomplished at developing compelling new images as they were adept at plundering art history for images ripe for reworking. Their sources included Soviet posters, Italian and American posters, and the iconic 1967 Black Power poster by French artist Tomi Ungerer, as well as touches of British Op artist Bridget Riley and American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein.

  Like many other groups in Pakistan that produced images supporting the mujahideen, the Front used the symbol of the hammer and sickle to identify Karmal with the Soviets. Time and again, it depicted him as a Soviet puppet, whether in the form of a mechanical clown wound by a Soviet key, a marionette suspended from a controller in the shape of the hammer and sickle or a mouthpiece for Leonid Brezhnev. Because Karmal was commonly identified as a drunkard, one or more bottles of vodka, emblazoned with the hammer and sickle, featured in several cartoons. All presented him as a ludicrous, contemptible figure.

  Several cartoons were more chilling. One showed atrocities and abuses of Soviet soldiers: stabbing mullahs in the back, bayoneting children, executing the aged and young, setting fire to crops, bombing mosques and seducing Afghan women with alcohol. Another fixed on Mishka the bear, the Soviet Union’s mascot for the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games. That January, giant posters of a smiling Mishka, promoting the Soviet airline Aeroflot, adorned Kabul’s streets. The Front showed Mishka dripping with blood, a bayonet slicing his belly. Its most fearful image, titled Red Devil, had the distinctive face markings, tongue out and hair styling of Gene Simmons, ‘the Demon’ of the American rock band Kiss.

  Before going to fight, many of the mujahideen sat for portraits taken with rudimentary box cameras, the usual technology in Afghanistan. When fighters were killed, their group used these portraits to celebrate the dead as martyrs. But some fighters went unphotographed and hence could not be pictured if they died, or their commemorative pictures showed them before they became mujahideen. A few government soldiers who had deserted were celebrated with photographs of them in their government military uniforms. While Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami was renowned as the most fundamentalist group, many martyrs included in its Mujahideen Monthly appeared bareheaded and had moustaches or were clean-shaven, like the government’s soldiers. Only a minority were turbaned and bearded, as beards remained a matter of choice in the Pashtun south.

  Some of the most striking photographs of the mujahideen showed fighters wearing gas masks said to have been stolen from Soviet troops. These photographs bolstered Washington’s claim that the Kremlin engaged in chemical warfare, a charge never established. The mujahideen secured other material from dead Soviet soldiers, stripping their bodies of identity cards, letters and photographs. ‘One of these Russian soldiers is surely dead. This photograph was taken from a corpse,’ Match captioned a photograph of three members of a tank crew in 1981. London’s Sunday Times displayed even less regard for the dead and their families. It published a portrait photograph and the identity card of a soldier from the Ukraine, along with a card from the soldier’s wife reprimanding him for ‘writing so few letters’, while willing him home so ‘your little girl and I don’t have to celebrate holidays on our own any more’.

  Westerners funded the training and equipping of mujahideen cameramen, hoping that Afghanistan could become another ‘television war’ like Vietnam, albeit to build western support for the conflict rather than opposition to it. In 1980 Margaret Thatcher thought it ‘excellent’ that her government was covertly aiding the mujahideen ‘to film Russian atrocities and military activities’—ignoring how members of Yhunus Khalis’s Hezb also used their new equipment to video the execution of government soldiers whom they had taken prisoner. A few years later, West Germans donated three million marks to a scheme initiated by federal parliamentarian Jürgen Todenhöfer, which saw members of the mujahideen come to Europe for a four-week camera course, so they could ‘break through the wall of silence erected around Afghanistan by the Soviet Union’.

  Washington—for once overtly—funded much more such training. In 1985 Congress financed an Afghan Media Research Center in Peshawar, which became the biggest journalistic operation devoted to the war, with about forty staff. Its director, Haji Sayed Daud, a former producer at Kabul Television, was appointed after Washington privately recognised that ‘Afghans must appear at least to be in charge’. The senior instructors, responsible for giving media-training to the mujahideen, were all Americans. In March 1987 the first group of thirty-five trainees graduated after six weeks’ instruction and immediately went into Afghanistan. Their photographs depicted much that otherwise went unrecorded ranging from the decomposing bodies of long-dead Soviet and government soldiers to ordinary rural life continuing as farmers ploughed fields, winnowed grain and carried spices on donkeys. The scale of their work—3000 hours of video and 94,000 negatives—was unmatched. But the Center’s stories were so biased western outlets generally dismissed them.

  Most other photographers and cameramen who went into Afghanistan were westerners making their trips as freelancers, often without assignments because the western press was unwilling to bear either the costs or the risks. Two were vehemently anti-communist Poles—cameraman Andy Skrzypkowiak and the journalist-photographer Radek Sikorski. Iranian photographer Reza Deghati soon known simply as Reza, went too. So did Habib Kawyani, an Afghan who trained at the Film and Television Institute of India in Poona, then worked with Afghan Film in Kabul. After fleeing to London in 1979, he made several trips from Peshawar, often for the British current affairs program World in Action.

  These trips depended on assistance from the main mujahideen groups. The photographers’ and cameramen’s escorts determined when they set out, where they went and what they did. In return, the photographers and cameramen were expected not just to endorse the mujahideen cause, which the photographers and cameramen typically supported, but also to boost the status of the group that escorted them, if not to denigrate their rivals. Otherwise, the photographers and cameramen risked not being taken again. Although the term was not yet used, they were embedded with their mujahideen hosts.

  The fruits of these journeys were often modest. A two-month trip yielded cameraman Nick Downie less than ten minutes of cut film. The risks were substantial. If captured, the Afghan government tried them for an array of offences, including espionage, and sentenced them to up to ten years in Kabul’s Pul-e Charkhi Prison, though they were typically released after several months. The mujahideen could be even more of a danger. Downie decided to stop working in Afghanistan after almost being killed in an attack by rivals of his escorts. Andy Skrzypkowiak was killed as he returned from his sixteenth trip into Afghanistan, filming in the Panjshir Valley where Ahmad Shah Massoud led Jamiat’s biggest force. By most accounts, Massoud’s arch rival, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar of Hezb, ordered Skrzypkowiak’s murder.

  Magazines continued to publish pictures of mujahideen executions of their fellow Afghans. Photographs of captured Soviet soldiers sold well; successful mujahideen attacks even better. British photographer Chris Gregory, who was married to Andy Skrzypkowiak, had a scoop on her one trip into Afghanistan in 1984 when she recorded the aftermath of an attack on a government convoy on the Salang Highway, then a second attack four days later on another convoy that destroyed all forty-two vehicles. Match, Time and the Sunday Times carried Gregory’s photographs. They gloried in her bloody images of a ‘text book ambush’.

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sp; The photographers’ focus was men because they did almost all the fighting and because their escorts instructed them not to take pictures of women. The photographers generally chose to ignore the increasing numbers of fighters who wore khaki combat kit. Some showed the mujahideen in the pakul hat, which had been largely confined to Nuristan until Ahmad Shah Massoud began always wearing one and many fighters across the country emulated him. Most photographers showed turbaned, heavily bearded mujahideen consistent with the longstanding image of Afghan tribesmen as primitive, exotic Islamic warriors. In doing so, they ignored the diversity of fighters as pictured in Hekmatyar’s Mujahideen Monthly.

  Peter Jouvenal became a cameraman because it paid better than photography and, by 1986, had made twenty-seven trips from Pakistan into Afghanistan. But regardless of how far most cameramen travelled, they generally returned with clips ‘of smoke billowing in the distance and of bearded, turbaned guerillas with old rifles sniping at convoys’, and the same was true of footage produced by the mujahideen. The film was slow to reach the outside world as it had to be carried back to Pakistan before being sent further afield, and it found little market once the war was no longer a novelty. Between 1982 and 1985, the major American television networks carried fewer than one story each a month about Afghanistan. The networks’ total newstime for Afghanistan in 1986 was less than an hour. Combined with the dearth of photographs of actual fighting, it meant the war did not become a spectacle.

  The National Islamic Front led by Sayyid Ahmad Gailani built its international profile by arranging unusually well-organised trips for photographers and cameramen—and staging displays of fighting and offering executions of captured Soviets and Afghans. Englishman Guy Munthe reported in 1985 that he declined several offers from the Front ‘to decapitate soldiers in front of my camera’. American director Jeff Harmon and British cameraman Alexander Lindsay filmed the corpses of Afghan army prisoners bayonetted to death and twelve Afghan prisoners in chains before a senior cleric, who had an executioner ready, awaiting orders from Gailani to kill them. This cleric claimed that he had presided over the execution of 2500 prisoners, ‘personally slit the throats of one thousand’ and had others ‘shot, decapitated or stoned to death’. A promotional photograph for Jihad—Harmon’s documentary commissioned by the BBC, which National Geographic screened in the United States as part of its Explorer series—showed the executioner axe in hand.