Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium

by Tim Bonyhady

  For a year or two, war rugs became part of the commercial mainstream. In Manhattan, Bloomingdale’s promoted war rugs as ‘something fresh, something new’. Across the Atlantic, Stern observed that they had ‘become all the rage in the United States’. The German edition of Penthouse echoed, ‘In the USA they are in’. Tatiana Divens, who had written the first major article about them in English for George O’Bannon’s Oriental Rug Review, contemptuously identified one of their new markets as the ‘Soho yuppie’.

  Interest was so great that the rugs featured in full-page carpet advertisements. The Ambalo brothers, Afghan Jewish carpet dealers in London with a stock of some of the most ambitious war rugs, took out one of these advertisements in the international carpet magazine Hali which principally covered the antique. This advertisement, featuring a spectacular big rug woven in Mashhad in the style of Safer Ali, sold immediately to a European buyer. Liberty’s of London, which also sold exceptional war rugs very different to the bland stock of most department stores, used one when touting its pursuit of ‘the rare, the eccentric, the authentic’ in Good Housekeeping.

  Herati dealer Sufi Abdul Wahid, who had owned the early war rug acquired by Reto Christoffel, became a key figure in the development of new designs after fleeing in 1983 to Pakistan. One design, based on a poster produced by the mujahideen’s interim government, both celebrated the Soviet’s departure and lampooned Najibullah. It showed two columns of Soviet tanks departing Afghanistan with their barrels lowered in defeat, and Najibullah as a marionette, held by the paw of the Russian bear, and mujahideen fighters aiming Kalashnikovs at him. A second design, based on another poster produced by the mujahideen’s interim government, had the hand of the Soviets reaching into Afghanistan. Its main text was ‘Jihad’, as the mujahideen’s supporters clung to the idea that, despite the Soviets’ departure and Najibullah’s rejection of communism, they were still waging a holy war.

  Arabs were a new market. According to dealers in Peshawar, they liked rugs with as much ‘action’ as possible. But some foreigners with a deep interest in Afghanistan and its carpets rejected these rugs. One was Australian journalist Christopher Kremmer who encountered them at the start of the 1990s in Peshawar, often hanging askew on the walls of aid organisations, and then saw more in Afghanistan. After engaging with the war day in, day out, Kremmer wanted to be soothed by rugs, not confronted by them. He expressed his aversion in his 2002 bestseller The Carpet Wars. Despite his book’s title, Kremmer made almost nothing of war rugs.

  CHAPTER 22

  Green

  Artists working for the mujahideen were quick to picture how they might achieve much more than take power in Afghanistan. In 1989 the mujahideen’s interim government published a poster showing a turbaned fighter with a green flag holding his Kalashnikov aloft in triumph on the map of Afghanistan while the towers of the Kremlin toppled and the hammer and sickle fractured. A year later, a cartoon in Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Mujahideen Monthly reprised this idea. Another turbaned fighter pointed his Kalashnikov directly at the Kremlin, while his cry ‘Allahu Akbar!’ reverberated across the USSR and beyond. Its text was ‘The effect of Afghan Jihad on events in eastern Europe’.

  In 1991, the USSR fragmented. Some analysts identify the war in Afghanistan as a significant cause; others disagree. But the impact of the Soviet Union’s collapse on Afghanistan is clear-cut. The Kremlin stopped its aid and the Uzbek leader Abdul Rashid Dostum abandoned Najibullah for an alliance with Ahmad Shah Massoud, giving Najibullah no chance of staying in power. In one of his last presidential interviews before resigning in March 1992, Najibullah predicted: ‘If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years. Afghanistan will turn into a centre of world smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned into a centre of terrorism.’

  Najibullah expected to witness none of this. A United Nations aircraft was to fly him into exile. But because he was unable to reach the airport, he was still in Kabul when the mujahideen raised green flags over the city in April 1992 and embarked on the usual destruction and denigration of signs of the old regime partly for foreign photographers. A group of fighters lay on Najibullah’s bed in the Presidential Palace. One danced on it. Another posed on a portrait rug of Lenin stripped from the palace, pointing his Kalashnikov at Lenin’s head. A third aimed his Kalashnikov at a bust of Lenin with wire around the neck as if strangling him. The mujahideen also executed some of Najibullah’s officials—performing one killing for the camera. But they did not pursue Najibullah, who had sought refuge in the UN compound with one of his brothers.

  A poster published by Jamiat in 1988 after Mikhail Gorbachev announced the withdrawal of Soviet troops showed an ecstatic boy in a pakul hat tearing up a red banner bearing the hammer and sickle with the text, ‘Afghanistan: The End of Aggression’. When the mujahideen took Kabul in 1992, members of Jamiat brought this poster to the city and pasted it up. On the basis that the war was over, some of the mujahideen laid down their arms and went home. Some leading Parchamis fled, including Anahita Ratibzad, who escaped to India. More than two million refugees returned to Afghanistan, encouraged by payments from the United Nations.

  Since war rugs had been made in response to Afghanistan becoming a battleground, it was plausible to think that peace might put an end to their production. The Asian Wall Street Journal reported: ‘Mothers and wives of the mujahideen fighters who wove rugs featuring machine guns, tanks, blood droplets and other sombre motifs during fourteen years of bloodshed are back to weaving traditional flowery and geometric patterns of the pre-war days.’ A Hong Kong dealer observed: ‘The women have stopped making them because they are happy.’

  Yet there was no end to aggression, especially in Kabul. As posters of mujahideen leaders identified the territories of the different groups in the capital, they began fighting over it as they had fought over almost everything else and the city became anarchic. Sebghatullah Mojadiddi of the National Liberation Front became president of the new ‘Islamic State of Afghanistan’ for just two months under an attempt at power-sharing brokered by Pakistan. Burhanuddin Rabbani of the much more powerful Jamiat was to succeed for the next four months, coinciding with a consultative process to determine an interim government that would rule until national elections. But Gulbuddin Hekmatyar never accepted this arrangement, and Rabbani refused to relinquish the presidency when his term expired.

  Kandahar also became anarchic as no group was strong enough to gain control or maintain order. But much of the north was different under Dostum, whose portrait was ubiquitous in Mazar-e Sharif, exemplifying his control of the city. Because of Dostum’s power, Mazar-e Sharif escaped civil war. While notoriously brutal, Dostum proved a relatively capable administrator. As part of encouraging education, he built new dormitories at its university and opened a new one in nearby Baghlan. Mujahideen leader Ismael Khan exercised similar control over Herat. He built a new school for 1800 girls and funded a public library, open for women in the mornings and men in the afternoons, staffed by five female librarians.

  The fight over Kabul was intense, prompting even more of its inhabitants to flee. For many of the mujahideen who received at most a small, irregular wage, the capital’s wealth was irresistible, so they acted like the bandits the communists always claimed they were. As they looted almost anything—and often took rugs—not only Dostum’s men but also those of other militias became known as ‘carpet baggers’ when not simply called ‘gunmen’. Where the war had been exceptional for its few rapes, these fighters made them commonplace. They forced women into prostitution, abducted them and sold them into slavery. They turned shipping containers into death chambers, where prisoners suffocated in summer. A shopkeeper considered them ‘devils with Kalashnikovs’.

  Swiss textile dealer Reto Christoffel had remained a regular visitor until he found himself trapped in Kabul when Najibullah’s rule ended. When Ariana Airlines finally gave him a seat, Christoffel waited for hours with other passengers and crew in a bui
lding away from the main terminal. There was neither food nor water, and fear was palpable in a way he had not experienced in more than twenty visits during the war. Time and again, departure was delayed, then word came that the plane’s front window had been shattered by gunfire. When it finally took off exceptionally fast and reached the clouds, the passengers broke into applause. After that, like most foreign dealers, Christoffel visited Peshawar instead.

  Abdul Noor Sher was still Kabul’s foremost dealer. As recalled by the Afghan writer Qais Akbar Omar in his memoir The Fort of Nine Towers, which takes its title from Sher’s compound in Kabul where Omar and his family found refuge during the war between the mujahideen, Sher initially divided his time between Delhi, where he moved his family and opened another store, and Kabul where he preferred to be. Sher maintained his three-storey shop in the Shahr-e Naw even when members of the mujahideen pillaged the store of Omar’s father, who was one of Sher’s partners. But when a rocket landed near Sher’s building, he sent his best carpets to India and closed his shop. As other dealers also fled or were looted out of business, just a few small traders remained around Chicken Street to make the occasional sale to foreign aid workers and journalists.

  Sydney accountant Richard Elliott knew about war rugs because his father had bought some in Peshawar in 1983 and one of his friends had photographed them in the markets of Islamabad. When he wanted to visit Pakistan, Elliott thought war rugs might provide a way of paying for his trip. Rather than sell through the carpet trade, he talked to Ray Hughes, one of Sydney’s leading contemporary art dealers, who was a family friend. While Hughes had only seen a handful of war rugs, he was enthusiastic. On a visit to Nigeria in 1992, he had collected three textile hats decorated with guns and tanks, commemorating the Gulf War. Elliott and Hughes came to a loose arrangement: if Elliott secured a good selection, Hughes would exhibit them. When Elliott succeeded, Hughes exhibited thirty-six in 1993 and, when almost all sold, Elliott procured two more consignments.

  Weavers continued to make many more but did not depict the battle for Kabul since they were typically far from the capital and had rarely woven images of specific incidents. Instead, they largely reproduced old designs in simplified form, which generally meant these rugs were of lesser interest. But Mohammad Yousef Asefi, a gasteroenterologist-turned-artist in Kabul, produced a series of oil paintings depicting the destruction. Asefi’s ‘starkly realistic views’, seen by Canadian writer Gary Geddes on a visit to the capital, included one of ‘fire raging from the ruins and a huge bank of black smoke sweeping…across the canvas, half obliterating a public monument and the shell of a large building’.

  Kabul’s main boulevard, Jadi Maiwand, was a frontline in the new war. Having exemplified the city’s normalcy through the 1980s, it came to symbolise Kabul’s devastation. When foreign photographers visited Kabul, they typically went to Jadi Maiwand first, generally photographing it when just a single car or cart or a few male cyclists or pedestrians were to be seen along its long lines of ruins. British journalist Jason Burke duly expected the rest of Kabul to look the same and was amazed to find that ‘much of the rest of the capital, though battered, chipped, pock-marked by bullets, filthy and run down, was actually intact’.

  The National Museum at Darulaman became another symbol of the war. As mujahideen groups fought over it, rockets hit the museum and its roof and top floors were destroyed along with most of its records. Fighters also pillaged its storerooms, despite the United Nations providing new steel doors. While most of the stolen material initially ended up in Pakistan, where the Minister for the Interior, Nasirullah Babar, bought some of the Begram ivories, collectors around the world purchased other pieces, sometimes still carrying their museum labels and accession numbers. When the Rabbani government finally gained control of the museum in 1995, its staff set about compiling an inventory of the little left in it, assisted by the new Society for the Protection of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage, SPACH, which Nancy Dupree had done most to create. Its key figure in Kabul was Carla Grissmann, another American, who first worked at the museum as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1960s.

  The cliché of the ‘forgotten war’—invoked from 1980 by those who thought Afghanistan warranted more western attention—had particular force through these years. Having funded the mujahideen until Najibullah fell, the United States provided almost no aid thereafter. Abdul Haq, who went from being responsible for most of the mujahideen’s attacks on Kabul to serving briefly as minister for its security, predicted that Washington would rue its neglect. ‘Maybe one day they will have to send hundreds of thousands of troops,’ he told the New York Times in 1994. ‘And if they step in, they will be stuck. We have a British grave in Afghanistan. We had a Soviet grave. And then we will have an American grave.’

  28 April 1993, the first anniversary of Kabul’s fall to the mujahideen, exemplified the Rabbani government’s lack of control. Since a celebratory parade would have provided a target for Hekmatyar, Rabbani delivered an hour-long televised address before officials and officers in the Interior Ministry. ‘With the blessing of our Jihad, the Russian empire was vanquished, the Berlin Wall came down, and the Central Asian Islamic Republics became free and independent,’ Rabbani boasted. But he also implicitly acknowledged the destruction, misery and brutality visited on Kabul by the mujahideen: ‘Unfortunately, last year was not fruitful.’

  The most infamous incident occurred in the Microrayon apartment blocks. Sometimes they were relatively peaceful, prompting residents of other areas to seek refuge there, but at other times they were such a battleground that the inhabitants fled if they could. A high school student called Nahid could not flee and, when fighters raided her family’s apartment, she jumped to her death to escape rape. Her death excited shock and horror in this city accustomed to violence. Stories would soon spread that Nahid’s father carried her body through the streets as a protest, but the mujahideen probably stopped him, as Amnesty International reported.

  In a celebration of Mother’s Day, President Rabbani argued there was ‘no problem as to the rights of women’ in Afghanistan. He illustrated the political importance of women by fixing on another Nahid, the legendary ‘sister’ killed at the forefront of the protests against ‘the ruthless oppressors, the Russian invaders’ in Kabul in February 1980. But Rabbani also admitted that ‘painful tragedies have occurred in some parts of the country, especially in the city of Kabul’. A woman in the capital acknowledged the obvious: ‘We were better off with President Najibullah.’

  The national flag remained a tricolour, but in a new form. The red band, once a symbol of blood shed in the fight for independence, went because of red’s association with communism. A white band optimistically intended to symbolise peace replaced it. Mojadiddi’s original version also included Islamic texts very prominently. ‘Allahu Akbar!’ was inscribed large on the green band; the Shahada, ‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammed is his Prophet’, was on the white. But Rabbani reduced these texts as the mujahideen divided over what constituted an ‘Islamic State’.

  In Jalalabad, fighters looted the only cinema before reducing it to ruins, while in Kabul they immediately stopped screenings of Bollywood because they equated its movies with immorality. But cinemas otherwise initially remained open and, in the capital, continued to be attended by women. Having enjoyed a big video market, Rambo III screened to full houses, partly because it was about Afghanistan. The manager of Kabul’s biggest cinema, the Kyhber, declared Rambo III ‘an Islamic movie’ because ‘Rambo kills Russians and he fights with the mujahideen’. Then another cinema showed a Kung Fu movie which, in the original, featured talk of rape and sex and showed an adult rubbing his face against a baby’s genitals. When outraged fighters interrupted one session, they forced the audience to pray in a nearby mosque. A week later, the government shut all Kabul’s cinemas.

  As the fighting continued, some cinemas became headquarters of the militias, others battlegrounds, and several were reduced to ruins. But
five or six reopened as male preserves under the protection of Massoud, a film buff said to be particularly fond of Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus. Kung Fu movies again played to packed houses, as did Rambo III, despite the fear and hatred of the mujahideen in the city, but Bollywood films were the most popular. Screenings were overseen by Siddiq Barmak, who had received a Soviet scholarship to Moscow’s renowned Institute of Cinematography and made two short movies under Najibullah, before joining his fellow-Tajik Massoud in the Panjshir Valley. When he returned to Kabul as head of Afghan Film from 1992, Barmak routinely cut scenes showing women’s bare arms and legs and scenes of men and women together, whether walking, talking or touching. In 1995, when the government shut all video shops as ‘centres of cultural corruption’ and burned ‘hundreds of uncensored Indian and British video films’, Barmak twice closed all cinemas, declaring he would ‘not let Islamic and national values be damaged’.

  Afghan Film’s one new feature celebrated Massoud’s Tajik fighters. Written by Barmak, and directed by Noor Hashim Abir, Uruj traced the transformation of a villager into an heroic member of the mujahideen after the communists jailed him and killed his family. Filming, in the Panjshir Valley, took just three months, but Uruj took two years to complete because Kabul was often without electricity, equipment kept failing and Afghan Film struggled to pay for post-production in India. When Uruj finally opened in Kabul in 1995, two of its stars were dead—killed when a rocket hit Afghan Film’s studios. British writer Jason Eliot, who attended its premiere, thought Uruj ‘would have held its own at any film festival’. It also screened in California and Virginia where there were big refugee communities.

  Photography was much less contested. Street photographers took their customary portraits with ancient box cameras and studios remained open, with fighters the clients of both. The war also created new work. A foundation in Kandahar that assisted disabled fighters documented their injuries as part of justifying their payments. Khalid Hadi, just thirteen years old when he started, became a recorder of stumps: legs that stopped at the thigh, knee or ankle and arms without hands. Sometimes the disabled posed in front of curtains. Occasionally, like other Afghan studio photographers, Hadi set them against an exotic painted backdrop. Their scenes were usually European, often mountainous. Hadi’s was a thatched English cottage, wandering brook and daisy-covered meadow.