Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium

by Tim Bonyhady

  A new dress code for women prescribed hijab—an Arabic term for covering, long used in Afghanistan—consisting of an ankle-length, long-sleeved coat, with a waist-length head cover drawn across the face in public. A poster produced by the Committee of Educated Women of Afghanistan—pasted up across the city within a fortnight of the mujahideen’s arrival—showed a woman in black hijab emerging from the map of Afghanistan coloured Islamic green, with one arm exultantly holding a Kalashnikov and a mosque behind her. It was deliberately an antithesis of the Bollywood posters of Indian actresses and of the travel posters of westerners torn down in Kabul by the mujahideen because the women’s clothing was too revealing. ‘Sister! With your Islamic covering, you turn the hopes of the enemies of Islam into disappointment,’ the new poster exclaimed. It ignored how the mujahideen, unlike the communists, did not allow female fighters.

  Boutiques in the Shahr-e Naw removed dresses and skirts from their windows to avoid attack, then closed altogether because there was no market for their stock, while demand for chadaris was so great prices tripled. Exposure of male bodies was judged differently. As bodybuilding remained popular, images of men with the biggest of muscles and briefest of underwear were displayed on hoardings. But as the mujahideen declared suits and shirt-and-tie a ‘sign of slavery to the West’ and their leaders wore salwar kameez and turbans and grew full beards, many Kabulis did so too. They included the men who became the only newsreaders on Afghan television. A popular joke involved a presidential election among animals in the Kabul zoo. The goat won because he had the longest beard.

  Enforcement of the new dress code for women was patchy in Kabul because the mujahideen groups were too busy battling each other. ‘The first few days after the establishment of an Islamic government they made a dress code mandatory,’ explained one young woman. ‘When the fighting intensifies, hijab and everything else is forgotten. We can go out without a head cover and no one seems to care. Then, when there are a couple of days of truce, they start picking up on women’s clothes, as if there is nothing else to worry about. We prefer not to have this restricted dress code, but it comes with a heavy price—house-to-house fighting.’

  In Jalalabad, women could work only in segregated offices and travel in segregated vehicles. In Lashkargah in the south, women could go out only with an escort and, to avoid contact with male shopkeepers, had to stand in the street while men of their family brought merchandise out for their approval. But in Kabul women gradually regained greater freedom of dress—token scarves, make-up, blouses and calf-length skirts with baggy trousers underneath—and more freedom to go out unaccompanied. While many government employees initially lost their jobs, most regained them. They included female newsreaders, who returned to television led by Shafiqa Habibi. Having read the news under four communist presidents, she continued under the Islamist Rabbani, wearing a headscarf.

  Many senior clerics were incensed by these changes. At a meeting at the Sherpur Mosque in July 1993, they issued a fatwa demanding full observance of hijab and segregation at engagement and wedding ceremonies. That August, sixteen members of Afghanistan’s Supreme Court issued another fatwa identifying the war against the communists as waged by Muslims to free themselves ‘from the bondage of the atheist rule’ and ‘re-establish the Divine Ordinances in the country’. Having ‘fought for fourteen years, and lost numerous lives’, the court declared, ‘God’s Ordinance should be carried out immediately, particularly those pertaining to veiling of women.’

  Hekmatyar ordered all women in his domain south of the capital ‘to wear Islamic attire’ and ‘refrain from randomly walking around’. The Supreme Court in Kabul went further. In ordinances never implemented, it instructed women to leave their homes only with their husbands’ permission and only when absolutely necessary. If they went out, women were to cover themselves completely; never wear attractive clothing, perfume or jewellery that made a noise; nor walk gracefully or with pride or in the middle of the sidewalk; or speak loudly or to strangers or laugh in public. The court also called on the government to dismiss all female employees and close those ‘breeding grounds of debauchery and adultery’, girls schools.

  The mujahideen were divided over whether to make a spectacle of punishments of criminals. But in September 1992, five months into their rule, the Rabbani government publicly executed three men, and then four more, for murder, looting and robbery. As would often be the case, some of those executed were fighters because of the lawlessness they brought to the capital. As would also become the norm, they were said to have confessed to their crimes. The crowds in Zarnegar Park—where May Day rallies once culminated—were all-male, primarily young and numbered several thousand, providing a ready market for food and drink vendors. Pakistani photographers with Associated Press and Agence France-Presse took pictures of the condemned with hoods over their heads, ropes attached to gibbets tied around their necks, standing on tables. Then a mujahideen guard kicked away the tables and photographers took more pictures.

  A few public punishments occurred in other places. In the south, one of the victim’s family administered the punishment—the widow of a murdered man slit his murderer’s throat. To the north, a woman was stoned to death after her husband denounced her as a prostitute. But the Rabbani government staged public punishments just once more, in Zarnegar Park in March 1996, when it hanged three men for murdering two shepherds and stealing their sheep, before a cheering crowd of several thousand who surged towards the gallows but were forced back by soldiers.

  This time the hangings were photographed by representatives of Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse, which all had begun employing resident staff in Kabul. They were also photographed by American James Nachtwey, who had a roving assignment with Time. As often happens with photojournalism, Time miscaptioned his work, presenting the hangings as ‘Raw justice: vigilantism rules in Kabul’, when those executed had been convicted by a government tribunal. British cameraman Peter Jouvenal was also there, sixteen years after he first went into Afghanistan. He was working with the BBC’s foreign affairs correspondent, John Simpson, on a documentary that became Afghanistan: Soldiers of Allah. Since new BBC guidelines precluded the screening of scenes in which people were killed or dying, Jouvenal filmed only the gibbets, the ropes, the crowd and the shadows cast by the dead men’s feet.

  CHAPTER 23

  White

  White was the colour of the Taliban, whose founders were ‘talibs’ or religious students at Islamic schools in Pakistan, which provided free instruction, board and lodging with Saudi funding. Some talibs were young refugees prevented by Pakistan from attending its secular government school system. Others were former fighters against the communists, disgruntled with the old mujahideen groups. When they formed the Taliban, they embraced the Islamic identification of white with purity and chose a white flag. Their clothes, standard for men of the Pashtun south, were often also white except for their turbans which usually were black, and worn with one end hanging almost to the waist. ‘With the tails of their turbans streaming, their loose shirts and flapping trousers of white cotton, their full beards… they leap straight out of some Victorian mezzotint’, British journalist Peter Popham observed with Orientalist enthusiasm. He found the Taliban’s appearance ‘inordinately romantic’.

  By some accounts, the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar, joined the mujahideen in the mid-1980s but abandoned fighting after the Soviet withdrawal to become an imam west of Kandahar. By other accounts, he started fighting only after 1989. Either way, Mullah Omar was a fighter and a cleric of no particular distinction—part of his appeal to other founders of the Taliban who wanted a leader independent of existing groups. A photograph of Mullah Omar, perhaps the only one, was taken before the Taliban’s emergence when, having lost his right eye, he was one of many injured fighters who sought financial assistance in Kandahar, and Khalid Hadi, that documenter of disfigurement, recorded his empty socket. While he led the Taliban, Mullah Omar was never formally pho
tographed or filmed.

  The extent to which the Taliban were their own creation or a creature of the Pakistani government remains contested. So is whether the Rabbani government initially helped the Taliban to fight Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, little realising how powerful they would become. By most accounts, the Taliban’s immediate motivation for taking up arms in 1994 was to stop the abuses by warlords in Afghanistan’s Pashtun south who abducted and raped girls and boys and tyrannised travellers. That October, after taking Spin Baldak, a transport hub controlled by Hekmatyar, they freed a Pakistani convoy, which one of Hekmatyar’s commanders had seized, and hanged this commander from a tank barrel—their first use of public spectacle to display their power. In just two days that November, they took Kandahar, after the commander of its biggest militia opted not to fight, probably for payment, and required everyone with guns to relinquish them.

  The Taliban enjoyed substantial support in Kandahar because they brought relative peace to the city and introduced laws which in large part expressed the values of southern Pashtuns. They ordered women to wear chadaris and prohibited them from working and studying, which few had been able to do because Kandahar had been too dangerous. They banned women from shopping, then allowed them to do so if they stayed outside stores—one of several slight ameliorations of their initial proscriptions. They stipulated that women could only go out when accompanied by a male relative and forbade women from riding bicycles or motorcycles or driving cars. They ordered young men to cut their hair and prohibited almost all forms of sport.

  Hekmatyar’s main force was outside Kabul, subjecting the city to indiscriminate rocket fire. Early in 1995, the Taliban defeated it, confirming the Taliban as the major Pashtun force in Afghanistan. But when the Taliban, in turn, tried to take Kabul, Massoud repulsed them, prompting them to continue the indiscriminate attacks on the capital. When the Rabbani government commemorated the mujahideen’s taking of Kabul three years before, a parade, led by a white-gloved bandmaster, featured Soviet SCUD missiles, American Stingers and English muskets, echoing the Jeshyn celebrations of old. But Rabbani was so fearful of attack that he staged this ‘anniversary’ three days early before a hastily invited audience.

  The Taliban also brought war back to Herat where the mujahideen leader Ismael Khan had improved public services by taxing trade with Iran. While Ismael Khan repulsed the Taliban with help from Massoud, the Taliban prevailed in September 1995 and piled up corpses of Ismael Khan’s soldiers in front of his former office as a warning to Heratis. They also began transforming life in the city. Their exclusion of women, except medical workers, from government employment, deprived Herat of most of its teachers. While many boys were denied an education, all 20,000 schoolgirls lost their places. Whereas young men enraged by the Taliban’s regulation of how they could wear their hair took to the streets in protest, young women excluded from education resorted to graffiti. ‘We girls want to go back to school,’ they wrote on the walls of Herat’s main mosque.

  The Cloak of the Prophet—donned by Amanullah in 1929 as part of a vain attempt to regain his throne—was housed in Kandahar in a special shrine inside a series of boxes behind multiple locked doors. When 1500 clerics from the south met in Kandahar in the spring of 1996, Mullah Omar took out the cloak to boost his authority. After climbing a mosque in the city centre, he held the cloak aloft with his hands in its sleeves and declared himself Afghanistan’s ‘Commander of the Faithful’. One witness was Peter Jouvenal, who happened to be there with the BBC’s John Simpson working on Afghanistan: Soldiers of Allah. From their minibus, which had windows curtained as if carrying women, Jouvenal spotted Mullah Omar on the mosque and covertly filmed him through a gap in the curtains—the one instance of Mullah Omar making a spectacle of himself and the one instance of his being filmed.

  The Taliban’s rise led Rabbani and Massoud to enter an accord with their arch-enemy of more than a decade, Hekmatyar, which saw him become prime minister in June. After moving to Kabul, Hekmatyar closed its surviving cinemas and required women to wear black hijab on the streets and in mixed gatherings, but enforcement of the new dress code was weak and compliance only partial, especially among young women working for international agencies in the Shahr-e Naw. As rumours circulated that Hekmatyar would reinstitute purdah and one government ministry stood down its female employees, members of the Women’s Radio and Television Organisation formed by Shafiqa Habibi asserted their right to work and declared themselves satisfied with the response. ‘Prime Minister Hekmatyar has invited women to take part in all aspects of life, provided they wear an Islamic hijab,’ announced Habibi, who remained on television. ‘He has recognised the social and economic rights of women and recognised that they are an integral part of society.’

  Amina Safi Afzali, a science graduate of Kabul University whose husband had been a Jamiat commander killed in the Soviet war, tried to shift the focus back to the Taliban. In early September 1996, about two hundred members of the Women’s Islamic Movement formed by Afzali marked the anniversary of the Taliban taking Herat by marching to the offices of the United Nations in Kabul. There they protested at the Taliban’s ‘gross violations of the human rights of women’, especially their closure of girls schools, exclusion of women from the workplace and imposition of the chadari. With the Taliban on Kabul’s outskirts bombarding the capital more heavily and indiscriminately than ever, the demonstrators thought they were better off under Hekmatyar.

  Kabul fell to the Taliban a few weeks later—possibly aided by Osama bin Laden who, having moved from Sudan to Afghanistan, may have bought off commanders outside the capital. Rather than try to defend the city, Massoud and Rabbani retreated north with their troops. Najibullah might have left with them but thought it humiliating to accept the Tajiks’ help or did not trust them. He also expected the Taliban to respect his sanctuary with the United Nations. Instead, on their first night in the capital, they seized Najibullah and battered, possibly castrated and shot him. Then they hung his mangled body from a traffic control post in nearby Ariana Square and placed unlit cigarettes between his fingers as a sign of debauchery. They also hung his brother, Shahpur Ahmadzai, from the same post, with banknotes stuffed in his mouth as a symbol of corruption.

  The Taliban justified these executions on the basis that their council and senior clerics had unanimously sentenced Najibullah to death as a mass murderer. They argued that formal proceedings were unnecessary because ‘everyone knew Najibullah was guilty’. They attributed his killing to ‘the anger of the people’. Others blamed Khalqis who had joined the Taliban but maintained their old enmity towards the Parchami Najibullah. Islamabad was also accused as the Taliban’s ringmaster. Yet the killings of Najibullah and Shahpur Ahmadzai were part of a pattern of the Taliban marking their victories by hanging their opponents from tank barrels and piling up their corpses, while rarely raping or looting.

  The killings also reprised those of Bacha Saqqao and his closest followers in 1929, which had remained alive in Pashtun memory, and also had their own visual portents. At demonstrations in Dacca, Delhi, Islamabad and Peshawar, supporters of the mujahideen had torched effigies of Najibullah, just as they had earlier burned effigies of Babrak Karmal, Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin. Refugees in Pakistan had woven carpets showing the mujahideen hanging Najibullah, and graffitists had brought this image close to Kabul. On a daytrip from the capital while Najibullah ruled, Australian journalist Christopher Kremmer noticed a house adorned with an image of Najibullah on the gallows, a prediction and a threat.

  Afghanistan’s flag became white—its twenty-third in the twentieth century, a far greater number than any other country, and a marked contrast with the start of the century when it was all black. But after a year, when the Taliban turned the mujahideen’s ‘Islamic State’ into the ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’, they embellished this white flag with the Shahada in big black script. Although they controlled much more of Afghanistan than the Rabbani government had ever done, and came to control m
ore, only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates recognised their rule. For the first time, in practice if not international law, Afghanistan had a cleric as head of state.

  Mazar-e Sharif was the last big Afghan city to remain outside Taliban control. Early in 1997, when the American rug dealer Tom Cole made a buying trip from Peshawar on the one civilian aircraft operated by Abdul Rashid Dostum, he found that women ‘walked freely’, some in chadaris, but many ‘completely unveiled’. Cole wandered the city brandishing his camera ‘feeling perfectly relaxed’. A few weeks later, Taliban fought their way into Mazar-e Sharif only to be repulsed by Uzbek and Hazara soldiers, who massacred thousands of them. A year later when the Taliban took the city, they engaged in even greater slaughter of Hazaras and abducted many girls and women, whom they forced into marriage. When Dostum went into exile in Turkey, Massoud led the only significant opposition to the Taliban and he controlled just five per cent of the country.

  A yardstick of the Taliban’s power was Afghanistan’s Independence Day on 19 August, commemorating the day Amanullah had announced his peace treaty with Britain in 1919. In 1997 and 1998 the Taliban simply marked this day with addresses on Radio Sharia, as they had renamed Radio Afghanistan. In 1999 athletes paraded in the Ghazi Stadium followed by a game of buzkashi and the Taliban held a function in a packed hall. In 2000 they held their first military parade. In 2001 they staged a much bigger one, led by two trucks pulling British cannons from the 1919 war and two men carrying spears, symbolising the primitive weaponry used by Afghans against the British. Uniformed soldiers marching without a band kept remarkable order. Big military equipment followed. A male paratrooper replaced the female parachutists introduced by the communists. While some banners were in Pashto and English, others were just in English for the foreign journalists in the city, especially two television crews. ‘Our country is a graveyard of invaders and colonists,’ a banner announced, with the British and Russians in mind. ‘What other country in the world can boast of defeating two superpowers?’ a broadcaster asked.