Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium

by Tim Bonyhady

  The punishments imposed by the Taliban were exaggerated and misrepresented. The Scottish Daily Record presented the stadium as if its sole use had been as an execution ground where ‘all male, all silent’ crowds watched as ‘hundreds were killed without mercy’. The host of a National Public Radio program in the United States maintained that the stadium was ‘where, every Friday afternoon, scores of people would either be executed, hung from the soccer goalposts or their limbs would be amputated’. Azar Nafisi, best known for her book Reading Lolita in Tehran, thought it was where a woman was ‘shot to death because she’s improperly dressed’. Robina Muqimyar Jalali, who in 2004 became one of the first two Afghan women to compete at the Olympic Games, told a journalist: ‘I go running in the stadium where the Taliban used to play football with women’s heads.’

  Several journalists tried to discover more about Zarmeena, and many questions were soon being asked. Had her husband abused her and their daughters? Was she raped as part of the civil war in Kabul? Had one of her daughters been the killer? Did Zarmeena’s brother-in-law sell two of her daughters into sex slavery? But little was clarified. Anton Antonowicz of the London Mirror was one who tried. He wrote two features about Zarmeena in 2002, inconsistent in key respects. The first claimed that Zarmeena’s husband, Alauddin, was brutalised by the Taliban long before her brother-in-law shot Zarmeena in the stadium. In the second, Alauddin had become Alluzai, brutalised under the Soviets, and one of his young Taliban relatives had killed Zarmeena.

  Novelist Khaled Hosseini has described himself as ‘haunted’ by Zarmeena’s execution. Born in Kabul in 1965, he left aged eleven because his diplomat father was posted to Paris, then went to California after his father requested political asylum following the Soviet invasion. Having finished high school, Hosseini studied medicine and acquired American citizenship, and he was practising as a doctor in Los Angeles and working on his first novel about Afghanistan in 2001. The attacks of 9/11 put a stop to his writing because he was embarrassed that ‘his country’, as he still conceived Afghanistan, ‘had been involved’. But when Hosseini found people ‘incredibly gracious’, he completed The Kite Runner, which reached a bigger international audience than any previous book about Afghanistan.

  In Hosseini’s second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, one of the protagonists is executed in the Ghazi Stadium after killing her husband. But his most influential treatment of the stadium is late in The Kite Runner when the narrator Amir goes to Kabul. Before a game of soccer, he notices ‘holes and craters everywhere, most notably a pair of deep holes in the ground behind the south-end goalposts’. He does not think further about them until half-time when three pick-up trucks arrive. A woman in a chadari is in one, a blindfolded man is in another, the third is ‘filled with something’. Hosseini sustains the suspense for more than a page, then reveals that the woman and man are to be placed in the holes and stoned to death for adultery, using stones in the third pick-up.

  The one stoning for adultery under the Taliban reported at length was in Kandahar in August 1996. The New York Times’s John F. Burns and the Guardian’s Jonathon Steele wrote separate pieces about it after visiting Kandahar together. Hosseini broadly follows their accounts but, apart from three pivotal moments, he has Amir keep his eyes shut to avoid the horror of the stonings. In marked contrast to RAWA’s visual record of Zarmeena’s death, Hosseini evokes the killings through the sounds of the crowd. His fictional account in The Kite Runner, and the 2007 film of his book, had such effect that it became a commonplace that there were ‘regular stonings of women’ in the Ghazi Stadium, though no one was killed this way in Kabul.

  Because the Ghazi was thought to be a place perverted, its use as a sports ground from the start of 2002 was treated as a key sign of a return to normality. Games between local teams, where the players wore shorts, the crowd could clap, music was played at half-time and the game was not interrupted by prayer, were a first step. An international game had far more interest. In February 2002, the British Football Association and Barclaycard sponsored a ‘Game of Unity’ between an Afghan team and soldiers from the international security force. Before the game, the goalposts used by the Taliban for hangings received new white paint.

  That was not all. When the German soccer great Franz Beckenbauer visited, an Afghan player wanted ‘those bloodstained goalposts’ ripped out at once. Beckenbauer called for a new pitch because the ground was brown due to severe drought. Although soon well watered and green, the idea that the ground was contaminated by its past took hold. The standard story was that ‘so much blood has been spilled on the football field and seeped into the soil below’ that an ‘attempt to grow grass there failed’. The opposite was sometimes also said: the blood had nourished the pitch’s ‘lush grass’.

  When the Afghan government decided to spend $50,000 on the stadium, a local company replaced the soil to a depth of half a metre to create a better playing surface and so ‘the players would not be stepping on the blood of so many people’. American journalist Dexter Filkins, who had witnessed an execution and an amputation in the stadium, soon found ‘a carpet of grass, green and deep’ and a place so transformed ‘almost nothing reminds you of what happened there’. The US still decided to spend more. When it laid new artificial turf at a cost of $1 million so the stadium could be certified for international competition, much of the focus was on ‘a break with the atrocities of the past’. ‘The dirt beneath the field—dirt once so soaked with blood that the grass couldn’t grow—was removed and replaced with fresh soil, symbolising a new start,’ announced the public affairs department of the US Forces in Afghanistan, though the soil had already been replaced.

  Elsewhere, in areas which the Karzai government did not control, public punishments continued occasionally. The execution in 2012 of a twenty-year-old woman called Najiba, in the Shinwari district north of Kabul, attracted particular attention because her death was filmed. As usual, there were many competing stories. Najiba was said to have been executed on trumped-up charges of adultery because her husband was part of a village militia that killed a Taliban leader; for having multiple affairs with Taliban fighters; for having been a sex slave of different commanders; or for leaving her husband, perhaps after being abused, and running off with a Taliban commander accused of assisting the government. The film captured Najiba kneeling by herself in a blue chadari; a man approaching with a Kalashnikov; his first shots missing; the third hitting Najiba in the back; and him continuing to fire as onlookers shout, ‘Allahu Akbar!’ Other footage, of several spectators holding up their phones to record the event, suggests that those responsible for the execution were happy to have it filmed.

  An appetite for old images of an apparently unthreatening Afghanistan that embraced the western was satisfied, above all, by Laurence Brun’s photograph from 1972 of the three miniskirted women in the Shahr-e Naw. It had been ignored for almost three decades before Elle published it in 2001 and British photographer Harriet Logan reproduced it in her 2002 book about Afghanistan. It soon gained unprecedented life on the internet. As it was posted and reposted on sites often used by the far right, it was never explained that this seemingly idyllic image of youth and freedom represented women in just a small, highly distinctive part of Kabul. There was never any mention of the acid attacks and shooting of women in western dress; no indication of the political fracturing of Kabul society; no recognition that other photographs of young women by Brun showed passionate leftists demonstrating with red flags on May Day.

  The photograph’s iconic status—and the heft of the visual—was confirmed in 2017 when President Donald Trump was considering whether to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan as he had promised to do during his election campaign. The Washington Post revealed that Trump’s National Security adviser, H. R. McMaster, showed him ‘a snapshot of Afghan women in miniskirts’—Brun’s image—to demonstrate that ‘western norms had existed there before and could return’. Some reports suggested that, particularly because the youn
g women were attractive, Brun’s photograph prompted Trump to increase the US force. As one headline put it, Trump ‘changed mind on Afghanistan after seeing a picture of women in miniskirts’.

  The unveiling at the Ghazi Stadium—even if it had been photographed—would never have excited this kind of attention because of the coats, gloves, heavy stockings and headscarves worn by the women who attended. Its fiftieth anniversary in August 2009 passed unnoticed. That the unveiling might again be commemorated, as Mohammad Daoud had in the mid-1970s, was unimaginable because of Hamid Karzai’s conservatism. As a result, there was no reflection on Daoud’s claim that his ‘bold and chivalrous action’ in 1959 had freed ‘talented and educated women’ to ‘take part in the building of the nation’ and ‘contribute actively and openly…in national life’, no reconsideration of this ‘new start’, no recognition of how two afternoons in the stadium—the unveiling in 1959 and Zarmeena’s execution in 1999—profoundly shaped Afghanistan.

  Queen Soruya, photographed by the Bieber Studio in Berlin, while on her Grand Tour of Europe with King Amanullah in 1928.

  One of the first photographs of unveiled women on the streets of Kabul, taken in 1959 by Andrew Wilson, who dubbed the woman looking at the camera ‘Miss Afghanistan’.

  Kabul University, 1962—not only a co-educational class but one where women sat next to men.

  ‘The New Women of Afghanistan’ in an industrial workplace, the Kabul printing house, 1962.

  The weaving of pictorial rugs flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, with King Amanullah in dress uniform a prime subject.

  John Lennon in his Afghan coat, photographed by John Downing in May 1968 at the London launch of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

  Kabul in the early autumn of 1972—Laurence Brun’s photograph has become the iconic image of Afghanistan’s modernisation under King Zahir Shah.

  High-school students in Kabul, May Day 1972, photographed by Laurence Brun. The main banner reads: ‘Let us walk towards peace, democracy and social progress.’

  Communist soldiers in the centre of Kabul celebrate following the Saur Revolution of 27 April 1978.

  The Pul-e Charkhi prison outside Kabul, January 1980—an inmate being hugged following his release by the new Soviet-installed government of Babrak Karmal.

  After François Lochon became the first photojournalist to record the Soviets’ forces in Kabul—flying in and out of the Afghan capital on 30 December 1979—his photographs were carried by magazines around the world, including West Germany’s Stern, which asked, ‘Have the Russians gone wild?’

  One of Alain Mingam’s prize-winning photographs of the mujahideen’s execution of an alleged traitor, June 1980.

  Red Devil, a poster of the Internal Islamic Front of Afghanistan, produced in Islamabad in about 1983, based on a photograph of Gene Simmons, ‘the Demon’ of the American rock band Kiss.

  Sharbat Gula, photographed by Steve McCurry, on the cover of National Geographic.

  This rug—based on a political poster produced in Peshawar in 1988—depicts Afghanistan’s President Najibullah as a Soviet puppet under attack by the mujahideen.

  One of the ‘tanky’ rugs, with oscillating tanks and ewers, sold in Kabul around 1989.

  A Kalashnikov mat woven by an Afghan refugee in Pakistan at about the same time.

  One of the ‘Jihad’ rugs initiated by refugee dealer Sufi Abdul Wahid, based on a 1989 mujahideen poster.

  ‘Sister! With your Islamic covering, you turn the hopes of the enemies of Islam into disappointment,’ exclaims this poster, produced in Peshawar, which the mujahideen pasted up across Kabul after they seized it in April 1992.

  The bodies of Najibullah and his brother Shahpur Ahmadzai, hung by the Taliban after they took Kabul in September 1996—a photograph by B. K. Bangash of Associated Press.

  16 November 1999, the execution of Zarmeena by the Taliban in Kabul’s Ghazi Stadium, covertly filmed by members of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.

  SOURCES

  In keeping with the book’s focus, these notes relate principally to material about the visual, especially primary sources that may otherwise be difficult to locate.

  INTRODUCTION

  For Queen Soruya and Helen of Troy, see Evening Independent, St Petersburg, Florida, 19 January 1929, p. 3. For 1979 and its consequences, see Christian Caryl, Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century, Basic Books, New York, 2013; Alla Ivanchikova, Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars, Purdue UP, West Lafayette, 2019, esp. ch. 3. For war rugs in Sydney, see the cover of the Sydney Review, October 1990, discussed p. 3; Woven History: Stories in Carpets, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 1990. Bashir Sakhawarz’s ‘Afghanistan 1972’ is at http://www.swans.com/library/art17/bashir02.html.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Ghazi

  For the speeches in 1959 at the start of Jeshyn, see Afghanistan News, October 1959, pp. 2–8. Sylvia Matheson wrote about the chadari in Time off to Dig, Odhams, London, 1961, p. 26; Joyce Dunsheath and Eleanor Baillie in Afghan Quest, Harrap, London, 1961, p. 95. For Edward Hunter, see his The Past Present: A Year in Afghanistan, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1959, chs. 4, 5. Albert Hourani’s ‘The Vanishing Veil: A Challenge to the Old Order’ is in UNESCO Courier, January 1956, pp. 35–7. Khrushchev’s account is in Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, Penn State UP, State College, 2007, vol. 3, p. 766. For Peter Richie Calder, see his Men Against the Jungle, Allen & Unwin, London, 1954, p. 183. Ruth Frances Woodsmall wrote one of the best extended accounts of the move towards dress reform in Afghanistan in her Women and the New East, Middle East Institute, Washington, 1960. For Andrzej Binkowski’s meeting with Zeinab Seraj, and his photograph of her, see his Von Taschkent nach Kabul, Brockhaus, Leipzig, 1962, p. 154. For an early account of Anahita Ratibzad, see Hunter, pp. 197–9. On Ariana Airlines, see Jenifer Van Vleck, ‘An Airline at the Crossroads of the World: Ariana Afghan Airlines, Modernisation and the Global Cold War’, in History and Technology, vol. 25, 2009, pp. 3–24. Delia & Ferdinand Kuhn wrote in Borderlands, Knopf, New York, 1962, pp. 268–70. Shirin Majrooh recounted her experience of the unveiling in Isabelle Delloye, Women of Afghanistan, Ruminator Books, St Paul, 2003, pp. 97–8.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Flapper Queen

  For Amanullah closing the royal harems, and much else, see May Schinasi, Kabul: A History 1773–1948, Brill, Leiden, 2016. For ‘rigid seclusion’, see National Geographic Magazine, January 1921, p. 97. The discussion of photography is in the The Times, 12 July 1928, p. 14; 16 July 1928, p. 10. For the Grand Tour, see Ehsan Ullah d’Afghanistan, Le voyage d’Aman Ullah Roi d’Afghanistan: 1927–1928, Ceredaf, Paris, 2005. The New York Times (NYT) described Soruya’s arrival in Italy on 9 January 1928, p. 5, and photographs of her on 15 April 1928, p. 56. Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah lauded Amanullah in Afghanistan for the Afghans, London, Diamond, 1928, esp. p. 7; Westward to Mecca, Witherby, London, 1928, esp. pp. 89, 91. On photography, see May Schinasi, ‘La Photographie en Afghanistan’, in Annali, vol. 56, no. 2, 1996; Holly Edwards, ‘Unruly Images: Photography in and of Afghanistan’, in Artibus Asiae, vol. 66, 2006, pp. 111–36. The Australian journalist was in the Australasian, 21 July 1928, p. 5. For ‘mystery of the East’, Amanullah and his cinecamera, and Roland Wild’s photography, see Wild’s Amanullah: Ex-King of Afghanistan, Hurst & Blackett, London, 1932, pp. 38, 178–9. For the impact of photographs of Soruya, see St Petersburg Times, 28 March 1928, p. 13. For the alleged photomontage, see Sadhan Mukherjee, Afghanistan: From Tragedy to Triumph, Sterling, New Delhi, 1984, p. 67. For Sorab K. H. Katrak, see his Through Amanullah’s Afghanistan: A Book of Travel, Karachi, 1929, p. 48. Key articles by May Mott-Smith include ‘The Afghanistan of Today: Woman’s Impressions’, Strait Times, 24 December 1928, p. 12; ‘Afghanistan, the Turbulent’, NYT, Sunday Magazine, 25 August 1929, p. 8; and ‘Behind the Purdah in Afghanistan’, Asia, 16 December 1929, pp. 12–16, 51. For the new dress code for women, see Thomas Wide,
‘Astrakhan, Borqa’, Chadari, Dreshi: The Economy of Dress in Early-twentieth-century Afghanistan’, in Stephanie Cronin (ed.), Anti-Veiling Campaigns in the Muslin World: Gender, Modernism and the Politics of Dress, Routledge, Florence, 2014, esp. pp. 164, 189–91. Jackson Fleming’s articles include ‘Clouds Above Festive Kabul’, Asia, April 1929, pp. 280–7, 324–30; ‘The Troubles of an Afghan King’, Asia, May 1929, pp. 402–14; ‘The Afghan Tragi-Comedy’, Asia, June 1929, pp. 467–73, 507–11. A key account of the uprising is R. D. McChesney, Kabul under Siege: Fayz Muhammad’s Account of the 1929 Uprising, Markus, Wiener, Princeton, 1998. Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah damned Amanullah in The Tragedy of Amanullah, Alexander-Onseley, London, 1933, esp. pp. vii–viii. The Soviet official who wrote about Amanullah’s ‘bourgeois reforms’ was F. Raskolnikov in ‘Civil War in Afghanistan’, The Living Age, May 1929, pp. 207–11. Two other key accounts of Amanullah’s rule are Ludwig W. Adamec, Afghanistan’s Foreign Affairs to the Mid-Twentieth Century, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1974; Senzil K. Nawid, Religious Response to Social Change in Afghanistan 1919–1929: King Amanullah and the Afghan Ulama, Mazda, Costa Merca, 1989.