A Burqa and a Hard Place

by Sally Cooper

  He flicked the switch. ‘Has it been tuned?’

  Tuned to what? I wondered, though knew better than to verbalise.

  Bing flicked through the channels and shook his head. ‘Okay,’ he sighed. My delinquency was now beyond comment but at least he was looking amused. ‘You’re going to have to get on our security register, get a call sign so you can do a radio check. Take this to the radio room down the corridor.’ He handed the radio back to me. I left Bing’s office with an awful feeling I’d just created a lasting impression.

  By the end of the afternoon, in preparation for the nightly radio check, my two-way radio had been programmed and I’d been added to the security register.

  ‘Radio check is 20 to 2100 hours. If you miss it, I have to come out and look for you and that makes me really angry,’ said Bing.

  It hadn’t taken me long to figure out that an angry Bing on my doorstep at 2101 hours wasn’t something I wanted. Perhaps ‘the worst’ was defined as recalcitrant staff not toeing the line. Any thought about having unwittingly signed up for the army was confirmed to me when I was told not to use my name when doing my radio check. From now on I was ‘Uniform November Four-Three’.

  10

  Spring Cleaning

  Tuesday 15 June was Ismail’s birthday. What that really meant was that an unnamed bureaucrat decided it was the day Ismail was born. With a high infant mortality rate, few hospitals and almost no communications infrastructure, birth registration in the Ghan had never been regarded as important. There had traditionally been no formal registration process and any details that may have been recorded had long since been destroyed during the war.

  Ask any Afghan how old they are and the answer is usually something like ‘Ummm, about twenty-nine … I think’. Someone called Naw Roz (New Year) was invariably born on 21 March, Afghan New Year. Any Ramazan, the Dari word for Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting and prayer, would almost certainly have been born in the month after which he was named. For most Afghans, birth dates are redundant. It was only when Ismail needed his papers to get to Pakistan during the Taliban’s rule that a bearded bureaucrat in the passport office decided that 15 June 1962 would be the day Ismail was born and completed the paperwork accordingly. When I called another Afghan friend to say that I was sorry I had missed his birthday – or, rather, the date he had once told me was his birthday – he said, ‘Oh yes, that’s right,’ and asked why I had called.

  Ismail’s birthday was not a day to celebrate, but for a different reason entirely. At the IRIN office, Tuesday 15 June was also the day I told the production team that I was advertising their jobs and instead of three producers, I would be hiring only two. Almost two months after my arrival, the day’s tasks in the office seemed to revolve around internet chatrooms, two-hour lunches, and complaints that we didn’t have the latest in mobile phones. Millions of dollars had been poured into the Ghan’s reconstruction and everyone wanted a piece of the action. I doubted that the IRIN staff thought they were necessarily entitled to state-of-the-art mobile phones but they reasoned that if their friend who worked for another aid agency had one, then they should too. It was as if the Cargo Cult and its idolatry of manufactured goods had been relocated to Central Asia. But most of all, after repeated attempts, I wasn’t convinced that any of the three were capable of making their own radio programs let alone able to train someone else to do it. I wanted a small and, as much as was possible in the new Afghanistan, professional team to whom I could gradually hand over the reins of training. I wasn’t sure advertising the jobs would necessarily produce anyone better but it would open up the field and allow me to see who else was around.

  This was the first time I’d ever had to ‘remove’ someone. But if our project was to train sixty Afghan journalists around the country, removal needed to happen sooner rather than later. Although the writing had been on the wall for some time, the more I got to know Aziz, Mirwais and Zarghona, the more awful I began to feel. With thousands of Afghans returning home, good jobs were hard to come by and all three were the breadwinners of their families. In my time out of the office, quiet evenings on the balcony with Jennifer, Henk and Mathilde, doing my Friday laundry or eating breakfast with Dr Martin, I agonised over it, but eventually pragmatism prevailed. There’s an old Chinese saying long appropriated by Development Inc.: if you give a man a fish, he will ask for another, but if you teach him to fish, he’ll be able to look after himself. Right now, IRIN needed some good strong fishermen.

  In the absence of a conference room, IRIN held its meetings in the studio. All three half stood when I walked in, catching themselves before I once again suggested they probably didn’t need to stand up every time I entered the room.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, sitting down at the head of the table and taking a deep breath. I hadn’t alluded to an office shake-up before now and this meeting was going to be hard for everyone. ‘Our project seems to be moving slowly and we haven’t really been training as many journalists as we should have.’

  I paused so Mirwais could translate what I’d just said. Having a translator made the task of delivering the news easier. Although Mirwais was one of the recipients, talking through a translator created a barrier between me and the bad news I was about to deliver.

  ‘In order to be able to do the training we’ve committed to, we need to remodel the team. I think it might be better if we had two producers instead of three. To make it as fair as possible, I’ve decided to advertise for two producers and each of you can apply.’

  I watched while they absorbed what I had said. Afghans rarely show much emotion, at least not in public and certainly not to foreigners who had just told them they may soon be unemployed.

  ‘Okay,’ said Mirwais.

  Aziz and Zarghona nodded.

  ‘Does anyone have any questions?’ I asked.

  Mirwais translated but everyone remained silent. ‘No. It is clear. Thank you for letting us know,’ he said.

  ‘Tashakoor,’ said Aziz.

  ‘Tashakoor,’ mumbled Zarghona as I stood up. They half rose again as I picked up my notebook and left the room. Even in times of crisis, Afghans never forget their manners. I really didn’t know how they felt, whether this was the end of the world or, in the great Afghan scheme of things, this was just another of the many speed bumps in their lives to date – that it was God’s will and we would await his verdict.

  Advertising the producer positions presented a problem. There was no Situations Vacant in the daily paper. The Taliban destroyed most of the country’s printing presses and, while some newspapers were starting to reappear, what dailies existed struggled for readership in a city of mind-boggling illiteracy. In the absence of any other way of advertising the jobs, I decided to use the most effective medium in town – Arman FM.

  ‘Excuse me, Sally, but that is a bad idea,’ said Ismail, who had dropped the ‘Miss’ in favour of taking a proprietary interest in my thinking. ‘No-one listens to Arman. The people listen to RTA.’ Radio-Television Afghanistan was the government broadcaster. While it wasn’t quite the ABC, it was widely regarded as the bastion of all that was culturally proper.

  I smiled. I’d just been in the car with Ismail and watched him fiddle with the radio dial until he found Arman and proceeded to turn the volume up as high as was culturally permissible.

  I thanked him for his excellent idea but told him my decision was made and dispatched him to the Arman office with a copy of the advertisement in English, Dari and Pashto, Afghanistan’s other official language.

  Ismail returned a short time later. ‘They have promised to put our advertisement in the condolences section,’ he said. ‘This is very good because it runs three times a day and the people always listen.’

  Ismail, educated by the Soviets, had a habit of calling his fellow countrymen ‘the people’. The condolences section, or death notices, was one of the most popular – and lucrative – segments of any Afghan radio station. However, while we may well be losing a few producers, I felt
a death notice was a little premature.

  Sometimes it seemed Afghan logic would have it that a square peg could fit neatly into a round hole, whether it was originally intended to or not. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. Today’s peg was neither square nor round, it was bent horribly out of shape and the best thing I could do was try to fix it.

  ‘I’m not sure the condolence section is what we’re after,’ I said to a perplexed Ismail as I donned my headscarf and left the office. Perhaps there was still time to save the advertisement from its fate.

  The Arman FM office was in Wazir Akhbar Khan, a well-to-do suburb of Kabul that, in a previous life, had been home to ministers, high-paid government officials and, in more recent times, aid agencies. Because of the number of security threats it had received, the walls of the Arman compound were high and the gates heavily guarded. Like many ‘offices’ in Kabul, it was once a house, though I suspected few of Kabul’s walls were lined with posters of Eminem and Destiny’s Child.

  In 2004, Kabul’s airwaves were a cacophony of sound ranging from Afghan poetry – dramatic sagas of unrequited love – to the thump of Nirvana beamed out via American armed forces radio. The country in which the Taliban had banned music was making up for lost time.

  Arman FM started rocking Kabul in the spring of 2003. It was Kabul’s first post-Taliban commercial radio station, the brainchild of three Afghan-born Melbourne-bred brothers, the Mohsenis. While it wasn’t quite jeans and jihad, nor was it burn your burqa. Arman blasted out Hindi pop, electro-Iranian, pre-Taliban Afghan ‘pop’ … and Kylie Minogue. The format was loosely based on Australian music stations and included the standard breakfast chat show and a late afternoon ‘drivetime’. Few Kabulis owned cars but every taxi, bus, Toonis and Land Cruiser had a working radio.

  It had been a controversial project, many believing that Arman FM was ‘too Western’ for Kabul’s traditional conservatism. Many from Development Inc. thought Afghanistan shouldn’t be thrust into the twenty-first century at such a pace and certainly not to the tune of Kylie. From the Afghan community, criticism had come from the usual suspects: the mullahs and religious conservatives. When Arman FM first went on air, it received a deluge of complaints about grammatical impurities and a perceived overuse of slang; Afghans place a high value on ‘good’ Persian, spoken well.

  But most Afghans loved Arman FM, though few admitted to listening. In addition to language, Afghan society places great emphasis on how one is seen to be living one’s life. A ‘good Afghan’ was one who was seen to pray five times a day, seen to attend mosque for Friday prayers, seen to read the Koran, seen to abstain from alcohol and seen to pursue traditional Afghan culture. What happened behind closed doors was another matter. Judging from the extraordinary response to Arman’s many on-air competitions, nearly everyone was listening.

  Arman FM may have enjoyed entertaining people but it was, first and foremost, a business. I explained my problem to the sales manager, who spoke excellent English, and returned to the office telling a bewildered Ismail that our advertisement would now run in the Jobs Vacant segment just before the 7 am news.

  ‘The people,’ I added, ‘always listen to the 7 am news.’

  Applications came in thick and fast, though definitions of ‘radio experience’ seemed to vary from those who said they enjoyed listening to New Home, New Life, the BBC’s long-running Afghan drama series, to a handful who had received some form of recent training. I eventually settled on two names: Mirwais and a young man called Asrar. Mirwais was, by far, the best of the old production team. With the departure of Aziz and Zarghona, he would also become the institutional memory. Aziz simply hadn’t shown enough interest in the job and while Zarghona showed great promise, she’d confessed that she didn’t think her father would allow her to travel to the provinces. Afghan women were rarely allowed to travel without a male member of their family accompanying them and, while Zarghona’s family was relatively liberal, they had drawn the line on her travelling with an unmarried foreign woman as a chaperone. I wrote glowing references for both, put in a few calls to friends at other media organisations, and Aziz and Zarghona were dispatched to the world.

  Asrar had been the star pupil of Radio Nida’s rookie producers whom I had trained the previous summer before leaving Kabul for Bamyan. In my excitement at the prospect of his joining the IRIN team, I forgot that, despite its modern trappings, in many ways Kabul life was as medieval as it had been 500 years ago.

  Asrar accepted my job offer but never came to work. Displaying the finest of manners he never told me why. I was, after all, a foreigner and Asrar’s private life was none of my business. But I did eventually figure it out. His boss, the owner of Radio Nida, was very much Asrar’s patron in the traditional sense of the word. While patronage should not be confused with serfdom, in Afghan society, where one’s position is based on an intricate network of reciprocal obligation and allegiance, to walk away from one’s patron was not only career suicide, it was also social suicide. It would have brought great shame on both Asrar and his family.

  The next name on my list was a young man called Faheem. Faheem was twenty years old and knew nothing about radio – but neither did I once. I got my first job at the ABC by writing in and announcing myself as a maker of great coffee and, in exchange for that service, I was willing to hang around and learn something about radio. I didn’t test Faheem’s coffee-making skills. In a nation of inveterate tea drinkers, it would have been unfair. Faheem had started his journalism career as a gofer at one of the few newspapers to survive the Taliban. I felt he had what it took after he described the lengths to which he and his colleagues went to ensure the paper got printed. After they had finished preparing the layout on the office’s sole and, no doubt, decrepit computer, Faheem and a colleague would unplug the hard disk and get on the office bicycle. With his colleague doing the pedalling, Faheem sat on the back and carried the hard disk all the way across town to where their paper could be safely printed. Occasionally they’d be pulled over by the Taliban, at which point his colleague’s rudimentary though useful grasp of Arabic, the language of the madrasahs, ensured them a safe passage.

  The good thing about Faheem was that he had written a few stories for IRIN’s website, he spoke excellent English, had an inquiring mind and was keen to learn. I couldn’t ask for anything more. With Mirwais and Faheem, I felt I now had a team I could work with and the days of staff lounging in cyberspace appeared to be over.

  The news that the Cargo Cult had left the building didn’t seem to make it to Farhad, our cleaner, messenger and chai wallah (tea maker). I’d never quite understood why the IRIN staff couldn’t make their own tea, but this was the Ghan and the importance of who made the tea and who didn’t should never be underestimated. Despite earning more than most civil servants, Farhad didn’t seem particularly interested in cleaning though he did spend a great deal of time playing with his top-of-the-line mobile phone. I’d spent the better part of the last two months asking him, via Ismail, to empty rubbish bins, sweep floors, clean the bathroom and wash the towels, all of which had been met with a sullen pout. As part of the office clean-up, Ismail sat with Farhad and read him a list of his tasks. Farhad was given a month to shape up. His only response was to say that my predecessor had promised to provide him with a Dari tutor, no-one had organised it and when was it going to happen?

  Sometimes, I wondered if I’d landed on another planet. There seemed to have been a shift from 2003 to 2004 and this was not how I remembered Afghans and Afghanistan being. In my short stint the previous summer, there had been an extraordinary optimism in the Ghan and rebuilding the country was seen almost as a national service, an intrinsic part of Afghanistan’s fierce national pride. Now, instead of ‘us’ and ‘we’, it was increasingly ‘me’ and ‘my’ and, when it came to talking about foreigners, ‘us’ and ‘them’. My decision to remove the producers had ultimately been based not on their financial needs but on who was willing and able to do the job. My co
lleagues told me Farhad’s age and circumstances made him one of Kabul’s vulnerable. That was true, but I was sure there were plenty more equally vulnerable young heads of families in need of education and a monthly pay cheque who would have happily emptied a rubbish bin.

  11

  Star Reporter

  In the great scheme of what Development Inc. calls ‘post-conflict countries’, amid the detritus of war, along with the aid workers and the security guys, come the journalists. While the Karwan Sara may have been the haunt of old hacks who had reinvented themselves as ‘media trainers’, we had managed to avoid real live journalists – until now.

  Claudia Lucas and her sidekick arrived with some fan fare early one morning while I sat eating breakfast with Jennifer and Dr Martin. Claudia was a correspondent of some renown with National Public Radio, the American equivalent of the ABC or the BBC. It was going to be a warm day and already the flies were buzzing. Kabul in summer had a seemingly endless population of flies, most of which could be found in the Karwan Sara dining room at 7.30 am. Jennifer was quizzing Martin about the symptoms of giardia, which she feared the Ghan had recently bestowed on her. Her description didn’t exactly lack in detail and I was relieved when the conversation was interrupted by a ruckus at the doorway.

  ‘Oh God, I’m so exhausted,’ said a loud American accent. ‘I can’t believe they put us on Ariana. We’re flying UN to get out of here. I’m going to make sure of it. Ariana sucks.’

  A second or two later, the owner of the voice walked through the door. She was a petite woman, somewhere on the darker side of forty. Dressed in jeans and a baggy denim shirt, her hair was a deep mahogany, styled in a crisp bob that suggested frequent visits to the hairdresser. Despite her apparent exhaustion, her wide, open face was remarkably well made-up for the hour and the location.