Jeremy Corbyn’s victory has annoyed all the right people (pun intended). It’s back to the 1980s so far as abuse and distortion are concerned. So, how loony is the left? And can Corbyn’s supporters defend him against dirty tricks and hate campaigns?
How can you vote against Bolshevism?” A French anti-communist poster from 1919, probably not featuring a vegetarian
Better the 1980s than the 1890s: George Osborne – and the Little-Sir-Echos in the media and the Labour Party – are worried – or happy, the Tories can’t decide on the line on this one – that Jeremy Corbyn will drag Labour back to the 1980s. This is a bit rich, coming from someone who is dragging Britain back to the levels of inequality of the 19th century, George. And, as I remember it, the worst thing about the 1980s was that your lot were in charge.
Corbyn’s candidature dragged the media back to the 1980s. The people who don’t want Labour to go back to the 1980s are busy dusting off the terms of abuse that graced the headlines of that very decade, “loony left” for example. But what was so loony about the left? As I remember it, the tabloids’ main targets were feminism, gay rights, anti-racism and talking to Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, most of which look pretty mainstream now. Another fine journalistic practise that is getting a lot of mileage at the moment – although, to be fair, it never exactly went out of fashion – is distorting what your subject says and stands for.
The people who said Corbyn could not be elected Labour leader now say he can’t win a general election. Have you no shame? You got it wrong. Time for a rethink, not another piece of pro-big business propaganda disguised as analysis. Hey, look! A Sky (!) poll shows he was the most popular of the candidates among the general public and “his left wing policies are also not necessarily as unpopular as many might believe” (they left out the “want to” there, for some reason).
Corbyn’s programme is not all that radical. Corbyn may be the most left-wing Labour leader ever, as Tariq Ali argues, but that’s mainly because of his foreign policy. On domestic policy it’s not exactly storming heaven. I was distracted from my work the other day by a lady from the Bloombergs agency explaining on one of those irritating BBC panel shows that advocating renationalisation of the railways would consign Labour to some circle or other of economists’ hell. But we did it before, Madam, and it wasn’t accompanied by red terror nor did it lead to economic collapse. How will it be paid for, she asked. Well, perhaps by savings on scrapping Trident – Oh sorry, it’s unrealistic not to spend billions on that – or by making Bloomberg subscribers and other top earners pay their fair whack in tax. People’s quantitative easing seems consistent with what Thomas Piketty argues and everyone thinks he’s wonderful, except for the Financial Times on alternate days. Raising the minimum wage? The president of the United States wants that to happen in his country – but then he’s a Muslim socialist born in Kenya, so what does he know?
Corbyn owes much of his victory to social media but can social media defend him? Hoist by their own primaries petard, Labour’s right wing are already plotting to reverse the party’s left turn by any means necessary. A key factor in mobilising for Corbyn was social media, whose echo-chamber effect allows us to consort with the like-minded, reinforcing our views/prejudices and giving us a feeling of power in the numbers, one of the functions of the revolutionary party, if I recall my Lenin. But the social media is also physically isolated, indulging his or her pleasure from home, the workplace or on public transport with headphones clamped to ears. Will the three-pounders or even many of the new party members be prepared to trudge along to monthly party branch meetings, be delegates to constituency parties, conferences etc so as to stop right-wing dirty tricks and ensure that the party’s policies align with those of its leader? Of course, I’m biased. I was expelled from Labour in the 80s. It was quite a relief, to be honest.
Corbynmania was in part a revolt against how democracy works but is there a viable alternative? Some 251,000 people, many of them never involved in politics before, rejected their betters’ advice and voted for Corbyn. Why? Many were young people feeling the effects of austerity and disillusioned with post-2008 capitalism. Many responded to a glimmer of integrity in the sewer of modern politics. And many were reacting against the cynical consumerist strategies that were the Blairites’ only principles but are to some extent inherent to parliamentary democracy, which is not government by the people, for the people but the people choosing who will govern them as a globalised capitalism decides the most important aspects of their lives. Syriza had a mandate to change this but failed. Admittedly, there are only 11 million Greeks but do 64 million Brits – or that proportion who want a change – have the power or the structures to impose it?
In 2007 the rule of General Pervez Musharraf was drawing to an end. His seizure of power in 2001 had encountered little opposition but his failure to tackle corruption and poverty and his support for the US’s post 9/11 War on Terror, which gave birth to a dirty war in Pakistan itself, meant that he was unpopular and under political pressure in 2007. Now the man he kicked out, Nawaz Sharif of the Pakistani Muslim League (PMLN) – not to be confused with Musharraf’s PMLQ – was coming back to Pakistan after living in exile as a guest of Saudi Arabia. I was sent to cover his return – which didn’t happen. But I was able to report on the state of the country ahead of Musharraf’s fall in 2008.
Mounted police prevent journalists gaining access to Islamabad airport as Nawaz Sharif arrives, only to be sent back to Saudi Arabia Photo: Tony Cross
Sharif touched down, only to be sent back to Saudi, Musharraf quite rightly fearing the reception he would have received … and did when he finally returned in 2008. The press was prevented from covering his arrival, we sweated in the sun on the road leading to the airport, while TV showed footage of a visibly shaken Sharif being escorted back to his plane by police.
Future prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani (2nd L, front row) prepares to announce that Benazir Bhutto will return to Pakistan at a hastily organised press conference in Peshawar Photo: Tony Cross
In Peshawar the PPP proudly announced that their leader, Benazir Bhutto, would soon return. She did, to a rapturous reception, only to be assassinated as she campaigned against Musharraf.
Unfortunately, the account I wrote at the time has vanished into the guts of a computer, as have others on the Palestinian presidential election in 2005 and the Turkish presidential election in 2007, but I have managed to reconstitute this report on the religious parties’ alliance, the MMA, a minority but an influential one, thanks largely to the manoeuvring of various military rulers, the failures of Pakistan’s education system and the fallout from the Afghan wars. An account of the 2008 election campaign will follow.
Waliat Khan, who makes rabobs – a traditional musical instrument – in Peshawar. His business survived despite a MMA ban on public musical performances Photo: Tony Cross
Peshawar, September 2007
Peshawar is capital of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), separated from Pakistan by the self-administering tribal areas, Pashtun country, like much of Afghanistan, and much affected by the Afghan war.
It has hosted millions of refugees since the Afghan Communist Party, the PDPA, took power in the 1970s and has continued to do so in the decades of war that have followed.
Since 2002 the province, and the city, have been run by an alliance of religious parties, the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal, (MMA).
Shortly after taking over, the MMA passed a law which decreed a strict interpretation of Islamic sharia law throughout the province.
Music for amusement was banned in public places, barbers forbidden to shave their customers, the two alcohol licences permitted to hotels frequented by non-Muslims were withdrawn, women were ordered to wear the burka and women’s bodies on hoardings covered up.
Musicians found ways round the law by simply moving to different places away from the authorities’ gaze, while bootleggers made it known that they would deliver booze to your door – cheaper, since they didn’t have to pay for licences.
But the law proved unpopular, as did the religious police set up to enforce it.
Anwar Kamal is a local leader of the Muslim League, PMLN, which is allied to the
MMA at national level and voted for sharia in the province.
Sitting in his comfortable home in a middle-class district of the city, he seems to regret the vote now.
“At the instructions of the present [provincial] government, you see, these people would come out on roads, stop your vehicle, pull out your cassette-player, break it there, pull out these billboards that would carry ladies’ photographs,” he says. “I’m not the one that disapproved of that but the common man also disapproved of that.”
Taking on music – a favourite amusement of all Pakistanis apart from the most puritanical of religious activists – appears to have cost the MMA and their religious police a lot of support.
The MMA claims to be more concerned about social justice than the Moslem League.
But in North West Frontier Province, and in Baloochistan, the other province where it is part of a governing coalition, it hasn’t got far in wiping out poverty.
Kamal argues that deprives it of the right to be too strict in introducing sharia.
“Islam says when somebody commits a theft crime you chop off his hand,” he concedes. “But there’s a precondition and that precondition is that you provide him an opportunity so that he can earn his own living. But if the government or the state fails to provide him that opportunity of earning, then you cannot punish him under Islamic law, that is chopping off his hand, you can put him in jail.”
Confronted by the federal government, which dubbed its actions “unconstitutional”, the provincial government has dissolved the religious police.
Pupils at the Dar-ul Uloom-Haqqania madrassa Photo: Tony Cross
Dar-ul Uloom-Haqqania madrassa, south of Peshawar, is one of thousands of religious schools in Pakistan which take up the slack left by a resource-starved public education system.
It’s one of the biggest, with about 3,000 students, and one of the most radical.
Haqqania’s head, Maulana Sami ul-Haq, was a friend and admirer of Taliban leader Mullah Omar and sent students to fight for him.
Ul-Haq also leads a breakaway faction of the Jamaat-Ulema-Islam, the country’s second biggest Islamist party, which has split from the MMA.
“They did not go on the road that we had decided,” explains Syeed Yusuf Shah, who teaches at the madrassa and is the faction’s North-West Frontier Province general-secretary. “We made some contents but they did not even work one per cent on that contents. For example, one of them was that we will not help America. But we helped. So we showed to our nation that we would do this-this-this contents but we didn’t do even zero per cent for them. That’s why MMA is unsuccessful.”
The maulana makes no secret of his support for the Taliban fighting the current Afghan government and his contempt for Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, whose cooperation with George Bush’s War on Terror has strengthened the religious parties, especially in NWFP, most of whose people are Pashtun like the majority of Afghans.
For a fuller report of my visit to Dar-ul Uloom-Haqqania madrassa click here
The violence of the Afghan conflict often spreads over the border.
But Pakistan hasn’t suffered the decades of civil war which brought the Taliban to power in Afghanistan.
The MMA mayor of Peshawar. Cahulam Ali, claims that gave the Taliban a mandate for sharia which his party didn’t have.
“Taliban government was supported by the people there,” he argues. “They were happy with that government. They obeyed Islamic rules but the Taliban did not impose their will on them. If you impose people here with the sharia bill in this area, people will oppose and people did oppose this bill. They say that at that time there was no gun, there was no fight between them – why do you impose us to do it?”
In areas where they haven’t won a majority, some hardline Islamists still try to enforce their views – trying to destroy statues of the Buddha in the Swat Valley, for example, threatening to kill barbers who shave of beards or bullying a woman who had acid thrown in her face not to go to an NGO because NGOs are supposedly agents of the infidel West.
Barbed wire around the Lal Masjid after it was stormed Photo: Tony Cross
In Istanbul two brothers used the city’s Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) as a base to send madrassa students out to close down Chinese massage parlours, claiming they were really brothels, enforce bans on alcohol and other measures.
After several months the army stormed the mosque, resulting in as many as 400 people being killed and enraging the religious parties and alienating part of the population.
I visited Qazi Hussein Ahmed, the leader the largest party in the MMA, Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI), in his home in Islamabad, where he was under house arrest for his opposition to Musharraf, whom he blamed for the bloodshed.
“Nobody can understand why did he resort to the use of force,” he told me. “We can disagree with the people of Lal Masjid … but there were so many ways in which they could have been controlled and they could have been evacuated. But they resorted to very inhuman killings, indiscriminate killings of the people.”
JeI opposed extrajudicial attempts to impose sharia, he said, but insisted that the Western mind has been “poisoned” against Islamic law.
“The objectives of sharia are not understood,” he argues. “The basic objective of sharia is that man should be related to the creator and he should be God-conscious and he should have the sense that he is accountable before God for all his acts and this makes him a responsible person. We want that the life, the property and the honour and also the mind of a citizen should be protected … this can be done through persuasion and through education and through training.”
Westerners think it is simply a question of “chopping off hands or chopping off legs” but these are these are a “final resort” if people are “bent on creating corruption in society”.
The MMA’s difference with the PMLN was that they wanted social justice and disagreed with liberal, free-market economics, Ahmed said.
At national level, the religious parties don’t have enough support to rule alone and the secular PPP accuses them of being inconsistent in their opposition to Musharraf.
The MMA is also accused of whipping up sectarianism, especially against the Shia-Muslim minority, despite the presence of Shia religious parties in its ranks.
In the massive port city of Karachi, Shia politician Abbas Qulemi told me that sectarian violence was high in areas where the MMA is high, including in Dera Ismail Khan, the constituency of MMA leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman and in NWFP.
“They have miserably failed in controlling the situation there [in NWFP], particularly in the killings of Shias,” he said. “You see, lots of Talibans are there … When they go to Afghanistan they fight there, when they come back they kill the Shias and, more surprisingly, the Shias are being killed and their relatives are being arrested.”
Both the religious parties and the Muslim League gained influence under the dictatorship of Zia ul-Haq in the 1970s and 80s. A strict Muslim himself, he built them up to counter the PPP, whose leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, he had executed after toppling him from power, and he was a key figure in helping Islamist mujaheddin fight the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan.
The MMA still has support, especially as opposition to Musharraf grows, but they can only hope to be part of a coalition, probably with the Muslim League which is unlikely to go along with their wish to impose sharia law. But they still exercise considerable influence on Pakistani politics and everyday life.
For an audio report on Pakistan’s religious parties click here
Everyone’s surprised by the support garnered by Jeremy Corbin and Bernie Sanders, not least their most ardent supporters. The British Labour Party may soon have a leader who can be described as left-wing without inverted commas. Americans may be invited to vote for someone who says he’s a socialist and could even win. Can this possible be true? And, as importantly, what does it mean?
“Keep voting, I’ll do the rest” De Gaulle tells France in this poster from May 68
The unpredictable is the only safe prediction in today’s political world, as parties that were solid melt into air and others that scarcely registered on the pollsters’ radar no so long ago win control of towns, cities, a country even.
Clearly, the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis and the mainstream parties’ responses – generosity to the banks and billionaires, austerity for those without their clout – have discredited capitalism, or at least its most brutal manifestations, in the eyes of many.
As Bernard Porter points out, to the generation that has grown up since the Cold War and is experiencing the Thatcher/Reagan legacy, Corbyn is not a dinosaur but a revelation.
Austerity has discredited its enforcers, including the careerist leaders of Europe’s formerly social-democratic parties, leading to an unexpected revival of the left in Greece, Scotland and Spain.
Of course, it’s also given a boost to the Trumps, Le Pens and Farages but that, too, is a symptom of the collapse in the authority of established parties and ideologies.
“I participate, you participate, he participates, we participate, they profit” Atelier populaire, May 68
But I think there is another, connected reason for the explosion of support for these two men and other political outsiders.
Isn’t it also a symptom of the rejection of the market approach to politics? Of spin doctors telling parties not to present policies they believe in to voters but pitch offers to that part of the electorate that is not inclined to vote for them – the “Them’s me principles but, if you don’t like ‘em, I’ll change ‘em” approach to democracy.
The efforts of Corbyn’s opponents to explain how unelectable he is, as he packs in huge crowds, races ahead of them in the leadership election stakes and then proves to be the most popular candidate among many non-Labour voters, have been an invaluable contribution to the great British comic tradition, as have their efforts to get rid of thousands of the wrong kind of voter. If we don’t like the voters, we can change them, as well.
Corbyn’s and Sanders’s support is evidence of a widespread desire for personal integrity in politics, a quality that is notable by its absence in most parliaments these days.
But, judging by reports of party meetings and public rallies, there’s also a demand for political honesty.
The strategic masterminds told party activists and bedrock supporters that they must keep their political libidos under control for fear of frightening the floating voter. In Britain that got them the Iraq War, economic crisis and two electoral defeats, not to mention the personal enrichment of prime ministers and their Svengalis.
So, many people want to vote for what they’d really like to see happen this time round. And it looks as if that could be a more realistic strategy in attracting many voters – including some of those tempted by Ukip or even Trump – than trying to sell a party as if it were something that gets rid of unpleasant stains.
Hannah Arendt apparently argued that electoral politics transforms the political relationship into that of seller to buyer, a point taken up by the PKK and the PYD in their turn to alternative forms of participation and organisation. Voters become consumers, passive individuals in an increasingly atomised society, delegating decision-making to a political caste that can claim their consent because they have participated in the electoral process.
We are thus coopted into our own political and economic exploitation, all the more so today when the politicians then declare themselves powerless in the face of the market on the most important questions that affect our lives. Russell Brand may not be as superficial as Jeremy Paxman would have us believe.
This goes some way to explain the enthusiasm for direct election of presidents, mayors etc that has spread outwards from the US, the Afghans having it imposed on them as an indispensable element of democracy by a coalition of countries many of whom didn’t practise it themselves (the UK’s Jack Straw congratulated them on at last electing their head of state – was he being subtly subversive or just not thinking what he was saying?).
The more representatives are elected, and the more personalised those elections are, the more consumer choice has been exercised and the more passive the electors should be once their ballots have been cast.
Hence the primaries – invented in the US, of course, and now exported to Europe (the mainstream French parties now have primaries, too, but, so far, they’ve delivered the required results, so no hooha about who’s voted in them).
Hilariously, in Britain a procedure that was designed to dilute the power of party activists in a mass of passive voters has become mobilised thousands to express disgust with austerity, careerism and top-down politics.
With added irony, the rise of social media, which in a sense add to the atomisation of society – the individual sits isolated in front of the screen and is bombarded with what algorithms decide is good for him or her – have fuelled the process, creating networks that establish a new form of the collective.
If Corbyn or Sanders wins, what happens next?
In Britain the establishment in its various manifestations has already shown its intention to override the democratic process by any means necessary.
I suspect that is when the weakness of social media-driven enthusiasm will become apparent. Will the thousands who have voted have the stamina or power to resist a long-term campaign of sabotage and vilification by professionals whose careers are intimately linked to the status quo?
In this respect, the Greek experience is not encouraging, so far at least.
Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistan’s ISI military intelligence died on Sunday. I met him at his home in Rawalpindi in 2007 and found a man who was bitter about having been declared an enemy by the West for his links to the Taliban and other Islamists after being hailed as a hero for sending many of the same people to fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. History can be so cruel! I’ll post a fuller account of this visit to Pakistan on my blog at a later date.
Hamid Gul, resplendent in his medals Source: Wikipedia
Rawalpindi, September 2007
There is evidence of the military almost everywhere in this city next-door to Islamabad, which is home to the military and secret service headquarters.
Serving and retired officers are housed in cantts, short for cantonments, and retired General Hamid Gul lives in a spacious and well-protected house in one of them.
Gul was head of the secret services, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) in the 1980s. In collaboration with US and other agencies, he armed and trained the mojahedin who fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. During his time as ISI chief there was an rise in jihadi activity in Indian-ruled Kashmir.
But in September 2007, as politicians and lawyers face off against President and Chief of Staff Pervez Musharraf, he says that it is time for the military to get out of Pakistan’s politics.
“This new-found freedom of the press and the judiciary, I think this is a gift to Pakistan,” he says. “This is going to lead to the empowerment of people. Now the military has got to go back to barracks.”
He is scathing about Musharraf’s allies. Today’s MPs are not independent, he says, “they’re under the shadow of the army”. But he hopes that “free and fair” elections will correct this state of affairs.
Gul is brutally frank in his criticism of Musharraf, whom he believes is on the brink of introducing martial law. “That’s the only option left to him. If he’s so greedy for power – and Americans are patting him on the back to go on and do it.”
“I’m quite amazed, really,” he says of Musharraf’s determination to cling on to both of his jobs. “It was my job twice to profile him because I was once his instructor in the staff college and second time he was my subordinate, when he was a major-general. He served under me and I wrote reports on him. And good reports, too.”
Back then Gul found the president-to-be pleasant and flexible. “I think it is fear that is driving him towards this and an unnecessary encouragement from the Americans.”
But the general, who has plenty of experience of Americans, believes they may be rethinking their strategy. “They’re very clever, they keep their intentions hidden,” he says.
Most analysts think that Washington is pushing Musharraf to reach agreement with Benazir Bhutto, who is apparently seen as secular and Western-friendly. Gul thinks they may plump for Nawaz Sharif, who, he says, has emerged as “almost unmitigated number-one political figure in the country”.
Gul is not against mixing religion and politics. Pakistan was born as a political-religious entity, he says. “They cannot be separated. In India and Pakistan, that is the lesson of history. If they [the religious parties] come to power, as long as they accept electoral politics, then there is no problem.”
The general advises the US to rethink its international strategy, especially its military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“There is no light at the end of the tunnel that they will succeed,” he says. “Tell me, are they succeeding? If they are not succeeding, then they must change direction.”
The Taliban, who imposed a distinctly unsecular regime on Afghanistan, came out of madrassas and refugee camps in Pakistan, enjoying the patronage of the ISI. While criticising the Taliban’s dispensation of summary justice, Gul says they did some “very good things”, introducing “peace” and “justice” after the chaos of the civil war between themojahedin factions he had himself backed.
But, he says, that was all after his retirement, and he was only responsible for the mojahedin, whom everybody, apart from the Russians, loved back then.
“The Americans, and let me tell you, French, German and all the free world which was afraid of the red menace,” he says. “They were all helping us. If it was culpable and was a crime, then we were all together in that crime.”
There’s no mistaking Gul’s bitterness, as he points to a lump of the Berlin Wall presented to him by the German government “with deepest respect to one who helped deliver the first blow”. Now, says retired General Hamid Gul, the US and the European countries with whom he used to work won’t give him a visa.
First posted on RFI’s website: http://www1.rfi.fr/actuen/articles/101/article_320.asp
In 2005 I covered Afghanistan’s first post-invasion parliamentary election. Here’s my account, written at the time, of how women and independent candidates struggled to make their voices heard, despite quotas, in a contest dominated by warlords and ethnic-based politicians. In the eastern city of Herat the legacy of one of these ruthless operators lives on, despite his being kicked upstairs to central government. In Kabul a former minister claims a mafia of warlords, drug-runners and NGOs is running the country.
A Kabul kebab restaurant Photo: Tony Cross
Kabul, 11 September 2005
At last, the freedom they were fighting for! Four years after the US and its allies toppled the Taliban, Kabul has traffic jams.
Our midday journey from the airport to a hotel in the centre of town is excruciating, as we crawl through streets packed with private cars, taxis and land-cruisers.
At the end of the war, there were comparatively few motor vehicles.
Just under a year ago, during the presidential election, there was more traffic but not this asphyxiating blockade of the city’s main arteries.
Now the smog has become thicker and the thrum of engines ticking over lasts from mid-morning to evening. Every Kabuli has been granted the democratic right to sit and curse the car in front and pump fumes into the city’s already dust-laden air, whether in his or her own car, in a taxi or in a minibus stuffed full of passengers.
Except for the beggars and hawkers, of course. Amputees, women clad in soiled and faded burkas and kids selling newspapers dodge between the cars and tap on the windows. Near the junction of Park Street and Chicken Street, where foreigners shop for rugs and antique furniture, a man dressed in rags stands in the middle of the traffic, bent under the weight of an apparently paralysed boy who is strapped to his back for the day. The man holds out his hand for alms from the oncoming motorists, as the boy lies on top of him, occasionally rolling his head from side to side, apparently oblivious to the passing traffic.
The Americans are rebuilding the road from the airport, so that visiting dignitaries have a smooth run to their main compound, which is on the way into the city.
The concrete and barbed wire fortifications around their buildings, and those around others that house foreign organisations or Afghan ministries, seem to have been reinforced, eating even further into the streets around them. It doesn’t look as if their occupants expect to leave any day soon.
A trader makes and seels Karzai-style astrakhan hats in a Kabul market Photo: Tony Cross
The square in front of the defence ministry is cordoned off by police … not just because a convoy of cars belonging to Defence Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak was attacked yesterday – the attack missed the minister who was out of town at the time – but also because the square is occupied by several hundred former soldiers.
We have to negotiate a passage through a barricade of bikes before we can talk to the protestors. They are some of several thousand military officers, about a third of the officer corps, who have been thrown out of the army.
These men used to belong to the various militias which were integrated into the army as part of the process which is supposed to demilitarise the country.
Having noticed that army officers’ salaries are several times higher than those of the police, the government has decided to dispense with their services.
The men, who seem to represent all of Afghanistan’s many ethnic groups, sit quietly in the dust around a van with a loudspeaker and a man on its roof, addressing them.
He climbs down and comes to talk to us.
Abdel Hafiz was a colonel. He says that the redundant officers could do the work now being done by the more than 30,000 foreign troops in a far-from-pacified country.
“We have high-ranking officers who are experienced and don’t need training. So we don’t need international forces to come here and secure our country.”
There aren’t a lot of jobs about nor spare fertile land to be worked.
“We’ve been borrowing from our friends and from our relatives, so now we are not able to borrow again. Now we’re out of money and our economic condition is getting worse.”
A crowd of about 40 men gathers as we talk. They all claim to be ex-mujahedin, who have fought either the Russians or the Taliban or both.
But the label can cover a multitude of sins. They could well have been involved in the brutality and sectarian viciousness which characterised the conflict and that means that many civilians don’t trust them.
Brought into the army by the post-war Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration programme, which aimed to find places for former fighters in a peaceful Afghanistan, they’ve now been deintegrated with little training in anything other than warfare … thousands of experienced fighters at a loose end in a country already ravaged by war.
Behind the cordon of truncheon-wielding police in front of the entrance to the ministry stands a line of soldiers, guns at the ready for use against their former officers if need be.
A girl plays by the water pump installed by residents of Shah Shaheen, Kabul Photo: Tony Cross
Shah Shaheen is a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of Kabul. The houses sprawling up the hillside and the dirt road that winds between them are all the same dusty colour. A new water-pump stands in a gap in the buildings, rigid and shiny against the jagged outline of distant mountains. The local people have themselves paid for its installation and would like the government to compensate them for the cost and provide other basic services.
Behind the shabby walls, in a house built around a traditional courtyard, Ghutai Khawari sits on a raised piece of ground, flanked by local supporters, with a small audience sitting in the shade provided by a colourfully-patterned sheet stretched between tall roughly-cut poles.
Khawari is a candidate for the Wolesi Jirga, the lower house of parliament which is to be elected on Sunday along with provincial assemblies.
She’s a journalist and her level of education seems to impress her audience. In a country with 70-80% illiteracy, poor voters almost always say that they want an “educated person” to represent them.
Her audience is entirely masculine, unless you count a few little girls playing in the street outside.
The men seem to have left their wives, daughters, sisters and mothers at home but they insist that they’re ready to vote for a woman candidate.
Ali, a young man who is enthusiastically moving chairs and making people welcome, speaks to us in English.
“No, it’s not important, that, it is no problem. Islam says that women and men are equal.”
Ghawari tells her audience that it would be a sin to vote for candidates with blood on their hands, a reference to the many warlords who’ve found their way onto the ballot-papers.
Earlier she told us that ending ethnic enmity is her top priority, “especially among women, where they say ‘you’re a Pashtun, you’re a Tajik’ and so on, because we’re women, we’re human, we’re one.”
She accuses the authorities of paying lip-service to helping women but not taking action.
“The government and some NGOs say they will give rights to the people but they don’t pay any attention to the majority of women, who live in the villages, in the provinces.”
She cites as examples the lack of education for girls and poor health care, which, she says leads to 1,000 women dying in childbirth every year.
To her audience she also stresses that she is running a shoe-string campaign.
“You are my only resources,” she tells them.
At least 68 seats have been reserved for women in the 249-member Wolesi Jirga, with at least two in the provincial councils, which will have between nine and 29 members.
Women’s rights campaigners are encouraged by the fact that 328 women are standing for the Wolesi Jirga. Not so many have come forward for the provincial councils, however, where the weight of tradition may be heavier.
The ruins of a shah’s tomb, Shah Shaheen, Kabul Photo: Tony Cross
Almost all the women standing are independents. That means that, like Ghawari, they have little money, no experience and no established network.
The regional bigwigs and established politicians may have terrorised the area where they’re standing or pocketed fortunes through corrupt dealings but they have the advantage of being well-known and, through patronage, they can find support among the men of influence in the towns and villages.
Ghawari and other women candidates in Kabul say that they’ve faced no intimidation or pressure while campaigning. But, they warn, that may not be the case in the provinces, especially the rural areas.
There women risk being chased off the street if they appear in public. What’s more women can’t go into the mosque to address Friday prayers. Many, though not all, mullahs preach against female participation in public life and, even without that, tradition militates against them.
And there’s also intimidation by warlords and the Taliban.
The Asian Network for Free Elections (Anfrel) reports that the husband of one female candidate in Baghlan province was jailed for two days without charge and later sacked from his job because he helped her campaign.
One woman election worker has been killed during the campaign. Other women report death threats and accusations that they are “American spies”.
Little wonder then that 51 women withdrew their candidacies for unspecified reasons before the campaign started.
Herat seen from a taxi Photo: Tony Cross
No-one can escape evidence of the election in Herat. Candidates’ photographs and slogan-bearing banners hang from string stretched between the pine-trees which line the streets, so that the city looks as if it’s celebrating a particularly popular festival.
Posters are plastered all over any available wall-space – on the concrete and metal umbrellas erected at crossroads to provide traffic-police with shade and on what looks like a peace monument, a structure topped with a globe and four doves which stands at one of the main road junctions.
And they’re contributing to the deterioration of the city’s historic legacy.
Enthusiastic campaigners have fly-posted their candidates’ images onto centuries-old minarets, which have survived earthquake and war but are now threatened by vibrations from a nearby road – and by electoral politics.
The long road to Herat from the airport is lined by trees almost all the way, encouraging fantasies of entering at the head of a trader’s caravan or a conquering army.
You pass through villages with traditional mud-caked buildings, past a park crowded with painted, concrete benches but no people to sit on them and over a bridge which looks down on a broad river-bed, where motorists wash their vehicles in the narrow strip of river that the sun has so far failed to evaporate.
Herat’s a relief after Kabul. Its wide, tree-lined streets are relatively clean and uncongested. There’s less dust and more visible history, most noticeably the huge and beautiful mosque in the city centre.
My translator, Hoshang, is bowled over by the city’s cleanliness and its exotic Persian atmosphere. When we see a man smoking a shisha pipe in a restaurant, he asks me what the strange object is, never having seen one in Kabul or in Peshawar, the two cities he has lived in.
Interior courtyard of Herat’s historic mosque Photo: Tony Cross
Clearly the governor who built the present seat of local government in the mid-20th century, didn’t want the home of secular power to be completely dwarfed by the mosque. It’s a rambling complex of brick-clad buildings, about as tall as the mosque and pleasant enough to look at, even if it can’t compete with the mosque’s tile-clad walls, which were decorated by craftsmen skilled in a 600-year-old art form.
It’s easy to gain access to high officials. Sitting in the corner of a large room, as a handful of officials administer the citizens who have come to petition him, deputy governor Mir Abdul Khalq, “call me Haj Mir because no-one in Herat will recognise me if you give me the full name”, offers cups of green tea and chats affably. But he says it would be better if I interview Governor Mohammed Khair Khuwa.
Unfortunately, the governor is in Kabul today, so we will have to come back tomorrow.
Haj Mir is a grey-bearded, wrinkled, smiling man, who chats freely about Herat. It is probably Afghanistan’s richest city and he boasts of its public buildings and housing.
I ask if supporters of Ismail Khan, who preceded Khuwa as governoror, still have much influence.
“Oh yes,” says Haj Mir. “I myself am a supporter of Ismail Khan and was with him for seven years during the war.”
This takes me aback since I’d understood that it had taken quite a power struggle for President Hamid Karzai, who was finally elected last year, to dislodge Khan from running the city last year.
Ismail Khan became governor of Herat province in 2001, after fighting the Russian occupation, being jailed by the Taliban and escaping to take control of Herat as the ultra-fundamentalist régime was bombed out of office.
During his governorship, there were many complaints about his warlord ways – a heavy hand with potential opposition and harsh treatment of women in the province.
Last year, there was heavy fighting between Khan’s fighters and those of a rival warlord, Amanullah Khan, a Pashtun. Kabul declared its support for Ismail but, shortly after the fighting ended, Karzai offered the victorious governor the post of minister of power and water – a poisoned promotion which dislodged him for his power-base.
Not everyone was glad to see him go. Riots followed his removal and Khuwa, a Hazara who arrived in town with guards from his own ethnic group, was obliged to take the oath of office in front of a picture of his predecessor.
Khan left behind a mixed reputation. He dealt with critics and suspected enemies in summary fashion – the head of the officially-backed human rights commission told us that, at the official opening of the organisation’s office in the city with national government ministers in attendance, a journalist was beaten up and dragged off to jail. Just so everyone knew who was boss, as it were.
The entrance to the courtyard of the Jamja Masjid (Friday Mosque) in Herat Photo: Tony Cross
But the ex-governor is still respected for making Herat one of the best-run cities in the country. He paid for public works and efficient administration by collecting the handsome revenue from customs duties on the frontiers with neighbouring Iran and Turkmenistan ¼ and refusing to pass any of the money on to Kabul.
Maybe it was that which inspired Karzai to conclude that the governor had to go, rather than the stories of armed tribal fighters doing as they wished on the city’s streets or women found alone with men being arrested and examined for signs of recent sexual intercourse.
But, once the rioting was over, the transition seems to have been relatively smooth.
Haj Mir seems to be working with his ex-boss’s successor and is happy to suggest that we interview the new head of security, Ayub Salangy, another out-of-towner who arrived two months ago accompanied by guards from his home province.
Of course, sending round a journalist may be the Haji’s idea of a practical joke; it turns out that Salangy is home sick today. But he agrees to see us.
Herat’s Jama Masjid Photo: Tony Cross
Delivered at Salangy’s house by a military vehicle, we find him in his garden, meeting leaders of the Provincial Reconstruction Team, one of the PRTs, the foreign military units that carry out aid projects, leading to complaints that they have made NGOs targets of possible guerrilla attacks.
We are shown into the house and wait in a living room so generously furnished that there is a TV at either end of the room.
On a table sits a photo mounted on curved glass with blue and gold edges. It shows the lieutenant-general embracing President Karzai as he arrives for a visit to Herat.
Salangy’s assistant assures us that the commander is a good friend of the president and gives us an outline of his employer’s career, which mostly consists of Karzai begging him to go to a number of troublesome provinces, with varying degrees of success. Salangy did serve in possibly the toughest posting, Kandahar, the Taliban’s stronghold at the time that they took power and still the scene of rebel activity, including a recent attempt to shoot down the president’s airplane.
When he finally meets us, Salangy doesn’t seem too ill. But he undoubtedly has a robust constitution. He’s a buffalo in a shalwar kameez; tall and broad, his hand swallows mine when we shake. Unusually for an Afghan, he is clean-shaven and his hair is cut short, adding to the youthful appearance of his face. It’s a surprising fact here that the men who have probably seen the most combat are the men with the most laugh-lines on their faces.
At some point in his career the lieutenant-general has picked up the art which the French call langue de bois. He studiously avoids giving any interesting answers to my questions: everything will go fine on election day; there are no serious security problems in the province; recent kidnappings and violence were in neighbouring provinces and not on his turf.
When I ask if he’s worried about the way the Americans have used the PRTs, he gently makes a fool of me by explaining that the people he was talking to were Italians, since they have taken over that work in Herat and the west of the country.
Asked if he sees himself as Karzai’s man in Herat, Salangy replies that he’s happy to represent the president and central government here.
But the question seems to have touched a sensitive spot. When I stop recording, the commander declares that, if I’ll permit it, it is his turn to pose a question.
“Who told you I was Karzai’s man?” he asks.
Hoping that the answer will not prove compromising for anyone involved, I tell him that his secretary told me that they were friends.
A group of trainee police officers pose for a photo while visiting Herat’s famous mosque
Before leaving Herat, we take up Haj Mir’s suggestion and try to see the governor. It’s a long and fruitless process which entails visits to his offices, his home and, just before we leave, the recently-built governor’s mansion in the foothills of the mountains that overlook the city.
Persian script dug into the sides declares jihad the salvation of the faithful and what looks like a kilometre of steps lead up to a self-important dome perched on a rock. One gets the impression that this building is part of Ismail Khan’s legacy.
We’re already late for the rendezvous and, after an inconclusive argument with guards and our taxi-driver about whether we will have to walk up all those steps to the mansion in the baking heat, we conclude that there won’t be time for an interview if we’re to catch the plane to Kabul. As we race towards the airport, a phone-call reveals that the governor hasn’t actually left his home.
A young boy at work in a Herat workshop Photo: Tony Cross
Both in Herat and Kabul, voters face a huge and confusing choice of candidates.
Ballot papers the size of broadsheet newspapers carry the names, pictures and symbols of hundreds of candidates for the Wolesi Jirga or the provincial councils; in Kabul’s case 390 for the national body and 216 for the provincial one.
Some 70-80% of voters are illiterate and, it being over 30 years since the last such elections, most of the population haven’t taken part in this sort of exercise before.
Of course, there was last year’s presidential election but that was a much simpler affair since only one post was up for grabs. The difference may not have sunk in to the popular consciousness – some punters have apparently told journalists that they intend to vote for Karzai this time round.
The process would have been even more complicated if the original plan to elect district councils at the same time had gone ahead. That vote was postponed. Not to spare the unfortunate electorate the struggle with a third enormous ballot paper. It’s just that the districts don’t really exist yet. Their boundaries haven’t been drawn and their populations have yet to be determined.
On the street most people seem keen to vote but no-one has much idea how to do it. Most Kabulis seem not to have chosen their candidate. In Herat more people seem to have made their choice for both the national and provincial assemblies.
In the cities, at least, no prejudice is expressed against women candidates. Several men declare that they are ready to vote for a woman and some say that they’ve already decided to do so.
Karzai apparently intervened personally to prevent party symbols being printed on the ballot papers, although an accompanying sheet does list the parties and their candidates. This is justified by arguing that it is political groups that have brought the country to its present condition. Karzai himself, of course, has no party although he does have a network of allies. His behind-the-scenes style of politics will probably be best suited by an atomised parliament, in which he can play off individuals or groups against each other.
The ban, along with a first-past-the-post voting system, favours a personality contest and undermines the possibility of a future development of parties formed on the basis of political platforms.
It strengthens candidates who are already well-known – religious leaders, ethnic or regional bosses and warlords, none of whom can be absolved from blame for Afghanistan’s woes.
But their notoriety may backfire, in some cases at least. Soraya Daqiqi, a woman candidate in Herat, says that village elders have told her that it’s time to give a woman a chance. “After all, look at what men have done for us – Timur Lang, Janghis Khan, and that German leader, Hitler.”
Other independent candidates also believe that they may benefit from an anti-warlord backlash.
The Taliban have stepped up attacks in the last few months and say that they will disrupt the election, although they say that they won’t attack voters.
Most of the violence has been clashes between their fighters and foreign or Afghan soldiers and it has mainly taken place in the south and east, where they still operate quite freely.
But seven candidates have been killed and there has been other election-related violence.
Nomadic kuchis, who have reserved seats and special polling stations adapted to their way of life Photo: Tony Cross
And there’s concern about the number of former commanders, many of whom have been involved in atrocities, who are on the ballot papers. Only 11 candidates were disqualified for being militia leaders before the campaign began, while human rights campaigners claim that in many areas at least half of those standing are warlords.
The internationally-staffed Election Complaints Commission says that only those who have been convicted of crimes can be excluded, which seems reasonable until you remember how difficult it is for victims to obtain justice here.
Of course, there is no clear demarcation between the terms “warlord” and “mujahed” and many violent killers have been invaluable allies to Karzai and the US.
Analysts at the International Crisis Group claims that deals were struck with some commanders, allowing them to remain on the ballot papers in return for promises to collaborate with the official disarmament process.
Nevertheless, there are no reports of candidates actually bumping off their rivals.
That may be a sign of patience, rather than of born-again pacifism. A clause in the election law has become known as the “assassination clause”. It declares that after the poll, if an assembly member dies, the runner-up takes his or her place, giving rise to fears that some frustrated candidates may revert to their old habits to achieve the victory that the electoral process failed to deliver.
The electoral law is remarkably tolerant of practices which the Asian observers of Anfrel, who know a thing or two about money politics, claim “may be regarded as vote-buying in other countries”.
They describe electoral cards being bought from voters in some provinces and mullahs being offered money in return for their endorsement (one of them boasts that his backing would mean at least 5,000 votes for the lucky bidder).
Rich candidates are able to spend large sums on fleets of vehicles, election workers and other resources, while poorer candidates struggle to raise funds.
The Afghan semi-official observers’ organisation, Fefa, says it’s disappointed that a ban on handing out gifts is only valid on election day.
The Afghan fondness for a feast may indeed prove useful in courting the floating voter. Fefa says that one candidate, who owns a hotel, has been giving free lunches and dinners “almost every day” and has hosted one lunch with music and dancing for about 5,000 people.
Uzbek warlord General Abdel Rashid Dostum proved even more generous. He invited notables in Sherbergan province to a party “in honour of his father” which lasted for three days.
One candidate told Anfrel that he was worried about what the candidates will do to recoup their outlay. “Maybe robbery or drug-trafficking. They need to get the money that they spent back.”
The Election Commission says that it can’t ban such practices because they are part of the Afghan tradition of hospitality.
Ramazan Bashardost (C) with supporters in a Kabul park Photo: Tony Cross
strange noise disturbs the peace of Kabul’s Shah-e-Naw Park. It’s the horribly distorted sound of a television rigged up among the trees.
Nearby is a tent, which has been occupied by Ramazan Bashardost every day since he resigned from the post of minister of planning and launched a clean-government campaign.
Bashardost is a candidate for the Wolesi Jirga and this is two days before polling day, well within the 48-hour period within which election campaigning has been banned, but he says that the video of him currently playing to a small audience is of a speech he made before the start of campaigning and so not in breach of election law.
Bashardost resigned in a row over the 2,355 NGOs which have mushroomed in Afghanistan in the war’s aftermath. The 2001 Tokyo reconstruction conference allotted them a third of foreign aid. But Bashardost compiled a list of 1,935 that he wanted to close, saying that many of them were fake, some operating for profit and not the benefit of Afghans, others just inefficient and nearly all spending most of the donors’ money on their staff salaries and operating costs rather than on the people they were supposed to help.
“About 70% of their budgets are used for administration or logistics or for a luxurious life,” Bashardost tells me. “There is NGOism in Afghanistan, like a Communist system. It is very strange that the Afghan poor people don’t have access to the directors of NGOs. I think it is more easy to meet Mr Karzai.”
When he was a minister he would send people to meet NGO chiefs.
“They returned to my office and say ‘Mr Minister, when the bodyguard is happy he took my paper and when the bodyguard is not happy he said very bad things to me and I couldn’t see the director’.”
Now he says that Afghanistan is run by a new nomenklatura of NGO bosses, UN and US officials, international military chiefs, Afghan warlords and government ministers.
“It is a very dangerous situation because $12 billion has arrived in Afghanistan since two years and the Afghan people believe that there is not reconstruction. I think that some people say ‘My life is now more bad than three years ago’. This nomenkaltura shares the money between its members and we’re losing the chance to show a good cooperation between Western countries and a Muslim country.”
Although he was educated abroad and speaks English and French, Bashardost mistrusts returned exiles as much as he mistrusts warlords, claiming that many have only returned for business opportunities and that those who are standing for the Wolesi Jirga are motivated by commercial, rather than political, interest.
Bashardost believes the multi-national mafia is also complicit in the drugs trade.
Since the US-led invasion, Afghanistan has returned to the top of the world league of opium-poppy growers, providing most of the heroin sold in Europe and much of Asia.
The ex-minister says that only one per-cent of the profits go to Afghan farmers and that local and international officials are involved in it.
“The new parliament may be a narco-parliament,” he says and slams Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali and President Karzai for saying top officials, including six governors, were involved in drug trafficking but refusing to name them, let alone take action against them.
Few candidates speak as freely or directly as Bashardost. Those with dubious pasts – or presents – use portentous declarations to avoid addressing embarrassing subjects. And, in a country in which guns rather than discussion have decided political issues for so many years, new candidates lack any experience of real political debate. When faced with a microphone, most either launch into long autobiographies, give accounts of their educational qualifications or make vague statements about ending the violence and rooting out corruption in exactly the same terms that their rivals use.
Voters in Shah Shaheen Photo: Tony Cross
18 September, election day. At the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, which is a polling station for the day, voters are encouraged to do their civic duty by music broadcast from tinny loudspeakers and banners bearing inspirational messages such as “Let’s join together to participate in the parliamentary election which is a legislative organ and one of the three pillars of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan”.
But the official enthusiasm doesn’t seem to have rubbed off onto the electorate. At 8.10am, just over two hours since the polls opened, there are few voters here, an astonishing contrast to the long queues to vote in the presidential election.
Inside the building a young election official says that it’s early yet, there’s still time, and assures us that voters have had no difficulty with the complicated voting procedure.
As he speaks, a man in a voting booth behind him is turning his ballot paper this way and that with a mystified air. He calls to an official to come and explain what he should do.
Outside two young men tell us that they have voted for Bashardost because they believe he is honest, while others won’t name their choice.
When we leave the building, SUVs have blocked off the street and armed guards stand outside the polling station. US ambassador Ronald Neumann is here.
He declares the day a triumph.
“Four years ago they were killing women with stones in the sports stadium and today women are running their separate polling places here next door to the men’s polling places.”
What does the ambassador think of the presence of alleged warlords on the ballot papers?
“I think people get to actually vote, so if they don’t want to vote for a warlord they don’t have to, they can vote for somebody else.”
So, even if a candidate has blood on his hands, he should be allowed to stand?
The tone becomes slightly less affable.
“No, I don’t think that’s a correct statement. I think what you need to understand is that this is the first time that they’ve tried to run a process by rules. And it’s a country where you don’t have full evidence, so sometimes you don’t get the result that you would ideally like, just as sometimes, in your country or mine, somebody may go free in a trial where you think they should have been convicted.”
Neumann gives the impression that, so far as he’s concerned, there have been exhaustive legal efforts to find war-criminals and that they are now over.
“The fact is that they did run a process by rules … and that’s a big, important step in the transition to building a rule-based system of law.”
More voters turn out as the day goes on but there are nowhere near last year’s number.
At Shah Shaheen nobody will tell us who their choice was, although one man says that he’s voted for a woman and a man, while the women, all clad in blue burkas, huddle in a short line at the side of the polling station.
The women at Fourth Makoryan, a middle-class district, are more assertive. Many of the polling officers and voters are elegantly dressed, some wearing smart trouser suits with headscarves.
One, who’s enjoying the sun after casting her ballot, proudly declares that she has voted for a woman candidate.
“We all want to vote for women because women are the ones who care for women,” she says.
But she’s not sure how much things will change for women after the election.
“Maybe yes, maybe no. In Kabul the women vote but in some other provinces some of them don’t vote. I hope that they all vote and the women win.”
Traditional Afghan buildings in Dehyaya Photo: Tony Cross
In Dehyaya, a village outside Kabul, we don’t see any women. To get there we have to turn off the fine new road that the American military have built to get to their base at Bagram airfield and on to a track across the dusty plain that lies between ranges of Afghanistan’s cruelly beautiful mountains.
The stones crunch under the weight of our four-wheel drive and the dust gets everywhere – into the car, into our hair, into our nostrils.
We follow the track round a bend and find the beginning of the village.
It’s made up of traditional Afghan dwellings; huge compounds hidden behind walls several hundred metres long.
They’re covered in dried mud, made out of desert dirt, and they look as if they have grown out of this unworldly, grey-brown landscape.
As a scorching sun burns the last drops of moisture from the land, we look down a long, straight street, flanked by long, straight mud walls, heading towards a distant perspective point.
There’s not a soul to be seen; it’s like High Noon – only with more dust.
Who knows how people scratch a living out of this arid landscape but the village seems to be large, even if you take into account the size of the compounds.
One thing’s for sure, land can’t be very expensive round here.
Down the street and around a bend, we come across a petrol station.
It’s deserted, too, but there are signs of election activity – candidates’ posters have been pasted on its walls and on the sign at its entrance.
He’s a notorious militia leader, whom human-rights campaigners have demanded be taken off the ballot paper, because of his alleged brutality during the war.
In the days of the fight against Russian occupation, Sayyaf was a friend of Osama ben Laden and mixed with the hard-line Islamists who received US funding for their anti-Communist jihad.
But, despite his dubious past, he has stayed in the running.
His position can’t have been hindered by the fact that he has recently acted as an adviser to Karzai, doing his best to keep Afghanistan’s legal system true to his severe interpretation of Islam.
A bit further down the street, and at last there are signs of life.
A small crowd of men and boys has gathered in front of the school, where voting is taking place.
As we go into the building, Hoshang suggests that maybe we shouldn’t stay too long.
Dehyaya from the mountain Photo: Tony Cross
“Taliban fire rockets at Kabul from these mountains.”
Inside, however, all is running smoothly, if not very busily, and the polling officers say that there have been no threats or intimidation.
One of the voters is a former mujahed. He won’t name the person he voted for but says that “he is my friend from the jihad time”. But, like all ordinary voters what he wants most is peace – “No more fighting in my country”.
To get back to Kabul, we’re told to go over the mountain.
As we climb the slope, we can at last see some patches of green in the village, hidden behind some of those long walls.
When our wheels get stuck in the dirt half way up the slope, I wonder if I should duck down in the back if men with guns appear or whether they’ll see me anyway. But they don’t appear and, when the car climbs over the peak, we see an inscription dug into the hillside.
I ask if this is another call to jihad, like the ones we saw outside Herat.
Hoshang squints at the writing. “No,” he replies, “it says ‘carwash’.”
And there, just below it, is a huge car lot, the vehicles glistening in the sun, and, beyond it, the grubby bustle of Kabul.
On our return, we hear that three rocket-propelled grenades were fired from the mountains during the morning.
Two failed to explode. One of them hit a UN compound and injured one person, although not seriously.
A photographer shows off his antique camera in Shah Shaheen, Kabul Photo: Tony Cross
Turnout is low throughout the country. Officials claim about 50%, some sceptics put it as low as 35% and claim that there were no votes at all in some parts of the south, where the Taliban are active.
The electoral commission says that seven polling stations never opened at all, apparently because the security services were too scared to protect them. Security worries led to a temporary disruption of the vote in many other places and there are already allegations of fraud.
Apparently anticipating a wave of enthusiasm throughout the land, the electoral commission made a last-minute decision to bring forward the start of the vote an hour. Unfortunately, the decision didn’t get through to all voting officials, some of whom arrived, bleary-eyed, at 7.00am or later, to find impatient voters waiting for them or to hear that some had already given up.
Piqued, perhaps, by criticism of the small number of candidates banned from standing, officials took another 28 off the ballot paper during the week before the vote. Human rights groups weren’t mollified, claiming that they weren’t the roughly 150 warlords and thugs that they had in mind.
And, unfortunately, the list of these late removals was either not posted up at many voting centres or put in a position which hardly anyone saw. Even where it was visible it was meaningless to the illiterate majority of voters.
To add to the confusion, two candidates were put back onto the ballot, one because he had been confused with someone else of the same name.
Now the votes have to be gathered in, using donkeys and helicopters to bring them down from the most remote mountain villages. Definitive results are not expected for at least a month and the absence of debate and clearly defined political camps makes it difficult to guess what the Wolesi Jirga will look like.
A Kabul street Photo: Tony Cross
Robert Kluyver, a fluent Dari-speaker and former UN worker who has set up the Foundation for Culture and Civil Society and also represents George Soros’s Open Society Institute, believes there are three main reasons for the low turnout. Many candidates were unknown and discouraging political parties added to confusion about what they might stand for, many hopes that were raised by last year’s presidential election have already been disappointed and in some areas, especially the cities, there’s suspicion that the results were rigged in advance.
“While a lot of candidates were ex-fighters, either mujahedin or Communists, I think that there will be a strong presence of civil society.”
But he believes that the parliament will be weak.
“With this low voter-turnout they will lack the political legitimacy they need. This parliament doesn’t have any clearly defined functions. Thirdly, the parliamentarians won’t have any experience in conducting parliamentary affairs and I think that there will be a strong tendency for the parliament to be bogged down in local issues, for example about schools and hospitals in particular districts, because that’s very much how the candidates now see themselves, representing the interests of their local community.”
He believes that, although most Afghans are sick of religious interference in politics, there will be a bloc of representatives who will push a hard-line position on issues such as sharia law.
And what of the question that voter after voter raised during the campaign – the warlords’ hold on the country?
Saman Zia-Zarifi is the deputy director of Human Rights Watch. Being of Iranian origin, he can speak Dari and has come to observe the election along with a team from the high profile US-based group.
He says that most voters had to choose between unknown candidates and notorious ones.
Zia-Zarifi is bitterly critical of the election complaints commission’s failure to strike “warlords, former military commanders and human-rights abusers” from the ballot.
“It created a certain amount of confusion and even questions about the political nature of this process,” he says and concludes. “It remains to be seen if the Afghan electors have achieved what the electoral commission failed to do.”
Yanis Varoufakis Photo: Public domain/Yanis Varoufakis Subversive interview 2013 cropped.jpg
I don’t want to sound patronising here, Yanis Varoufakis certainly has more academic qualifications than me and could undoubtedly teach me a thing or two about economics, but it does seem that his time as a minister has been an education for him in politics, the nature and art of negotiation and the ruthlessness of the establishment.
Understandably, Varoufakis seems to be in a sour mood after his experience of negotiating with the EU, the IMF and Wolfgang Schäuble. He voted against the austerity package accepted by Alexis Tsipras and is now merrily spilling the beans about an alleged Syriza Plan B for handling being squeezed out of the eurozone, the unpleasant odours that haunt the corridors of power and Schäuble’s apparent intention to make Grexit a reality.
“ … there was point blank refusal to engage in economic arguments. Point blank. You put forward an argument that you’ve really worked on, to make sure it’s logically coherent, and you’re just faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken. What you say is independent of what they say. You might as well have sung the Swedish national anthem – you’d have got the same reply.”
But why did he imagine it would be any other way?
Forgive me for saying so, Professor, but you were naïve. These people already know the arguments and have decided that they are of no use to them.
Some – Schäuble, Tusk – appear to be ideologically committed to austerity, perhaps due to a sentimental attachment to the idea of the lower orders suffering or perhaps because of their political, personal or family histories.
Others have built careers in the service of an establishment that is becoming increasingly addicted to short-term financial returns, big dividends, not paying taxes and slashing waste, ie what’s left of the welfare state.
They don’t want to listen to the opposing case and explaining that case was not relevant to negotiation over Greece’s debt.
In the long run, austerity means that the EU, and eventually capitalism, will eat itself.
But – and for anyone who’s read previous relevant posts on my blog may find I sound a bit Johnny One Note here – the restraints on their short-termism have gone. These were essentially a powerful labour movement and, even more importantly in my view, a competing social system in the form of the Soviet bloc. They no longer exist, so the capitalist class no longer accepts that the state disciplines its need for higher and higher returns in the briefest delays possible.
Negotiation is not about persuading your opponents of the correctness of your case, it’s about convincing them that they have something to lose by not accepting your demands or at least reaching compromise.
That’s why I was amazed when the Syriza leaders declared that they would not leave the eurozone or accept loans from Russia.
Whether you intend to do it or not, why rule out a course of action that could frighten some of the people on the opposite side of the table (although not Schäuble in the first case, apparently)?
Equally puzzling was the Syriza leadership’s acceptance of France’s “help” in drawing up its final proposals (after Varoufakis’s resignation).
The French government and the civil servants it deployed to look over the Greeks’ shoulders may not want a Grexit but they have enthusiastically applied austerity policies and seem to have had a major role in drafting a swingeing package for Greece.
While the negotiations were going on, someone suggested to me that Schäuble was playing hard cop to allow Angela Merkel to look like the soft cop. Not a good comparison. Angela was quite hard enough. Wolfgang was more like the cop applies electrodes to your genitals.
The French Socialist leaders were the soft cops, with President François Hollande apparently on the phone to the Greeks and the Germans continuously in the run-up to the last deal and, in the end, they managed to thrust their package down the Greeks’ throats.
Oh well! At least the Syriza leaders showed that politicians don’t have to wear ties.
Ties are the sartorial descendants of a scrap of material that knights used to wear to stop their breastplates rubbing against their necks. Whether the big swinging dicks in the boardrooms and ministries like it or not, we don’t wear armour any more, so ties are pointless.
That’s a tiny victory, I suppose.
I’m off to Greece this week. So more on the blog later.
After three years in power, Hamid Karzai – or his Western sponsors – decided it was time that Afghans should have the chance to directly elect him, or an alternative of their choice. Although they were the majority of the population, women’s voices were not really heard in the campaign. Outspoken candidates and activists faced death threats and other intimidation. And the real decisions were made in traditional Afghan power-broking, usually along ethnic lines, away from the few elections rallies and media debates. And, of course, there were widespread accusations of corruption and dirty tricks on polling day.
A soldier and a civilian show they’ve voted on polling day 2004 Photo: Tony Cross
Kabul, Loghar, Panjshir Valley 3.10.04 – 12.10.04.
A huge image of Ahmed Shah Masood looks out from the front of Kabul airport.
The Mojahedin leader’s assassination just before the fall of the Taliban has made his portrait an icon for post-Taliban Afghanistan and helped legitimise the political influence of those who fought at his side, first against the Russians and then against the Taliban.
Two almost simultaneous flights arrived from Dubai this morning. One was run by the state-owned Ariana, the other, which we were on, by Kam Air, an airline apparently run by an Iranian businessman reported to be a friend of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Uzbek warlord (and presidential candidate) Abdel Rashid Dostum. A lot of Kam Air’s staff speak English with rolling Russian accents.
Along with Afghans in pakools and shalwar kameez, loaded with bundles of scruffily-wrapped, Gulf-bought goods, both planes delivered a troop of journalists arriving to cover the presidential election.
The airport wasn’t even open when I was last here in 2001. We arrived by road and left on a UN light aircraft from Bagram.
There are other changes.
Many more Kabulis seem to have cars now, giving rise to a lot more pollution, at times combining with the ever-present dust to hide the mountains that surround the city. Beggars slip between the cars to solicit drivers or passengers. They’re often children in rags; sometimes they’re adults who’ve lost a limb to a landmine, or some other weapon; some have lost both legs and slide between the vehicles’ wheels on low carts which look like modified skateboards.
In town there are some Western-style shopfronts, a cut-out muscle-man advertising a gym, quite a lot of mobile phone shops. Western civilisation has brought its own places of worship to this devout land – one shopping mall has been built and another one is under construction.
Another innovation is the bulky concrete blocks which jut far out into the street, forming protective walls around US, UN and international security force compounds in anticipation of attacks, particularly against promised disruption during the election period. The armed guards on the gates are a long-standing feature of Afghan life.
I see fewer women on the streets. Immediately after the fall of the Taliban, nearly all women wore the burkah, or chadri as I’m now told it should be called. There were hundreds of women-beggars, asking for charity because their husbands had been killed and they had been banned from working or remarrying (this last still applies).
Now I see few women, except on the markets. Many of those I do see are totally covered, others just wearing headscarves. A new habit has appeared of hitching up the front of the chadri onto the top of one’s head to allow conversation or freer movement. It seems to contradict the point of the thing. A local paper interviews girls who are regularly abused because they don’t cover their hair sufficiently.
Women civil servants count the votes Photo: Tony Cross
Soraya Parlika has changed. She now wears a smart green suit and has a stylish haircut. She receives us in the headquarters of the All-Afghan Women’s Association in central Kabul. In 2001, she met a stream of Western journalists at her home. There are no other journalists here today.
We were all interested in her then because she had stayed in Afghanistan under the Taliban, hiding in safe-houses, had spoken up for women’s rights under the mojaheddin rule of the early 1990s and had been jailed under the pro-Soviet régime, despite a family history intimately linked with that of the Afghan Communist Party.
She’s not standing in the presidential election and now the news-media are queueing to talk to the one woman candidate, Masooda Jalal.
Parlika says that, after the experience of the loya jirga when 10 women, including her, stood for vice-president, she isn’t running in this race so as not to split the women’s vote.
“They did name a woman as vice-president of the loya jirga but that was a symbolic gesture and I don’t accept gestures.”
She refrains from directly criticising Jalal. “Maybe she wants to represent the interests of Afghan women,” she says – but she adds that there is little serious difference between the 18 candidates.
When asked if women will participate in the election, she says that, although it’s an advance that they have the vote, many will just follow their husbands’ orders.
In any case the election was rushed and “we don’t have much time to change people’s mentalities before the election”.
And that’s a big job, starting with the incumbent president.
“I think it’s clear that Mr Karzai will win and he hasn’t said a word about women. How can you change his mentality?
“At the same time, for the future we have to work, not in the towns but in the rural areas, with men and women, to talk about the importance of women participating in society. But we need a lot of time for that and this election has been organised very quickly. Some people don’t even know what an election is and why it’s important.”
As dusk falls and the call for prayer echoes in the little garden below the window, Parlika tells us that the centre in which we’re sitting has been attacked nine times in the last 10 months and that she herself has been attacked four times.
The world’s press is nearly coming to blows for the chance to interview Masooda Jalal, in the groundfloor flat which is serving as her headquarters.
It takes a long wait and a lot of wielding of elbows to get to see her. As we talk to her, a TV cameraman bursts into the room and films the proceedings.
Jalal’s replies seem well-rehearsed, if rather evasive. Like all the other candidates, she promises to tackle corruption and put “professionals” into key posts, although what professions they should hold is never specified. Like the other candidates, she avoids mentioning warlordism and the soaring production of opium.
She also avoids any specific mention of women, until asked.
A male candidate, Abdul Latif Pedram, nearly got himself disbarred for blasphemy for saying that women should have the right to divorce and that maybe polygamy should be banned.
Why hasn’t she raised these questions?
“I raised it (sic) in emergency loya jirga,” she replies. “I put it in my programme and announced as a presidential candidate: I said that, if I get the success, the women of Afghanistan will participate in the leadership of Afghanistan, in decision-making power, equally to men and the women will be participating in designing national strategies and country-wide policies equally with men and, equally with men, they will be present and participating in the implementation of foreign policies.”
Jalal manages to keep a straight face as she assures us that she will win, if no-one tampers with the election result.
“I am welcomed by Afghanistan people with flowers, not with rockets. No security problem I have. I have gone into the hearts of people; they like me.”
She claims to have had no threats of violence and says that she travels without bodyguards.
Why is her experience so different to that of activists like Soraya Parlika?
“Well, maybe because she was … well …” Jalal hesitates and says the word interrogatively, if not insinuatingly, “… a Communist? She was a highlighted figure of Communist government in the past. So maybe she has personal problems with other competitor groups, political groups.
“But I’m an impartial person and I’m not a member of any party and I have no enemy in Afghanistan and throughout the world.”
But, despite apparently enjoying a completely unique popularity, Jalal does have critics. Some of them say that she is in fact close to the Panjshir Valley-based Jamaat-e-Islami party. And some say that she was encouraged to stand simply to forestall the complaints that would have come from outside Afghanistan if no woman had entered the presidential race.
It’s estimated that two-thirds of Afghans are women, over 20 years of war having culled the male population. But the weight of tradition is likely to prevent women making use of this numerical advantage.
This is a society so conservative that girls who’ve returned from Iran pine for their lost freedoms. NGOs report that women have been imprisoned for leaving abusive husbands, refusing to marry their parents’ choice of husband and trying to remarry after becoming widows.
Anyone who questions these practices can expect virulent opposition in high places, as Latif Pedram found out.
A television appearance in which he questioned the justice of polygamy and the ban on women divorcing without their husbands’ permission apparently caused a storm of protest. That’s according to the Supreme Court, at least, which went on to accuse him of blasphemy and try to get him struck off the ballot-paper for challenging the Islamic republic’s sharia law.
The bid was unsuccessful. Pedram is still standing. But he accuses his rivals, and notably the Karzai camp, of sabotaging his campaign, attacking him and his co-workers while he travelled the country in search of votes and even of tying to kidnap him.
Pedram is a tall, courteous man, whose campaign posters break with current international practice in making him look considerably less handsome than he is in real life. He has had a chequered career, ranging from poetry to politics, from Maoism to working with Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Masood.
He lived in France for some time and picked up faltering French to go with his faltering English.
His programme opposes “needless and unbridled privatisation” of assets such as banks, roads and railways, calls for free education for all, a campaign against narcotics and laws to stop violence against women and children. He has attracted some support among young voters with a proposal for a ministry for youth. He also advocates non-alignment. Even though the manifesto makes the mandatory promise to work with the “the world community … against all forms of terrorism and extremism” and accepts that capital and free markets are “an undeniable reality”, one guesses that Pedram is not Washington’s favourite candidate.
He shrugs off the pressures that he’s come under.
“A woman is working, when she comes home, she is under the orders of her husband, her husband can hit her because she doesn’t have full rights. That’s why I accept this risk.”
But the profound conservatism of Afghan society, especially on the status of women, brought down one reforming king and played a major role in bringing down the pro-Soviet régimes.
Pedram accepts this and that his support-base, mainly urban middle-class youth, is narrow but insists that he’s not running to win but to help create a movement that can work for change.
As we leave, I ask him who sent the bouquets of flowers that lie on shelves behind him. He looks slightly embarrassed and replies: “Supporters, maybe ladies.”
A training session for Fefa election observers Photo: Tony Cross
Akbar Khan, who’s fixer/translator for my French colleague Valérie Rohart, hasn’t registered to vote. “Not while my country’s under occupation,” he says. I’d expected this reaction to be widespread but most Afghans seem keen to take part in their first-ever election by universal suffrage.
That’s certainly true of most of the educated middle class.
Mohamed Nyazi, who has set up a monitoring group called Free and Fair Elections in Afghanistan and pronounces its acronym, Fefa, apparently without even thinking of football, almost blushes as he explains how much he hopes that everything will pass off well.
“We have some difficulties, some problems, because in Afghan society the situation is not good,” he says. “We have economic problems, also. But we’re happy for this election because this is the first election and this is an experience for going to democracy. We will see these problems but we will pass these problems and we hope in Afghanistan there will be free and fair elections in the future.”
Professor Kazeem Ahang, at the journalism faculty of Kabul University, is also enthusiastic, even though he believes that Afghanistan is still largely feudal and that there will be tribal and ethnic pressures on the poll.
He proudly declares that he has registered and seems puzzled that most of his family didn’t bother, on the grounds that the result is a foregone conclusion.
And the professor will probably not exercise his newly acquired right. He’s been invited to visit the US and is desperately trying to find a flight out. If his efforts prove successful, he won’t be here on polling day.
Election workers in the country say that they have some work to do to convince peasants that the whole thing isn’t fixed in advance and that its outcome could affect their lives, but on the streets of Kabul only a minority of people say that they’ve refused to register. Most are proud to have done so and ready to declare their voting preference.
Indeed, as incumbent Hamid Karzai apparently boasted when challenged on the suspiciously high registration figures, many Afghans are so keen to vote that they have registered several times.
No-one knows Afghanistan’s population, war having pushed census-taking off the agenda for many years, but it’s believed to be about 27 million. The UN initially estimated the number of eligible voters at 9.8 million. When registration figures reached 9.9 million they revised that figure to 10.5 million. By the end of the registration process the figures apparently showed pretty much every potential voter had registered.
Only 41.3% of those registered are women, although they form the majority of the population, and diplomats claim that the figure is as low as 5% in some parts of the south, where prejudice and insecurity have militated against female participation. The same diplomats say that Hazara women in the north were at first forbidden by local leaders to register but then changed the men’s minds on the grounds that the Hazaras would be outvoted by other ethnic groups if they didn’t.
So the figures look dicey, an impression confirmed by American journalist Christian Parenti, who has managed to buy two polling cards, although how he would convince a polling official that he’s Afghan is unclear.
A traditonal Afghan compound on the road between Kabul and Loghar Photo: Tony Cross
There are signs of reconstruction as you leave Kabul going south. Long stretches of timber-yards seem to be doing business supplying, among other things, scaffolding. There are some large and vulgarly decorated houses just built or under construction. But vast areas of the city, perhaps most of it, have yet to be rebuilt; whole stretches lie in bombed-out ruins and others seem to have always been shabby and down-at-heel.
On the road to Loghar province, you soon pass into semi-desert, with occasional bursts of cultivated land. Stretches of land are pitted with little flags, which signify the presence of landmines. A mine-clearing team is working in one large field.
And there are miles of dust; wasteland dotted with traditional Afghan buildings. Viewed from outside, the architecture is one of the least attractive in the world – a long wall made from mud-bricks faced in brown-grey mud, often with a small tower in one corner and buildings in another. The building material is fragile, which is unfortunate given the country’s history.
A guard at Mohamed Aslam Masood’s campaign headquarters Photo: Tony Cross
Behind the walls, these houses are more pleasant. There’s usually a garden, although its plants are all tinted grey by the ubiquitous dust, and the one-storey homes have windows which let in plenty of light and sprawl to accommodate an extended family.
In such a building, protected by armed guards, we find Mohamed Aslam Masood, lounging in a corner of a bright living room, receiving the heads of villages stuck out in the wilds of Loghar.
He’s been sent here to represent the Karzai campaign and seems confident that he has the province sewn up.
“Here we have people from all over our province, Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek. We are all like brothers,” he declares, as mobiles trill, their rings ranging from music to birdsong. I cannot see the distinctive features of an Uzbek among the dozens of people in the building.
Six election workers have been killed in the province during the campaign, some UN vehicles have been blown up by landmines and gunmen have shot at registration centres, but Masood assures us that everything is running smoothly here.
The villagers ask if the campaign will provide transport to ferry voters to the election centres. There are only 25,000 centres spread out across this sprawling, mountainous country, necessitating a long and difficult journey for many voters.
The answer is no, the president’s campaign doesn’t have enough money for that and they must find their own transport. The villagers receive this information with remarkably good cheer.
Faisal Olek Mujadad makes his entrance Photo: Tony Cross
There’s a respectful buzz and everybody gets to their feet, as a huge man, dressed in grey from his turban to his well-used shoes, enters the room. His authority over everyone here is almost tangible but he wears it casually, smiling and shaking hands with joviality. He’s introduced – Faisal Olek Mujadady, the former governor and former mojahedin commandant of the region.
He says that he has given up the gun, having resigned from the army three days ago, and clearly has a career in some other branch of public service lined up.
As the commandant merrily assures us that the province will vote Karzai – “after 25 years of problems, we’ve had two years of peace and brotherhood” – a younger man, bearded and fresh-faced and dressed in white, enters and takes a seat.
This is mullah Ghulam Rassool.
“Mullah dangerous, mullah Taleb,” the commandant says in English and grins. The cleric giggles.
His links with the former Taliban régime haven’t prevented the mullah being given responsibility for the Karzai campaign’s publicity in Loghar.
Indeed they might have helped. He says that the province’s religious leaders sent him to see the president to negotiate the price of their support. It included a commitment to build several madrassas here, to stamp out “prostitution”, which they claim is rife, and to gain the release of Afghan prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
The mullah is pleased because two prisoners have already been freed, one of them being the former Taliban minister of frontiers, Naim Kuchi.
Mullah Rassool seems to be one of the “moderate Taliban” with whom Karzai has been discussing. One suspects that the definition of the much-abused adjective in this case is “ready to deal with the president”.
The mullah’s puritanical politics don’t prevent him talking to Valérie or being a rather jolly fellow. He giggles when pressed to give a straight answer to a question and when interrupted by the commandant for perhaps being a little too nostalgic when asked how the current state of affairs compares to the previous régime.
“To start with the Taliban government was not bad,” runs the acceptable version. “But afterwards foreign governments came and interfered in our country and terrorism took place.”
The reference to foreign countries presumably indicates Pakistan but, considering that its security services, the ISI, virtually created the Taliban, it’s not clear when “afterwards” began.
When Valérie asks the mullah if he received money from the Karzai camp, the commandant interrupts: “You see, she understands that for the mullahs everything’s a matter of money!”
The mullah giggles again and everyone present feels free to laugh – once the commandant has cast the first disrespectful aspersion.
Drivers of the highly decorated lorries that travel between Pakistan and Kabul Photo: Tony Cross
At a crossroads down the road, villagers seem to confirm Masood’s confident assessment. The occupant of a van sent from Kabul to hand out Masooda Jalal posters claims to be doing well but everybody who’s ready to reveal their voting intention says that they will vote for Karzai.
Isah Gul is typical.
“I will vote for Karzai because he is a Pashtun and a good person,” he says.
Why are Karzai’s ethnic origins important?
“Because I’m a Pashtun, I will vote for a Pashtun.”
The road to the Panjshir Valley Photo: Tony Cross
The Panjshir Valley is different.
The drive from Kabul takes several hours, along a good road through the Shomali plains, once the garden of Afghanistan, now largely reduced to a dustbowl, and up into the mountains where the road deteriorates.
As you approach the valley the road improves again and the landscape changes. Jagged rocks from steel-grey mountains tumble into a shallow, green river which races along beside the road. You pass by orchards, climb up a mountain to look past twisted war-wreckage down onto cultivated fields; in one two cows lock horns as a herdsman looks on.
Welcome to the Panjshir Valley Photo: Tony Cross
The entrance to Panjshir, which was recently declared a province, is effectively a frontier-post. Visitors must stop at a gate made from scaffolding sanctified by a massive billboard of the region’s most famous son, Ahmed Shah Masood, to be checked by armed guards. A decorative tank-shell greets you once you have passed through the checkpoint.
Abandoned ordnance on the road to the Panjshir Valley Photo: Tony Cross
On the way we passed a collection of dilapidated tanks and other heavy weapons lying about on a dusty plateau, the fruit of the disarmament programme which involved buying the various factions’ arms off them.
Just down the road from the frontier, we pass another collection of heavy weaponry, ageing but in better condition and lined up neatly between some buildings under construction and a board explaining that these structures are a gift from the people of Japan.
As I reach for my camera, Akbar says: “Don’t take photos!”.
It could land us in trouble. These weapons are supposed to have been handed back, too, he says.
Panjshir Valley villagers Photo: Tony Cross
The small town of Roha is the home-town of Hamid Karzai’s chief rival, Yunus Qanooni, we’re told. He’s a Tajik and one of the leaders of the Panjshir-based faction of the Northern Alliance, who accumulated enormous power after 2001, exploiting the reputation of Ahmed Shah Masood, their record of resistance to the Russians and Taliban and, above all, the weapons and fighting-men which they brought with them to Kabul to take control of the new government’s key ministries.
Qanooni himself became minister of education, not as crucial a post as that taken by fellow Northern Alliance chief, Mohamed Fahim, who grabbed defence, while keeping his own militias in reserve. But Karzai seems to have manoeuvred Fahim out of the election calculations, while Qanooni is relying on the Tajik vote to provide a power-base during and after the vote.
A Panjshir Valley shopkeeper and hiss friend show their loyalty to Ahmed Shah Masood Photo: Tony Cross
Small shops made of wood or converted goods containers line the road, a partridge in a cage often standing in front of displays of cheap goods. Qanooni’s poster is on display in many of them – but so is that of another Tajik candidate, Abdul Hafeez Mansoor, who is playing the ethnic card more blatantly.
As in other rural areas, many inhabitants are strangely reticent about their voting intentions.
“I will vote for the person who fulfils my conditions. He must be a Muslim and an Afghan and must defend our country,” says one man who is pushed to the front of the crowd. These supposedly personal demands are voiced with surprising regularity, leading one to suspect that the speaker has heard them at the local mosque, rather than from listening to the voice of his own reason.
Some of the younger men say that they will vote for Qanooni, “… he’s a Muslim, he was a mojahed, he’s a good person”. Older men explain that they will wait for the shura, the exclusively male meeting of village leaders, to declare its voting preference.
A young man is introduced as Barayolai, a mojahed.
What are you doing now? I ask.
“Now I’m still a mojahed,” he says and lets out a wheezing laugh.
Taken aback, I ask whom he’s fighting now.
“If anyone comes, like al Qaeda, like foreigners, we’ll gladly fight them.”
Is there a risk of that?
“Yes, for sure. Why not?”
But when asked if he has fought any al Qaeda, Baroyalai says that they daren’t come into the area.
His candidate of choice is Qanooni.
A tank serves a peaceful purpose by Ahmed Shah Masood’s mausoleum Photo: Tony Cross
On a ridge sticking out into the valley, surrounded by bare mountains with a view into the fertile area below is a disused tank, stripped of its paint, its barrel pointing into the air, shirts drying on its body.
They belong to a small group – a gardener, a stallkeeper, guards – who make their living at the tomb of Ahmed Shah Masood, whose dark green, plastic-looking roof shines in the sun against the bare, hard creases of the mountains.
Inside, his grave is decorated with dark cloth, gold and silver coloured streamers and Arabic inscriptions. Two men come in and kneel to pay their respects.
Ahmed Shah Masood’s tomb Photo: Tony Cross
The chief guard on duty, Mekhuer Ahmad, is a man in his 30s, fair for an Afghan and blue-eyed, dressed in battle fatigues but quietly spoken. He was a guard for the guerrilla leader and believes that everything would be better if he was still alive.
“He was completely opposed to the Americans, so if Ahmed Shah Masood was alive there would not be American soldiers in Afghanistan.”
He says that he has nothing against the international force, Isaf, but has nothing but contempt for the Americans.
“The Afghanistan people hate them,” he says and goes on to blame the US for conflicts all over the world, although the only example he actually names is Palestine.
Mekhuer Ahmad has a low opinion of President Karzai, too.
“In the beginning we offered to be his bodyguard. But now he has taken on foreigners,” he says, and indeed at yesterday’s Karzai rally in Kabul, security during the three and a half hour wait for the president was assured by a group with pistols on their hips and machine-guns in their hands, whose spokesperson was an elegantly-coiffed American blonde and whose personnel was largely made up of pink-skinned men with shades and goatee beards.
Ahmad accuses Karzai of being pro-Pashtun rather than pro-Afghan and says that he wants a president with the interests of the whole country at heart. He, too, seems to favour Yunus Qanooni.
Traditional dance at Hamid Karzai’s election rally in Kabul Photo: Tony Cross
Pulling into Kabul after dark, we have to stop alongside the lines of lorries that have been banned from entering the city for the week before polling, for fear of a repetition of last week’s lorry bomb.
The vote takes place in less than 36 hours and many people registered in Kabul are coming into the city, while others, registered elsewhere, are leaving. Another sign of concern over security – armed police check each car, opening all the doors, checking out the passengers and looking under their legs and behind them for weapons and explosives. It’s not ultra-thorough but it’s methodical enough to cause a traffic-jam which seems to be accepted with reasonably good humour by drivers and passengers.
A bridge over the Kabul river Photo: Tony Cross
The solidity of Stalinist architecture didn’t prevent the former Soviet Cultural Mission, which is behind the former Soviet embassy, from being shelled into a wreck of concrete, metal and dark holes where rooms used to be.
It wasn’t reduced to this condition during the war to drive out the Russians but after it, when the liberators fought it out among themselves. The artillery of Abdel Rashid Dostum fired from mountains on one side of Kabul and the artillery of Ahmed Shah Masood fired from mountains on the other side, many shells falling short and destroying liberated buildings or killing liberated Kabulis.
A few kids hang around outside the destroyed building, along with a grey-bearded man, who says that his name is Abdul Hafar and that he is a refugee returned from Pakistan. He takes us through a hole in the wall into what must once have been the cultural centre’s garden.
On the left of the gap through which we climbed are toilets hammered together out of wood and UN High Commission for Refugees plastic covering. On the right is a tent, the ground covered in cheap carpets, clothes and cushions neatly piled to one side, which has served as home to Abdel Hafar and six relatives for the last two and a half years.
Children with scars from infections on their faces stare at us, other men gather round and women come out of homes set up inside the dilapidated building to hang their washing in the polluted air.
Abdul Hafar says that he fled to Pakistan during the war, after helicopters of “the enemies of Afghanistan” shot up his home.
Was it worth fighting that war? I ask.
His answer is equivocal.
“The situation is better than in Taliban times. For a year we’ve had peace in Afghanistan. But I’m not sure that it will last because we had war for 25 years. The new generation has grown up in a country at war so everyone has mental problems, no-one is used to peace.”
As he speaks, the throbbing of military helicopters passes overhead.
One wouldn’t have thought it possible to live in the flattened streets around the ex-embassy. But, in a site where just a few shards of building are left standing, some families have rigged up tarpaulins and plastic sheets to make their homes.
Gul Haidar has lived here for seven months. Under the Taliban his father was arrested after neighbours claimed that he had a weapon in his home. He was released but, following a tip-off that they were coming for him a second time, the family fled to Pakistan. His father lives in this ruin with the rest of the family now and Gul Haidar tries to scrape a living as a street-hawker.
Is life easier here or in Pakistan?
Buildings creep up the side of the mountains around Kabul Photo: Tony Cross
“It is the same for us. It is hard here and it was hard in Pakistan.”
Gul Haidar, who originally came from the Panjshir Valley, says that he will vote for Yunus Qanooni.
There’s another refugee camp right by the vast football field which stretches out in front of Kabul stadium, where Karzai held his election rally and where, a few years ago, the Taliban carried out public executions. Some government buildings are nearby.
Here tents have been pitched in neat lines or stretched over half-destroyed buildings. Detached lorry cabs and other twisted war-wreckage stand in the midst of the dwellings. A cobbler sits at the side of the road with a group of men around him.
We’re not the first visitors, it seems.
“For the last three years, lots of journalists and people from the UN or the Afghan government have come here,” says Ismail Khan, who introduces himself as the camp’s agent. “They interview us but they don’t help us.”
He supports Karzai, whom he credits with bringing peace and stability to Afghanistan but he believes that the refugees have been neglected by the government.
“I think he wants to bring unity to Afghanistan, too. But ministers drive by every day. They see us but they do nothing for us. What have we done wrong? Our children get no education. When they’re older, they’ll disturb the country. We don’t want this kind of life.”
Another man, Mir Ahmed, has been here two years, since returning from Afghanistan.
“We came back because we saw that there was peace.” Then, like most of the refugees we talk to, he adds: “We were refugees in Pakistan; now we are refugees in Afghanistan.”
Most of the men here say they will vote for Karzai. But, when a van from the Qanooni campaign pulls up and starts distributing posters, the political debate steps up a notch. People start grumbling about ministers who have “built themselves six houses and done nothing for us”.
A man with one leg, one of the tens of thousands of Afghans handicapped in the decades of war, limps up to our taxi as we leave. Earlier he wouldn’t say anything but now there’s no stopping him.
“At the beginning of the transitional government Karzai said he was going to pay 3,000 afghani per month to the handicapped,” he yells. “Now he’s going to pay 300 afghani. What can we do with that?
“These ministers coming back from abroad have salaries of 50,000 or 80,000 per month. If Karzai can give that to his ministers, why is there no money for the poor?”
Men queue to vote on polling day in Kabul Photo: Tony Cross
The next day is polling day. It’s a freakishly grim day, unusually cold for the time of year, the sky a gloomy sort of yellow-grey. At 7.30am the streets are eerily quiet. A public holiday has been declared, so no-one’s rushing to work. Traffic has been banned, except for Kabul-registered taxis. As we climb into one, my interpreter, Jamshid, who has already taken a taxi to meet me, says that the driver asked him:
“You know why it’s like this today?”
“No.”
“Last night one of the candidates made a deal to sell Afghanistan to foreigners. Allah is angry.”
There’s already a long queue at the mosque in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighbourhood, which today serves as a polling centre. Men tell us that they’re delighted to vote. A smaller queue of women forms at a side-building where they can lift their chadris in private and be checked against their polling cards.
But, as we leave, we’re stopped by an excited group of off-duty soldiers. They thrust their thumbs towards us and shout something.
“Look, we voted half an hour ago and already the ink has washed off.”
It’s true that their hands show no sign of the ink-mark that is supposed to stop multiple-voting.
They proffer their voting-cards which have been stamped.
We stop an Uzbek man coming out of the mosque and get him to rub his thumb with spit. The mark starts to go, although it doesn’t vanish altogether.
At other polling stations the queues are equally long and the enthusiasm as great – one man is carried out of the centre by two friends; despite their help, he’s short of breath, but he pants out an explanation, that he and his wife have flown in from the USA just to vote, he fell ill on the plane and wouldn’t allow that to stop him taking part. But the report of the fading ink has begun to spread. It’s happened at many centres in Kabul and, it seems, throughout the country. Angry men claim that this is a plot to allow people with several voting cards to use them all.
All the candidates, apart from Karzai, leap on this opportunity to demand that the poll be called off. They or their representatives gather at the house of Satar Sheerat, an intellectual who is standing although without much hope of massive support. Apart from Karzai only Masooda Jalal is unrepresented. From her headquarters, she declares that she’s boycotting the poll but won’t have anything to do with her competitors for second, third or whatever position.
A mob of journalists gathers in the garden, as UN representative Manuel da Silva and EU envoy Francesc Vendrell come and go. Da Silva declares that the Joint Electoral Monitoring Board won’t call off the vote and the candidates continue their meeting. The press’s impatience grows and for a moment it looks as if the first casualties of the day will be from our ranks or those of the security guards who are obliged to use physical force, but happily not their weapons, to prevent us storming into the meeting room.
Finally, Sheerat and some of his temporary allies appear on the patio to read a declaration. They detail a number of minor complaints, such as Pakistanis allegedly posing as Afghans at one polling station, and claim that the ink crisis makes the poll untenable. They call for a boycott, although most of the morning is already over and it’s difficult to see how they can communicate the order to their supporters throughout the country.
In the middle of a little clump of reporters, one candidate, Amayan Shah Asufi, launches into a bitter attack on the probable winner.
“The drug-traffickers have an interest in the election of Karzai, because he’s a weak personality and his authority doesn’t go beyond Kabul city,” he says.
Asufi claims that some government ministers and some provincial governors are “directly involved in drug-smuggling” and that drug-money has been used to reelect Karzai.
While the candidates insinuate that this is all fraud by the Karzai camp, the fault seems to lie with UN trainers. Ill-prepared election officials have used ink that was supposed to stamp polling-cards to stamp hands, others have failed to shake before use, others just haven’t made sure that the ink is properly applied.
Pakistani author and journalist Ahmed Rashid, perhaps the best-known authority on the region, strikes an I-told-you-so note – he blames the cock-up on the unholy rush to hold this election before the country was ready for it.
“It should have been postponed one or two years,” he says.
The excitement caused by this bungling obscures the fact that the day goes off with no apparent violence in Kabul.
Véronique Rebeyrotte of France Culture and Valérie Rohart of RFI on the way to the vote count with the ruins of the former royal palace in the background Photo: Tony Cross
The day before polling day rockets were fired on the city from the mountains overlooking it but no-one was injured. Harassment of election-workers during the campaign was more serious, with about 30 of them being murdered.
But the Taliban have failed to carry out their threats, posted in “night letters” on mosque walls, to attack every one of the candidates, to punish villagers taking part in the vote and to disrupt the poll itself.
There are relatively few reports of violence on polling day: we hear of rockets killing three children in Helmand province and hitting two polling stations before voting began, of about 32 people, government forces and guerrillas, being killed in fighting in the south and of two attempts at suicide-bombings being foiled in Kandahar province.
Vickram Parekh, an analyst at the International Crisis Group’s modest office in Kabul, believes that the Karzai government has isolated the die-hards by negotiating with so-called “moderates”, while convincing the Pakistani army to finally put aside any sentimental or tactical attachment to their former proxies and hit them hard in the tribal areas along the frontier. The Pakistanis perhaps also had their own reasons for ending the no-go zone in these provinces, which has lasted since the British Raj, in the context of sectarian and religious violence in cities like Karachi and has even threatened the life of President Pervez Musharraf.
The Taliban also seem to have lost a lot of sympathy among the population, even in the Pashtun areas which were their power-base when the movement began.
The politicians’ anger over yesterday’s malfunctions isn’t shared by most people on Kabul’s central market. Hardly any of them want a rerun and most believe Karzai will be reelected.
Relief at the lack of disruption predominates at the press conferences called by election observers.
Fefa outlines a number of abuses and calls for a mechanism to be set up to look into the candidates’ complaints but says that the “ink problem” was solved in most places by 9.00am, thanks to the work of UN officials.
Fefa also notes a violation of a ban on campaigning on the day by supporters of Hamid Karzai in Gardez, Yunus Qanooni in Jalalabad and Masooda Jalal in Herat.
The organisation’s observers seem to have been made unwelcome at polling stations in refugee camps in Pakistan, where there were 1.5 million potential voters. They were prevented from entering some voting centres. In others their IDs were taken, or documents to help their work were torn up or they were taken out of the centres as the ballot boxes were sealed, which might give rise to some suspicion.
But, Fefa president Mohamed Nyazi regards these problems as minor ones and declares the election “fairly democratic”.
International observers seem to be even more ready to judge the abuses of secondary importance.
The Organisation of Security and Co-operation in Europe’s representative Robert Barry says that in some areas observers and agents were not allowed to enter polling stations; responding to claims that election officials sometimes went into the booths with voters to tell them how to vote, he says that they were urging but not forcing the electors to vote a certain way.
But the OSCE still declares that nullifying the election would “put into question the expressed will of millions of Afghan citizens who came out to vote, carried out voter registration and manned polling stations despite great personal risk”.
Barry does admit that there could still be problems.
“There’s a famous quote by Joseph Stalin that says: ‘It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.’ So we have to wait for the count to be complete before we make an overall assessment.”
The judgement seems to have been made, however.
Organisers know that a rerun would be practically impossible because of the oncoming winter, which will render much of the country inaccessible, never mind tricky questions like how it would be paid for, whether election workers would have the stamina to go through it all again or whether the population would be ready to turn out to vote again.
Nobody’s even mentioning the possibility of a second round which, according to the rules, has to take place if the leading candidate gets less than 50%. One gets the impression that this didn’t enter into the pre-poll calculations, it being assumed from the start that Karzai would clear that barrier in the first round.
And, of course, there are international considerations. Karzai is Washington’s man. The Bush administration doesn’t want a failure before the US presidentials, nor does it want to further discredit its plans for an election in Iraq in January. The other power-brokers seem ready to tolerate a certain amount of bungling and jiggery-pokery in the hope that some semblance of stability will follow.
Many election observers seem genuinely concerned not to pour cold water on the enthusiasm of voters who did turn out, even if some of them turned out more times than they were entitled to.
But what about those votes which were cancelled out by the double or treble votes of the multiply registered, or the stuffed ballot boxes, or the intimidation by local armed leaders?
In many other countries these practices would have been declared impermissible. What is the acceptable level of malfunction or fraud and how does it vary between countries?
Outside Kabul stadium before Hamid Karzai’s election rally Photo: Tony Cross
At first glance, the Afghans have had an American-style presidential election, minus the electoral college, fortunately, and the international consensus now seems to be that this is real democracy. Thus Jack Straw, the foreign minister of a country which doesn’t elect its head of state, was second only to George Bush in congratulating Afghans on electing theirs.
But is the Western way the only way? If Afghanistan developed its own form of democracy without outside instructions, would it be in the way agreed in the post-invasion conference at Bonn?
Isn’t it possible to adapt the shura and the jirga, most obviously by the participation of women, to provide an expression of the interests and will of the majority of the population?
In any case, the real campaigning wasn’t public debates and election rallies, which the candidates reluctantly got round to holding in the last couple of days, it was deals with warlords, provincial bosses, former Taliban and religious leaders, whose decisions on whom to support filtered down to tribal elders and village shuras.
Probably only one candidate stood with the expectation of winning. The other big players hoped to gain enough support to be strongly placed for the after-poll carve-up, usually by becoming the de-facto representative of an ethnic group and/or a region.
So traditional habits live on and will continue to do so. Afghans have chosen their president by universal suffrage but armed militias, corruption, ethnic and regional factionalism and deal-fixing behind the backs of the people continue to flourish, like the opium poppies that Karzai has promised the West to uproot.
Whether you agree with the result or not, the massive No vote in Sunday’s Greek referendum was a courageous choice. Nobody knows what will happen now – not the Greeks, not the troika … not even Angela Merkel. The majority of Greeks chose to risk more economic hardship rather than willingly undergo further humiliation at the Eurobullies’ hands. A few observations:
The Greeks said no to do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do: Jean-Claude Juncker and Christine Lagarde told them they were naughty not to have paid their taxes. He was finance minister and then prime minister of a tax haven from 1989 to 2013. Being employed by the IMF, she doesn’t pay taxes anywhere (as was, of course, also the case for her predecessor, the delightful DSK). I don’t think that any of us could swear, hand on heart, that we would insist on our contract being rewritten if offered tax exemption but why exactly do international pontificators on fiscal rigour have this status?
European unity is good … but at what price? I have to admit to a sentimental attachment to the European Union and the euro. Being able to travel across most of a continent without showing my passport or changing my money is a pleasing taste of a world without national borders. But how many Greeks should be made unemployed, have their pensions slashed or otherwise reduced to penury to afford me that pleasure?
Europe would look pretty stupid without Greece: Juncker and friends said that the Greeks were voting on whether to stay in the euro and maybe the EU. Grexit would be a big blow to the euro project but they may be ready to accept it for the sake of an example to the other southern European slackers. But what will become of all those speeches about Europe’s heritage and values if the country that gave us the words “democracy”, “philosophy” – not to mention “poliics”, “comedy” and “drama” – is no longer part of our Europe? What has Luxembourg’s contribution to our common culture been, remind me?
Opinion polls are crap: Thank God I resisted the temptation to write a headline about Yes and No being neck and neck on RFI’s website on Saturday following the last poll, which showed the Yes winning with 41.5% against 40.2% for the No. This is not the first time the pollsters have been spectacularly wrong or that partisan media and interested parties have tried to influence the result by seizing on the prediction that serves their purpose. What happened? Were those canny Greeks also plotting their revenge on pollsters, journalists and EU chiefs by lying about their real intentions? Of course, even if the pollsters are genuinely trying to get it right, they can’t avoid the fact that being polled is passive and going to vote is active. They include in their calculations the responses of people who won’t be arsed to go and vote, whose opinion, quite rightly, isn’t taken into account in a real democratic process. But still we write articles based on one poll as if it was a factual account of the public’s mood and politicians allow their results to influence policy. I think we do have enough evidence to say that François Hollande is not very popular in France at the moment but can we really be sure that 51% of French people don’t think very highly of Alexis Tsipras on the basis of one poll?
This is the beginning of an era of austerity, not the end: Austerity doesn’t deliver what’s promised and depresses demand, thus further damaging the economy. But the IMF, the EU and the German leadership have turned down Yanis Varoufakis’s kind offer to save capitalism from itself. Electoral considerations come into this for Merkel, although, as George Papandreou showed when he resigned as Greek PM, an establishment politician is prepared to fall on his sword for the greater bourgeois good if bullied enough. Please read my previous post Austerity the new normal on why I believe that the changes in the structure of the working class and the collapse of the Soviet bloc have lifted the restraints on unbridled capitalist accumulation and are likely to lead to all the social reforms of the 20th century being “reformed” away.
The Arabian Sea seen from Mumbai Photo: Tony Cross
There was a surprise result in the 2004 Indian general election, which I covered for RFI. Congress won despite the BJP’s boasts of “India shining” thanks to its economic management. Much of the middle class liked the BJP4S success in reconciling Hindu nationalism with mall-building multinationals but the poor, especially the rural poor, were less impressed. I visited Bombay and Gujarat. The latter turns out to have been a good choice, Gujarat being the home base of Narendra Modi, who has taken advantage of Congress squandering the good will of its voters and led the BJP to power. See the second half of this post for a visit to the scene of communal riots that are still a controversial part of the PM’s past. Here’s what I wrote on my return to France in 2004.
Mumbai, 18-21 April 2004
The behl puri sellers by the Gateway to India are going to vote Congress. Behl puhri, a sort of spicy dry rice crispies with vermicelli, is, I’m assured, the essential Bombay snack. Actually, I’d already tasted it in London but I’m now told that can’t have been the real thing. It doesn’t taste very different to me, agreeable but not irresistible.
The promenade in front of the luxury Taj hotel, which has attracted a swarm of cheaper hotels including my own along the seafront, is popular for the locals’ evening stroll and for tourists any time of the day, so it’s a good beat for hawkers.
As the behl puri seller assembles my snack, he and his friends explain that they will back Congress when it comes to their turn to vote in the general election which is going on at the moment … in a complicated system of stages, designed to deal with the world‘s biggest electorate. The behl puri sellers are Hindus but don’t sympathise with the Hindu-nationalist agenda of the Bharatya Janata Party, the BJP, which led the outgoing government.
What do they think of Moslems?
‘‘They are our brothers.’’
What about the Hindu-chauvinist project of building a temple on the ruins of the mosque at Ayodhya, which was destroyed by a mob in 1992 with several BJP leaders looking on approvingly?
‘‘They keep talking about it but they don’t do anything.’’
It’s not entirely clear what they should do.
Fishermen men nets on Mumbai seafront Photo: Tony Cross
India has a name for the casual labour, with no rights and no security, which provides a living for these street sellers. It’s called the “unorganized” sector and it accounts for 92% of the country’s employment. There are many such neologisms here and it is difficult to know whether they’ve been invented to give nominal dignity to the oppressed or to disguise the nature of their situation.
I thought I’d seen poverty in the eight Asian countries and three Middle Eastern ones that I’d visited before coming to India but, even in war zones, I’ve never seen the widespread, everyday degradation that I’ve encountered in Bombay.
One of the city’s main thoroughfares, Mohamed Ali Road, is being widened or reconstructed. Half the road is torn up leaving a lower layer open. Families have taken up residence on this mixture of tarmac, metal and rubble. As I drive by in a taxi, a mother does her domestic chores in the open air and her baby crawls naked in the roadworks, with cars, auto-rickshaws and motor-bikes driving past, belching filth into the atmosphere.
On another route into the city, shacks made out of cardboard, wood or corrugated iron have taken over half the pavement for miles and miles and miles. Many have two storeys, although the ground floor would oblige most European to stoop and the top floor is just tall enough to crawl into and sleep. Some of the slum-dwellers have decorated their frontages. Sometimes the dwellings give way to workshops, with racks of steel bars or wood offcuts. You come to a corner and the pavement city stretches off down another long road to the left.
The dhobi ghats, open-air laundries, of Mumbai Photo: Tony Cross
As in all poor countries, street-hawkers and casual labourers pushing barrows stacked with sacks or raw materials are often to be seen.
Beggars are everywhere, including mothers with babies. At traffic lights, the occupants of cars are likely to be accosted by eunuchs wearing kohl and dressed as women. Apparently, many are former street-children who were castrated when young. I’m told that this brutal arrangement at least provides them with a community which affords some solidarity among the indifferent concrete and dirt.
When the heat of the afternoon becomes overpowering, labourers sleep on the street in the baskets they use to carry building materials. At night taxi-drivers sleep on their bonnets. Under the flyover which overshadows Mohamed Ali Road, I see three men taking a siesta. The man nearest to me has a stump cut off at the knee lifted above his body, the stump patched with rags.
The causeway leading to Haji Ali Bukhari mosque Photo: Tony Cross
A causeway leads to the tomb of Haji Ali Bukhari, which sits on an island in the bay. When the tide comes in, the tomb is cut off by the sea. That hasn’t stopped the construction of dozens of improvised stalls selling flowers and sweets for Muslims and Hindus to present to the Haji, many of them perched on wooden stilts half-submerged in water. Beggars line the other side of the path. A toddler stands unattended, about a yard from the water. A group of four lie, nearly naked, chanting in the midday sun, banging their truncated limbs on the ground in time. Near the entrance to the shrine men and women sit on the ground with piles of change in front of them. It’s considered propitious to give alms after a visit and they change notes for coins for a small commission, so that the faithful can gain maximum credit by giving to as many supplicants as possible. One of the money-changers, a raggedly-dressed woman, is talking into a mobile phone.
On the way back, the handicapped men have stopped chanting and are sitting up having a fag.
Near the hotels, street-children beg off the tourists. One of them, a girl called Pinkie, tells me she comes from Pune and left because her parents kicked her out. She doesn’t know why. She walked to Bombay because she had a relation here already living on the street. She speaks quite good English and can also throw in a few words of French or Italian that she’s picked up from tourists.
The street-children tend to ask you to buy them a tin of powdered milk ‘‘for my baby sister’’. I was impressed by the altruism of the request the first time. By the third, it occurred to me that reselling the tin would bring in a lot more than the couple of rupees a tourist is likely to give if left to his or her own initiative.
The visitor from a rich country becomes prone to that sort of calculation here. We feel persecuted by persistent beggars and snarl at them, become terrified of being charged more than the locals and haggle over a few rupees. Later we realise that we’ve saved the value of a coin which we wouldn’t bother to pick up in the street back home.
One could say that we’re used to delegating our social responsibilities to the state and aren’t used to coming face to face with the inequalities that are part of the equation that creates our privileges. We see that we can’t resolve it all and have no system, like zakat, tribe or caste, which will decide our priorities for us.
Boys play cricket in a Mumbai street Photo: Tony Cross
Arun Gawli used to work in the organised sector. He was employed in Bombay’s textile mills, along with tens of thousands of others. A vast area of the city depended on the mills for work and, often, for homes which were made available to mill workers’ families.
But, as workers will, they organised trade unions, went on strike, improved their wages and conditions. The employers closed the mills and moved the work out of Bombay to smaller workplaces and even to homeworkers, who were likely to be more compliant.
The way to get rich now in Bombay is through real estate. So the land on which those mill workers’ tenements stand can be valuable, if the homes are replaced by cinemas, car parks and shopping malls for Bombay’s developing middle class. So evictions are widespread – malls eat men.
The strikes were long and sometimes violent. Workers found themselves locked out for years. Employers would subsidise scab unions which sometimes took on a certain independence and imposed conditions on the bosses, the promotion of the union leader to senior management, for example. Some of the young unemployed joined gangs and the gangsters became embroiled in the industrial disputes.
As the organised sector declined, organised crime grew.
Hundreds of people are gathered in the fortified compound outside Arun Gawli’s home. Apparently it’s the same every day. They want help, maybe in fighting an eviction, maybe to get a job, maybe for some other problem. Perhaps some want to help Gawli’s campaign to be elected for Mumbai South Central constituency.
For the record, Gawli denies having committed the crimes which landed him in jail a while back but he doesn’t bother to sue the news-media which describe him as a “don”, a criminal godfather Bombay-style.
To interview Daddy, as the don likes to be called, local journalist Dnyanesh Jathar and I are ushered into his multi-story home, told to remove our shoes and put in a lift, which takes us to the roof. We wait in a roof-garden, with a small temple for the household’s use, a painted cement elephant and a garishly coloured relief of the monkey-god Hanuman on the wall. As we wait, a man places his hands on Hanuman’s bright pink legs and appears to say a silent prayer.
Gawli appears in kurta-pyjama and Nehru-cap, whose brilliant white contrasts with his dark skin and black moustache, and signs namaste with his hands, smiling charmingly.
He says that he’s helped slum-dwellers improve their living conditions, cleaned up stinking toilets, some of which leaked so badly that tenants had to take umbrellas in with them, and provided water and drainage.
He says that he entered politics to work in an unspecified capacity for the Shiv Sena, the far-right Hindu-chauvinists who helped break the millworkers’ strikes and now control the city council. At one time, they reportedly backed Gawli against Muslim gangster Daoud Ibrahim on the grounds of his religious and communal affiliation. Daoud is now in hiding, allegedly in Pakistan whose secret services are supposed to have worked with him, and wanted for his alleged part in the 1993 bombings which killed 317 people, in reprisal for the massacre of thousands of Muslims in the previous months.
But Shiv Sena ditched Gawli while he was in jail, detained under the National Security Act. He claims that they joined in a chorus of wrongful accusations of crimes of violence committed by some of his associates.
‘‘How could I have done them while I was in jail?’’ he asks, with a logic that seems faultless but for the fact that his prison-guards are accused of allowing him to hold a durbar, or court, while under their supervision.
Anyway, an offended Gawli set up his own party, Akhil Bharatiya Sena, eight years ago and is now fighting Mumbai south-central against Shiv Sena incumbent Mohan Rawale. Another candidate is Sachin Ahir, for the Nationalist Congress Party, a Maharashtra-based split-off from Congress. He’s Gawli’s nephew.
I point out that Gawli seems pretty wealthy for a redundant millworker, which is what he claims to be. He says that his family had a number of cows (the Gawlis are apparently a caste of cowherds) and sold milk before the government took over milk distribution, when they invested their earnings in property.
A no-handbag-snatching zone in Mumbai Photo: Tony Cross
The real estate boom is believed to have made many dubious characters wealthy but the dons apparently also protected some of the poor against other landsharks. Some people see them as Robin Hoods, although their criminal repertoire seems more extensive, and perhaps more ruthless, than that of the hero of Sherwood Forest.
They entered politics when election candidates decided to add muscle to more traditional means of campaigning and seem to have felt at home in the political milieu.
India’s Election Commission declares that 700 members of the upper or lower houses of parliament have criminal records and this election looks set to add to their ranks. The front page of the Asian Age features mugshots of 24 candidates ‘accused of serious offences’ – extortion, rape, dacoity (banditry) and communal violence, for example. Arun Gawli is among them, accused of murder, abetting murder and rioting with a deadly weapon.
Other interesting candidates include two eunuchs, Sonia Ajmeri, standing against deputy prime minister Lal Krishna Advani, and Sanjude Nayak, fighting Defence Minister Harin Pathak, and a record number of film stars, including Govinda, the star of 125 Bollywood greats, who’s standing for Congress in Mumbai North-west. The Economic Times tells us he has forsaken his trademark white shoes and purple shirts for the garb of white shirt and white trousers, which is apparently the uniform of the political caste.
‘‘My dancing has been compared with John Travolta and Elvis Presley and my films have offered entertainment to the lower middle classes.’’ Govinda tells the paper. ‘‘I am a common man, and in my new avtar, people can identify with me.’’
The substrata of the class system are even more conscientiously defined than in Britain.
Gujarat 21-22 April
A shrine in rural Gujarat Photo: Tony Cross
Binu Alex is Kerala Christian, which I suppose allows him a certain distance when reporting on events in Gujarat, a long way from his birthplace and a very Hindu state.
Cows seem to be everywhere in the streets of Ahmedabad, the state’s biggest city, while other beasts, camels or human beings for example, carry the burdens and pull the carts.
‘‘The cows are better looked after than the people,’’ says Binu. The state has a Cow Services Commission, with a department for protection of cows, a department to encourage breeding and a department for making medicine from their urine and their excrement. The state is also the site of India’s space programme.
As we drive around Ahmedabad, Binu points out the invisible dividing lines between Muslim and Hindu neighbourhoods. At a crossroads, he points to one corner and says: ‘‘That’s a police post.’’
The he points at a large modern building on the opposite corner and says: ‘‘That was a mall owned by a Muslim. During the riots a mob attacked that mall and burned it. The police just sat in their post and watched.’’
The riots took place in 2002 and Ahmedabad still bears the scars.
They started after Muslims in a town far away from Ahmedabad stoned a train carrying Hindu activists, who had been to Ayodhya, the city where a mosque was destroyed 10 years previously. The “pilgrims” apparently chanted slogans in favour of their claim for a temple to be built on the site of the mosque, leading the Muslims to attack the train, killing 59 Hindus.
A wave of violent reprisal swept the state, from the main cities to the villages on the edge of the forests where adivasi tribal people live. Officially 1,000 Muslims were killed, although most estimates put the figure at 2,000, their homes and businesses were attacked and often burnt to the ground. Thousands were forced to live in refugee camps for months afterwards.
As we pass a group of middle-class homes, Binu points to one and says that it was the home of a Muslim former judge.
‘‘The crowd attacked that one and not the others. They knew where to come.’’
Another well-known Muslim tried desperately to phone his contacts in Delhi, appealing to them to intervene to stop the bloodshed. When that didn’t work, he went out into the street and said to the murderers: ‘‘Spare these people – take my life instead.’’
They took his life; but as well, not instead.
Usually, it was easy to find where the Muslims lived. For example, everyone knows who lives in Narodia Patia, a poor area of dusty alleys running between two-room concrete houses. When the mob arrived, the women of the area got together and discussed what to do.
‘‘We had decided to stay,’’ says vegetable-seller Zuleika Manu Chowdry, whose bare, untidy house is on the street where the attack began. ‘‘Then we saw Kausarbano run past with her belly slit open and we thought we’d better leave.’’
Kausarbano Shaikh was pregnant. The mob cut open her womb and paraded the foetus through the narrow lanes, impaled on a sword.
The police had already told the women that they were on their own. They fled the area and spent months in a refugee camp. Over 120 people were killed in this one area. One young man we meet fled the massacre with his father. But his brother was handicapped and unable to walk, let alone run. The rioters pulled him out of his wheelchair and slaughtered him on the spot.
Gujarat voted the day before my arrival.
Before the election, 20 of its 26 seats were held by the BJP. Binu and other journalists believe that party has done well, if not better, this time round. The state minister is local BJP leader Narendra Modi, who’s now well-known throughout India because so many people have accused him of complicity in the communal violence. A success in this election could put him on track for a brilliant career at federal level.
Yamal A Vyas is a cheerful man who lives and works in a modest house in a middle-class area. He’s the convenor of the committee which draws up the BJP’s economic policy in the state.
He believes that the party has run the state well, attracting investment which ‘‘according to my understanding of economics’’ will trickle down and enrich the whole population, although he doesn‘t specify exactly when. Vyas claims that Muslim voters are deserting Congress, which they traditionally saw as their secular defender, because they’ve lost faith in it and see the good work that the BJP has done for development;
He says that he regrets the violence of 2002 and denies that the BJP colluded in it or that the police were lax in defending the victims. Hindu-Muslim relations have improved since then, he believes, but adds that sometimes Muslims behave provocatively. For example, ‘‘in cricket, when Pakistan won against India, they let off fireworks and celebrated.”
I remark that perhaps this shouldn’t be a capital offence. Vyas agrees.
Dr Hanif Lakdawala is less enamoured of the chief minister. He claims that the day before the riots Modi held a meeting with top police officers and other officials and told them: ‘‘Tomorrow whatever my boys are doing you’re not going to interfere.’’
Lakdawala is a qualified medical doctor and the director of Sanchetawa, an NGO which works with the poor of both communities. It’s well-furnished office, decorated with posters against domestic violence and for literacy, is in the improbably-named New York Trade Centre, a low-rise concrete building with a sign depicting the Statue of Liberty outside.
The doctor has become a high-profile opponent of sectarian violence, since he accused Modi of complicity with it in 2002.
He says that poverty crosses the communal barrier and reaches extremes on both sides but that he sees no sign of that bringing Hindu and Muslim together. He believes that, with the encouragement of Modi and the state government, the communal division in Gujarat is the deepest in India.
Indeed, the 2002 bloodletting was not the first such pogrom here. Lakdawala believes that it won’t be repeated on the same scale because of the national and international attention that it attracted but that further clashes will take place.
Shortly before our arrival at the headquarters of Prashant, a Jesuit human-rights and social-development centre, two other visitors had barged into the ground-floor reception area. They had threatened Father Cedric Prakash and his co-workers with violence if they didn’t stop their agitation against communal hatred and violence. They finally left when Prakash phoned the police.
It’s not the first time the Jesuit priest has been threatened, or even attacked. As long ago as 1992, he was badly beaten for speaking out against the destruction of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya. Since then he’s had death threats, hate-calls and (unsuccessful) pressure from politicians on the religious hierarchy to shut him up.
To stand up to all that, you need a strong personality and Prakash, who was born in Bombay 53 years ago, joined the Jesuit order in 1974 and has been in Ahmedabad for 17 years, clearly has charm and a forceful will in about equal measure.
He characterises the 2002 violence as ‘‘state-sponsored’’ and is one of a number of activists who have campaigned for retrial of cases arising from it on the grounds that they were conducted within the state and were thus subject to political and communal pressure.
During the election campaign, they won a victory when India’s Supreme Court ordered a retrial, outside Gujarat, of 21 Hindus accused of killing 15 Muslims in an arson attack on a shop known as the Best Bakery. Yesterday the state government announced that it would appeal against the decision. Prakash and his colleagues hope to get 12 other similar cases judged outside the state.
Prakash points out that Moslems are not the only victims of dirty politics in Gujarat. Christians are such an infinitely small proportion of the state’s population – 0.5% – that one would think it hardly worth a Hindu chauvinist’s time attacking them. But they do – 84 times in 1988, when the Hindu right launched a sort of turf war over the right to recruit members of tribal groups.
The local BJP’s Freedom of Religion law, named with fine bureaucratic irony, is a product of hard-line Hindu hostility to conversions to Christianity and could be a model for national legislation if some BJP and Hindu activists get their way.
The act enrols the judicial authorities into the policing of religion. A conversion cannot take place without the permission of a District Magistrate, who must also be informed of the fact afterwards. Anyone carrying out an illegal conversion may be punished by three years in prison and a fine. But the law is particularly concerned to protect minors, women and members of scheduled castes or tribes from being led astray. It raises the possible prison term to four years and doubles the fine if they are the subject of the conversion.
Throughout India’s history dalits and adivasis have not unnaturally been attracted by religions such as Islam, Buddhism and Christianity which don’t stigmatise them on the basis of caste.
Prakash and other Christian social activists are particularly worried by a ban on ‘‘allurement’’, defined as ‘‘any gift or gratification, either in cash or in kind’’ or a ‘‘grant of any material benefit, either monetary or otherwise’’.
In many poor areas they provide educational and medical facilities. The hard-liners have insinuated that these are bribes to convert and the activists fear that this could be the pretext for prosecutions or attempts to close the programmes.
Prakash is one of the few people I meet who believes that the BJP are losing ground locally.
‘‘We went to the south of the state yesterday to watch the voting,’’ he says. ‘‘I think they’ll lose seats. People are seeing through them.’’
My journalist companions look sceptical.
Homes of rawals outside Amirapur Photo: Tony Cross
Two kilometres outside the village of Amirapur, just after passing a pastel-coloured temple, you come across two streets, looking a bit lost in the middle of the fields. In one a camel stands tied to a tree and broken stones create a road-surface of sorts. This is where rawals, a so-called “intermediate caste”, live.
A little further down the road on the opposite side, live the dalits, Gandhi’s “children of heaven”, sometimes called backward castes or untouchables.
Not just untouchables but unsmellables: “It has something to do even with wind direction,” says Anosh Malekar a local reporter who has joined us for this visit to rural Gujarat. “The lower castes always stay so that they don’t pollute the winds also of the upper castes. Suppose that we are on the west and we have westerly winds, an OBC house will be at the far end of the village and no upper caste will stay beyond them.”
But for the tinny echo of a radio and a couple of dogs, there’s no sign of life around the dozen or so one-storey concrete houses laid out in two rows and shaded by trees. Suddenly the radio is switched off and we can only hear birds singing. Then a few people venture out into the intense midday heat.
Ramesh Bhai Karsan Bhai
One of them is Ramesh Bhai Karsan Bhai, a short plump, dark-skinned man, dressed in a white tee-shirt and kind of sarong, a string of beads hanging round his neck.
He tells us that 20 years ago their homes were closer to the village, but even less sophisticated. Indira Gandhi’s government built them new homes and they moved here.
The people here belong to a sub-caste, the chamars, who make leather.
“Whenever an animal dies in the village,” says Ramesh, “we go there, we bring the carcass here, we remove the skin and make leather to use for various purposes. All kinds of animals – cow, buffalo, goats, ox … even camels.”
They sell the product to traders from the towns.
When no animals have had the good grace to die, they work the fields of upper-caste peasants or run errands for them, earning a pittance for about 12 hours’ work per day.
Dalits in Amirapur Photo: Tony Cross
Feisty 57-year-old Isaben says that two years of drought have meant not enough work, meaning not enough to eat. And that’s meant debt, as the dalits have borrowed from money-lenders who settle interest rates as they see fit.
Isaben only borrows from the man for whom she usually works and refuses to pay interest. “Even today I owe him 5,000 rupees, but I told him flat on his face that if I get no work, I won’t be paying.”
She draws an “Oh, my God!” and a shocked, but impressed, laugh from Anosh, who’s interpreting, when she explains that if any of the money-lenders give them trouble, she herself will go and beat them up.
Children in the dalit quarter of Amirapur Photo: Tony Cross
Prakash, an unemployed 22-year-old who gets occasional work on other people’s land, lives with his extended family of seven people, of whom only his married brother has regular work.
In the best of all possible worlds, if he could change his life, what would he want?
“His dream is of a better life,” translates Anosh. “He is ready to start a small business, preferably something to do with leather, because that’s his expertise. Or of a small job which would pay him something like 100 euros a month in Indian rupees, where he could work something like eight hours and come back … it’s important that he could get an income that could see survival of his large family, as well as ensure education for his next generation – because he thinks education is important.”
In the village itself, the local schoolteacher, Hasherben Patel,her husband, Prakesh, and her assistant are standing outside the school.
Patel says that 80 per cent of the children that she teaches come from poor families – “if they work today, they eat; otherwise they don’t eat.” The droughts have hit them badly and they haven’t received much help from the government.
The other 20 per cent are upper caste. “They own all the livestock around here” and, although she doesn’t know exactly how much, “have fat bank balances”.
There are two schools serving the village, one for the centre and one for its outskirts, meaning that the dalits whom we met all go to a separate school from those who live in the area that we’re now in. But the teacher insists that there is a caste mix in both schools and that they were built to conform to government regulations that mean to stop children walking too far in the hot sun.
This is a Congress-run village; the dalits had already told us that. Although they are Hindus, they don’t vote along religious lines for the BJP but for the country’s best-known secular party.
The teachers are full of praise for the small group who run things here. They seem to have a tight grip on parochial power but our informants credit them with using it to obtain good roads, water and 24-hour power-supply, which is rare in rural India.
Out of deference to central government efforts at a form of positive discrimination, the village head is a woman. But, not unusually, according to Anosh, “the village is de-facto run by her father-in-law”.
Driving out of the village, we come across a crowd following a sound-system blaring out frantic and distorted music. Two men in brightly-coloured clothes, their face painted and turbans knotted on their heads, are perched on top of horses.
They’re bridegrooms from another village who are both marrying local girls and are being paraded around the area so that the community can judge the quality of the catch.
Young men from the other village say that they think their comrades have done well marrying here. They start to praise the facilities here and then stop, local patriotism demanding that they claim their own territory is just as good.
In a new blast of pipes and percussion they set off through the greenery. I don’t see any of the dalits in the crowd.
As I’ve just reported in a much-tweeted story on RFI’s website, the French government collected a record 19.3bn euros from tax dodgers in 2014, up from 18bn in 2013, and it expects to collect even more in 2015.
The government is claiming the credit for its anti-tax-dodging drive but there were earlier reports of people in that department complaining that they were understaffed, particularly given the number of tax avoiders who have come forward following the Swissleaks and Luxleaks revelations, and could collect far more.
Panic seems to have seized certain members of the accumulating classes, inspiring an unprecedented outbreak of honesty.
Unless I’m mistaken, the Greek government’s proposal to chase up tax dodgers has been pretty much pooh-poohed by the EU, IMF and other negotiators, for whom making the poor suffer seems to be a matter of principle – see my post Austerity the new normal, which also goes into the French experience and ventures an explanation as to why this is going to carry on indefinitely.
Anyone tempted to soap the rope for benefits scroungers might like to know that pursuing social security fraud, including employers’ unpaid contributions, only netted the French government 852.6 million euros.
