The stunningly beautiful Hazrat Ali Mazar (Shrine of Ali) in central Mazar-e-Sharif
As the Afghan people face further suffering and the big powers and international agencies debate how to deal with the new Taliban government, I am posting photos from my reporting assignements in the country in the first decade of the century, the captions are based on memory but I have done my best to avoid inaccuracy.
A key element in the Taliban’s seizure of power this time round was the collapse of support for Ashraf Ghani’s government in the north, a region where Pashtuns, who form the Islamist movement’s traditional base of support, are in a minority.
I visited Mazar-e-Sharif in 2009 and interviewed Atta Muhammed Noor, a Tajik former warlord who had become governor of Balkh province and has now fled the country.
Mazar-e-Sharif’s population includes Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen and Hazaras, the latter group, who are mostly Shia Muslim, having particularly bitter memories of the previous period of Taliban rule.
Men line up to petition the governor, who has swapped his battle fatigues for a smart suitThere seems to be little machinery of local government, so individuals and community elders present their requests direct to the governor, which I supose keeps down the wage bill and has the advantage of giving him great powers of patronageAgreement seems to have been reached hereA woman enters the UN commpound, which, like all public buildings, has armed guards in case of attackMen enter the Hazrat Ali MazarWomen pray outsideLegend has it that when Ali, Islam’s fourth caliph, who was both cousin and son-in-law to the prophet Muhammed, was assassinated his remains were loaded onto a white camel, which walked as far as Balkh, then collapsed and died. Local people say the shrine was built on the place where he was buried, although the Iranian city of Najaf is also cited as his resting place – the doves that gather on the roof of the Hazrat Ali Mazar are believed to be attracted to this holy place. Over 1,000 are believed to have died last year because no-one was feeding them during Covid lockdownPeople gather around the shrine – this young man had come to Mazar from a rural area seeking work – he is wearing a traditional Uzbek coat, the chapan, which was adopted by former president Hamid Karzai, along with elements of dress from other ethnic groups, in an attempt to symbolise Afghan unityNot all practices hereabouts are strictly Islamic – this man is a fortune tellerHere are the tools of his trade – I omitted to ask what he used the knife forThis boy sells paper handkerchiefs and other such merchandise to passers-byA retired police officer talks about local people’s struggle to surviveThe covered market is a riot of colourChillis are good trade – strange to think that they are not indigenous to Asia but came from the Americas, spices having been a motor force of early colonialism Pomegranates – a staple in the central Asian and Caucasian dietI’m told that vegetables are not highly regarded – Afghanistan has a kebab culture, if you have the money, you eat meatBut, fortunately for the nation’s health, cauliflowers, courgettes, aubergines and so on still find plenty of buyersAuto-rickshaws are a popular form of transport, usually referred to by the name of their Chinese manufacturer, Qingqi or Chingchi
Traditional dance at Hamid Karzai’s rally during the 2004 presidential election
A new period in Afghanistan’s history has opened up with the return of the Taliban to power and the hasty departure of US forces.
I reported from Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, during the 2004 and 2009 presidential elections and the 2005 legislative election.
Here are photos of some of the country’s long-suffering people taken during my assignements (my camera was stolen in 2001 during an unpleasant roadside incident, so none from then, sadly). Unfortunately, I don’t have easy access to my notes of the time and a link to a slideshow on RFI’s website in English appears to be broken, so I no longer have people’s names and am writing captions from memory. So here goes:
For a small fee this boy burns incense (span) in a can and waves it around your head to chase away evil spirits. His father is dead, leaving his mother to look after several children, the fate of many women after decades of war. His income, collected on the streets and in the parks of Kabul, is essential to feed the whole family.
His friends play table football in Kabul’s central parkThe daughters of better-off families on their way to school, following the end of Taliban rule when education for girls was bannedEvery morning labourers gather at key points of the city in the hope of being hired for the day. Many of them are Hazaras, a minority group who are mainly Shia Muslim and have often suffered discrimination or persecution, notably during the Taliban’s rule
Some of them stay until late in the day …
… in the hope that some employer may need an extra handThis man runs taxi-buses and employs boys to tout for business. He seemed quite proud of providing an income for their familiesA stallholder at the bus stationA cassette vendor. Before 2001 the Taliban banned music, so he sold tapes of religious speechesA timber merchant in the mainly Pashtun area of the cityAn Uzbek tradesman makes Astrakhan hats of the kind favoured by Hamid KarzaiBakers in KabulThe uncooked bread is placed in an underground oven, which is sprayed with water to prevent overheating … then brought out with the help of iron rods… and sold to an eager public. One series of the Danish TV showThe Killing took its heroine to Afghanistan, where she found the remains of a murder victim in a walk-in baker’s oven. So far as I know no such ovens exist in the country (please send a comment to correct me if I’m wrong)A vendor at Kabul’s bird market. Quails are popularButchers at a street market, hygiene not a top priorityThis restaurant-owner was once a professinal wrestler. Photos of his former triumphs decorate the walls of the establishmentA kebab sellerThe temple that served Kabul’s small Sikh communityAn election worker, handicapped like so many people who may have lost limbs in fighting, bombardment or to landminesElection workers are trained in 2005Women arrive at a polling station in 2009A pottery in KabulThe clay being workedPashtun villagers, camping in Kabul where they have come seeking workResidents of the camp wash in a spring nearbySelling light bulbs on a Kabul market, with proof that they workA photographer with a box camera in the Shah Shaheen neighbourhood of KabulThe caretaker of the British cemetery, where many foreigners, including participants in the 19th-century British forays into Afghanistan, are buried. He told me the leaders he most admired were Daoud Khan, who abolished the monarchy and was ousted by the Communists, and Najibullah, the Communist who was driven out by the Western-backed mojaheddin and murdered by the TalibanRecreation in the Bagh-e-Babur gardens, first laid out under Moghul emperor Babur, destroyed during the last century’s wars and rebuilt sincePolice leave the scene of a Taliban bank raid with the body of one of the assailants in the back of the vehicle in 2009
Photos of Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, Panjshir Valley and elsewhere to follow in a later post
Worldwide protests over the murder of George Floyd have given a new boost to campaigns against police brutality and racism in France. Ministers have promised action, while insisting that “France is not the United States”. But official France is still in denial over the nature and extent of the phenomenon.
In 1986 I came to France to take part in the massive marches that followed the death of Malik Oussekine, a student of Algerian origin who was killed by police during demonstrations against a right-wing government’s proposed education reform.
It was December and I remember the cold, the crowds and sleeping in a small flat in Belleville along with a crowd of other agitators from various European countries, there, like me, to convert the French to our view of how to fight racism and change the world. Our efforts were not rewarded with great success.
One night a group of us were arrested by cops on motorbikes, one of whom sported a very striking moustachewith waxed points and was particularly indignant about our attempt to flypost the walls of a bank.
We spent most of the night at the commissariat, pretending not to understand French, which wasn’t that far from the truth, and thus avoiding answering questions. The moustachioed cop was furious when his boss decided not to charge us and kicked us out onto the street, to find our way back to base as daylight broke on the boulevards.
The outrage that met Malik Oussekine’s death led to the education minister resigning and his education bill being dropped.
Two of the three cops who beat Oussekine, members of a motorbike squad like the ones who arrested us, were tried and found guilty of involuntary homicide. But they only received suspended sentences and, although disciplinary action was taken against both of them, one continued to work in the police force.
“After this parody of a trial … I have come to realise that in the country where I was born I will always be a second-class citizen,” Malik’s sister, Sarah, commented.
Shortly after I came to live in France, in 1993, a report appeared in the newspapers of a woman who spent the night in the cells after accusing a police officer of racism while he checked a young man’s identity papers.
A little later young black man died in detention in the police station near where I lived in Montmartre. There was a small protest march past the scene of his death but no great scandal.
Since then the deaths of youths from racial minorities have led to many protests and, on some occasions, riots, most notably in 2005 when the banlieue exploded nationwide after two teenagers were electrocuted while fleeing a police patrol.
Recently cops were caught on video racially abusing and maltreating an Egyptian migrant who had jumped in the river to escape their attentions. And the media have uncovered two Facebook groups where several thousand “guardians of the peace” shared racist and sexist comments, several revealing a certain amount of sexual insecurity and one coining the interesting slogan “Make Normandie Viking again”.
According to one study, 54% of police officers voted for Rassemblement National (formerly Front National) candidate Marine Le Pen in the second round of the 2017 presidential election.
This journalist’s tweet shows cops sporting far-right symbols while on duty.
Quand #extrêmedroite prolifère dans la #police: glaçante panoplie «de signes, insignes, symboles, slogans où des policiers affichent publiquement leur amour de la violence, du thème de la vengeance (…) de la mort, voire des idéologies nazie ou fasciste» https://t.co/IpNhA7wxzopic.twitter.com/UmKK0vh5UC
France’s government-appointed rights defender, Jacques Toubon, a former right-wing justice minister who has taken his job far more seriously than many people expected him to, has called for records to be kept of identity checks by the police.
In a 2016 study his commission found that 80% of the blacks and Arabs interviewed were 20 times more likely to be checked than white people.
Toubon has just opened an investigation into the case of Gabriel, a 14-year-old Roma who claims to have sustained serious injuries to the left eye when he was kicked in the head after being detained for stealing a scooter.
Last month he delivered a report that found institutional racism in police treatment of a group of 18 youths, “black or Arab or pereceived as being so”, in a Paris district.
As he approaches the end of his term, he may wish to turn his attention to the case of four families in the Val-de-Marne town of Vitry-sur-Seine who have just filed complaints over the arbitrary arrest and racial abuse suffered by their 14-15-year-old sons last month. One of the boys hopes to become a police officer.
All of which would seem to imply that when mainstream-right politician Damien Abad denies there is institutional racism in the police force, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner accuses actress and singer Camélia Jordana of “shameful lies” when she says she doesn’t feel safe when faced with a cop or Prime Minister Edouard Philippe declares that the overwhelming majority of officers of the law are not racist, they do not have tremendous respect for empirical evidence.
Castaner this week responded to the latest protests against police brutality with a ban on chokeholds, an order that police oficers suspected of racism be suspended while an inquiry takes place, and a promise to make internal investigations more independent.
Despite Castaner’s assurance that “France is not the United States” and “there are no racist institutions or targeted violence”, that sent police unions into a lather of indignation, which ministers greeted with a frenzy of appeasement.
Maybe not all French coppers are bastards, though. A young participant in one of the Facebook groups complained that none of the women at his police station would go out with him if he revealed his fascist sympathies.
Much kerfuffle about the toppling of the statue of a Tory slave-trader in Bristol last weekend.
I seem to remember certain moments when knocking down statues was widely hailed as a Good Thing, in Iraq in 2003, for example, or in eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
A statue of Saddam Hussein is toppled in Iraq in 2003
Members of the French government have assured us that the statue of Colbert, the minister under Louis XIV who drew up the Code noire, the legal framework for slavery in French colonies, will remain in place.
In world virus news, over 1,000 doves are reported to have died in Mazar-e-Sharif, the north Afghan city that is home to a beautiful mosque where they nest on the roof.
Doves in front of the mosque in Mazar-e-Sharif Photo: Tony Cross
They have starved to death because lockdown has meant nobody is feeding them, as they were when I visited the city in 2009.
Lockdown has meant that some 30 doves die every day, according to the mosque’s imam Photo: Tony Cross
Legend has it that they flock there because the mosque was built at the site of the tomb of Ali, the prophet Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law. His body is said to have been put on a camel that walked to the city and then died there. Historians do not agree with this account.
France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 29,319, up 23 in 24 hours. 11,678 people are in hospital, down 283, with 933 patients in intensive care, down 22. 71,832 people have been discharged from hospital, 326 of them yesterday.
