Rohafza spends her days sitting behind a padlocked grill door, immovable and staring at Maidani, the place her son is buried. The woman’s face is pale, and her hair is graying. For two years the door has stayed closed, barring Rohafza from seeing her son’s grave. It’s her family that is [...]]]> By Sohaila Weda Khamoosh

Rohafza spends her days sitting behind a padlocked grill door, immovable and staring at Maidani, the place her son is buried. The woman’s face is pale, and her hair is graying. For two years the door has stayed closed, barring Rohafza from seeing her son’s grave. It’s her family that is keeping her gated – for her own safety, as they say – to prevent Rohafza from sneaking out at night to scream at the grave site. 

Zarmine (her back to the camera) prays in front of her brother Hashmatullah’s grave.
creidit: Sohaila Weda Khamoosh/Killid

With about 50 percent of adult Afghans suffering mental health problems, Rohafza’s story is one of millions who have undergone trauma in a war-torn country with little to no mental health services and archaic practices of handling mental illness at a family level – a combination that can make patients’ lives as tragic as the events that transformed them.

In Rohafza’s case it happened 18 years ago, when 17-year old Hashmatullah, her only son, was killed in the partisan war that followed the fall of the communist government of Afghanistan’s president Najibullah (1987-1992). Mujahedin groups that had been funded by the U.S. to fight the Soviet-backed government turned their guns on each other plunging the country into bloody civil war.

A rocket smashed into their neighbourhood killing Hashmatullah, her sister’s grandson and two of their classmates. “They were just coming back from school,” says Zarmina, one of Rohafza’s five daughters

Her father was sitting outside when suddenly there was a big blast and “Hashmat and his friends were thrown up in the air.” By the time they boy arrived at the hospital, the doctors’ efforts came too late.

“When they brought his body home, it was doomsday in our house. We sisters could hardly see the coffin for the crowds that had poured in to mourn with us,” Zarmina recalls.

According to the daughter, their son’s death unhinged both her parents, but it was her mother who lost her mind, leaving the family overwhelmed with caring for her. “Sometimes in the middle of the night we would see she was not in her bed. We would find her at Hashmatullah’s grave, screaming.”

When her mother tried to burn their house down, setting the carpets on fire, according to Zarmina, the family went ahead and tied her down with a chain. “But this only worsened her condition,” the daughter says.

As inadequate as the family’s response to Rohafza condition is, professional support is nearly non-existent in this country scarred by over three decades of war. Currently, a 60-bed clinic in Kabul is the only publicly run comprehensive mental health facility, while psychiatrists remain hard to come by. A 2006 joint report by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Afghanistan Ministry of Public Health lists the total number of psychiatrists countrywide at two.

In 2010, the situation showed little improvement, with two doctors and a total of 200 beds for psychiatric services countrywide, according to WHO in an article by AFP.

Afghanistan, however, is not an isolated case. Seventy-five percent of an estimated 450 million people with mental health issues live in developing countries, with many of them being shut away, rather than treated.

Back in their village in Afghanistan, Zarmira remembers how her brother was born after a great deal of prayer and fasting by her mother, as their father had threatened to abandon the family if their sixth child was a girl. When Rohafza gave birth to a boy, she named him Hashmatullah, meaning Greatness. But he would not live long enough to fulfill his promise, laments his sister.

* Sohaila Weda Khamoosh  writes  for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS. By distributing the testimonies of survivors of war through print and radio, Killid strives for greater public awareness about people’s hopes and claims for justice, reconciliation and peace across Afghanistan.

Shah Barat was a zookeeper at the Kabul Zoo when Taliban fighters marched into the city. As tens of thousands fled he stayed on to look after the animals in the zoo. In this testimony*, Shah Barat remembers the zoo’s former glory and subsequent devastation.

Before the Taliban took over [...]]]> By Noor Wali Saeed Shinwarai

Shah Barat was a zookeeper at the Kabul Zoo when Taliban fighters marched into the city. As tens of thousands fled he stayed on to look after the animals in the zoo. In this testimony*, Shah Barat remembers the zoo’s former glory and subsequent devastation.

Before the Taliban took over the city in 1996, Kabul Zoo was home to 37 species. There was Marjan, the zoo’s much-loved lion, an Indian elephant, deer, birds and numerous other animals.

Taliban fighters killed some for food. A few more escaped and were never traced. The zoo, which was established in 1966, and counted as among Asia’s best, was ravaged by war. That some of the animals survived was due to the dedication of zookeepers like Shah Barat.

The Kabul Zoo was counted among Asia’s finest before war ravaged Afghanistan. Credit: Killid

“I suffered many hardships, hunger and danger, but I did not let the animals in the zoo go hungry,” he says. “They are also the creatures of God and goodness to them is counted as being good in the eyes of God. Unfortunately the hard hearted people turned their guns on these dumb creatures.”

The young Shah Barat had sought employment in the zoo because of his love for animals from childhood. “I had a special sympathy for the animals in my village,” he says. “I had kept many in the house. Villagers knew me as an animal lover. When I saw a sick dog, I would take care of it. Actually my house was a small zoo!”

Ruined by war

Kabul was far from his village in Andar district, Ghazni province, but Shah Barat was determined to work only in a zoo. In 1988, he joined the Kabul Zoo. Five years later, at the time of the first major exodus of civilians from Kabul, he was considered one of the senior zookeepers with many staff members fleeing the incessant bombing by rival mujahedin factions jockeying for control. The mujahedin had formed the government after toppling the communist Najibullah regime in 1992. But the power-sharing arrangement was short-lived, and between 1993 and 1996 when the Taliban took over Kabul, power continuously shifted from one faction to the other.

“Every time a rocket was fired the animals were traumatised,” he recalls. “I never thought the great Kabul Zoo would be turned so soon into a ruin!”

The civil war years were a time when people cowered in their houses from fear, according to Shah Barat. The price of everything was sky high. Salaries were not paid on time, and when they were, it wasn’t enough for even a week. Still, the zoo keepers bought rations for the animals out of their own meager resources.  “I kept my 10 children and wife hungry, but the animals were never hungry,” he says.

He speaks particularly warmly about his relationship with Marjan (meaning coral in Dari and Arabic), the zoo’s only lion. “Marjan was a gift from the Cologne Zoo. People came from all over the country to see him. He was our only source of income,” he recalls.

The zoo’s fortunes further dipped with the Taliban takeover of the city. The fighters showed no mercy for the animals, as groups of gunmen entered the zoo to tease and shoot.

Cruelty to animals

He remembers the day a gunman foolishly entered the lion’s enclosure and was torn to pieces. The next day his friends returned and threw a grenade in Marjan’s den. The unsuspecting lion was horribly maimed. “Marjan became blind in one eye. His jaw was full of shrapnel. He lost several teeth, which meant that he could not tear the meat he was fed. He couldn’t smell. He lived for another 10 years but he was a pale shadow of his former regal self,” he says.

He fondly remembers a monkey that was a gift from Nepal. She had become tame in the zoo and would even “eat her food with a spoon much to everyone’s delight,” he says. When the war broke out, and rockets rained from the sky, the caged animals were frantic with fear. “The war made her wild, and she escaped,” he says of the monkey.

When one day a bomb landed on the deer enclosure, he ran to see the damage, only to find that “All the deer were bathed in their blood.”

A rocket killed the zoo’s sole elephant.

After U.S. troops drove out the Taliban at the end of 2001, the horrendous abuse of animals was widely reported. The one-eyed lion Marjan became world famous and many zoos and organisations sent teams of experts to help rehabilitate the zoo.

Marjan died in January 2002. Shah Barat, now 55, still works for Kabul Zoo, earning 6,000 Afs (roughly 110 USD).

*Noor Wali Saeed Shinwarai writes  for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS. By distributing the testimonies of survivors of war through print and radio, Killid strives for greater public awareness about people’s hopes and claims for justice, reconciliation and peace across Afghanistan.

by Usha Sahay

As Iran expands its nuclear infrastructure and North Korea issues increasingly hostile threats, analysts continue to expend much energy trying to figure out what military capabilities the two main “nuclear outliers” have. One is certain: Iran and North Korea have an outsized ability [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by Usha Sahay

As Iran expands its nuclear infrastructure and North Korea issues increasingly hostile threats, analysts continue to expend much energy trying to figure out what military capabilities the two main “nuclear outliers” have. One is certain: Iran and North Korea have an outsized ability to influence debates about US defense policy. In March, the US decided to expand its missile defenses in Alaska to counter a potential North Korean ballistic missile attack. The threat from Iran has similarly driven US missile defense planning, arms sales and other policy decisions. North Korea and Iran have also become highly politicized components of our national security discourse. For instance, Republican Senators Bob Corker and Jim Inhofe recently cited the countries as reasons to oppose President Obama’s desire to reduce US and Russian nuclear stockpiles and instead increase funding for modernizing our nuclear arsenal.

Often mentioned in a single breath, the threats from Tehran and Pyongyang are important shapers of national security decisions in Washington. So it’s worth asking: do Iran and North Korea pose the same type of danger? Is one of more concern than the other? And how should the US deal with these countries, which pose the most acute challenges to the global nonproliferation regime?

Iran and North Korea share some important characteristics: both are ruled by authoritarian regimes, both have issued worrisome threats to neighbors that are US allies and both have remained intransigent despite harsh international condemnation and strict sanctions.

Still, from a purely capabilities-based standpoint, the countries shouldn’t technically be grouped in the same category for one very obvious reason: North Korea has a nuclear arsenal and Iran does not.

North Korea conducted its first nuclear test in 2006 and it has enough plutonium for 4-8 nuclear weapons. Iran, for its part, may be interested in something more than peaceful nuclear energy, but it has refrained from enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels and from acquiring enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb. Moreover, while neither nation can hit the US with inter-continental ballistic missiles, North Korea’s missiles can reach farther than Iran’s (in fact, there’s some evidence that Iran has had to pause its ballistic missile program due to difficulties imposed by economic sanctions).

In terms of US policy options, North Korea’s nuclear weapons constrain our actions in a way that isn’t applicable with Iran. While many have given serious consideration to a military strike on Iran, few consider attacking North Korea a good idea because of its nuclear weapons and the significant conventional military threat it poses to South Korea. Taking out an existing nuclear arsenal is a tall order, and in North Korea’s case, a strike would be incredibly difficult since we couldn’t even be sure where our targets were.

In this regard, the North Korean and Iranian cases are similar. Iran doesn’t have a nuclear arsenal, but a military strike on the country would be a disaster. Iran would surely retaliate against Israeli and US targets. The confrontation could escalate into a destabilizing regional war in the already volatile Middle East — and all this without any guarantee that Iran couldn’t simply rebuild its nuclear facilities a few years later. Worst of all, premature military action would breed resentment and insecurity in Iran, which would probably compel its government to embark on a full-scale nuclear weapons program — a decision that has not yet been made.

This brings us to the crucial difference between Iran and North Korea: with Iran, the United States has a unique opportunity to solve the problem before it becomes a greater crisis. Iran still hasn’t committed to going nuclear, which offers a chance to prevent it from following North Korea’s path. The reason for cautious optimism is that, unlike the North Korean “hermit kingdom”, Iran is integrated into the global economy and dependent on international trade. So, economic sanctions should give us far more leverage with Iran than they have with North Korea. (Sanctions expert Etel Solingen makes a distinction between “inward facing” and “outward facing” governments, arguing that the latter are more interested in ties with the international community and therefore more likely to be swayed by sanctions. In many ways, Iran is inward-facing, but certainly much less so than North Korea).

Relatedly, although Iran is far from a liberal democracy, its system is more open than North Korea’s and its leaders are much more accountable to the public. Iran analyst Alireza Nader recently suggested that the government in Tehran is more responsive to economic pressure, pointing out that “North Korea has suffered from sanctions, but its regime does not care about its population the way the Islamic Republic has to consider its population.”

All of this means that the US can still use its considerable diplomatic leverage to avoid being forced to choose between a military conflict and living with an Iran with expanded nuclear capabilities.

To be sure, dissuading Iran from its nuclear ambitions won’t be easy. Thus far, negotiations have yielded little except frustration. But this isn’t because Iran is a lost cause with which we’ve run out of options. Rather, talks have largely foundered because both sides have yet to commit to the flexibility and trust-building needed to broker an agreement. With Iran, more so than with North Korea, the foundation is in place to reach a compromise — all that’s needed is the political will to get there.

North Korea and Iran pose tough foreign policy challenges, and in both cases, the available options are few and far from ideal. But with Iran, continued negotiations offer an opportunity to stop a still-nascent nuclear program and prevent a nuclear breakout that would destabilize the region and threaten the credibility of the global nonproliferation regime. As we look for ways to deal with two difficult “outlier” states, that’s one opportunity we shouldn’t fail to seize.

– Usha Sahay is a Herbert Scoville, Jr. Peace Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, DC, where she studies US nuclear policy, with a focus on US-Iran relations and global nonproliferation efforts. She is a recent graduate of Columbia University.

Photo: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad meets with North Korea’s ceremonial head of state, Kim Yong-nam in September 2012. [AFP]

Years of war have turned Afghanistan into one of the most mined countries in the world. Landmines have killed and maimed tens of thousands. In this testimony, 28-year-old Mahro recalls the day she came upon unexploded ordnance that robbed her of her sight and the use of one hand. 

In 1994, the [...]]]> By Kreshma Fakhri

Years of war have turned Afghanistan into one of the most mined countries in the world. Landmines have killed and maimed tens of thousands. In this testimony, 28-year-old Mahro recalls the day she came upon unexploded ordnance that robbed her of her sight and the use of one hand. 

In 1994, the family was living in Qala-e-Haidar Khan next to Arghandi in Kabul province. They owned cows, and the sale of milk was their main livelihood. As the youngest, it was Mahro’s job to take the cows out to pasture. She remembers how, on one fateful day, she was grazing the family’s cows near a military post with her aunt’s son. “He pulled out something that was half buried in the ground, and hit it with a stone,” she remembers.  When the landmine exploded,  her cousin, only a bit older than she, died in the blast.

Thousands of uncleared landmines remain in Afghanistan. Credit: Najibullah Musafer/Killid

Every side in the successive rounds of fighting in Afghanistan has planted anti-personnel mines. They have been laid in residential areas and on agricultural land. Landmines were planted by the communist regime of President Najibullah, during the fighting with U.S.-supported mujahedin groups. The mujahedin, in turn, mined tracks to villages to prevent the advance of Soviet tanks. Further mine-laying took place between 1996 and 2001 during the conflict between the Taliban government and the Northern Alliance led by Ahmad Shah Massoud. Even today 45 people on average lose their limbs every month to deadly anti-personnel mines, according to Engineer Abdul Wakil, head of the Mine Action Coordination Centre of Afghanistan.

Littered with landmines

Mahro says it was a soldier who had pointed out the grassy knoll by the military post and told the children to take the cows there. “My cousin knew the area well. He had found shards of artillery there. But he did not know the grass could be hiding unexploded landmines,” she says.

Mahro says at the time of the incident a war was raging between mujahedin groups. “There were no Christians or Jews in Afghanistan. The war was among the mujahedin.” Christians and Jews is a reference to the U.S.-led international troops in the country since 2001.

Mahro’s father, who did not want his name revealed, describes it as a time when everyone was armed. He is matter of fact when he recalls the accident that changed his daughter’s future. “They (Mahro and her cousin) were foolish,” he says without a trace of emotion on his face. “They went to a military post, and hit a mine with a stone. The boy was killed and the girl lost her eyes.”

For 40 days, Mahro was in hospital. Her father says she drifted between life and death.

“She had suffered grave injuries, and we rushed her to the Jamhuriat Hospital. But when she was not getting better, we moved her to Sehat-e-Tefel (Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital in Kabul).”

Utter frustration

At first it seemed one of her eyes could be saved, but doctors operated because they feared her brain would suffer permanent damage. After 40 days the Red Crescent flew Mahro to Germany for further treatment. She learnt how to use her lame hand, but her blindness was beyond treatment.

“I returned to the country after one year. I was in depression, though I was only a child,” Mahro remembers. “I did not have a specific problem, I was free to move around the house, but I was very sad.”

One problem that nagged her was the fact that she could not recall parts of the Holy Quran and some of Hafiz’s poems (a great Persian poet) that she had learnt by heart before the accident. “I would keep telling my family I have forgotten whatever I’ve learnt.”

Slowly she adapted to living without the gift of sight. What she had forgotten, she relearnt with the help of an aunt, uncle and two siblings. She learnt the holy book by heart – the commentary, translation and rules of reciting. “I was always interested in the Holy Quran,” she says, recalling how she stayied with a relative for eight months to study it. He was also Hafiz – one who has learnt the Holy Quran by heart, she says. “I stayed for eight  after she got out of the hospital. “When I returned home, I kept learning.,” she says, until, with the help of cassette tapes, she finally mastered the full 30 chapters.

Since 2007 she has been a teacher of the holy book. Now 28, she lives in Kabul’s Gulbagh area where she teaches more than 40 students. “I don’t know how many students I’ve taught,” she says modestly. But to her students, she’s a teacher like any other.

*Kreshma Fakhri  writes  for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS. By distributing the testimonies of survivors of war through print and radio, Killid strives for greater public awareness about people’s hopes and claims for justice, reconciliation and peace across Afghanistan.

Kabul’s seventh district is also called Sarzamine Sokhta in Dari (Burned Land). Nearly everyone here has lost a family member in the successive rounds of blood-letting witnessed by the city over the last three decades. In this testimony, Mir Abdul Wadood, now a teacher in a school in neighbouring Parwan, realls [...]]]> By Sohaila Weda Khamoosh

Kabul’s seventh district is also called Sarzamine Sokhta in Dari (Burned Land). Nearly everyone here has lost a family member in the successive rounds of blood-letting witnessed by the city over the last three decades. In this testimony, Mir Abdul Wadood, now a teacher in a school in neighbouring Parwan, realls the year 1999 when Taliban dragged away and shot nine of his family members. 

The green flags flags on the 10 graves in Parwan’s Laghmani village are visible from miles away. Credit: Killid

Among the dead that day were Wadood’s two grown-up sons, two nieces, two nephews and his wife’s two nephews. One other nephew, Abdul Hai, had a miraculous escape that allowed him to recount the story. Shot in the face, he managed to drag himself on to a road before collapsing. Passersby took him to Anaba Hospital in Panjsher, where he gained consciousness, and told them the exact location of the cold-blooded murder of nine other family members.

Wadood’s family, which hailed from Kabul and Karez Mir, north of the city, had sheltered in Parwan province to get away from the Taliban, who had formed the government in Kabul. But the Islamic fighters continued advancing north in pursuit of Ahmad Shah Massoud, an anti-soviet political and military leader who, together with his forces, had retreated to his stronghold in the Panjsher Valley.

On that fateful day in 1999, the Taliban arrived in a Datsun pickup truck Wadood’s home, and took away 10 young people, between the ages of 20 and 35 years. The captives, their hands tied behind their back, were take away and made to stand in a circle. Then, one by one they were dragged into the middle of the circle, and shot dead.

The dead, all between the ages of 25 and 35, were put to rest side-by-side in nine graves in Parwan’s Laghmani village. Today, the green flags that the family placed on the graves are visible from miles away, standing out between the yellow leaves of trees.

Killed by grief
“Unfortunately I was in Kabul at the time, and the way to Parwan was blocked,” says Wadood. “When I came back 40 days later, I went to the graves of the nine members of our family, including my two sons – one 29 and the other 25. I cried,” he says. “The graves were like swords in my eyes,” he adds.

But there was more bad news for Wadood. On his return from the graveyard he decided to visit his sister who herself had lost two sons and a daughter – to “share her grief,” he says.

“That is when relatives told me she had died. The fresh grave near the nine, which I had seen and prayed over, thinking it was a neighbour’s, was actually my sister’s. Her heart had failed from grief.”

Wadood gets up and shuts the door leading to an inside room where his wife is. He says she has been very disturbed ever since he told her that a journalist was coming to interview them about the death of their sons.

“My wife has never been the same since the deaths,” he says. “When the nine coffins were brought into the house everyone cried and screamed, but not my wife. Her voice was not heard. Her depression worsened when our elder son’s widow married again, leaving us to take care of their two children.”

Scarred forever
Wadood confides that their sons are never mentioned because it upsets his wife. “Laughter has left our house,” he says. “We never mention our sons. I have had to bury their remembrance along with them, I have no choice,” he adds.

Today, a third of his salary as a schoolteacher, which is roughly 6,000 Afs, or 110 U.S. dollars, is spent on medication for his wife.

His story is not unusual, Wadood says. Between 1996 and 2001, the Taliban and Massoud’s Northern Alliance fought for control of Parwan. Every time the Taliban won the province, the Shariah law was implemented. Parts of the province went back and forth from Taliban hands to Massoud’s. Hundreds of civilians died. The fighting ended with Massoud’s assassination by two suicide attackers believed to be al Qaida, on Sep 9, 2001 – two days before the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York.

Three months later, in December 2001, U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan and ousted the Taliban starting a new chapter in the tumultuous history of Afghanistan and its civilian polulation.

* Sohaila Weda Khamoosh  writes  for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS. By distributing the testimonies of survivors of war through print and radio, Killid strives for greater public awareness about people’s hopes and claims for justice, reconciliation and peace across Afghanistan.

Esmatullah Mayar writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS. By distributing the testimonies of survivors of war through print and radio, Killid strives for greater public awareness about people’s hopes and claims for justice, reconciliation and peace across Afghanistan. In this testimony, 55-years-old Mahparwar remembers Shab-e-Barat, “the Night of Forgiveness”, is an [...]]]> By Esmatullah Mayar 

Esmatullah Mayar writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS. By distributing the testimonies of survivors of war through print and radio, Killid strives for greater public awareness about people’s hopes and claims for justice, reconciliation and peace across Afghanistan. In this testimony, 55-years-old Mahparwar remembers Shab-e-Barat, “the Night of Forgiveness”, is an Islamic holiday celebrating God’s mercy. People pray for forgiveness for those who died.  It was on one such night of forgiveness, 21 years ago, that Mahparwar’s younger brother was killed by the mujahedin.

Mahparwar’s brother Mohammad Shafi was a cycle repairer in Kabul. The 19-year-old had just married a year earlier “And had a pair of twins — a daughter and son,” his sister recalls. He had no connection with any political party,  she stressed, saying he was neither a member of Khalq nor Parcham — two communist parties that ruled Afghanistan after the assassination of president Daud Khan in April 1978. “He did not have a job with the government or any organisation.” 

Photo: Mohammad Shafi was only 19 when he was abducted and killed by the mujahedin. Credit: Killid

It was last days of the regime of President Najibullah, (1987 -1992) and the war between government forces and jihadist parties had engulfed the country, remembers Mahparwar. It was the 15^th of Shoban, 1370 (July 5, 1991 in the Gregorian calendar), as they celebrated Shab-e-Barat, when tragedy struck.

“My brother was travelling to Jalalabad when armed people (mujahedin) came down from the mountains in Mashal Kandaw (on the highway between Kabul and Jalalabad), abducted and killed him immediately.”

His killers left his body on the roadside and fled, says Mahparwar.

“We got to know about his murder on Barat night but we could not find his body. My other brothers searched all over. Some of our relatives said they had seen our brother in their dreams, and we should search for him in the places they mentioned.

Her brothers searched everywhere. In the end they found him in a hospital mortuary.

Death of innocents

Mahparwar had been kept unaware, she says. “All they told me was that Shafi was injured, and was found in the Kabul hospital. But when I went to my father’s house I saw a friend of my brother, a soldier in the army, weeping loudly.”

“We buried him in Charqala village of Chardehe (Kabul province). My mother has not been well ever since.”

Shafi was the cleverest and most hardworking of her siblings says Mahparwar, working in his bicycle repair shop steadily through the winter and long hot summer. He did not waste his time in idle gossip, she says.

her sister-in-law, Shafi’s wife, finally remarried and took their son with her. “His name is Sahel, he looks very much like my brother,” she adds.

The situation in Kabul, meanwhile, went from bad to worse when Najibullah’s government was toppled by mujahedin forces, who then turned on one another. People fled the city in the tens of thousands. Mahparwar, too, became a refugee in Peshawar.

Bad news continued to pour across the border. “There was not one day when we did not hear of the death of relatives in Afghanistan. My younger sister’s husband was killed in the war between Hezb Islami and the Hezb-e-Islami led by General Dostum in Mazar-e-Sharif.”

Lost futures

In her childhood she had built castles in the air for her family, says Mahparwar, but the warlords “dashed everyone’s dreams and hopes”. All three of her brothers are poor, she says, one is a taxi driver, the other a labourer. A third is a mechanic. “The war took everything from us.”

Mahparwar’s children go to school, and she says she is happy for them. But she continued to be haunted by the fact that her brother’s killers are still free. “Arrest the murderers of my brother. Arrest the murderers of many others as well. They should be tried,” She says.

“They made us weep. They took away our breadwinners from us.” While her brother died on the night of forgiveness, for Mahparwar forgiveness is not within her reach, she says.

Instead,  she wants for the stories of three decades of war to be told and remembered. She wasnts the to be collected and archived, so that “Future generations can see how our country was tyrannised,” she says.

Today, Mahparwar is a member of the Women’s Council in Chehelsotoon, in Kabul city, which was set up to support survivors of war.

Nobody celebrated the 10th anniversary of the 2003 coalition invasion of Iraq on March 19-20. Stephen Zunes summarize the losses in one of his excellent articles in the Santa Cruz Sentinel:

“The death [...]]]> Johan Galtung, Rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University, is author of “Peace Economics: from a Killing to a Living Economy”  (www.transcend.org/tup).

Nobody celebrated the 10th anniversary of the 2003 coalition invasion of Iraq on March 19-20. Stephen Zunes summarize the losses in one of his excellent articles in the Santa Cruz Sentinel:

“The death of up to half a million Iraqis, the vast majority of whom are civilians, leaving over 600,000 orphans. More than 1.3 million Iraqis have been internally displaced and nearly twice that many have fled into exile. Almost 4,500 Americans were killed and thousands more have received serious physical and emotional injuries that will plague them the rest of their lives. The war has cost U.S. taxpayers close to $1.3 trillion”.

This is on top of killing 1.3 million in the UN-imposed sanctions.

To use expressions like “humanitarian intervention” or “human security” given such predictable insults to basic human needs and rights beats Orwell’s 1984 Newspeak. With nothing to justify this, the coalition should bow in confession, contrition and compensation. 

Iraq did not become a democracy as a result, despite some constitution and multiparty elections. An artificial country put together by the U.K. out of the beaten Ottoman Empire, multi-national with Shia Arabs in the south, Sunni Arabs in the middle and Sunni Kurds, cannot be treated as a unitary state. Democracy inside each nation makes good sense, and the Kurds are benefiting from that, having been set apart. (Con)federation first, then democracy.

The Iraqi majority is Shia, meaning that the one person-one vote formula favors the Shia for the whole country, thereby also favoring Iran and other Shia parts of the Middle East.

But they got rid of Saddam Hussein? Yes, in a caricature of the rule of law, killing him before he could tell his side of the complex story. He is already becoming a myth, close to a martyr.

In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda (1867-1956) published a book that soon became very famous: La Trahison des Clercs. The English title was doubly unfortunate: The Betrayal of the Intellectuals.

For one, “by” would have been better than “of.” Second, an intellectual is a person always questioning his own assumptions, and that is the key issue here. A better term would have been “intelligentsia”, maybe trained as intellectuals but not to question anything, only to give answers, and more particularly answers in line with authority inclinations. Another word would have been “experts”; still another, more like Benda’s clercs: “bureaucrats”. They have all traded in their autonomy for money, status, power; and may also be available for short time hire on a per-diem basis.

Benda takes to task French and German intelligentsia of the 19th century for their extreme nationalism, racism and belligerence, leading to the wars of 1870-71 and 1914-18, and to the first and second Versailles treaties.

Benda had two alternatives to nationalism backed by state power. One was the classical culture of the Antiquity — border-transcending and unifying. The other was the Christianity of the Middle Ages — similarly border-transcending.

The security and regional experts providing premisses for state violence, hide behind presidents and prime ministers. Bush-Blair depended on support from their advisors but what they got was not intelligent, but stupid.

To assume that one can invade a country without encountering hard resistance is stupid. Even if polls showed more Iraqis favoring the USA than Saddam it is unforgivable to forget the third category: those who favored neither.

To refer to resistance as “insurgency” assumes that the invader has some kind of legitimacy, making any resistance illegitimate. But the second UN resolution glared by its absence.

To assume that a dictator can be deposed and democracy introduced is equally stupid. The dictator is there for some reason: the country is ungovernable. Being forged together by a colonial power–Libya, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria — the faultlines survived decolonization. The colonial power ruled with a hard hand, and their thinking survived in the intelligentsia delivering the premises for war. One person-one vote democracy works in homogenous countries, like the Nordic ones, or in countries with so many faultlines that they somehow cancel each other out (United States, Tanzania).

To assume only one scenario, namely war — maybe after sanctions — reveals intellectual poverty. Iraq had problems but not the casualties, exile and displacements of the 10-year-old war, which may last for another 10, having upset so many unstable equilibria.

Nonviolence works against dictators. There are conflict resolution, trauma reconciliation. And yet, they cater to U.S.-U.K. war addictions, sending others to hell.

Such people should be known for their tested inability to analyze and forecast and remedy. Academia should be for
intellectuals, not for clercs, intelligentsia. And states should update their advisors.

Kreshma Fakhri writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS. By distributing the testimonies of survivors of war through print and radio, Killid strives for greater public awareness about people’s hopes and claims for justice, reconciliation and peace across Afghanistan. In this testimony, Zubaida from  the village of Qala Mullah recounts for [...]]]> by Kreshma Fakhri

Bala Hesar fort in Ghazni has survived the ravages of war. Credit: Najibullah Musafer/Killid

Kreshma Fakhri writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS. By distributing the testimonies of survivors of war through print and radio, Killid strives for greater public awareness about people’s hopes and claims for justice, reconciliation and peace across Afghanistan. In this testimony, Zubaida from  the village of Qala Mullah recounts for the firs time how she, thirty-two years ago, watched her husband being taken away by Soviet soldiers.

“It was the 2nd Sawr in 1359 (April 21, 1980),” Zubaida begins her account of the events that happened 32 years ago. “My husband was visiting us in Jaghatoo district, in Ghazni. A year before the communist government of Babrak Karmal had won power with the help of the Russians (then Soviet Union).” Many Afghans were angry, she said, and “drawn into a fight between Jihad and atheism” as she says – the one led by U.S.-supported mujaheddin, the other by the ruling government. 

A man named Sayed Jagran was the commander of the anti-government forces in Jaghtoo district, where they lived. “In my village, Qala Mullah, he was carrying out propaganda against the government. But few people had the time for him. Most people were working on Bande Sardeh (a dam 28 kilometres away in south Ghazni).” Zubaida’s husband Mohammad Ismail was one of those who would come home on Thursday after a week of hard work, and return early in the morning on Saturday.

“One Thursday he came back and never went back to Bande Sardeh,” she says. Russian soldiers swarmed Qala Mullah after the Ashrars (anti-government forces) had already left the area. Only defenceless people remained. “ ‘Come out of your houses,’ the Russians shouted. We trooped into a compound — my husband was the first person they led away.

Zubaida and her six children tried to stop them, but he was taken away to nearby Qala Qata. “They took him to the centre of the village and shot him for siding with the opposition,” she remembers “They had no pity on anyone. They went from house-to-house killing all the men.”

In the end, they killed 21 of her relatives. Except for one farmer who escaped there was no male left to bury the dead, she says. “We ferried the bodies in a wheelbarrow, and buried them in a pit.”

“I tied a piece of red cloth on a pole on the top of our house so the Russians would not bomb us.”