1997
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INTERNATIONAL REPORTING |
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Index | 2/5 | 2/14 | 10/1 | 10/7 | 10/14 | 10/15 | 10/27 | 11/3 | 11/30 | 12/31
Afghan Professionals Fleeing Rule by Clerics
Long before dawn, whole families have crept from their homes
and headed down to the Kabul River, hauling tin trunks and
burlap sacks full of clothing and household goods.Their destination has been a stretch of broken ground lighted only
by the glow from a crescent moon. There, flanked by miles of
rubble that is all that is left of much of Kabul, doctors, lawyers
and engineers and their fearful-looking families wait for daylight
and the minibuses that go east across the mountains to Jalalabad.
From there, many switch to camel routes across the mountains
into Pakistan to complete their flight from the harsh new world of
the Taliban. The fleeing families have been frightened by decrees that threaten
to return Afghanistan to village medievalism, especially for
women and girls, whom the Taliban have forbidden to go to
work or school. On Saturday, in a new instance of the rigidities that issue each
day from the shadowy Muslim clerics who control the Taliban,
Western reporters were summoned to watch a Soviet-built tank
roll across a cellar's worth of brandy and beer found in a Kabul
hotel. Taliban decrees range across the gamut of everyday life. Kite
flying and marble playing, traditional pastimes among Afghan
children, have been banned, as have music and dancing. Men have been ordered to pray at their neighborhood mosques
five times a day. A strict dress code requires women to be
shrouded from head to toe and men to abandon Western suits.
Other decrees have called for death by stoning for adulterers and
amputation of hands and feet for thieves. To many educated
Afghans who stuck it out in Kabul through 18 years of war, or
who left but returned, the intolerance is the final straw. While the fundamentalists have brought peace to the 75 per cent
of Afghanistan that they control, their assumption of power in
Kabul threatens a new and possibly more protracted ordeal -- a
narrow, mosque-centered society modeled on life in the
mud-walled villages from which many Taliban clerics and
fighters have come.
"We don't want to live in a prison, which is what the Taliban are
offering us," said a physician who was moving furtively through
the crowd clamoring for space on the jam-packed minibuses to
Jalalabad. The doctor, who gave his first name as Habibullah, darted back
into the crowd, anxious not to draw attention from the hard-eyed
Taliban fighters cruising the area to enforce their ban on leaving
the country. Exactly what Taliban control will mean may take months, or even
years, to determine. Little is known about their leaders, and in
particular about the 38-year-old Muslim cleric, Mullah
Mohammed Omar, who heads the Taliban ruling council in the
conservative southern city of Kandahar. Mullah Omar is a former guerrilla commander in the war against
the Russians, but he has refused to meet foreigners since helping
to establish the Taliban as a fighting force two years ago. All Are Grateful For End to War But one thing on which virtually all Afghans in areas
under Taliban control can agree is that the
fundamentalists have accomplished something that
few would have believed possible: putting an end in most of the
country to a conflict that evoked the waves of barbarism that
swept across Asia in the distant past. Only ruins are left of the Afghanistan of 1978, when a
Communist coup set off a spiral that led to a Soviet combat role,
a decade-long Muslim guerrilla struggle and then a savage civil
war among more than a dozen guerrilla groups. The fighting killed an estimated 1.5 million Afghans and severely
disabled 500,000, destroyed 10,000 villages and turned the
country into a vast scrapyard of abandoned, rusting weaponry. Nor have many Afghans contested the extraordinary appeal of the
Taliban promise to reunite the country. A force unknown to most
Afghans only two years ago, they persuaded one regional faction
after another to bow to their authority without a fight and
achieved their triumph at Kabul as government soldiers
abandoned their defenses without firing a shot. Their successes have owed little to military prowess, since most
Taliban fighters are poorly trained village youths with only light
weapons. The force that took Kabul probably numbered no more
than 1,000, of a total force of about 25,000. Poor and Hungry Do Not Mind Change For the vast majority of Afghans who are poor, hungry
and illiterate, and who have never known the citified
liberties the Taliban are stripping away, the fact that
the fundamentalists have routed the warring guerrilla groups is
almost the only important issue. This view is voiced widely even in Kabul, the city considered
modern by the standards of Afghanistan, a land where most
people continue to live lives that are almost biblical in their
adherence to ancient ways.
In Kabul, where the fighting by rival factions has killed tens of
thousands of civilians in the last three years, desperation reached
the point where people were prepared to pay almost any price to
stop the war. "All that matters is that the fighting has stopped," said Sameh,
20, who was begging in the bazaar by the Kabul River one
afternoon last week. Sameh, at one time a guerrilla with the group headed by Ahmad
Shah Massoud, the military power behind the defeated
government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani, lost a leg in the
fighting but found like many former guerrillas that the group
cared nothing for him once he was wounded. It brushed him
aside while its commanders enjoyed the perks of power. "Perhaps the Taliban will help me," he said. "Nobody else did." But for the remnants of the Afghan middle class who were not
among the tens of thousands who had already left, the end to the
bombing, shelling and sniping has been only one aspect of the
Taliban triumph. While the Taliban have appealed to the professionals to remain
and help rebuild Afghanistan, many have either left or are
planning to leave because of their fears being trampled under
Islamic totalitarianism. Conciliatory Signals To Outside World Aware of the menacing image that they have created
among educated people at home and in many of the
countries that will be needed to help pay for
reconstruction here, the Taliban have begun sending out
conciliatory signals. They have said they are open to ties with the
United States and the rest of the outside world, pleaded for
Western aid and hinted that they may review some of their
decrees. At a news conference in Kabul on Sunday, the foreign minister in
the provisional government, Mohammed Ghaus Akhund,
appealed to foreign aid agencies that support half of Kabul's
million residents and many others throughout the country of 16
million for patience. The aid agencies have appealed to the Taliban to ease the
strictures against jobs and education for women. The agencies
have been wrestling with how they can continue to feed, clothe
and educate Afghans, as well as provide support for much of the
country's medical care, without breaching Western human rights
concepts by bowing to Taliban rules. Some programs have been suspended because female aid
workers have been forced to stay home, but Mullah Akhund,
who appeared for his news conference wearing American-made
aviator sunglasses, promised that the restrictions on women and
girls would be reviewed once the Taliban controlled all of
Afghanistan. "I am hopeful these small questions will be resolved," he said. But other evidence suggests that the Taliban's decisive voice will
be the village mullahs, or clerics, who control the movement
from Kandahar, not the more urbane officials who offer
reassurance in Kabul.
Although the Taliban are Sunni Muslims, traditionally
hostile to the Shiite Muslims who predominate in Iran,
there are ominous signs that the Kandahar clerics
could prove as intolerant of dissent as the ayatollahs who took
control of Iran in 1979. In Mullah Omar the Taliban appear to have their own counterpart
to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who combined religious and
secular power in Iran until his death in 1989. Mullah Omar was raised in a village outside Kandahar and spent
years fighting the Russians, losing his left eye to a sniper bullet.
He also studied to become a mullah in the deeply conservative
Muslim religious schools called madrassahs. It was in the madrassahs, some in Afghanistan and some across
the border in Pakistan, that the Taliban imbibed a mix of
fundamentalism and nationalism that in 1994 brought about a
resolve to take up arms and clear Afghanistan of the factionalism
and banditry spawned by civil war. The Taliban took their name from an Arabic term that means
religious students, but they were quickly joined by many
guerrillas from outside the madrassahs who were equally
disillusioned with what had become of the groups that fought the
Russians. As Taliban fighters have swept across Afghanistan, their ruling
clerics have said repeatedly that they did not seek power for
themselves, only a sort of guarantor's position that would allow
them to insure the country's adherence to Islamic principles. But Afghans say Mullah Omar's actions suggest that he may be
planning to install himself as a sort of overlord. They say talk by
Taliban officials of establishing a government representative of all
groups and opinions in Afghanistan may only be a ploy to head
off dissent while the Taliban consolidate their power. Taliban proclamations identify Mullah Omar as Amir
ul-Momineen, an Arabic term meaning prince of the believers that
Muslim scholars trace to disciples of Mohammed, more than
1,000 years ago. The use of the title has shocked many Afghans, as well as
Muslims elsewhere, since it implies that he envisages himself as a
leader for Muslims beyond Afghanistan. The notion has been
further encouraged by his statements citing Taliban
fundamentalist practices as an example for other Muslim
countries. Earlier this year, during a sacred festival in Kandahar, Mullah
Omar shocked many Afghans by donning a cloak kept for
centuries in the city's main mosque that Muslims believe to have
been worn by Mohammed. Moderate Muslims Express Concern Much behavior has combined with measures likes
banning women and girls from school to persuade
more moderate Afghan Muslim leaders that Taliban
practices are an extreme reaction to the suffering of the last two
decades, and not a model for preserving the country's Islamic
traditions. "Islam is a moderate religion, and it does not permit such
extremism," one of the country's most eminent Muslim scholars
said in a private talk with visiting reporters. The Taliban clerics have mixed calculations with outbursts of
violence and anger. After Taliban fighters reached Kabul and
summarily killed Najibullah, the country's last Communist
president, the clerics said that this was "not the policy" of the
Taliban and that henceforth opponents would be tried before an
Islamic court. But at other times the clerics themselves have seemed to be barely
able to control their passions. Last week, Western reporters were
interviewing a Taliban official when Mullah Turabi, put in charge
of the Kabul city government by the Taliban, burst into the room
wielding a cane. The mullah, who lost an eye and a leg in the struggle against
Soviet forces, berated the official, then struck him on the face.
"How dare you talk to these journalist infidels!" he said. Neighboring Lands Issue a Warning Fear of the Taliban's fundamentalism has reached
beyond Afghanistan's borders. The concern prompted an emergency meeting on Friday among
the Muslim-inhabited republics of the former Soviet Union in
Almaty, the capital of Kazakstan. Attended by representatives of
Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, the
meeting issued a warning that the republics, now independent
countries with military ties to Russia, would not stand by if a
new Taliban offensive carried the fighting close to Afghanistan's
northern borders. Taliban leaders have said they have no intention of exporting
fundamentalism. But Mullah Akhund, the provisional foreign
minister, became agitated Sunday when he was asked about the
warning issued at Almaty, calling it a "threat and interference"
with overtones of the 1979 invasion. "If the Russians are considering interfering in our affairs again,
they will be making a huge mistake," he said. |
