Cry of Angels

Once the capital of the Kushans, Kabul Shahan, and Mogul empires, and the city of seven gates and defense walls, Kabul was always a proud storyteller. From Alexander the Great to Changez Khan, from Persian attacks to the Mogul invasion, and from British wars to Soviet defeat, Kabul marked the story of her ruins in history books. There were stories of the bravery of her sons and daughters behind every broken minaret and lost monument. The centre of Zoroastrianism, and then Buddhism, praised by Persian and Turkish poets, marked in the history of the Rig-Veda, has shed the light of civilization to other parts of Asia. The first European to visit Kabul in the eighteenth century, the English Traveller George Foster, described it as “the best and cleanest city in Asia.” For the past 3,000 years, Kabul has had many visitors. Some came as adventurers and left, some came in order to stay, some came and left and forgot they were there, while some looked forward to coming back, others came to help but would ultimately return home, leaving the wounded body of Kabul behind. Perhaps I visited Kabul to hear her story before the wrath of history shrugged her off forever. With a chronically ill soul and broken limbs, lying wounded and mourned, Kabul barely had the energy to tell her story to the world. In fact, she was shy and embarrassed whenever her name came up. The good old days of the 1980s were past, when her name was making headlines in the West and her heroes would inspire Charlie Wilson and his War on Communism. When I asked Mother Kabul why she had been quiet, she murmured, “My story of honour goes with my heroes; I can‟t praise cowards.”

It was the autumn of 1996. The city of Kabul was nothing more than a ruined ghost town, and there was barely anyone to be seen on the streets. You no longer heard hopeless young girls screaming for help and jumping from rooftops to escape gang rapes by warlord‟s gunmen called the former Mujahedeen factions, who had once encouraged them to join their brothers in the holy jihad against communists. The fearful sound of aimless rockets and the cry of widows and orphans in the middle of night had finally stopped.

Taliban clerics imposed a draconian form of Islamic law whose harshest edicts fell on women: They could go out but only in the company of a blood-related man; they were beaten if their ankles and hands did show from beneath their burqas. They were barred from working and studying outside their homes. Women and men in Kabul had only one wish: “We wish we were not born.” The only types of employment for men was the war industry of the Taliban, fixing pickup trucks for holy warriors, preparing food in restaurants, tailoring clothes and selling gasoline on the roadsides. Most families were headed by widows. You can imagine a households headed by a widow who was barred from working outside her home.

The silence of the city and traumatised faces of Kabulis were like the quiet moment after a tornado, or a hurricane that had left people homeless, or a destructive tsunami. Maybe Mother Nature cannot compete in rendering a scene like the one orchestrated by a conglomeration of gunmen, and warlords, the so-called “former Mujahedeen” in the name of God. One cannot describe the physical and cultural destruction of Kabul in words; one instead hopes the passage of time finds the right phrase for it. The once-elite neighbourhood of Macroryan, the Soviet-built apartment complexes, and residences of Kabul‟s officials, with their Western lifestyles, were burned, and households were looted. Doors and windows were taken away and used as firewood; plumbing and fixtures were taken to Pakistan and sold as scrap metal. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the non-communist residents were either killed by the Soviet regime or left the country; the communist residents faced the same fate during the Mujahidin era. Many residents left their homes and escaped to safer districts of the city during the factional fighting of Mujahedeen following the Soviet withdrawal.

Those who repeat history are dominated by their aspirations and ignore the past; and those who are aware of the past can prevent history from being repeated.

Arif Parwani
Kabul, Afghanistan
August 5th, 2010