Kολωνάκι Square

Kabul Letter Number Two

August 11, 2003

Yesterday was the most interesting day yet. Our driver Razoul, who is becoming a friend, drove me south out of the city to the former Royal Palace of the former king, who was crowned in 1933 and is still alive and now living back in Kabul. It is a ruined shell, but still a grand building. The avenue down to the Palace is lined with destroyed buildings, as this was one of the most the most heavily fought-over areas. It is also where the Hazara people live, who are a Mongol people said to be the descendants of Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde. This makes them stand out in what is mostly an Aryan country. They are also Shiite, and they have always been seen as outsiders by other Afghans. Under the Taliban a slow policy of extermination was implemented against them.

Razoul also took me to his old school. It had been used as a base for fighting during the war, and there are traces of mortar attacks everywhere. Bullet holes still grace the walls. I even saw a Russian shell-casing lying on the ground. All the windows have been blown out, and people have come to remove the electric wiring, in order to sell it. The extraordinary thing is that the school is still in use. The classes have timetables on the walls, with Physics, Biology, English and Arabic all being taught in the ruined premises. Razoul said that when he was a student there, there weren’t any chairs and he had to crouch during the lessons. We stood in this ravaged building and the mountains stretched into the distance all around us, great bare silent witnesses to the brutality that the Afghans have meted out to each other. In many ways the best thing about this visit was to see the land stretching away into the distance: Kabul quickly becomes quite claustrophobic, with the dust and the smell and the people, and it was good to be able to lift my head up at the mountains.

After this most interesting visit I returned to the city to teach a lesson to my group of architects and restorers, including the ones I had just seen at the Gardens. This is a class of about ten students, and the more I get to know them the more I discover how various the ethnicities of Afghans are: Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara and others speaking Persian, Pashto, Urdu, Baluchi, Hazaragai, Uzbek and Turkman. In the class there was much laughter and teasing about their differences—I am always aware, however, that they were killing each other not so long ago, and so try to keep a watch on where the conversation is going. Every so often a slightly threatening tone emerges. But it really does seem that the Afghans lived in harmony from about 1919 to 1978, until foreign powers intervened with their money and their weapons, first the Russians, then the USA and the Pakistanis, the Iranians and the Saudis. And the country has suffered terribly. In fact I think this is a very spiritual and non-materialistic people, which must be partly why they were able to fight so resolutely and successfully against the Russians. But the experience of fighting outsiders seems to have given them a taste for it, and led to their fighting each other. The destruction and psychological trauma is very great. Yet I think to have come here in the 1960s must have been quite wonderful. I will try to visit some of the country before I leave.

All for now. I hope all is well.

Andrew