Kandahar Cockney: A Tale of Two Worlds. James Fergusson

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СКАЧАТЬ in the north-west quarter. Being Shi’ites, these people with high cheekbones and narrow eyes, descendants of Genghis Khan’s hordes who had sacked Mazar in the thirteenth century, had already been cruelly persecuted by the strictly Sunni Taliban. They evidently wanted nothing to do with the new regime. Looking half a mile down the main avenue with his BBC binoculars, Lionel spotted two colleagues running for their lives, bullets kicking up the dirt behind them like a scene from a cowboy film. One of them was Al, newly returned from the Live News offices in Islamabad.

      The Hazara revolt signalled a general uprising in the town. Within moments the air above Lionel and Mir was fizzing with bullets and even artillery fire. The crew had only expected to be out for half an hour and had left their flak jackets in the hotel, a two-minute taxi ride away. Their taxi, however, had vanished, and it took them several hours to get back to relative safety, creeping through the sidestreets with their backs to the walls. En route they encountered the rebel Uzbek commander Ghafar Pahlawan. Oblivious to the gunfire exploding all around him, he was reclining outside his house in a stripy deckchair recently looted from a Western aid agency compound, comfortably shod in a pair of oriental blue slippers. Mir and the BBC men, crouching and flinching at every burst of gunfire, asked him wildly what was going on.

      – You are journalists, Ghafar purred. I think you know what is going on.

      Even the hotel wasn’t safe. Mir and the journalists huddled in a corridor in the centre of the building, the frightened staff congregated around them, as the battle outside raged through the night. One of the BBC crew was almost hit by a stray bullet fired more than a mile away. By morning the Taliban guard posted at the hotel’s gates the day before had disappeared, the clearest sign yet that the invaders were in deep trouble. Later, Lionel and Mir watched a Hi-Lux truckload of Talib fighters speed past the hotel gates in the direction of the shrine, shooting as they went. It was suicide – and a hundred yards further on they died the way they wanted, a glorious martyr’s death at the hands of the townspeople, who opened up on them from all sides. Such vignettes were repeated across the city throughout that terrible day.

      I heard separately what had happened to Rick during the fighting. He beetled out of the Oxfam compound with his cameras the moment it started. Somewhere in the city he dived into a house to shelter from an outburst of shooting, only to find a platoon of Taliban manning the windows. The house seemed solidly built and he was minded to stay put until the shooting subsided, but a local man who had been similarly trapped insisted that it was not safe. They argued. The local won. The two of them bolted across the street to take cover in another building. Just as they reached it a tank shell sailed into the first house and flattened it.

      Some six hundred Taliban were killed as they retreated desperately from house to house. Another thousand were captured out by the airport as they tried to flee. Many were said later to have been herded into truck containers that were sealed and dumped out in the desert, where they were baked to death.^* It was the first serious military reverse the Taliban had ever known, as well as a great embarrassment to the three countries – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – that had responded to the capture of Mazar too soon by formally recognising the legitimacy of the new regime.

      These were dangerous times for Westerners in Afghanistan. They were also dangerous times for Mir. By now he should have been at home with his family, cowering beneath upturned furniture behind bolted doors. His colleagues among Mazar’s small cadre of interpreters had long since abandoned their Western charges and melted into the town. Mir never explained why he alone stayed behind. It might have been out of a sense of loyalty, or naivety, or a mixture of the two, but there is no doubt that it was another fate-sealing moment.

      As the chaos continued into Thursday a collective decision was taken by the small foreign community to evacuate. The nearest border was at Hairaton, ninety miles to the north, where the Amu Darya river marks the southern edge of Uzbekistan. The UN hastily arranged a convoy.

      Lionel David was staying not at the UN’s heavily sandbagged guesthouse, from where the convoy would depart, but half a mile away at the city’s main hotel. The BBC crew loaded their voluminous equipment, tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of generators, sat phones, Toko boxes and old-fashioned edit packs in silver suitcases, into the backs of two cars. But they were fatally slow in starting out. Over by the UN guesthouse a large and hostile crowd had gathered around the waiting convoy. When the mob started smashing car windows the organisers decided they could wait no longer, and set off for Hairaton. The first BBC car turned the corner and drove straight into a riot. The mob had stormed the empty UN guesthouse and was in the process of looting it. Now they turned on the equipment-laden BBC car.

      Lionel and Mir arrived in the second car to see their cameraman and soundman sprinting down the street pursued by a swarm of Afghans shouting Kill the foreigners. By now it was open season on all outsiders. Everyone in Mazar understood that the Taliban were secretly armed and funded by the Pakistanis, just as the Pakistanis with their American and other Western allies had armed and funded the Mujaheddin opposition to the Soviets twenty years before. British, American, Pakistani, Taliban – what was the difference? They were all foreigners, and all guilty by association. It was their fault that jang, the fighting, had finally come to the once peaceful city of Mazar. The BBC men narrowly escaped in the second car and made it back to the hotel, where they discovered that someone had stabbed the car door, piercing the metal. Mir advised Lionel that there was nothing for it but to seek official protection. And so they all drove together to the traitor Abdul Malik’s house to see if they could find someone, anyone, in charge. They found General Majid Ruzi, one of Dostum’s senior commanders, who was full of purposeful sympathy for the foreigners.

      – Leave it to me, he said. I’ll see what I can do.

      Three weeks earlier I had interviewed Ruzi myself along with Ewan, Rick and Mir, in a field tent out on the western front. We sat cross-legged and drank tea in glorious sunshine on the edge of a plain tinkling with birdsong, the air filled with the scent of red and yellow spring flowers. His men were hunting partridge chicks among the brush, walking in long lines through the undergrowth with nets. He seemed an urbane and charming man. He was shrewd and educated and appeared pleased with the opportunity to discuss the war. The Northern Alliance, he told us, would never permit the Taliban to take Mazar. This was because the northern Afghans were liberal people with no time for fundamentalism. The Uzbeks believed in live and let live. Had we heard that in Kandahar the Taliban were insisting that stallions wore trousers? He roared with laughter. Were these people not preposterous?

      But there was no live and let live from Ruzi now. Lionel recounted in the Observer what happened next, in what he described as an act of personal catharsis. Mir and the Westerners were escorted by Ruzi’s men back to the UN guesthouse. A quarter of an hour later Ruzi himself turned up. Then odd bits of their looted kit began to materialise. The foreigners’ metal suitcases were so conspicuous that it was easy for Ruzi’s men to retrieve them from the bazaars into which they had vanished. An open Russian jeep appeared with a sullen young man in the back, a TV camera marked BBC bouncing on the seat beside him. He was a Hazara commander, darker-skinned than the average Afghan, wearing Western-looking brown clothes. He had been arrested while carrying the camera – or so Ruzi said. Events began to accelerate. Ruzi barked orders. The milling crowd of looters, suddenly electrified, drew back. That was the moment that Mir realised his mistake in soliciting Ruzi’s help.

      – Lionel, he said, he is going to kill this man.

      Thinking quickly, Mir went down on his knees and touched Ruzi’s feet, the sincerest Afghan gesture of supplication and respect. Lionel followed suit and beseeched the General, Mir translating feverishly: a lump of glass and metal was not worth dying for. He would prefer the Hazara to keep the camera equipment than to pay for it with his life. But Ruzi’s decision was final. The Hazara was marched by two gunmen to a wall across the road, a look of disbelief on his face, protesting loudly over СКАЧАТЬ