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CounterPunch
August
9, 2002
Return to Afghanistan:
Ladies and gentlemen,
let's have a big hand for Gul Agha: the UN's warlord of the year
by Robert Fisk
The
Independent
Gul Afgha knows how to handle the United Nations.
He smiles, he praises, he loves the UN, and he is immensely grateful
for the advice of Under Secretary General and Special Representative
of the Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict, the
diminutive Ugandan Olara Utunnu. Every time Mr Utunnu talks about
democracy and peace and the need for children to receive proper
schooling, the governor of Kandahar beams with delight. In one
corner of his office, the chief of police sits, a massive, high-peaked
Soviet-style cap on his head, a tsarist leather strap across
his military blouse. In the other, the thin, rather weedy-looking
director of education reclines nervously on a sofa, his hands
fidgeting constantly with his tie.
Mr Utunnu wants to know about the governor's
"vision". And there was just the slightest narrowing
of Gul Agha's eyes when this was translated into Pashtu as "puhaa".
Warlords don't have a lot of visions but the whiskery Mr Agha,
clad in the kind of overtight Marxist brown tunic and trousers
that the PLO used to wear, quickly got the idea.
"When I became governor of this
city," he told Mr Utunnu, "the doors of education opened."
Why, Mr Agha had even spent his own money in opening a special
computer school for students, an academy to which he did not
invite us but upon which he intended to lavish further personal
funds.
"This has not happened anywhere
else in the country--not even in Kabul, only in Kandahar."
At which point, the fearful director of education took the floor,
standing with hands clasped in front of him while delivering
a homily on the generosity of the governor of Kandahar, his foresight,
his wisdom and, of course, his vision. It was all of six minutes
before Mr Utunnu could thank the director so profusely that he
was forced to sit down.
No, Mr Agha assured the Special Representative
of the Secretary General, there were no underage soldiers or
policemen in Kandahar. "We have invested a lot in our police
and intelligence forces--we are continuing our efforts to combat
terrorism along with the coalition forces."
The problem is that Mr Agha, like almost
every other governor in Afghanistan, is a bit of a rogue. Taxes
do not all go to central government. His own militia are better
paid than government soldiers. But his claim that his schoolteachers
were paid twice the average salary of those in Kabul was untrue.
They are paid half the salary of Kabul teachers. His references
to "our President, the esteemed Mr Karzai" may have
satisfied Mr Utunnu (a boy with a treble voice later serenaded
the UN's expert on kid soldiers with paeans to both Mr Karzai
and Mr Agha), but it's no secret in Kabul that the governor is
a loose cannon.
A couple of weeks ago, uneasy at the
US air force's propensity for bombing wedding parties, he summoned
regional leaders to a meeting at which he wished to demand prior
knowledge of American operations in the Kandahar region. Most
of his fellow barons--perhaps paid even more by Washington than
Mr Agha is--declined to attend. So instead we got a lecture on
Mr Agha's love of constitutional law and human rights. And Mr
Utunnu then received one of the more imperishable quotations
to come from Afghanistan since 11 September: "President
Bush of America," the governor announced, "has really
appreciated Islamic law ..."
Harsher than the increasingly mellow
Druze warrior Walid Jumblatt, infinitely more polite than the
Serb mass murderer Ratko Mladic, was the governor of Kandahar
trying to win the UN's warlord of the year award? When he offered
to show us his prison, there could be no doubt of it. There were,
perhaps, a few children in the prison, we were told, but they
were merely accompanying their imprisoned mothers. As for child
prisoners, think not of it.
So Mr Utunnu and his cortege drove through
the fog of diesel smoke and sand to Kandahar's central prison,
a rickety barracks with a heavy machine-gun mounted on a tripod
over the front gate. "Unspeakable things happened here under
the Taliban," one of the governor's minions muttered to
me as we entered. I could believe it. In fact, I could believe
anything in this prison. The stone floor had been newly scrubbed
and the inmates sat in their bright little cells, red and golden
carpets on the floor, flowers and pot plants in the window to
keep out the sun.
"I've been here for three months,"
a smiling youth told me. "I stole 20 million Afghanis (lbs290)
and I may be here for three years." He had not yet been
charged. In fact, virtually no one in the cells appeared to have
been charged.
It was all a bit like Potem-kin's villages.
And sure enough, when I walked behind the prison guards, I turned
a corner to be overcome by a giant, overflowing midden, a common
latrine with a single beam of glistening wood for prisoners to
sit upon and a floor slippery with shit.
A few dozen metres further, I came to
a courtyard in which the prisoners had piled their bedding: rotten,
stained mattresses and plastic sheeting and soiled clothes. These,
no doubt, were the real furnishings of the tiny brick cells.
So who owned the red and golden carpets? "And now the women's
prison," trumpeted the police chief in the tsarist uniform.
Mr Utunnu strode inside--to find just four sad young girls sitting
on the floor of a cell. The first two were wives--or rather widows--of
the same husband they had allegedly just killed.
The third had run off with a boy she
loved, in preference to the old man to whom her dead father had
allegedly betrothed her at birth. The offence of the fourth was
unclear. Just what constitutional law the third young woman had
transgressed was never vouchsafed but I was assured that her
boyfriend would be sentenced to five years for "taking her
away from home".
Again, a short walk round the other cells
revealed a rather different story. Many of them were packed with
hundreds of sacks of US-donated wheat and rice and processed
peas. Many others were stacked floor to ceiling with hundreds
of Kalashnikov rifles, light and heavy machine-guns, boxes of
ammunition and shells.
I asked the Tsarist policeman for an
explanation. "This is really a police compound," he
said. "We let these four women stay here because it is more
comfortable. What you saw were our stores." So where, I
wondered, was the real women's prison? Where were the children
who were supposedly staying with their mothers? Mr Utunnu was
unfazed. An intelligent, sharp, if slightly short-tempered, man,
he was an opposition leader in Uganda who -- had he not made
a judicious exit from his country a few years ago -- might have
ended up in an institution just like this one. But he declared
himself reasonably satisfied. He had talked to the prisoners.
They had made no complaints.
He was not in a position, he said, to
know if the carpets on the cell floors were usually there. He
had wished to visit the prison and his request had been granted.
So, ladies and gentleman, let's give
a big hand to Gul Agha, governor of Kandahar, friend of President
Bush, devotee of child education and, most assuredly, winner
of the UN's warlord of the year award.
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August 9,
2002
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Corporate
Crime:
More Shareholder Power
Not the Solution
Ansar Ahmed
The Waning
of the
Pax Americana
Alexander
Cockburn
War,
the Military and the Hunt for the "Violence Gene"
August 8,
2002
Ron Jacobs
Iraq:
The Final Storm?
Dave Marsh
Now Ain't
the Time
for Your Tears
Mark Weisbrot
Bush
Administration Tries to Hide Role in Venezuela Coup
Anthony Gancarski
AIPAC,
Congress and Iraq
Robert Fisk
Families
of the
Disappeared Demand Answers
Gary Leupp
Karzai's
Bodyguard
August 7,
2002
Anis Shivani
The First
21st Century
Police State
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Fallon's
Fallen
Is the US Navy Killing
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Robert Fisk
For the
Forgotten Afghans,
the UN Offers a Fresh Hell
Dr. Susan
Block
Rigas in
Cuffs
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies of the US Part 5: the Call of Democracy?
August 6,
2002
Philip Farruggio
Signs
of the Elites
Bruce Gagnon
We Must
Come Alive
David Krieger
From
Hiroshima to Hope
Jerre Skog
Global
Reach of Corporate Crime or What the Hell are
They Teaching at Harvard?
Robert Fisk
Return to
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Collateral Damage
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Fox in the Pension Fund
August 5, 2002
Rahul Mahajan
Iraq
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Jordy Cummings
The
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Israel and Palestine
Bernard Weiner
Inside
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Mike Leon
US Mute
to Israeli Brutality
Norman Madarasz
Brazil:
the Most Important Election of 2002?
August 4, 2002
Susan Davis
Fat Americans
August 3, 2002
David Krieger
Nuclear
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Gilad Atzmon
The End
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Gavin Keeney
Everybody's
a Critic
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
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