In the capital of the deep south of Afghanistan, the Taleban gain ground on the government and western troops. Caught between two wild fires, the population lives in the fear not to find something to eat, to be the victim of friendly fires from Nato soldiers or to be abducted or even killed by the Taleban whose Kandahar is the stronghold.
Fatima Mohammad Salwar has accepted the presence of a foreigner at her place. A mad decision because this 40 years old kandahari could get into big troubles. If an integrist happens to know about it she risks death. But Fatima insists, she wants to show the world in which conditions she lives. A widow, the woman with a tired face lives with her daughters in a hovel made of mud, two small rooms with no running water and with electricity available only for a few hours a day. Her husband died in 2001 during the american shellings on the town of Kandahar. Fatima though does not feel resentful against western troops based in Afghanistan. « He was a peddler in the bazaar, he had no choice but to go to work. His way was to go very near the Taleban’s positions. God decided! » Her husband was a poor man. Fatima hasn’t got any picture of him to show. She does not seem to think of him hardly anymore. Another thing worries her: how to find something to eat. With the rise of the price of staple food, it is more and more difficult to find something to eat.
For four months this mother of three daughters has been weaving carpets in a community workshop devoted to pull the widows out of destitution. For the time being, nobody is paid. They will have to wait the sale of the first carpets in a few months. Meanwhile, as soon as she has finished her work, Fatima sets off to beg on the dusty and masculine streets of Kandahar. The men, holding power in this mysoginist society, ignore disdainfully Fatima when they walk by her. Some of them snigger at her. The most compassionate discharge their duty, the zakat, a compulsory alm for a good muslim, that is why fatima receives a few afghanis, the currency here. Fearing violences, the widow strides along the streets with two other beggars. Like all women of the second biggest town of Afghanistan, fatima wears a heavy ultramarine colored burqa, a veil which wraps her entirely like a ghost..
The corrupt or the fundamentalists
The wanderings of fatima in those streets with beige earth made walls is like the existence led by half a million of Kandaharis: lost. Without any money, without work , without hope, with no ilusions, no security, not even tears to moan about oneself, Kandaharis beg, wander fearing attacks and abductions, push their fruit carts around – it is a growing area – and fall asleep without thinking about the next day. Nobody knows who to turn to. Towards a corrupt govenment, weakened and with no results? Or towards the Taleban who are in control through terror and opposed to any change that Kandaharis know too well already?
The dream of Hamid karzai, the afghan president, himself native of this province does not motivate anybody any longer. The Karzai family gives of itself an image of corruption and impotence. In october 2008, a report of american investigators have established a connection between Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the president and the traffic of heroine. Ahmed Wali Karzai is today the chief of the provincial council of Kandahar, a key post in the region.
In the streets of the town, it is difficult to find somebody willing to vote again for the President. The former royal capital is so out of touch with Kabul, culturally as well as politically, that a few afghan intellectuals dare to speak of the necessity of a split of the North from the South, which would model on the ethnic division of the country. Although at the 2003 elections, the inhabitants of the provinces of the south have voted by the majority for Hamid Karzai, believing, full of hope, that this new governement was going to bring them security and prosperity. But all the contrary happened. Since 2006, the bloody come back of the Taleban keep surprising people. Whether it is the ambush of 10 french soldiers, a few miles away from Kabul in august 2008, the attack of the indian embassy killing 41 persons in a secured district of Kabul, or the human bomb thrown at Abdul Hakim Jan in february 2008, in Kandahar, killing more than 80 persons, each time a new step which appeared to be impossible is taken, showing the serious proof of the advance of the religious integrists.
The Taleban had the control over Kandahar from 1994 to 2001 before being flushed out by the american troops. Several huge cemeteries have been built in the outskirts of Kandahar showing the fierceness of the fightings. One of those huge cemeteries was created on the request of the Mollah Omar, the chief of the Students, to bury his faithful fighters. Today, the Taleban remain numerous and their ideology is entrenched. The ways of transmission have incredibly modernised. To get in touch with an audience beyond the Pashtuns’ territory the Taleban have even created a website by the name of the old regime in power: the Islamic Emirates of Afghansitan. Dispatches and news translated in five languages answer to western news agencies with an accurate vocabulary: ‘Puppets’, ‘invaders’ are the names they give to the government and to the western troops who are backing it. In order to convince tha majority of illiterate Afghans – 70 per cents of Afghans are illiterate according to the UNICEF – the Taleban are spreading DVDs telling the warlike feats of the Students of God, and use the shabnamah, ‘the night letters’, to communicate with the population. Shabnamah are leaflets handed out secretly, at night, guaranteeing the death to anybody who would collaborate with the ennemy.
In talking in the Bazaar, or in the secret of the houses, one can find very few people backing the project of the Taleban, the return of a dictatorial islamic regime. Since their collapse in 2001, a few freedoms have been obtained: for example, the broadcast of music or the possibilty, though very few, for some women to work. The Kandaharis know that the come back to power of the Taleban means deprivation of freedoms. Nevertheless, the Students in religion are still powerful because they are feared. Their violent methods can be seen in numerous killings everyday. Anybody working with the governement is a target, even more if it is a woman. The first thing all Kandaharis do when they get up is to check who were killed at night and where happened the bombing. The police chief commander Mohammad was not high placed but was working for the government. He received a bullet in his heart and is lying in a container serving as a mortuary in the Mirwais hospital, the only center of care of the province of Kandahar. The police officer was killed at his home, during his sleep. The policeman is in his night gown.
The hospital of Kandahar is a mass of the horrors done everyday in the southern areas. At some times of the day, the Mirwais hospital seems to be as crowded as a bazaar. Paradoxically, it is one of the most liveliest place in town because it is the place they inform about the dead and the survivors. In the garden of the hospital, the bodies of recently injured by Taleban fighters as well as by western soldiers are put together with survivors having been amputated a few months before and who come back to the hospital to ask for a new artificial limb at the orthopedic ward financed by the NGO Handicap International. Such as this tall bearded man with a sharp face bringing his son to get a wheelchair. The young man is now like a vegetable: a piece of shrapnel from a UK army bomb is lodged in his brain. The 8 milimeters metal piece has paralysed completely Said Wali, a 25 years old peasant. To remove it could worsen the case. After having visited about one hundred patients, each of them having an incredibly horrible story, the director of the orthopedic ward center finds useful to add: « it is just a normal day. Sometimes, people come with stories far worse ». Surprisingly enough, the resentment of the massacred persons is weak against their butchers whether those are Taleban or westerners. Kandaharis dont dare to think anymore.
Poverty, the driving force behind war
Babour (a nickname) has got a little job which takes all his days and nights. He seldom goes back home. He is a body guard, porter, waiter and sometimes a cook at a richman’s place working for the government. His salary is meager, a bit more than an hundred dollars a month. His boss does not let him go back home because the man is frightened that babour kills him when he comes back. Outside a few dollars offered by an enemy would be enough to apparently persuade babour. With a disillusioned but serious expression on his face, the handyman admits that if the Taleban give him some money to blow himself up in carrying out an attack, he will agree to do it. It is not the fact to die as a shadid, a martyr, which drives him but the money which will be given to his family after. « We have got nothing », he ends. The young general handyman of 23 years is a native from a small village in the north of the town. In spite of his fears, his boss does not spare his employee for all that. In the pashtun culture, one has to be intolerant to be respected.
Shafiq (name has been changed) is nearly 30 years old, his way of dressing, a long shalwar kamis, a dark green shirt and a huge turban of the same colour, his non trimmed beard, his tousled hair, make legitimate to think he sympathizes with the Taleban. In Kandahar, clothes are codes to inform about what you are. Nobody dresses in a carefree way. Against all expectations, Shafiq is a daily worker on the building of a road which will allow the Nato’s armies to move along the roads of the north west of the province. In Kandahar, there is a package of projects to build bridges, roads financed by the canadian army. Until the installation of this structure, the Taleban who get around by small motorbikes are on their own grounds. The construction sites are regularly attacked by the Taleban. Twice, the young man with an expressionless face escaped death: a mine had been planted by the Taleban aiming at the truck carrying him back to town with other workers. Shafiq gets a miserably low wage, about ten euros a day for ten to fifteen hours of work.In Kandahar, a risky job does not bring good money but just enough to survive.
Fatima, Shafiq and Babour are just average Kandaharis, lost in the sand desert of the deep south. More enticed with money than motivated by any ideology, they lead a drop-to-drop wretched life. Sometimes porters, sometimes killers, sometimes workers, sometimes Allah fighters. « If they dont fight, they know they will get nothing » a World Food Program afghan worker sums up, himself distributing food to women like fatima. If the Kandaharis choose sides, it is above all the side which allow them to have a less empty stomach.
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