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2 Pastor
Jones and a dreaded ghost By M
K Bhadrakumar
Broadly speaking, successful
United Nations diplomats rise up the greasy pole
at headquarters in Turtle Bay either by playing
safe and allowing the good life to remain
unruffled or alternatively, living dangerously.
Staffan de Mistura, the Swedish-Italian who
represents the UN secretary general in
Afghanistan, belongs to the second category. His
previous assignments included Sudan, Somalia,
Rwanda, Kosovo, Lebanon and Iraq.
De
Mistura's main qualification for the assignment in
Kabul, however, was that he was very unlike the
brilliant Norwegian diplomat whom he replaced, Kai
Eide, who turned out to be "a disappointment" (to
borrow the description from a New York
editorial) as far as
Washington was concerned.
De Mistura -
appointed just over a year ago - lacked a stellar
international stature, but Washington wanted him
in Kabul, given his previous working experience
with both General David Petraeus, US commander in
Afghanistan, and Karl Eikenberry, American
ambassador in Kabul.
The late US special
representative for AfPak, Richard Holbrooke,
confided with The Cable, "I [Holbrooke] had a very
good talk with him [De Mistura], quite a long
talk, we went over every aspect of the
relationship. He wanted to discuss how he could
relate to us ... I assured him that the US
government and the US Embassy look forward to
working with him ... De Mistura has the unanimous
support of the US government."
The above
long-winded introduction becomes necessary for
comprehending the alchemy of the explosive
violence that shook the northern Afghanistan city
of Mazar-i-Sharif last Friday afternoon that led
to the killing of five Nepalese guards and three
UN employees at the UN compound.
Accounts
vary as to what happened. Following the Friday
Prayer, a crowd that was leaving the famous Blue
Mosque found another set of religious leaders in a
Toyota Corolla fitted out with loudspeakers urging
people to join them at the burning of the effigy
of a militant fundamentalist Christian pastor in
the US by name of Terry Jones who oversaw the
burning of a copy of the Koran at his church in
Gainesville, Florida, on March 20.
The
crowd then turned and started walking the
one-kilometer journey toward the UN compound. The
Gurkhas who provided security for the UN were
somehow overwhelmed and killed while a larger
group apparently broke into the compound. In the
violence that followed, all Afghan national staff
and the Russian head of the UN office were spared,
while the crowd went for Westerners, namely, three
workers from Norway, Romania and Sweden.
What stands out is that the victims were
deliberately murdered rather than killed by an
out-of-control mob. Meanwhile, agitation against
Jones has spread to Kandahar and the violence in
Mazar-i-Sharif and Kandahar has somehow become
coalesced, as if originating from one vast
reservoir.
Afghan authorities and De
Mistura have instinctively blamed the Taliban for
the violence in Mazar-i-Sharif. The Taliban flatly
rejected the imputation. Indeed, there are
intriguing questions as to what really happened.
As the London Observer noted:
If the glimmer of popular sympathy
for violence in Mazar is disturbing, so too is
the fact that such a terrible attack on Western
civilians should have happened there at all.
Mazar is a highly secure city of ordered
streets, where cars are regulated by traffic
lights, which, almost uniquely in Afghanistan,
not only work but are obeyed. When Liam Fox, the
[British] defense secretary, toured Afghanistan
[in January], he made a point of adding Mazar to
the usual British itinerary of Kabul and
Helmand. "It was a totally unthreatening
environment]," he said at the time. "It's a city
the size of Bristol and it felt just like any
safe city in Central Asia." ... The newly opened
US consulate, which has taken over an old hotel,
does not even have a razor wire along its not
particularly high walls.
Indeed,
anyone familiar with the Amu Darya region would
know that the walk from the Blue Mosque to the UN
compound itself is as eternal a walk as the
footsteps that Neil Armstrong, the American
astronaut, took on July 20, 1969, under the close
monitoring of the Kennedy Space Center at Cape
Canaveral. Not a bird can fly across that one
kilometer without the three lords of the northern
Afghan manor noticing it (or permitting it to
happen) - Rashid Dostum, Uzbek strongman; Mohammed
Mohaqiq, Hazara Shi'ite leader; and Atta Mohammad
Noor, currently governor of Balkh province and an
erstwhile Northern Alliance leader.
Dostum, Mohaqiq and Atta might have had
ups and downs in their mutual often-acrimonious
equations, but one thing that unites them for a
lifetime is their visceral hatred toward the
Taliban and their existential fear of a return of
the Taliban to power in Afghanistan. They do not
need to be told that the Taliban and them simply
cannot co-exist within one Afghan political
entity.
In sum, De Mistura has completely
misjudged the signal from Friday's bloody violence
in Mazar-i-Sharif. The city simply cannot have any
Taliban presence. The weekend's violence in Mazar
and Kandahar is of different kinds, although they
are joined at the hip insofar as they are an
explosive manifestation of a dangerous threshold
of Afghan alienation with Westerners.
A
ghost steps out from shadows The fact is
that not only Dostum, Mohaqiq and Atta but the
entire city of Mazar-i-Sharif - nay, the entire
northern and western regions of Afghanistan - have
taken stock that under a shroud of great secrecy,
something of momentous consequence for their lives
and that of their families and friends and ethnic
compatriots may have commenced on March 28 at a
faraway place - the Federal District Court on
Constitution Avenue in Washington, DC - and they
have no say in the matter.
The hearing has
finally begun on a case concerning a former
high-ranking Taliban official who has been held at
the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in
Cuba for the past eight years. His name happens to
be Mullah Khairullah Khairkhwa.
The very
mention of that name curdles the blood of any
citizen of Mazar. There is a 14-year history
behind it when mere anarchy was loosed upon the
world, and indignant desert birds searched for
carcasses to feed on in the ransacked city
streets.
What Khairkhwa's name evokes is
within living memory, a happening of 1997-1998.
Briefly, to cut a horrendous story short,
Khairkhwa was the chief of intelligence under
Taliban leader Mullah Omar who headed the
operations to capture Mazar in May 1997 through
treachery in a trade-off (masterminded by
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence - the ISI)
with some of Dostum's renegade commanders. The
attempt backfired and in the resistance that
followed by the Hazara Shi'ites and Uzbeks, who
form the bulk of the city's population, thousands
of Taliban soldiers were butchered and the rout
almost finished off the Taliban and Khairullah's
future.
But then, the ISI didn't let
misfortune overtake their favorite Taliban
official and Khairkhwa regrouped and returned to
first lay siege to Mazar and then bombard it for
several months and thereafter storm it in August
1998. This time, Khairkhwa and the ISI took no
chances. The Hazara Shi'ites were massacred in
their thousands in revenge and for the next six
days after entering Mazar, Khairkhwa ordered his
men to go from door to door looking for male
Hazara Shi'ites and summarily executed them.
Thousands of Uzbek prisoners were packed
into transport truck containers to be suffocated
or to die of heat stroke so that Khairkhwa could
spare ammunition. Among those who managed to flee
the city were Dostum, Mohaqiq and Atta. Mohaqiq
was evacuated in the nick of time from Khairkhwa's
clutches by a helicopter.
An Amnesty
International report of September 3, 1998,
chronicled unemotionally: "Taliban guards
deliberately and systematically killed thousands
of Hazara civilians ... in their homes, in the
streets where the bodies were left for several
days, or in locations between Mazar-i-Sharif and
Hairatan [on the Oxus River]. Many of those killed
were civilians, including women, children and the
elderly who were shot trying to flee the city."
Every little child in Mazar knows the epic
story of that bloodbath, which reached an historic
scale the city had not seen since Genghis Khan and
his Mongol army passed through in the 13th
century. That is to say, nothing has been
forgotten, nothing forgiven. And there is fury,
anger, fear and frustration building up among the
Uzbeks, Hazaras and Tajiks of northern Afghanistan
that a Pashtun conspiracy is afoot in Kabul with
the covert blessings of the "international
community" to rehabilitate
Khairkhwa.
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