July 9

July 08, 2010

AFCECO, Afghanistan
Ian Pounds

On the morning of January 9th, 2001, two men forcibly entered a small mud-bricked home near the village of Yakawlang, Afghanistan only to find a black haired, black eyed, freckle-faced, five-year old Hazara girl alone in the room stoking a heater.  The girl looked at the men’s faces, then at their Kalashnikov rifles that already dripped beads of melting frost onto the floor.  “Where is your father?” one of them asked, without introduction.

The girl was stunned.  She didn’t know what to say.  The men dressed like Taliban, their guns were Taliban, but they looked different.  She glanced again at their faces.  They were not Pashtun.  They were from somewhere else; they spoke Dari, but poorly, and their noses were strange, and their beards, and beneath the dirt their skin was white.  “I don’t know,” the girl finally answered.  “He went out with grandfather.”

Again the man asked.  “Tell us where is your father?”

The girl told him, she didn’t know.  Without thinking she ran from the room.  She moved faster than her feet.  She fell and bumped her head.  When she reached her mother she told her that two men had arrived looking for father.  Her mother reached out and touched her on the brow.  When she brought her hand back there was blood on her finger.  “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” said the little girl.  “I ran and fell and bumped my head.”

“Are these men friends of your father?”

“No,” the girl shook her head, but she didn’t know what to call them.

Her mother headed back to see who these men were.  The girl followed close behind.

“Where is your husband?” the same man asked as soon as mother and daughter entered the room.

“He is gone with his father.”

“We will kill you if you are hiding him.”

The mother opened her arms.  “Kill me, but he is not here.”

Instead, the men walked around the room and rummaged through boxes and clothes and smashed a framed picture of the girl’s father.  They took anything of value they could carry, and left the house.

Hiding in the mountains surrounding Yakawlang was a veteran of the mujahidin resistance against the Soviets, a Hazara warlord who now fought against Mul Omar’s Taliban but who for several months had been losing ground.  Up north Mazar i sharif had fallen, and the Northern Alliance had begun to splinter again.  The general had riled up the Taliban with hit and run assaults on their positions in Bamyan Province.  He and his men had fled Yakawlang just the day before, knowing the enraged Taliban forces would descend upon the village and its despised Shi’a Moslems.  He was not known for being a coward.  He and his men had been privy to deeds that have rarely been imagined.  The practice of forcing people to purchase the lice from his soldiers’ heads was indicative of the extent to which he’d go in order to amalgamate simple plundering and killing with extreme forms of humiliation.  The “dance of death” had been a favorite, wherein a man’s head is removed but before his body and heart stop functioning the neck is cauterized with boiling oil.  The body is left to writhe and “dance” for some time, an entertainment meant to traumatize the living as much as the dead.

Now the general uncharacteristically waited.  One of his top advisers had suggested they surprise the Taliban during the night.  He and his men had the advantage of knowing the terrain well.  But the general dismissed the thought.  Though Mul Omar controlled most of the country, the Taliban’s days were numbered.  All that the general need do was outlast him.  If he played his cards well he could have a place in the next government.  He would ask to be a minister, an MP perhaps.  Who knows, he thought, maybe even vice-president.  “Let the Taliban come and kill everyone,” he said, “So in the future my people react and fight when I tell them to fight.”

The ground was frozen.  There would be no grave digging.  The Taliban would hang around for three days, kicking those women away who were intent on trying to bury the dead.  This would be added insult, because Moslems are compelled to assure the martyred souls travel quickly to the hereafter.  Some women would go out at night to retrieve their loved ones, but the bodies would be immovable.  Their blood will have frozen them to the ground.  The best these women would do is suffer the cold in order to keep the dogs from taking their part in this nightmare.

The little freckle-faced Hazara girl had listened to gunfire before.  At times like these her father spread a large, hand-stitched quilt over her from head to foot.  When the firing stopped he’d pull the quilt down and kiss her, saying it had only been a dream.  He was not there to comfort her now.  Minutes after the two Taliban soldiers left, the girl ran out of the house into the cold morning to find him.  Everywhere she looked there were only women and children.  Nobody would answer her questions.

This girl, like most all the girls hadn’t seen much of anything beyond her village.  She hadn’t even seen the places in her province that had been etched into history, not the healing mineral waters of Lake Band-e Amir, not even the 1,500 year old giant Buddha statues carved into the sandstone cliffs twenty kilometers away.  She knew only of their names.  She knew the taller Buddha, Salsal was a boy, that his name meant “light that shines in the darkness”.  She knew its companion Shamama was a girl Buddha, that her name meant “queen mother”.  Many nights awake in bed she imagined the Buddhas were real people, that she one day would visit them.  She made up stories, what they would eat, the arguments they would have.  Once she imagined they were going to have a baby.  But these statues would never be more than names and stories to her.  In two month’s time they would be destroyed.

The first day went by and none of the women told her what had happened, why they cried so or where her father had gone.  On the second day she found her uncle sitting behind the house.  He seemed not to have his wits about him.  She pulled on his sleeve until he spoke.  He told her the truth, that her father his brother was no longer with them.  She did not believe him.  She ran inside but could not find her mother.  Frantic, she headed again for the back door.   At first the Taliban had been careful to march their victims away from the village, but now they did not care who witnessed what.  The girl emerged from the house just in time to see a Taliban shoot her uncle once in the heart, then once in the face.

At least 300 men and boys were killed.  One who survived was a man everyone called “uncle” but who was only a good friend of the girl’s family.  He would tell the story of how the Taliban tied his and twelve other men’s hands with their own turbans.  If there was no turban they used rope.  If no rope, electrical cord.  They were forced to walk for an hour, through the freezing waters of the Yakawlong River.  The men’s feet became blocks of ice.  Finally they were lined up against the wall of an Oxfam building (a former NGO clinic).  While the fighters argued over who had the honors to shoot, which of them would become Ghazi, the uncle who had once been a teacher pleaded with a Tajik boy who had been a student of his.  This student, like most all students appreciated his teacher very much.  He went to the Taliban officer and lied, explaining that a mistake had been made, that his teacher was not Hazara.  The commander for whatever reason acceded, and let the man go.  This did not, however, absolve him of loading the bodies and half dead bodies of his friends and relatives into the truck after the shooting was over.

It was in her ruined home late on the third day that the Hazara girl heard this story for the first time.  None of the women, including her mother, were concerned any more about what the child should hear or not hear.  The girl had earned the truth.  No matter the years, she’d remember those rifles, and the broken picture of her father, and the red of her mother’s fingertips after touching her brow.  She’d remember the cries of women and old men, and Taliban dragging daughters into rooms, and then silence.  She’d remember money appearing that she had not thought existed, money her mother had hidden, her neighbors too.  Carpets, jewelry, even radios piled into pickup trucks, and when it was over and the trucks and rifles and men had gone, blood that could not be cut from the frozen earth.

Though these fragments she knew to be real, they would remain invisible to the world to which she would soon be introduced, the world beyond the towering and ill-fated Buddhas, beyond the borders of her useless, drought-ridden province.  As one world rushed out of her life, the other rushed in. 10,780 kilometers away, another pair of iconic statues stood poised to fall that year, ones made not of sandstone but of glass and steel.  The girl would have to negotiate the world’s collective sadness over their destruction and the deaths therein, while she carried the massacre of Yakawlong alone in her heart.  She would have to negotiate so many new things, the world’s sudden interest in the graveyard that is Afghanistan, those who would deny the massacre ever happened, and even the complicit Hazara warlord who would soon become Second Vice President.

Mostly, though, she would have to negotiate her mother’s decision to marry again.  It was, her mother would try to explain, a way for her to survive, the only way, even if it meant orphaning her girl.