The Honey Thief (6 page)

4

The Life of Abdul Khaliq

The life of Abdul Khaliq, destined to end in pain and sorrow, began in the second decade of the twentieth century by the Western calendar. At that time, Afghanistan was ruled by Habibullah Khan, who was of the Barakzai dynasty and known as Emir, another name for ‘chief’. Habibullah enjoyed the friendship of the British – a friendship that won him gifts from time to time, some of them personal, such as English revolvers, and some designed to flatter his intelligence, such as an edition of the works of Charles Dickens. Habibullah was in fact an intelligent man, an educated man, and amongst those who ruled Afghanistan and made life a great torment for the Hazara, he was not the worst. His father Abdur Rahman Khan, who ruled before him, was more savage, and his great-grandfather Dost Mohammad Khan had not a single friend in the Hazarajat, the homeland of the Hazara. The Barakzai family for generations believed that every mountain, every stone, every river, every fish and bird in Afghanistan belonged to the Barakzai, and that those who lived within Afghanistan’s borders should honour the Barakzai above all other mortals. Sometimes two Barakzai each believed at the one time that Afghanistan belonged to him. In that event, one tried to kill the other. Dost Mohammad’s sons, all three of them, fought for the throne after their father’s death with the fury of baboons. His youngest son, Sher Ali, ruled first, since he had been his father’s favourite; then the second son, Afzal, stole the throne from Sher Ali; later still, the first son, Azam, became Emir. The Barakzai never knew whom they could trust, but they knew who they could
never
trust: their brothers, their uncles, their sons, their cousins, or anyone at all related to them by blood. It was said of the Barakzai that their sleep was plagued by nightmares. When they awoke in the morning, their first act was to check that head and shoulders were still joined at the neck.

In the mountains of their homeland, the Hazara lived in hope of a ruler in Kabul or Kandahar who took no interest in them, who did not know a Hazara from a Turk, for whenever an emir turned his gaze towards the Hazara it meant bigger taxes, or the destruction of homes, or murder, or all three. When Dost Mohammad concerned himself with the Hazara, it was only to have his soldiers drive families out of Helmand and from the plains around Kandahar so that their land could be given as a gift to his followers. Those Hazara who could, journeyed north to Hazarajat and began life again. Most made the journey on foot, with the older children holding the hands of the smaller children and the mothers and fathers burdened by heavy loads. When these refugees arrived in Hazarajat, they were taken in without complaint by those who lived there. The sight of a family struggling along the road was a familiar one for any Hazara, not just in the time of Dost Mohammad but for centuries before. The rule was always this: if there is no room, find room, and then find more, for more Hazara will come.

Over the centuries of their life in Afghanistan, the Hazara made their homes not only in the mountains of Hazarajat but in other regions too. Yet Hazarajat remained our spiritual home, our stronghold and our sanctuary. Most of the stories of the Hazara mention the mountains and the snow, for in Hazarajat the snow lies on the ground for six months of the year. We speak with knowledge and pleasure of the fleece and hides of sheep and goats that we rely on for warmth in the coldest months. We celebrate the beauty of the moon when it stands above the mountain peaks, so much bigger than the moon of the plains and valleys. We hear the voice of the wind as it rushes down the slopes and howls between boulders and we can tell when the wind is warning of bad weather to come, and when it whispers of spring rain, or sunshine. The Hazara know the weather that is on its way before anyone else in Afghanistan.

When times are bad in Hazara settlements a long way from Hazarajat, the fathers and mothers of families will begin to debate in quiet voices the possibility of taking to the mountain road that leads to the homeland. And some will say, ‘But is it our homeland? We have never lived there in the past, but in Helmand.’ All the same, the desire to be secure amongst other Hazara will prevail and they will put their feet to the mountain road. Hazarajat is all we have and it is precious in the same way that a golden ring that has been passed down through generations of a family is precious. You don’t want to lose the golden ring. It has circled the fingers of your ancestors. It has been taken from the hand at death and placed on the hands of those who survive. If you were to lose the ring, you would search the ground for days, for weeks, cursing yourself for your carelessness.

Of all the Barakzai who ruled Afghanistan, the most ambitious was Abdur Rahman, the son of Afzal Khan and grandson of Dost Mohammad. The time would come when he would send his soldiers to murder Hazara in such numbers that in some villages, blood formed in pools like the puddles that lie in the gutters after a storm. No Hazara can hear the name of Abdur Rahman spoken without spitting on the ground and putting his hand over his eyes, but the Emir’s daring is freely acknowledged. It is usually the father who drives his son’s ambition, encouraging him to aim high. But with Afzal Khan and Abdur Rahman, it was the son who drove the father. He led the soldiers who seized Kabul in 1866, and led them again when they defeated the army of his uncle Emir Sher Ali at Sheikhabad later that year. Abdur Rahman put his father on the throne in Kabul, then roused his army with fine speeches and travelled with it south to Kandahar in the spring of the following year, where he slaughtered more of Sher Ali’s soldiers. No doubt Abdur Rahman knew how to lead an army, but when it came to advising his father about the way in which to rule Afghanistan, his imagination went no further than murder. He was like many powerful men who seize a land by force: he used the same methods to rule that he employed to take power. Abdur Rahman was the Saddam Hussein of his age; either you fell to your knees to worship him, or your throat was cut. It took no more than a year or two for Abdur Rahman and his father to rouse the disgust of the Afghan people, and Sher Ali regained the throne in 1869 when the people demanded an end to tyranny. Abdur Rahman and his father Afzal Khan made their escape to Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, to plan their return to Kabul and Kandahar.

In Samarkand, the Russians controlled everything. Their great empire, ruled by their own Emir from the city of Moscow, strove to include Afghanistan in its dominions. In Hazarajat, the words ‘Russia’ and ‘Russians’ were always spoken with a shake of the head, the same as ‘Britain’ and ‘Englishmen.’ It was not that the Hazara feared the Russians or the Englishmen, only that the ambitions of these foreigners always unfolded in such a way that Hazara were left on the roadside with their belongings on their backs while smoke rose from their houses. It was a curious thing. The Hazara didn’t fight in the armies that attacked the English over the ages, or in the armies that attacked the Russians, yet the demand for money to support these wars always started with higher taxes for the Hazara. If you didn’t pay the taxes because you couldn’t, your house was burnt to the ground and you yourself might have the bad luck to be hanged from a tripod in front of your sorrowing family.

Foreign soldiers found it impossible to subdue the soldiers of the Afghan armies. As it was in the past, so it is now. The Russians and the British, learning nothing from their past calamities, believed that a war lasting a year, at worst five years, would settle the issue of who would rule Afghanistan. When the foreigners won a battle and advanced fifty kilometres to set up their tents, they thought that one more such victory would give them Afghanistan. What they didn’t understand, then as now, is that Afghans, whatever their tribe, Pashtun, Uzbeki, Tajik, Hazara, consider a single defeat a matter of no significance. For Afghans, a war of a hundred years is an easy thing to imagine. If your enemy wins a battle today and advances fifty kilometres, then he is that much further from his home, whereas the Afghan’s homeland is all around him. Between the foreigners and their final victory lie thousands of mountains, and on each mountain thousands of rocks. Afghans know to whom the mountains and rocks are loyal; they know to whom the many caves will give shelter. It is to them. If the foreigners would only listen in the right way, their ears would hear the mountains and rocks whispering a warning: ‘The ground is parched. Where your blood is spilt flowers will bloom.’ The foreigners – their generals, at least – could not listen and would not be instructed. They persisted. They died.

But Afghan emirs sometimes saw more profit in befriending the foreigners than in cutting their throats. Abdur Rahman believed in profit above all things on earth and embraced the Russians with a full heart. His message was simple and direct: ‘My uncle rules Afghanistan today. He is aged. I am young. In a few years’ time, I will rule.’ The Russians needed a friend on the throne of Afghanistan to frustrate the British and were prepared to provide Abdur Rahman with a villa in Tashkent, the great city of Russian Turkestan, together with servants and bodyguards and a bag of gold on the eve of Ramadan each year. The message of the Russians to Abdur Rahman was as simple and as direct as Abdur Rahman’s message to the Russians: ‘Wait’. Abdur Rahman was intelligent enough to see that it would require the death of his uncle Sher Ali before he would have the opportunity to cross the Oxus River on Afghanistan’s northern border and seize the country. If he attacked too soon, the people would rally to Sher Ali, who hadn’t the same reputation for violence as his nephew. So he waited there in Tashkent, learning patience by growing vines in his garden. For sport, he rode his horses at the gallop over fences. He occupied himself with games, too; he taught the Russians how to win at backgammon, while from the Russians he learnt more about the game of chess than he had known before. His other great project called for the cooperation of Tashkent’s tailors, who used their craft to provide him with new ceremonial uniforms of endless designs and colours, some modelled on those worn by European and Russian emirs. Abdur Rahman’s vanity became a treasure trove for tailors.

Abdur Rahman waited eleven years for the death of his uncle – long enough for the vines he’d planted to bear harvests of fruit, long enough for his mares to have foaled many times, long enough for the Russians to start losing to him at chess. When the news of Sher Ali’s death came through, the Russians sent an invitation to Abdur Rahman’s villa in Tashkent. ‘You are to attend the mansion of His Imperial Majesty’s Governor-General for Turkestan together with such members of your household as it pleases you to present to His Excellency.’ Abdur Rahman visited the mansion in his ceremonial uniform of green silk with his sword at his side and swore that he would be Russia’s best friend in the world once he crossed the Oxus and seized Afghanistan with his Russian carbines. But when he crossed the Oxus, he met with the British, who had thousands of troops in Afghanistan at that time, and swore that he would be Britain’s best friend in the world if those troops were withdrawn. Lepel Griffin, the British envoy in Kabul, arranged the deal in the British fashion of mixing good manners with treachery, and Abdur Rahman became Emir of Afghanistan in 1880.

In that year of 1880, Hazarajat was divided between those in the north who had supported Sher Ali as Emir, since he’d treated them with no more than average cruelty, a tyrant they could bear, and those in the south who remembered that the new ruler in Kabul, Abdur Rahman, was a man of great violence. The Sher Ali supporters feared that Abdur Rahman would take his revenge on them, and they argued that all Hazara should stand as one against the scourge to come. I wish I could say that every Hazara stood by his brother, but such was not the case. The southern Hazarajat came out in support of Abdur Rahman for the sake of survival, and the Emir limited his vengeance to the north.

And his vengeance was terrible. His years of exile in Tashkent had acted on his ambition like a whetstone on a knife’s edge. He remembered the rebellion that had cost his father the throne and regretted that he had not acted sooner and killed those who had not honoured Afzal Khan. He had made a vow that on his return to Kabul, any man who opposed him would die. He meant those who had opposed him in the present, those who might oppose him in the future, and those who had opposed him in the past. He made a blunt offer to the Hazara of the north: ‘Send your leaders to Kabul to kneel at my feet, or die.’ No Afghan of any ethnic group will accept an ultimatum other than in the most desperate circumstances. To even make an ultimatum is insulting; usually, the order of words is so crafted that those who are being warned can save face. Abdur Rahman knew very well that his ultimatum would be rejected, as it was. His soldiers were already advancing on Hazarajat even as the offer was being discussed.

Massacres take many forms, not only in Afghanistan but elsewhere in the world. Sometimes people are rounded up in groups of fifty or so and shot all at once. Sometimes the massacres are carried out in smaller numbers, a family at a time, so that it is only after some weeks that a final tally reaches into the thousands. The number killed depends on the organisation of the killers. The more efficient the killers, the faster the murders, and the faster the murders, the greater the final tally. Abdur Rahman’s soldiers were not as efficient as the German soldiers who murdered Jews in the 1940s, but they did their job to the satisfaction of the Emir. They went from house to house, forcing the younger men into the centre of the village, where they murdered them according to the preference of individual captains and generals. In some villages, most of those killed were put to the sword, either with a single wound to the upper chest delivered with a downward stroke so that the blade struck the heart from above, or by beheading. In other villages, scaffolds were set up with long cross-beams from which five or six men could be hanged at one time. If long beams were not available, men were hanged one at a time from tall tripods. Certain commanders chose to kill their captives with gunfire, shooting Hazara on their knees. Resistance of any sort was punished by torture, conducted in the open before the gaze of those whose own turn would follow. The more savage commanders killed every Hazara they encountered, regardless of sex and regardless of age.