Kandahar Cockney: A Tale of Two Worlds

Author’s Note (#ulink_0c67aacc-c110-59ec-b159-a51c87c1c9b0)

The account that follows is a true story. However, although Mir supported this project from the start, he has also always wished to remain anonymous. For this and other reasons, including legal ones, names and some details have been changed.

Prologue The Old Bailey, Winter 2002 (#ulink_1f8a7389-d9a6-5d52-8a70-28f071f68998)

The jury hadn’t deliberated for long enough. It was barely two hours since the judge had finished his summing-up and the court had risen for the lunchtime recess. The case was complex and serious. Surely they couldn’t have reached a verdict already? They had barely had time to digest their jury-room sandwiches. Lenora, the defence barrister, thought the Tannoy recall to the courtroom was probably due to some technical question they wanted to put to the judge. I’d had a chance to study the jurors over the previous week, and they seemed a responsible lot: six men and six women, eleven whites, one middle-class black in a poloneck. On the face of it you couldn’t ask for a better slice of citizenry. Two or three of them had taken copious notes during the trial. The oldest of them looked like an avuncular Guardian reader in his grey-collared cardigan and half-moon spectacles on a chain, a man who looked as though he had seen and got the point of Twelve Angry Men. We needed someone who could think for himself, an independent-minded liberal capable of countering the prejudices of the jury’s weaker members, someone who might object in principle to the judge’s one-sidedness. He looked like our Henry Fonda. With luck he might even be picked as the jury foreman. Surely such a man could not have missed the fact that in his summing-up the judge had spent a full hour on the prosecution’s case and just half an hour on the defence’s – could he?

There was little doubt that the trial had gone badly. Gulabuddin, diffident at the best of times, had performed so poorly in the dock that Lenora thought there must be a problem with the interpreter and had called for a replacement. The judge suspected this was just a ploy by the defence – a suspicion apparently confirmed when Gulabuddin’s answers continued to bear no relation to the questions put to him, questions that in the privacy of his lawyer’s chambers he had answered with the confidence of an innocent man. Nerves? An Afghan’s innate shame and shyness at talking about sex in public? It was hard to tell. Lenora worried that Gulabuddin had come across as morally dubious. The judge evidently thought so. I’d looked him up in Who’s Who and found him to be an Establishment man, a product of Harrow and Cambridge and a stalwart of the Law Commission, a respected body engaged in the reform of the law. He also seemed to be one of those clubland patricians with a kneejerk distrust of journalists of any kind. Even the prosecution counsel had privately observed to Lenora that he was very Old School. My stomach tightened at the memory of my own appearance as a character witness the day before. Like the BBC correspondent Lionel David I had been belittled, discredited, almost sneered at.

– Mr Fergusson, the judge had expostulated when I explained why I’d posted bail for the terrified creature in the dock: I believed him to be innocent. We are really not interested in your views. As a journalist of great experience, you know perfectly well that standing bail for someone has got nothing to do with their innocence or guilt. That is for the jury to decide; you know that.

I hadn’t banked on my testimony having an adverse effect on the case. The consequences of losing it were so appalling that the Afghans hadn’t even dared contemplate them. From the cramped public gallery I watched Gulabuddin stooping in the dock, flanked by yellow-shirted Securicor guards. He looked hopelessly out of place, a big man oddly diminished by the expanses of light oak and pompous Edwardian brass. He shifted his weight and smiled uncertainly back at me. It had been a bad idea after all not to get rid of his awful suit and dress him up in something smarter. The idea had been to present him as a respectable maths professor down on his luck, but in fact he looked more like the seedy sex-offender he was accused of being. His eyes were red and haggard, the bags beneath them dreadful proof of his weeks of fear and insomnia. He’d been crying quietly in the cafeteria during lunch. His cousin Mir, the Kandahar Cockney, this story’s starting point and the reason that I was here at all, was sitting in the row in front of me with his head between his knees and his fingers in his ears. Courtroom 17 was unusually small for the Old Bailey and had no separate public gallery, so that onlookers were escorted into the back of the courtroom itself. The tiny public benches were so like the pews of an English country church that Mir almost appeared to be praying. Then again, he probably was. If ever there was a moment to invoke the mercy of Allah, this was surely it.

The usher entered from a side door and whispered something to Lenora, who flinched and shot a sickly smile across the silent courtroom. It wasn’t a technical question: the jury were ready to deliver their verdict after all. She was as nervous as the rest of us now, her earlier bravado all gone. We stood as the jury filed in, radiating the gravitas of their task. We searched and searched their faces for a sign of their decision but they avoided eye contact with any of us.

1 London, May 1998 (#ulink_9e146c62-649e-5008-9d37-d9b13c3938b1)

Ihad told Mir in Islamabad that I would help him into the country but that once he was here he would be on his own, barring emergencies. That was our deal – and as far as I was concerned the sooner he started taking responsibility for his new life in the West, the better.

Even so, I grew anxious as the date of his flight drew nearer, because the question of where he would stay in London had not been resolved in advance. In truth I had no idea what I would do if he simply turned up and threw himself on my mercy. I might have been justified in holding him to the strict terms of the deal and turning him away, but we both knew I wouldn’t do that, not now. I could end up having to put him up, and it wasn’t hard to envisage a night on my sofa turning into two nights, three nights, weeks. After all, he had made a corner of the Live News offices in Islamabad his home for well over a month. I certainly didn’t want that happening to me. My flat was simply too small.

He had told me that he would find somewhere all right. I had asked him about it several times but he always gave the same vague answer, that he thought he knew some Afghans who would help him, no problem. So with two days to go I was relieved to hear via the Live News office telephone that he would be staying with Hamid, a family friend from his hometown of Mazar-i-Sharif who was already resident here. What was more, he did not want me to meet him at the airport because Hamid would be collecting him himself. His plane would not be landing until midnight, he said, and since it was far from certain how long it would take him to clear immigration I should stay away because he did not wish to inconvenience me. Although this was precisely the outcome I had connived at, I couldn’t help feeling a little cheated. Mir’s first landfall in the West would have been worth witnessing. I imagined him shambling through the sliding doors at the end of the customs and excise chicane, wide-eyed at the size of the place, the high-tech travelators, the carpeted hush, the adverts for booze, the lights and the clean steel lines and the unequivocal Western-ness of Heathrow Airport. His expression would have been something to see. But I made myself be glad instead that he had responded as intended to my arm’s-length attitude, that he seemed after all to have understood the terms and spirit of our agreement. On the day of his flight therefore I merely made sure he had my telephone number and instructed him to ring immediately once he had arrived at Hamid’s, whatever the time of night.

– No problem, he said, a little too cheerily for my liking.

– And you know what to do? You’re a tourist until they ask for your passport. Then you ask for political asylum.

– Ask for passport – then say, ‘political asylum’. I understand.

I enunciated slowly, and not just because of the crackling on the line to Islamabad, nor even out of consideration for his imperfect English. It was mainly nervousness at all the things that could still go wrong. There could be a spot check by immigration officials at Islamabad airport, for instance. Such things had happened before, and there was a serious risk that his story would not hold up under close interrogation. I thought again of my letter of sponsorship, carefully designed to persuade the British High Commission in Islamabad to grant him a tourist visa. This document had gone through many drafts, but thinking back it still struck me as clunkingly bogus.

Dear Mirwais. I am very much looking forward to seeing you again on your short holiday to London. I can’t wait to show you Big Ben, Tower Bridge and the other sights you wanted to see. Our time will be short but I’m sure we will manage to fit them all in. Also, I have many journalist friends here who are anxious to meet you. Some of them could be very helpful to you in your career as a media worker when you return to Afghanistan…

– You will be unobtrusive, won’t you?

– Unobwhat?

– Unobtrusive. Never mind. Just act natural – try to look like everyone else, OK?

I had already told Mir to go straight to his seat when he boarded the plane, to talk to no one, to stay put throughout the flight. Now I told him again.

– No problem, no problem, he sang.

It was hard to tell if he had really understood. He had an Afghan’s happy-go-lucky attitude to life, a shoulder-shrugging approach born of the certainty that nothing on this earth happens without God’s say-so. I had seen this doctrine of insha’allah in action many times in his homeland. It caused pedestrians to stroll out into fast-moving traffic without a glance to either side; it led soldiers to ignore totally the warning whistle of an incoming shell. This Muslim mindset had its philosophical charms, but these would probably be lost on the average Heathrow immigration officer. For that reason I had gone over the drill with Mir three or four times, including in writing. The timing was vital. If he claimed asylum too early he could quickly find himself on a plane back to Pakistan; too late, and the entire long process of immigration could be declared invalid. It had to be done at British passport control and there would probably be no second opportunity. We went through other last-minute arrangements. Did he have enough money? Phone numbers? How much had he packed? Too many belongings could cause suspicion in Islamabad. But he assured me that his entire worldly possessions would fit into a single bag, and eventually I could think of nothing more to say. The rest was down to him – and no doubt to Allah. I wished him a good trip and told him once again to call me when he arrived. He promised he would.

– And, James? he said finally.

– Yes, Mir?

– I am werry excited.

– Good, I said. We’ll talk when you get here.

– Insha’allah, he replied.

But he didn’t call that evening, causing me to spend a good part of the night wondering what had gone wrong. Perhaps it had been a mistake after all to allow someone else to collect him. I had stupidly taken no telephone number or address for Hamid. Mir was therefore in a position simply to melt into the immigrant underworld forever if he chose, because there would be no practical means of tracing him. And what then? What of the legal responsibility I bore as his official sponsor? How far did that extend? It would be a simple matter for Mir to give the officials at Heathrow a false address. Could they hold me to account if that happened? Yet I knew I was right to have taken this risk, and my conscience was clear.

By working as an interpreter-fixer for me and other foreign journalists, Mir’s and indeed his family’s prospects for a normal life in Mazar had been wrecked. I thought of the Hazara Shi’ites who had come banging on the doors of his family home one night, wild mountain men who reeked of dirt and blood, grenades dangling from their long, matted hair. Mir had exited through a back window with a small prepacked suitcase and kept on running, days and nights of dodging patrols and tramping the secret goat paths of the Hindu Kush, a heroic journey of danger and hardship that had ended in virtual destitution on an Islamabad office sofa. There was no question: we, the Western press collectively, owed him a second chance. I had talked over the decision to help him with friends of mine, fellow journalists as well as expatriate aid workers with years of experience in Afghanistan. They mostly thought I was mad. They said I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for, and nor did he – the immigrant life would be nothing like his imagination. The streets of London were not paved with gold. Far from disappearing into the underworld, they predicted, Mir would pester me forever. Alone in the West he would fade, not thrive, and sooner or later he would return to his only certain source of financial and psychological support: me. These expats were not cynics. But they said I needed to understand that an Afghan refugee was for life, not just for Christmas. They understood what it meant to give a poor Third Worlder a leg-up. After all, that was what they did for a living. At the same time they were surrounded by so much suffering in their daily work that they had developed a tough skin, a means of separating themselves from the poor they sought to help. The best and most humane among them would no doubt like to help everyone they met. But the obvious impossibility of this, the ethical difficulty of picking out some for special treatment while ignoring others, meant that they had a blanket rule: arm’s length for all of them, and no exceptions. Otherwise there would be moral as well as organisational chaos.

Perhaps it was once possible to put this dilemma aside, to box it off as one of the hazards of working in the Third World, but in these post-9/11 days it is a harder issue to ignore. Like it or not, the armies of the West have reengaged in Central Asia. They are fighting in our name, and our taxes are paying for them. For them at least, the dilemma is inescapable. In the spring of 2002 the BBC made a documentary about the tiny force of British paratroopers charged with keeping the peace in Kabul, the West’s advance guard. They were shown patrolling in full battle order through neighbourhoods where buildings had been reduced to broken stumps by shellfire a decade before, their trademark red berets bobbing in the market crowds. We saw them struggling to comprehend the vengeful motives of duplicitous warlords, eating the same rations day after day, manning their Spartan barracks on full alert by night. At one point the interviewer asked a lieutenant what the most difficult thing about his mission was. The officer’s name was Oz Mohammed, which must have titillated the documentary’s producers, and he thought hard before answering. Was it the danger? The discomfort? The frustrations of working in an alien language and culture?

– No, he said. The most difficult thing is when a kid comes up and asks for something. You can’t respond, obviously, because then you’d have to give all of them something. That’s the hardest thing. Because these people have got absolutely nothing at all.

A year before Mir’s arrival at Heathrow I touched down in Mazar-i-Sharif in a tiny Red Cross plane armed with $1000 in cash, a two-thirds-grown beard and a scrappy map showing how to get to the Oxfam compound from the airport. The plane made the trip from Peshawar two or three times a week, weather permitting, and at that time was the only practical means of reaching northern Afghanistan from the outside; yet there were no other passengers. The other seats were heaped with packages and supplies for the offices of the various international aid agencies scattered around the town. It was a glorious spring morning, so bright that I had to narrow my eyes to look out through the little portholes. We flew low over the snowy tops of sun-blitzed mountain peaks, jagged and cruel-looking. I’d read somewhere that Hindu Kush means Indian Killer: it was not a place to crash. After an hour or so we cleared the mountain range and flew high over rolling hills and then, in a wide dusty plain, the dun-coloured blocks of Mazar itself. The buildings sprawled outwards from the famous shrine in the city’s very centre, the lustrous cobalt of its domes and mosaic-studded flanks glittering like an eye.

I had chosen Mazar as my entry point into Afghanistan because it was the only major city still unconquered by the Taliban. Over the winter it had become an important focus of resistance, the gathering place for the various factions of the new opposition Northern Alliance. This unlikely grouping of Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazara Shi’ites and others had spent an uneasy winter preparing for the spring fighting season. The previous summer the Taliban had seemed unstoppable. In September they had taken Jalalabad and then Kabul, where they dragged the Western-backed President Mohammed Najibullah from his UN safe-house and hanged him in the street. Massoud and Rabbani, the Tajik leaders who had been holding the capital, fled northwards in disarray. Only the onset of winter, when the stupefying cold and snowbound passes make fighting in Afghanistan impractical, saved the resistance from being routed. But now the snows were melting and the unconquered part of the country was holding its breath for what would happen next.

There was no doubt that the Taliban wanted Mazar badly. The city was the key to control of the northern regions where most of the country’s agriculture and almost all of its gas and mineral reserves were located. Moreover the new regime craved international recognition, which had so far been withheld on the grounds that it did not control all of the country. Conquest of Mazar therefore represented the ultimate prize of legitimacy to power. The Afghans called Mazar a city. In reality it was no more than a large town, although its population was greatly swollen now by refugees from the war and by an influx of fighting men from all over the country. This was interesting from a purely anthropological point of view, a rare cross-section of the country’s extraordinary ethnic diversity. In the words of an old Afghan hand I had met in London, Mazar was like the bar scene in Star Wars.

And indeed the mix of people I found there was extraordinary. There were Uzbeks, Tajiks, Pashtuns, Arabs, Ismaili, Hazara, Turkmen and Mongols. There were men in turbans and silk sashes, in flat caps and in skullcaps, in combat gear and in waistcoats, in robes and in trousers, in long-sleeved chapans and in shalwar qamiz, the long cotton shirt and matching baggy trousers favoured throughout the region. The women were mostly veiled, though many were not; the men were bearded and unbearded, with slant eyes and kohl eyes, brown, green and even blue eyes. There were subtleties here, ethnic and social gradations unfathomable to a stranger like me. Stopping to ask for directions it was impossible at first to make myself understood, and a curious crowd quickly gathered. Even in this ethnic melting pot my disguising beard had evidently fooled nobody. An old man was pushed forward and gave me directions in what sounded like broken Russian. It was a relief to reach the sanctuary of the Oxfam compound, its blue steel doors decorated with a small poster of a crossed-out Kalashnikov and the slogan Working for a Fairer World. The Oxfam staff rented out a few dormitory-like rooms for $40 a night. It was one of the few places that visiting foreigners were permitted to stay.

Over the following two days I took courage and went out to explore Mazar on foot. The atmosphere of the city was strange. The streets were filled with men armed with the tools of choice in Afghanistan, a Kalashnikov slung casually over a shoulder or a rocket-propelled grenade with its butt rested on a hip, the distinctive lozenge shape of its sharp end cocked at the sky. Hi-Lux trucks roared by from time to time, the soldiers swaying in the back covering their mouths with their turbans against the dust clouds. The crowds who scattered to let them pass always closed ranks again, and normal life resumed. Almost uniquely in Afghanistan, Mazar had not been touched by fighting in recent times, not even during the Soviet invasion of the 1980s. Perhaps that was why the population seemed to behave as though the town was immune. It was a phoney war in which they had been waiting for something to happen for so long that they now believed nothing ever would. A certain defiance was detectable in the shops and markets, where business was clearly booming despite the rate of inflation in the north. The afghani exchange rate to the dollar was nearly triple what it had been a year before, yet the stalls were well stocked, the people far from starving. The main square was dotted with groups who sat around story-tellers, guardians of an oral tradition stretching back to biblical times. The wares on sale in the markets were mostly dry goods at this time of year: the melons for which Mazar is famous were not yet in season. At one or two places they even sold Murree beer imported from Pakistan. It was easier to procure alcohol here than across the border to the east, where retail outlets were tightly controlled and foreigners had to obtain a permit and ration book if they wanted to drink.

Only once on my rambles around Mazar was I brought up short, while attempting to inspect the inside of the shrine in the city centre. An old guidebook I had bought in Peshawar described the building as the finest in the country. It commemorates Hazrat Ali, the dragon-slaying cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, who was assassinated in 661. The original shrine was destroyed in the early thirteenth century by Genghis Khan, who thought there was gold buried beneath its pillars. The present building is a fifteenth-century replacement.

– Not the least of its charms are thousands of white pigeons who make their home here, I read. Local belief has it that should a grey pigeon join the flock, it will become totally white in just forty days, so holy is the site.

I had removed my shoes and was about to pass through the great south gate when a bent old man on a stick came out and began to scold me, jabbing a gnarled finger in my face. He wore the white robes of a mullah, and I backed away, grinning dumbly: I had meant no offence. But the torrent of invective merely strengthened and the inevitable crowd gathered. I raised my hands in an exaggerated sign of surrender, which some of the crowd found funny. It wasn’t clear if they were laughing at my expense or the mullah’s, although they didn’t seem to share the old man’s anger. Then one of them called out in English, the first I had heard from a Mazari resident. He was a neat man with small round glasses who spoke precisely with a slight American elision.

– Where are you from? What are you doing here?

– From England. Inglistan. I wish only to see the inside of this beautiful holy place.

The man in glasses translated my answer: the mullah shouted back. The bystanders turned their heads to watch like the crowd at a tennis match.

– He says foreigners are not permitted.

– Please tell him that if this is true then I will leave, I said, pointing amiably at my shoes. Although, please also tell him that I have visited many mosques in many countries, and have never been forbidden to enter before.

My translator hesitated.

– Does it say in the Koran that foreigners may not enter? I added.

A smile flickered across the English-speaker’s lips, and then he nodded vigorously.

– You are right. I agree.

He translated once again in a loud voice for the benefit of the crowd, who began to murmur among themselves, enjoying this spontaneous public debate. But the mullah’s eyes blazed. He shook his stick, spittle flecking his beard, his harangue rising to a shriek before he turned on his heel and hobbled off at speed into the recesses of the shrine. The exchange was suddenly over, and the crowd, muted, began to disperse. The man in glasses smiled and shook his head.