Afghanistan: Misery, poverty and bread

EUGENE BINGHAM looks at life in Afghanistan, now the focus of world attention but previously lost in obscurity.

In the the dusty, narrow bazaars of Kabul, the aroma of baking bread has tempted Afghans for centuries.

Through all the years of turmoil their country has suffered, that sweet smell was one of the few things they could rely upon.

Come war, insurrection or the imposition of fundamentalist Islam rule, the bakers huddled around their oven pits tending dozens of flat, oval loaves.

During the best of times, bread supplemented evening meals of pilau or kebabs. But in the past few years, with drought and war plunging this once proud nation into poverty, families have lived on bread and tea alone.

For many, there is nothing else.

Few countries could claim to be as unlucky as this land-locked home to 20 million people. In recent years alone it has suffered political instability, Soviet occupation, mujahideen infighting and the tyranny of the Taleban - now it finds the missiles of the world's superpower pointing in its direction.

"I thought things could not get any worse for the Afghan people," says Shaukat Zamani, who left the capital, Kabul, in the mid-1980s and now lives in Auckland. "In the last few weeks, I am sure it has hit rock bottom."

How can the people trying to scratch out a living go on? For some, the answer has been to flee: this week, New Zealand welcomed two planeloads of the flood of refugees. But for the vast majority, escape is an impossible dream.

With the last vestiges of civil society crumbling, families are having to rely on themselves to survive.

Farridon Qurbankhel, who returned to Auckland this month after three months in Kabul, was shocked by what he saw.

"There is not much left - it was like going to a cemetery," says Qurbankhel.

"The first thing that struck me was the thousands of beggars, including young children. It was really distressing for someone who had been in New Zealand for a while."

Others spoken to by the Weekend Herald described seeing lines of women cloaked in their burqas sitting on the side of the road begging.

"Kabul is a city of widows, so many men have died," says one Afghan. "Mothers are left to live in poverty, and because they are not allowed to work [under Taleban rules] they sit on the side of the road or get their kids to go and beg."

All over the city, too, men rise early in the morning and walk for hours to buy cheap vegetables and fruit to sell - potatoes are popular. But with the population so destitute, these small businesses are hardly thriving.

Prices have put even basic commodities out of the reach of ordinary people. A bag of wheat costs about $US2, and a kilogram of mutton about $US1. Black market drugs, often the only medicines available, sell for much, much more.

Compare those prices with the average income: civil servants lucky enough to still have their jobs - a dwindling number of teachers and administrators - earn about $US3 to $US5 a month.

Zamani, who is in regular contact with family and friends in Afghanistan, said many people were turning to trade in rugs, though this has been put in jeopardy since Afghanistan's borders with its six neighbours were closed.

"It was a tradition of the tribes expressing themselves," he says. "Now ordinary people, civil servants, labourers, everyone has turned to rug weaving because there is so much demand for these rugs in Pakistan."

Zamani says homes in Kabul and central Afghanistan had been set up with looms.

"Trade has become the only way to make a better life for yourself, unless you are a Taleban official or a commander for the Northern Alliance."

Out in the vast rural belt, farmers are suffering because of the worst drought in 30 years. Crops of wheat, rice and vegetables struggle under the third year of dry conditions.

United Nations officials say that in the north, rain-fed wheat crops are down by 65 per cent, irrigated crops by 30 per cent and livestock by 70-80 per cent.

A Taleban ban on growing the traditional, if eyebrow-raising, crop of opium poppies has crippled entire communities too. United Nations officials said this week that farmers were so desperate, they were trading their young daughters to pay off loans.

It has never been easy toiling the earth of Afghanistan. Geography has forever conspired against agriculture.

It is mountainous. The imposing Hindu Kush range (the western extremity of the Himalayas) stretches from east to west, dividing Afghanistan into three distinct geographic regions: the southern plateau, the central highlands and the northern plains.

The north features fertile foothills and plains, making it the most fruitful agricultural region. It is also rich in mineral deposits and natural gas. The south, by comparison, is barren, with plateaus at an average altitude of 1000m, and sandy deserts.

The middle of the country is dominated by the vast peaks and deep, narrow valleys. The average elevation of the interior is 2700m. Kabul itself sits at about 2000m.

The lie of the land has always made it difficult for travel. Roads are notoriously narrow, dusty and treacherous. The few surfaced roads began to be laid in the 1960s.

The only good road is a loop that links the main cities of Herat, Kandahar and Kabul, built with Russian and United States aid.

The more famous route is the approach that links Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Khyber Pass. Tourists describe it as a barren, desolate passage.

"The Khyber Pass is like a longer, totally dry, more rugged version of the Rimutakas [near Wellington]," says one traveller. "Very winding, and the hills are just bare white rock ."

The pass itself is stacked with reminders of the region's high military presence and its history.

On the Pakistan side of the border, brown-uniformed soldiers from the Khyber Rifles unit loiter around a sign on the route that declares: "Khyber Rifles Welcomes You to Khyber Pass, formed 1878."

Smugglers mingle with the local tribes, most colourfully represented by women in bright robes carrying bundles of hay.

Buildings are few and far between. Tribal leaders live within huge walled compounds. From the top of the pass, you can see 19th-century British-built forts which mark the boundary in the surrounding mountains.

Sandwiched as it is between the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and the Far East, Afghanistan has been subjected to the influences of many conquerors and other cultures throughout the ages.

The towering second or third-century statues that stood in Bamiyan, central Afghanistan, until they were blown up by the Taleban this year were a remnant of the country's Buddhist past.

The eastern religion had spread from India and remained strong until Islam's westward advance reached Afghanistan around the 7th century. Islam remains the dominant religion to this day.

Its rulers have been far less consistent.

From Alexander the Great to Genghis Khan, the Great Mogul Empire to the Kingdom of Afghanistan and the ill-fated Soviet occupation, power has never been easy to hold in Afghanistan.

Even today, the answer to who is the government is not straightforward. The extremist Taleban movement has ruled most of the country since 1996, but opposition forces under the name of the Northern Alliance still hold power in the northeast.

The UN still recognises the Northern Alliance leader Burhanuddin Rabbani as the country's official government and it maintains diplomatic posts around the world, including Australia.

The alliance's counsel-general in Canberra, Mahmoud Saikal, fled Kabul in the early 1980s. He has returned several times since, though each time he grows sadder about the state of his country.

"As a schoolboy, I remember Kabul as a lively city," says Saikal. "Surrounded by its mountains, it has beautiful winters, with half a metre or so of snow."

Those sub-zero temperatures contrasted sharply with highs above 30 deg C during the summer.

The young Saikal used to love watching soccer matches at the international sports stadium in the capital. He also used to love going to one of Kabul's 15 or 16 cinemas where Indian movies and a few American films would play.

Young Afghans do not enjoy such luxuries today: the Taleban has barred most forms of entertainment, including television and music.

The decree is part of the Taleban's quest to impose its strict interpretation of Islamic law. The movement is led by Afghans raised in exile and trained in ultra-conservative Islamic seminaries (madrasas) in Pakistan.

Like most of his followers, the supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, belongs to the Pashtun ethnic majority.

The Pashtuns are ethnically closest to the people of northwest Pakistan, while the next biggest group, the Tajiks, are of Persian origin. Many other minority groups, including the Uzbeks, are linked with the people of the central Asian republics to Afghanistan's north.

An April report by the UNHCR said thousands of men from these ethnic minority groups had been rounded up and killed by the Taleban.

Throughout Afghanistan, but particularly in the cities, Islamic law is imposed by morals police known as the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue.

The UN report says the Taleban's Shari'a courts imposed cruel, inhuman or degrading punishments.

"Men and women who do not conform to the Taleban's edicts are often sentenced to severe lashing, beating and flogging," says the report.

"Authorities have bulldozed alleged sodomisers under walls, stoned adulterers to death and amputated the hands or feet of thieves."

But the report also noted human rights abuses by the Northern Alliance authorities.

"Some commanders in the north reportedly use torture routinely to extract information.

"Some Taleban prisoners held by [the Alliance] were forced to labour in life-threatening conditions, such as digging trenches in mined areas."

New Zealanders who have recently fled the Northern Alliance-held city of Faizabad, however, say that conditions there are relatively calm.

"When we left, life was almost normal," say aid workers Neil and Sandra Chesterton, who left the city this week after living there for 15 months.

"For the majority, life just continues to be a struggle for existence in an already impoverished, war-torn and drought-stricken area.

"Our concern now is what is going to happen to the ordinary families who just survive from one day to the next and deplore terrorism?"

Map: Opposing forces in the war against terror

Afghanistan facts and links