Wedding Hall”. Condemnation of the “inhuman” attack – they always use the same word – has been uttered
by everyone, including Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, who expressed his fury on Twitter. So what’s new?
Well, an extraordinary poem, for one thing, posted in Persian on Facebook by an anonymous young Afghan
man. He’s outraged that the president hosted Afghanistan’s hundred years of “independence” with a
banquet close to old King Amanullah’s palace – for American, EU and UN diplomats, along with the usual
Afghan ministers and acolytes. Here are the first lines of the unknown man’s poem, which I’ve translated
into English:
“The victims are coffin’d; and they’ll be buried.
A body here, another two there; six children from one home; fourteen in a single village cemetery.
The coffins will be re-sold – just this evening. But where can we take their shoes?”
In the Islamic world, bodies are buried in shrouds. Their coffins are taken back to the mosque for reuse.
The poem continues:
“Take the shoes to the tables of celebration for our ‘independence’,
Just a stone’s throw from the Dubai Wedding Hall, to Amanullah’s Palace!
Tomorrow night, there’s a celebration. The president will be there. And the ambassadors. The US. Europe. The
United Nations.”
“Tomorrow night there’s a party. It’s a party where they’re selling our flag...
We should take these shoes, and arrange them across their dinner table.
Perhaps then we would be seen – in the middle of the red and green [of our flag]...
That we are the black colour of our independence.
What a flag! What a celebration! What an independence!”
There’s an irony to all this. In the new, so-called “democratic” and “free” Kabul, weddings are now all
segregated. A couple arriving together must each go to a different hall. Women cover themselves with large
scarves to conceal their bright clothes and make-up. The corrupt political class, with their vast wealth and
property, hold extravagant wedding parties with much security. But the average couple now has to save and
borrow to cover the cost of a wedding. It’s a strange thing, but in Afghanistan their happiness must be
condemned to death.
The irony, of course, is that on 19 August, the Afghan cabinet celebrates a national holiday that American-
supported Afghan governments have usually been keen to observe. It marks the end of the 3rd Anglo-
Afghan war in 1919 and the signing of the treaty that ostensibly gave Afghanistan full control over its
internal and external affairs. The helpless Afghans pin their hopes on words like this, just as we used to hope
poetry, music and a literature of resistance would pave the way to justice. On Facebook, the anonymous
poet captures this pain and the immense sense of loss.
What has changed since the 1979 Soviet invasion? The promised ‘freedom’
has come in the facade of fake elections and failed governments
In the late 1980s, it was the rockets fired from the hills above Kabul by the then Mujahideen forces which
used to kill and wound Kabul residents at weddings, inside schools, bus stations or on the roads. The
slaughter of civilians was indiscriminate and used as a tactic against the Soviet-backed communist regime of
Dr Najibullah which was then in power.
At the time, I viewed the mujahideen as God-fearing defenders of Islam against the “infidel” communist