Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar (18 page)

For three weeks we crisscrossed the country, mostly among the
interahamwe
while they continued their killing. They thought we were French commandos, who had been on their side during earlier fighting with the Tutsi-dominated RPF. When the French sent commandos to intervene in Operation Turquoise, which we mistook initially as an effort to stop the mass killing and which turned out to be an attempt to stop the Tutsi advance, French commandos we came across thought we were British special forces. It was bizarre, but true, that the Brits were still the original enemy for the French, and so they felt it was a good idea to keep us “SAS men” close by and under their eyes.

The genocidaires had the backing of the French because the Tutsi rebels spoke English, a legacy of their time in exile in neighbouring Uganda. It seems incredible that the French would give a damn—but they did. They were complicit in genocide, and even today known mass killers remain at large in France, although most French reporters now acknowledge that this was as dark a period in their history as Vichy. When I discovered the last three thousand Tutsis left alive in Rwanda in Bisesero, close to Lake Kivu, the French forces were flying biscuits to the
interahamwe
, who looked down on hillsides strewn with the carcasses of their victims. The
interahamwe
had been killing Tutsis in these hills just the day before and wanted to finish the job. The French had no idea where they were or what had occurred, they just thought they were going to stop the Tutsi advance. By the end of the morning, though, they had been shamed into helping the Tutsis by French colleagues with me, who freaked out when we found a Tutsi girl of about ten. She stood before us wearing a plastic bag on her head; the top of her skull had been opened like an egg by a Hutu militiaman with a machete, who at the time was no doubt guzzling the biscuits the French commandos had flown in.

A week or so later Dom and I were with the French commandos when they rescued Theoneste Bagasora, founder of the
interahamwe
, from the Butare airfield as the Tutsi forces encircled the city. It was many years before
Bagasora was sentenced to life in prison at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. He was Rwanda's Himmler, the author of the final solution to the “Tutsi problem.” When the French special forces flew out of Butare with Bagasora in a light aircraft, we were left on the ground, in danger of being trapped between the advancing Tutsis and the defeated Hutus.

So we drove south, back down the road I'd first travelled with Vjeko two months earlier. We shot past terrified Hutu government soldiers and got to the border a few moments before sunset. In central Africa, night falls almost instantly at six every evening. We'd again run out of food. The adrenaline in our systems was causing us stomach cramps, acid was gnawing at our insides as we drew up outside a Hutu police post and parked about one hundred yards short of the officers, who were listening to radio reports of the fall of Butare. They were drinking heavily.

“Monsieur. Monsieur. Can you help me?” a voice whispered in French from the darkness behind us.

I turned to see a tall, slender, good-looking and well-dressed boy of about nineteen. He was wearing a designer shirt made of quadrants of differentcoloured cloth, jeans, and running shoes. He looked like a kid from New York. He was shaking and staring into my eyes. He was a Tutsi—a couple hundred yards away from safety in Burundi.

“Dom—you're fluent in Swahili, and we're starving. Will you go and ask the guards if we can buy one of their goats—tell them they can have the liver, whatever, just keep them drinking and talking. I'll stick with our new friend.”

We all walked toward the guards, with Dom shouting Swahili greetings as we approached. I kept the boy away from them, on my right, so that he could run into the bush, or dive into the river that marked the border, if they came for him. Dom is tall, with long blond hair that hangs below his ears. He has very long arms. He threw them wide in greeting. He swept all the guards into their little hut as we walked past. I noticed their bloodied machetes leaning against the weatherboard walls.

“Fuck off to Burundi, you cockroach!” one of the guards yelled at our backs. We both froze, then run-walked until we got to the bridge, where I shoved him hard into no-man's-land.

“Oui,” I shouted after him. “Fuck off.”

I turned back to the guards and Dom. He was speaking such fast and elegant Swahili that they had lost interest in the
inyenzi
(cockroach). Now they were trying to screw Dom for fifty dollars for a kid goat.

“You've got to kill it and clean it for that kind of money,” said Dom.

He was haggling with a man of about forty who had bulging eyes. His face was wet with drunken sweat. The whites of his eyes were yellow. The goat was pulled along on a thin bit of string. The policeman had his machete across his knees. He chuckled.

Thwack.

In a lazy, well-practised motion, he took its head clean off.

CHRISTINA LAMB

THE ROAD TO MY FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH AFGHAN CUISINE STARTED
, oddly enough, at the bar at the American Club in Peshawar, Pakistan. There's always a favorite watering hole for journalists covering a war, and for those reporting on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s it was this two-story house in University Town.

Frankly, there wasn't much choice. Alcohol was banned in Pakistan, so there were no bars and just a few hotels where you could sign a form to say you were a heathen and a furtive waiter would appear at the door bearing a basket. Inside, under layers of pink napkins and newspaper, would be a bottle of Murree beer brewed by Parsis in Rawalpindi.

The American Club was far more convivial. If only we had realized, Osama bin Laden was living just a few blocks away; but in those days in the 1980s we had never heard of him. The Arab Afghans, as they were known, were mostly people their own countries wanted to get rid of—sinister, shadowy figures who fought like crazy and of whom the Afghan mujahideen were wary at best.

On the menu at the club were cheeseburgers with forbidden bacon and wondrous calorie-laden things that I had never encountered in England, such as sloppy joes and Oreo-cookie ice cream, paid for with tear-off paper
coupons bought in five-dollar booklets. To wash them down you could order anything from ice-cold Budweisers to Johnny Walker Black Label.

I was twenty-one when I went to the club for the first time, having set out for the Afghan frontier to be a foreign correspondent. Men were seated in a row at the bar wearing green army jackets, some with old bloodstains or charred bullet holes. As I walked in, a couple of them swiveled around and looked me up and down.

“How many wars have you covered?” asked one in a thick American drawl.

“None, it's my first,” I replied nervously.

They were Vietnam vets and could tell me how many Americans had been killed there—58,000—and therefore how many Russians must be killed in Afghanistan. It was simple Cold War arithmetic, and the war they were covering seemed black-and-white—the evil commies versus the noble (Western-backed and -equipped) Afghans. I preferred thinking of it in more romantic David versus Goliath terms of the brave man from the mountains with an old Lee-Enfield rifle and rope sandals ranged against the most powerful army on earth.

Neither, of course, was true. Afghanistan is known as the graveyard of empires, having never been conquered from Alexander the Great to the British. However, the real decisive factor was not the Afghans' tenacious fighting but their CIA-supplied Stinger missiles, which could down Soviet helicopters and thus nullified the advantage of airpower.

Yet when I started questioning the received opinion about the mujahideen, writing about some of their own excesses, I found myself denounced as a commie and eventually banned from the American Club, deprived of beer and pork products. Instead I spent my evenings with Pakistani or Afghan friends or other renegades drinking Russian vodka we called Gorbachev, bought at the local smugglers' market.

I had gone to the club because I desperately wanted to know what foreign correspondents actually did and how they operated. My only experience
was a summer as an intern at the
Financial Times
, where foreign correspondents known as the Camel Corps wafted in from exotic destinations, speaking in strange languages on the phones and lugging battered leather satchels of foreign newspapers.

I also wanted information about getting into Afghanistan. I had met a diplomat from the British embassy who I guessed was a spook; he advised me, “Make sure you take your own cup; you can catch all sorts of diseases from the mujahideen.” I had never thought about hygiene as part of war reporting and, twenty years on, have never traveled with my own cup.

Like all journalists in Peshawar, I spent all my time trying to get what we called “inside.” The way to do this was through one of the resistance parties. Pakistan's military intelligence, ISI, which was in charge of distributing weapons, had followed the old British principle of divide and rule to form seven different groups, most headed by former Kabul university professors.

Some were a waste of time trying. The fundamentalists like Yunus Khalis, a fierce seventy-year-old with a sixteen-year-old wife, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose men threw acid in the faces of Afghan women who worked, were never going to take along a female journalist. Hekmatyar had me thrown out of an interview because, his men said, he could see my ankles.

Some were hard to take seriously, such the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan (NIFA), run by Pir Gailani and his sons, who had lived in Knightsbridge. We nicknamed them the Gucci muj because of their fondness for neatly pressed camouflage with pens made from gold-plated AK-47 bullets peeping from their top pockets.

Others were too keen—Jamiat-e Islami, run by Professor Rabbani, was so adroit at taking journalists along that I dubbed their office Mujahideen Resistance Tours Ltd. Their favorite tour was to take journalists to the city of Khost, which was not far across the border. I lost count of the number of times I read stories on the “battle for Khost”—it was how we knew there was a newcomer in town who had fallen for their line.

The best plan, it seemed to me, was to get to know individual commanders. Each day I would spend hours sitting awkwardly cross-legged on the floor drinking green tea and crunching sugared almonds from tiny glass dishes. My favorite was Abdul Haq, the twinkly-eyed Kabul commander who was always jovial despite having lost a foot to a land mine and with whom I shared a fondness for pink ice cream.

Once I'd convinced them I wouldn't be a liability, commanders would send me into Afghanistan with their men, disguised as a mujahideen clad in men's baggy pajama trousers secured with a long cord and a woollen cap and dirt rubbed into my fair skin to darken it. The Pashtun honor code would ensure my safety—one fighter would be designated responsible for me and instructed that if anything happened he would be chopped into little pieces.

After all the hassle and anxiety of getting in, the first day in Afghanistan was always wonderful. There was no sign of a border, because there wasn't really one—just a random line, drawn up by the British, which split tribes and villages in half. But the mujahideen always claimed even the air was different, and when I was traveling with them so it seemed.

Even so, once I'd been inside Afghanistan a few days I would dream of getting out. This was less because of the hazards of war, such as being bombed by Soviet helicopters or driving over a mine, but more because there was nothing to eat. My first morning waking up in Afghanistan after a long trek by foot and mule, sitting uncomfortably astride a consignment of RPGs, was high up on a mountain in Paktika. Breakfast, served to me sitting on a roof in the cool, crisp air, was delicious thick cream and warm, floppy, freshly cooked naan. But it was a misleading introduction. Never again did I have such a breakfast. Afghans could survive weeks on nothing but dried naan.

Later a correspondent friend, Marie Colvin, and I made up what we called the War Correspondents Diet. Basically you would eat what you liked for weeks at home, then spend weeks of near-starvation trekking up and down mountains in Afghanistan or some other godforsaken conflict zone.

After I had lived in Peshawar for a while, I met a man called Hamid Karzai, who was spokesman for the Afghan National Liberation Front headed by Professor Mojadiddi. The ANLF was a standing joke among Afghans because it had so few forces inside the country, so hardly any journalists came to speak to Karzai. This I discovered was a shame, as he was eloquent and passionate about his country's history—in fact, I had never met anyone so fiercely proud of his country. He was also a gracious host. His house was always full of tribal elders from southern Afghanistan whom he had to feed and shelter. His was an important family—his father was leader of the Popolzai, one of the royal Durrani tribes—but his brothers had all moved to America, where they ran Afghan restaurants. Hamid probably served up more food than they did—being the only representative of the family in Peshawar, he was expected to provide huge platters of stewed mutton and colorful pilau rice topped with grated carrots and raisins. For me he always had some English chocolate.

Karzai's hometown was Kandahar, which he pronounced with a long
a
in the first syllable that somehow captured his yearning for the place and its summer winds, which swept across the desert with such a blast of heat it was said that they could fry a fish. “That's the real Afghanistan,” he would say as told me of its orchards, which grew forty types of grapes and pomegranates that shone like rubies and had a taste so exquisite they would bring tears to the eyes.

Early on in our friendship, he decided he was going to take me there. Eventually in the summer of 1989 we set off, stopping first in Quetta, a small earthquake-prone town in western Pakistan surrounded by mountains that looked like swirled toffee and seemed to be on the very edge of the earth. Our first stop was a bazaar full of men with dark eyeliner and jeweled sandals with high heels, many of whom were holding hands. In a small shack away from prying eyes, I was kitted out in
shalwar kameez
and a long length of black silky cotton with fine white stripes that both the
shopkeeper and Karzai could whisk into a turban with a twist of the fingers but I found impossible to tie.