Saturday, January 11, 2003
Bamiyan still struggling to recover from Taliban years
Amir Shah (Associated Press) Bamiyan, January 11
Once, Said Askar was a farmer. Now his wife and four children make their home in a smoky, one-room cave carved from a sheer rock face where Afghanistan's famed Buddha statues once stood.
Though bare of furniture, with a dirt floor and one plastic sheet for a window, the home is a major improvement for the family. Members of Afghanistan's Hazara ethnic group, they fled into the mountains to escape campaigns of murder and ethnic cleansing by the ruthless Taliban militia. Now, with the Taliban gone and life returning to Bamiyan Valley, they and 51 other families - the poorest of Bamiyan's poor - scrape by in the caves and hope for better days.
"Life here in the caves is very difficult. It's cold, and my daughter is sick," said Askar, taking a pair of water buckets from another daughter who had carried them to the cave mouth, a hazardous 45-minute climb along a narrow track.
Bamiyan, about 100 kilometers west of Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, had been home to the glories of Afghan's rich history, of which the pair of towering, 1,500-year-old Buddhas was the crown. The Taliban dynamited the statues in 2001, calling them idols that offended their interpretation of Islam. Between 1998 and 2001, the Taliban, who originated among the Pashtun ethnic group of eastern Afghanistan, killed many Hazara here, burning homes and crops, stealing and killing livestock.
More than 5,000 buildings were leveled _ even the local mosque that had housed the main school because the Taliban, Sunni Muslims, considered the Hazara's Shia branch of Islam to be heretical. The region still has no electricity, and water comes from the small river.
Yet people have begun to piece their lives back together - house by house, sheep by sheep.
Even in winter, when temperatures drop to minus 20 Celsius at night, the town bazaar's 50-odd shops, restaurants and small schools bustle. New construction on roads and homes invites hope.
A major factor in the revival has been the presence of US troops, who are greeted with smiles and waves as they stroll through the bazaar. That's a striking contrast to southeastern Afghanistan, where US and other forces continue a tense search for remnants of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida organization, blamed for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.
"We try to be very visible," said one American soldier shopping in a small food market. About 30 US troops in the area recently built a bridge over a river that runs by the bazaar, distributed blankets and food and helped rebuild some homes, said the soldier, who wouldn't give his name. Locals are effusive in their praise for the troops. They are "like a pillow," said Aziz Ullah, selling diesel fuel out of his small shop in Bamiyan's bazaar.
"If America goes, then once again these terrorists will come back and kill," said Bamiyan's mayor, Nasir Ahmad, who says the Taliban killed four members of his family and imprisoned him for two years.
Also helping with rebuilding are some 25 Afghan and foreign non-governmental organizations. One of the most active, the Afghan charity Shuhada, runs projects ranging from a carpet weaving workshop to midwifing and nursing classes.
It has built 11 houses for the poorest families and plans to build 200 more. At a Shuhada-run computer course, boys enthusiastically copy programming commands into dog-eared notebooks. At another of the group's projects in a private home, illiterate teenage girls covered by long shawls sit on the floor as a woman teaches Arabic script.
While the Taliban have been driven out of the valley, remnants are believed still operating in surrounding mountains. On Monday, one suspected Taliban member was arrested in Bamiyan town and taken to Kabul by US Army helicopter.
The presence of US forces may also be stifling the urge among residents to seek revenge, which could set off another round in Afghanistan's long history of score-settling.
Ahmad, the mayor, said one of his neighbors pillaged with the Taliban, but he claims not to want vengeance.
"The man could never compensate me for my animals and house," said Ahmad, helping supervise a road-building project on the fringe of the bazaar. He motions to the work at hand.
"This," he says, "is the right way."
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