Esquire: Death on the Iranian Border

Life in Afghanistan is so hard, people have been fleeing to Iran in search of jobs. But in doing so, some are paying the ultimate price.

November 5, 2007

ISLAM QALA, Afghanistan — The people of Islam Qala, a border town where Iran meets Afghanistan, say a man was killed here last night. He was making a run for Iran a few miles up, and they shot him. He will not make the news; with all the dying in Afghanistan and the black cloud of nuclear rhetoric hanging over Iran, there is little concern left for a man trying to travel in between.

The mass deportations started in the spring, thousands of Afghans rounded up and trucked to the border. 100,000 people in the first two months. Families were separated, stories surfaced of legal immigrants having their papers torn up, of beatings, intimidation, and theft. And still, Afghans are desperate enough for jobs in Iran to try swimming upstream.

“Afghanistan is a bad country because we don’t have any money, you can’t do anything.” Esmatullah is the driver dispatched to take me from Herat to Iran. He’s finely groomed and neatly dressed in jeans and a blazer; he could be selling slacks at Saks 5th Avenue. But people invest in dress because to make money here you have to look like you have it, and despite the means suggested by his outfit, waiting at home for Esmatullah is a sick wife whose medication he cannot afford. He has a son as well, two-year-old Navid. “It means good times,” he says. Whether the boy’s name was divined before, after, or — my best guess — during conception, he won’t say.

And so we find ourselves in an old car with a cracked windshield and broken air conditioner, cruising westward through the desert, past the ruins of castles built centuries ago and refugee camps built within my lifetime. There is no human presence for as far as the limits of human vision — and the mountains miles away — allow us to see, only the empty, weather-beaten encampments whose color so resembles that of the terrain they seems to have risen from the earth in a single moment of terrestrial agitation.

Then there is a girl, not more than nine years old, wearing a red dress and walking alone in front of the walls. Her dress tugs at her as the wind tugs at it, pulling her forward faster than she’d like to go so that she has to lean back into the wind. So much life having already moved through these refugee camps, her presence appears purely spectral.

“You are lucky,” Esmatullah says. “You have a nice city. See my city, my country?” He lowers his head; squints. “In your country, people are free. Do you know what it means, ‘free?’ It means you don’t have to do some actions because the government says. We can’t have girlfriend, womens can’t go out without chadr, do you know what it is, chadr? Womens can’t wear any clothes that they want.”

In the eyes of the Afghans, Iran’s society is free, its infrastructure sophisticated (and intact), and its opportunities attractive. And that the people on this side are called Afghan rather than Iranian is only arbitrary; one of the many geopolitical residues of the Great Game. The borders were drawn with a typically colonial disregard for ethnic nuance and an eye instead toward creating a buffer state between the Brits and the Tsarists, so now rival tribes share a national identity, while a family finds itself separated in two different countries. Here, Sunni Tajiks of the same parentage reside on either side of chain-links and razor wire.

As you move further west along the road to Iran, the pretext of an Afghan national identity withers, and Iran’s industrial reach presents itself. We drive toward the border on an Iranian-built road; we are escorted by Iranian-built power lines. In the distance, orange dump trucks glide across the desert as if they belong there. Esmatullah says that they’re building a railroad, that although Iran is kicking Afghans out they want to keep selling to Afghanistan. “It is the person that is, how do you say? Two-faced.” Still, Esmatullah would be in Iran at a moment’s notice if he could. “I wanted to leave Afghanistan but I couldn’t. The situation was very bad for learning, for business, I couldn’t finish school. It’s like a dream for me every time that I go somewhere, where I can learn new language, computer programs, but it’s a wish. How many countries have you been to?”

As we near Iran and the border towns, sand spilled from the desert creeps across the road. A man stands on the asphalt with his hands on a shovel. He lifts a pile of sand, flicks his wrist and lets the wind do the rest, carrying the cloud of swirling dust over the road. A small boy holds out his hand for alms. They’re not part of any government road maintenance team, they’re just Afghans jobless here and unwanted elsewhere, serving as a makeshift municipality borne from Afghanistan’s signature brand of desperate entrepreneurialism. But no one stops to pay; the child is an unintimidating taxman. The boy and the man watch us drive by.

We pass them at eighty miles per hour and we’d be going faster if we weren’t into the wind. The road is good, a rarity for this country, and we have it to ourselves. Then there is a car with Iranian plates brushing by us on the right, two wheels catching the sand and sending the car swerving; it fishtails for fifty meters, and then regains control and jets off, out of sight in an instant. A ripple of action on a piece of land devoid of life, through which people pass on their way somewhere else but seldom stay. “Maybe he is afraid of Afghanistan,” Esmatullah says with a smile. “He is an a rush to get home.” A few moments later, a border police pickup truck passes on the left.

For those conspiratorially inclined, Iran presents plenty of fodder. There was the shipment of hi-tech roadside bombs from Iran intercepted in Afghanistan last month, booty that had Western pundits wondering rhetorically how Tehran could possibly not know about weapons moving under their noses.

There is poetry in the accusations. Iran using Afghanistan to fight America the same way America once used Afghanistan to fight the Soviets — as a remote playing field where the enemy’s blood can be let by your weapons in someone else’s hands. And there is the curious pattern here; it is mostly men being deported through Islam Qala. Iran’s border with Afghanistan extends to Nimroz and Farah provinces, border crossings near no airport and accessible by no safe road. It’s nearly impossible for any journalist to get there to document soldiers pushing people from busses, and, whether by coincidence or not, those are the places where the women and children are let off.

The impact of a sudden surge of unskilled workers and resource — draining refugees on an already unstable country is predictable. There are no jobs for them. They can sweep sand from the road and watch people drive by. They can also join the insurgency, or fund it by farming poppy. It’s the West with its shoulder against the wall trying to keep the whole thing from toppling over, so we hear that all of it — the bombs, the mass deportations — are part of hot potato concocted by Iran to keep the international community distracted from its nuclear ambitions. Iran meanwhile asks why they should have to drain their subsidized health care and compound their own job shortage to accommodate Afghans, especially given that Western countries have effectively closed their doors to Afghan refugees. The government of Afghanistan maintains that their relations with Iran are amiable. From here, it looks like Iran has deflected the economic impacts of American-imposed sanctions onto one of America’s own clients.

There are a number of checkpoints as we near Iran. Soldiers open the trunk, they look through our things, Esmatullah shows them my ISAF press credentials, we move on. At one stop Esmatullah talks congenially to one of the officers, who lets us pass without a search. “It’s about security, to make sure there’s no bomb, but he’s my friend.”

When we reach the gates of the border, it is late afternoon, and it is quiet. Men walk into Afghanistan through the fenced-in corridor that connects the two countries, accompanied by porters carrying their bags who, for having been born on this side, will never see the other. There is an “Afghan Duty Free Shop.” Parked nearby is a bus that has “Tourism Germany,” written on the side. The guards swap out, carrying their dented teapots with them. We get out of the car, walk around, take pictures. Someone says 160 people were deported yesterday, but there is little happening now. We talk to some people, and then we turn around and head back to Herat.

On the way back, the sun is setting. The Herati sunset is Mother Nature’s muse to Persian poets, its charm inspiring greats like Jami, the last great lyricist in classical Persian. And everything on the way between Islam Qala and Herat is oriented toward Persia. The Iranian-built road; the Iranian-built power lines; the domed huts built for centuries with chimneys tilted westward to catch the wind from Iran for cooling; the makeshift antennas jerry-rigged to the roofs to grab Iranian television channels.

As we drive on with the sun fading behind us, cars begin pulling over. Their occupants climb out, lay their prayer rugs down on the side of road, and begin their bows toward Mecca. Which here in Afghanistan, is also toward Iran.

AFP: Herat poet Nadia Anjuman remembered two years on

November 6, 2007

KABUL (AFP) — Two years ago police discovered the battered body of Nadia Anjuman, a young Afghan poet already known in literary circles for her poignant poems about the misery of being a woman in Afghanistan.
Police arrested her husband on charges of beating her to death in their home in the western city of Herat; he confessed to the assault but not to murder. Today the case is classified by the courts as “suicide.”
The death of the 25-year-old thrust her work into the spotlight and today her poems — written in the Dari language, which is close to Persian — have been translated into several languages.
They speak of the pain of Afghan women, trapped in a conservative culture torn apart by nearly three decades of war that were followed by the 1996-2001 rule of the extremist Taliban — known for their harsh treatment of women.
An extract from “Useless”, for example, reads: “Happy the day when I will break the cage/When I will leave this solitude and sing with abandon/I am not a weak tree that sways with every breeze/I am an Afghan girl and it is right that I always cry.”
Anjuman’s work evokes “a great sorrow directly linked to her status as a woman and an Afghan,” says Leili Anvar, a literature expert who has translated some of her poems into French.
Under the Taliban, girls could not go to school, women were barred from working and confined largely to their homes.
The removal of the fundamentalist regime has seen few improvements to the lives of most Afghan women, who suffer abuse and discrimination.
Women still chose to end their lives through self-immolation, including in Herat, an ancient city of two million people and known for its art, culture and literature.
Anjuman “was becoming a great Persian poet”, the head of the respected Herat Literary Circle, Ahmad Said Haqiqi, said at the time of her death on November 4, 2005.
Anvar, who has dedicated several pages of an upcoming anthology of Afghan poetry to Anjuman, agrees. “When one considers her age, the extreme maturity of her work is astonishing,” she says.
Anjuman “showed a great mastery of Persian free verse and of the music of language,” she told AFP.
One of the late poet’s professors at the University of Herat, Mohammad Daud Munir, says her work showed a “deep and comprehensive thought.”
“Her absence has left a gap in the literary community of Herat,” he said.
Anjuman’s first collection, “Gul-e-dodi” (“Dark Red Flower”), came out a few months before she died and while she was a university student.
The Herat Literary Circle has since released a second collection of 80 poems and her work is regularly published, Munir says.
Abroad, beside the publication due in France, Anjuman’s work has also been translated into English and Italian.
The memory of the young woman is fresh among those who were close to her.
Her best friend, Nahid Baqi, who studied with her at university, is bitter.
“Everyone wants to forget,” she told AFP. “There was pressure on the authorities to conclude that it was a suicide.”
Anjuman’s husband, Farid Ahmad Majeednia, who is the head of the Herat University library, says she has written only about the Taliban period and before she was married.
“All of her poems are a narration of sorrow and sadness which is a result of being imprisoned behind home walls,” says Majeednia, who is raising the couple’s young daughter.
“Now almost two years later, my hands and legs still tremble when I think of her death and her absence,” he says.
“After Nadia’s death lots of things have ended for me.”