bout de papier, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2007) — Fall 2007 // Automne 2007, pp. 26–28
THE PLACES IN BETWEEN by Rory
Stewart, Toronto: Penguin Canada, 299 pp.,
2004, $18.00.
THE PRINCE OF THE MARSHES AND
OTHER OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS
OF A YEAR IN IRAQ by Rory Stewart,
Toronto: Penguin Canada, 196 pp., 2006,
$24.00
A hundred years from now historians will have passed judgment on the two curious wars that began the 21st century. Will these wars then be as faded as the wars that surrounded the opening of the 20th century? Will they have been assembled into the welf and the warp of a quickly changing world and for which there are few large historical consequences? Japan’s wars with China and Russia, the Spanish American War, the Boer Wars, and the Boxer Rebellions were relatively small affairs
– relative to what was to come later in the first half of the 20th century. Today there are small footprints of these wars and their echoes are largely contained within historical footnotes. Curiously, only the British skirmishes with the Pashtuns on the Northwest Frontier of present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan can be tracked to today’s troubles in the same region.
For those living at the time or for the participants, these wars were of some significance involving as they did major European powers; and just as today’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, they captured world-wide attention. Both of today’s wars involving the military might of the United States and major European powers dominate the world’s agenda almost to the exclusion of all else. In part this is due to the amount of oxygen American interests consume; but for other countries there are significant national interests involved ranging from keeping relations with the United States in good repair or for some, the belief that the future of western civilization depends on the outcome.
A consequence of the global preoccupation with the Afghan and Iraqi wars has been the proliferation of books, both good and bad, that detail the mites and the mighties, and the labyrinthine motivations involved in these troublesome conflicts. For those who had forebodings of the demise of the printed word with the advent of the www, its dependent children email, blogs and YouTube and their associated .com enterprises, the literary canon shows no signs of yielding to these neoteric devices and concepts. Very few of the books, however, in the hurry to have the first if not the definitive word, contain mihrabs to give readers a sense of understanding or a sense of the future of what is involved. Pre-emptive protection, regime change, elimination of nasty weapons and drugs, retribution, punishment, emancipation of women, the spread of democratic values and the security of oil supply have all been promoted as the reason or among the reasons for sending thousands of western troops to Afghanistan and Iraq. Unfortunately, very few have much to say about the Afghans and the Iraqis and their countries.
Enter Rory Stewart – then an itinerant British diplomat. Stewart succeeds in fixing that troublesome imbalance. In short order he has given us two books The Places in Between detailing a gruelling walk across most of central Afghanistan in 2002 and The Princes of the Marshes, memorializing a ten-month “governorship” in the Iraqi marsh-centered cities of Amarah and Nasiriyah in 2003-04. These two books provide a ground-up view of why western interventions have been such failures in their objectives and form part of the events that have altered the world’s strategic balance. They should be required reading for all who deal with places foreign. Hopefully, the books will be read long after these wars come to some form of conclusion as illustrations of what we don’t know when we militarily engage societies such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the opening of Places Stewart succinctly acknowledges the basic humanity of his journey and his hosts:
But never in my twenty-one months of travel did they attempt to kidnap or kill me. I was alone and a stranger, walking in very remote areas; I represented a culture that many of them hated, and I was carrying enough
money to save or at least transform their lives. In more than five hundred village houses, I was indulged, fed, nursed and protected by people poorer, hungrier, sicker, and more vulnerable than me…. I owe this journey and my life to them.
Stewart’s Afghan journey began in the early winter months of 2002 just weeks after the fall of the Taliban. The route stretched from Herat in the northwest, due east through the central mountains along the Hari Rud (river), through the lost Islamic capital of the Turquoise Mountain, into the Bamiyan valley (the home of the destroyed cliff Buddhas) and onto Kabul. It was the route taken by Babur early in the 16th century (probably based on bad advice) as he began the wanderings that led to the establishment of his Mogul empire. Babur died in 1530 in India and after a delay his remains were buried in Kabul under the widely-quoted inscription, “If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.” A more recent traveller is quoted by the author as writing that she was “reluctant to recommend this route without the gravest reservation.”
The passes only lower to 14,000 feet and in the winter deep snows and 40 below temperatures are common. For most of the route, the Hazara people dominate. The Hazaras are Shia and descendants of Genghis Khan, an earlier traveller in the region. They are at the very end of the Afghan social scale and, it is more the result of their isolation that they continue to survive at some 10 percent of the population. They were the last to be dominated by the Taliban in 1996, which added further to their misery and downtrodden status.
The author’s journey is blessed by the Herat governor and he starts with two minders from the local security authorities. Their and many other conversations establish the strength of the book. As the author notes
Yuzufi [local official in Herat] had an older view of an Afghanistan with a single national identity, natural frontiers, and ambassadors and a culture defined by medieval poetry. The Security Service saw my walk only as a journey to the edge of Ismail Khan’s terrain. The Hazara area was as foreign to them as Iran. But for Yuzufi my walk was a journey across a united country. Perhaps this was why he was one of the only people who thought the walk possible.
As the author leaves, Yuzufi remarked “Record me in your book. As the Persian poet say: ’Man’s life is brief and transitory. Literature endures forever’.”
The minders, Seyyad Qasim and Abdul Haq, related through marriage, are of a different order. Described with a touch that Cervantes would appreciate, they work now for the new regime in Herat but their histories reflect the country: probably before they were with the Taliban; before that they fought the Russians; and even earlier, as children, they enjoyed one of the few periods in recent Afghan history when there was reasonable peace throughout the land and when the national buzkaski in Kabul had the status of Stanley Cup playoffs between Montreal and Toronto. Along the journey’s route, the recent history of Afghanistan is also memorialized: destroyed Russian equipment, places where Russians died; places where the Taliban killed Hazaras and places were the Hazaras killed Taliban. And from 600 years earlier or even 900 years there are still signs of Babur’s journey and the wanderings of Genghis Khan’s armies.
The author deftly gives Babur’s journey currency by quoting from his journal (and those of many other previous and more recent travellers on the same route, demonstrating the endurance of the people and the land. In one quote a local ruler in the 16th century was convinced of his invincibility and without planning believed he could defy the invading Uzbeks. Babur writes:
Zulnun… kept his ground against fifty thousand Uzbeks with a hundred and fifty men. A great body of the enemy coming up took him in an instant and swept on. They cut off his head as soon as he was taken.
And today, the author observes:
No where in Afghanistan did the cruelty of the Taliban seem so comprehensive or have such an ethnic focus. In a three-day walk from Yakawlang, where the Taliban had executed four hundred to Sahidan, where eighty shop fronts had been reduced to blackened shells, every Hazara village I saw had been burned. In each settlement, people had been murdered, the flocks driven off, and the orchards razed. Most of the villages were still abandoned. The Hazara knew little and cared less about the World Trade Center.
It is these riffs up and down the historical scale that provide a reality check for our current preoccupations with things Afghan. The folly and conceit or our coming is quietly and devastatingly illustrated by Stewart’s daily privations and small courtesies that are extended by his hosts. “Only when he saw I was warm and had finished eating did he lean forward and ask, ’And who are you? And where are you from?’ As he ended his journey in Kabul, Stewart, perhaps with journalistic opportunism, picks up a piece of paper from the street:
There is a consensus in Afghan society: violence must end, respect for human rights will form the path to a lasting peace and stability across the country. The people’s aspirations must be represented in an accountable, broad-based, gender sensitive, multiethnic, representative government that delivers daily value.
It was a draft proposal, in English, intended for the Afghan government! Needless to say there are many such draft proposals lying in the dirt of Iraq.
By 2003, Stewart was looking for a new adventure (he had resigned from the British foreign service by this time) and thought that Iraq offered an antidote to tree-planting in the Highlands of Scotland. He was asked by the Foreign Office to be “deputy governorate coordinator” of Maysan, and by late September 2003, he was on his way via Basra. Maysan “lay in the marshes just north of the Garden of Eden. Or rather just north of the dead date palm and visitors’ parking lot that Iraqis claimed marked the site of paradise.” His mission was to create “a democratic Iraq at peace with itself and with its neighbors” – or in the jargon popular in Baghdad, “a multi-ethnic, decentralized, prosperous state, based on human rights, a just constitution, a vibrant civil society, and the rule of law.”
The Prince of the Marshes is written as a series of journal entries and excerpts from documents still available to the author. It covers the period from September 28, 2003 to June 28, 2004. It was a period in which the brilliant military invasion of Iraq in early 2003 turned into the quagmire that deepened and broadened the fissures of Iraqi society into vast gulfs of irreconcilability. The author tracks this decline through the eyes of a civilian coalition team working within the confines of a supposedly homogeneous people of the marshes. Like the Hazaras in Afghanistan, the Marsh people were the outcasts of Iraqi society and in some ways were more harshly treated by the previous Baathist regime than were the Kurds in the north.
The team, when fully staffed, was made up of a disparate group of short-term aliens who were supposed to re-establish social and economic services until such time as elections could be held for Iraqis to take over. The author, through wit, understatement, satire, irony and naïveté, treats us to the 10 months of slipping and sliding that only dealing with an ancient, patient and knowing people could produce. The daily work ranged from the establishment of a local governing council, the appointment of police and security officials and local administrators to obtaining some measure of understanding of the various social and political forces and local personalities. The work made Lawrence Durrell’s descriptions of a British embassy in central Europe between the wars appears as nursery play. Money was no object and tens of millions of dollars were available and the author’s accounting standards would have led Judge Gomery to early retirement.
It is the author’s dealings with the Prince of the Marshes that is at the centre of the book and provides its sub-title – and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq. The Prince was a serious occupational hazard having for the previous 17 years fought the Baathists from Baghdad and had considerable legitimacy both locally and with the new forces in the capital. The naming of the “Prince” (he was not) was attributed to Paul Bremer, which he subsequently denied, as with so many other things for which he was responsible. The British military and more significantly minor civilian functionaries were of little consequence. The marsh Arabs could remember British soldiers from 50 and even 100 years earlier and assess their true importance on the area’s many-millennia of recorded history. Upon Stewart’s introduction, the Prince “glanced at me and then looked away.” While there were other occasions, it was clear that the Prince (although he was overcome by the new forces in the marshes and from the east) had an understanding of the relative order of things.
For Stewart the new order crumbled when the invading forces failed to provide protection for the new local authorities he was instrumental in putting into office. Paralleling the “looting” in Baghdad a few months earlier, in the words of the new local governor, “You sent home my security force, dissolved the police line and took responsibility for the building. How did you then let the crowd get in and steal everything?”,, the author notes “the governor left that meeting certain that we were not prepared to give him the level of protection we gave ourselves. And from then onwards almost any hope of cooperation was lost.” A few lines earlier he notes: … we thought property less important than life. And because we could not define the conditions under which we were prepared to kill Iraqis or have our own soldiers killed. Occupation is not a science but a deep art that can only be learned through experience.” And clearly it is an experience that western publics do not wish to learn.
In the middle of his Afghan journey, the author was presented with a dog, a “Sag-Jingo,” a dog of war, as company for the last five weeks of his trek. It was the size of a small pony and named Babur by the author. When the author flew off to Scotland he made arrangements for the dog to follow. It was not to be. Babur died before he got on the plane.
Someone had given him rack of lamb. After eating bread all his life, he had neither the teeth nor the experience to handle a bone. The shards cut up his stomach and killed him. I had thought that line of smells by unmarked boulders, stretching to a snow-ridge horizon, with ice holes for drinking, would finish with good meat, oak trees, rabbits, and a warm house. But it ended with his death.
Perhaps fitting testimony to our own efforts in that ancient land.
Another Afghan host, when asked by the author to explain the Hazara, carefully unwrapped the Koran and read:
Unbeliever, I do not worship what
you worship,
Nor do you worship what I worship,
I shall never worship what
you worship,
Nor will you ever worship what
I worship,
You have your religion and
I have mine.
Many have died to arrive at that understanding.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2007) — Fall 2007 // Automne 2007, pp. 26–28. Read the rest of this issue →
