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A poet on the run in Fortress Europe
Saturday, 5th November 2005, by Robert Fisk
I can’t help you, I say. I will write about you. I will try to pump some compassion out of the authorities
Mohamed sits on the chair beside me in Amsterdam and opens his little book of poetry. His verse slopes down the page in delicate Persian script, the Dari language of his native Afghanistan. "God, why in the name of Islam is there all this killing, why all this anti-people killing ... the only chairs left in my country are chairs for the government, those who want to destroy Afghanistan." He reads his words of anger slowly, gently interrupted by an old chiming Dutch clock. Outside, the Herengracht canal slides gently beneath the rain. It would be difficult to find anywhere that least resembles Kabul.
"The donkeys came to Afghanistan, Massoud, Rahbani and the rest," Mohamed reads on. "All the people were waiting for the donkeys. Gulbudin said these donkeys have no tails - ’only I have a tail, so I shall have a ministry,’ he said. The donkeys are now in the government." Donkeys may be nice, friendly beasts to us, but to call anyone in the Muslim world a khar - a donkey - is as insulting as you can get. Mohamed was talking about the "mujahedin" guerrilla fighters who moved into Kabul after the Russian withdrawal in 1990, an arrival that presaged years of civil war atrocities which left at least 65,000 Afghans dead. This was the conflict which so sickened the anti-Soviet fighter Osama bin Laden that he left Afghanistan for Sudan.
Mohamed looks at me - a small energetic man with dark, sharp eyes. "I wanted future generations to know what we went through, to understand our pain," he says to me. I couldn’t stop myself writing this poetry." This was his mistake...http://tinyurl.com/da5kp
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A poet on the run in Fortress Europe
Saturday, 5th November 2005, by Robert Fisk
I can’t help you, I say. I will write about you. I will try to pump some compassion out of the authorities
Mohamed sits on the chair beside me in Amsterdam and opens his little book of poetry. His verse slopes down the page in delicate Persian script, the Dari language of his native Afghanistan. "God, why in the name of Islam is there all this killing, why all this anti-people killing ... the only chairs left in my country are chairs for the government, those who want to destroy Afghanistan." He reads his words of anger slowly, gently interrupted by an old chiming Dutch clock. Outside, the Herengracht canal slides gently beneath the rain. It would be difficult to find anywhere that least resembles Kabul.
"The donkeys came to Afghanistan, Massoud, Rahbani and the rest," Mohamed reads on. "All the people were waiting for the donkeys. Gulbudin said these donkeys have no tails - ’only I have a tail, so I shall have a ministry,’ he said. The donkeys are now in the government." Donkeys may be nice, friendly beasts to us, but to call anyone in the Muslim world a khar - a donkey - is as insulting as you can get. Mohamed was talking about the "mujahedin" guerrilla fighters who moved into Kabul after the Russian withdrawal in 1990, an arrival that presaged years of civil war atrocities which left at least 65,000 Afghans dead. This was the conflict which so sickened the anti-Soviet fighter Osama bin Laden that he left Afghanistan for Sudan.
Mohamed looks at me - a small energetic man with dark, sharp eyes. "I wanted future generations to know what we went through, to understand our pain," he says to me. I couldn’t stop myself writing this poetry." This was his mistake...http://tinyurl.com/da5kp
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posted by Dan at 6:16 PM
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