 Raz Mohammed today playing flute in ruins of Music Street, Kabul. |
  KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- Dec 23, 2001 One day a few years ago, in the depths of the Taliban's reign over the Afghan people, 26-year-old Raz Mohammed navigated the crumbling, deserted remains of the capital's once-fabled Music Street market in his wheelchair, and took out his wooden flute. He began to play, just to cheer himself up and to remember the peaceful streets of his childhood (before Music Street was destroyed in Afghanistan's civil war, people came here to buy instruments, hire a musician, or just to listen). Raz played a happy tune, but not long after his flute began to echo through the ruins, one of the Taliban's religious policemen happened by and ordered him to stop. |
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"He said I was breaking the holy command of Mullah Omar," Raz recalls. "So I told him: that order is meant to prevent music from distracting living people. But here, in this desert of a place, I'm only playing to the dead." While the Talib stroked his beard, wondering what to do next, Raz resumed playing. The Talib listened. And listened. Raz Mohammed, consummate survivor of the Afghan catastrophe, had chalked up yet another convert to the cause of simply getting himself through another day. With his charismatic grin, a sparkle in his eye and the smooth talking ways of a seasoned confidence man, Raz has overcome a handicap that often proves fatal in this most unforgiving of urban environments: at the age of 14, he lost both legs to a Soviet anti-personnel mine just after the Red Army's withdrawal in February of 1989. I first met Raz and filmed him just two days after the explosion. "Just give me something to put me to sleep," he cried in to the camera, "how can I live without my legs ?" Brilliantly well, as things have turned out. He's not only living, he's played the lead role, these past twelve years, in keeping his birth family of ten together through the cruelest of conflicts. And he's found a wife; together, they've had two healthy, rambunctious sons of their own. |
 Raz, age 14, after losing his legs to a Soviet mine in 1989. |
 Raz, aged 19, during the Afghan civil war in 1994. |
 Raz, in 2000, during the Taliban regime. |
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"God has blessed me," Raz told me during a visit here a year ago: "a man who has lost two legs has had two children of his own. Many men who have perfect health have no family at all. Truly, I'm a lucky man." Raz spoke those words, in the spring of 2000, as a pseudo-Talib -- he had grown a long beard and donned a black turban to win over the Taliban bosses of the Afghan Red Crescent, where he was forced to go to beg for help for his growing family. "We all had to be good Talibs," he says today with a grin. "But they were stupid people and easily fooled." Maybe, but the regime's thugs were dangerous, too. |  Raz and youngest son, Omed. |
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Raz's younger brother Juma Khan was jailed for nine months at the infamous Pul-i-Charkhi prison. His crime: defending himself in a street brawl; his adversary, bearing a grudge, had Talib friends in high places. Another brother, Malik, was caught selling Indian movie videos, but managed to escape his religious police pursuers. Today, visiting with Raz and his family in post-Taliban Kabul, I'm reminded who the true heroes of this tragic war really are. They're not guerrilla fighters, foreign jet pilots, journalists or aid workers. They are the families of this brutalized country, who've scraped through and survived, who have overcome the murderous treachery of Afghanistan's homegrown warlords and the disastrous interference of foreign powers great and small. As Afghanistan's new interim ruling council meets for the first time, and as politicians like President Bush and Britain's Tony Blair pat each other on the shoulder for a job well done, the big men in suits look vaguely ridiculous -- when you consider that a young, destitute mine victim named Raz Mohammed correctly prescribed a remedy for his country's agony and loss seven long years ago. Here's what he said in 1994, during the fighting that destroyed much of Kabul: "Peace will come if all these leaders are brought together to choose a council that can govern the country in a peaceful way. You can't run a country in this situation -- fighting and killing each other, each leader in his stronghold, fighting from there. They should choose a new way." "They" -- the warlords and the politicians and diplomats --appear to have done just that, at long last. Whether they'll follow through and achieve a permanent peace is far from clear. But those powerful men and women who like to think that they stand tall should reflect on the words of a young man confined to a wheelchair, Afghanistan's true throne of wisdom and experience. |