When Marc Weide’s mother who was 65 was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she chose euthanasia. Here, we publish his shockingly frank diary of her final days

Monday February 11 2008

5.30pm: Dad is bent over the toilet bowl with a brush in his hand and a scowl on his face. I walk up to him. “Shall I give you a hand?” Dad begins to snicker, abandoning any attempt to make sense of the situation. We stand shoulder to shoulder with our backs to Mom, who paces around the patio with a newly fitted catheter in her hand.

The catheter has been put in by her nurse, Marianne to enable her doctor, who will be with us in half an hour, to give Mom a lethal injection. But instead of having a moment of peace with us, as Marianne suggested, Mom demands that we clean the toilets. Both upstairs and downstairs.

My brother, Maarten, is sitting on the edge of the bathtub, staring out of the bathroom window.

“Imagine,” he mutters. “Her last hour, spent like this.”

This is the Netherlands, where voluntary euthanasia is permitted, as well as physician-assisted suicide. This is the day my mother has chosen to die, and the toilets need to be spotless.

Three months earlier

I’m on a writer’s retreat in the UK, where I have been living for the past three years. I’m working on my novel when my mobile phone rings. The display shows it’s Maarten, calling from the Netherlands. Mom’s test results have come back.

“It’s secondary cancer in her lungs.” He pauses. “They think she’s got two to six months left.”

I phone Mom. She talks without interruption, barely taking breath, about quitting her job just two months before her retirement, about what might have happened if she had not had that innocent-looking polyp removed from her womb, about why the doctors had not investigated her lungs earlier.

The prognosis is she could live another year if she undergoes chemotherapy. But she won’t. “I’m not going to go bald,” she says. “I don’t ever want people saying, ‘How sad, that beautiful hair all gone.”

When I phone again, she sounds as if she doesn’t have time to talk.

“I’m arranging my cremation.”

“Oh … ”

“Yes, the text for the card, the location, the flowers, the coffin … I’m really busy.”

Dad, Maarten and I do not seem to be part of the equation.

Late January 2008

Dad phones. After two and a half months, Mom is deteriorating rapidly. She suffers from headaches, sickness and loss of coordination. She takes a fall while Dad is having a shower. When she has a shower, half the bathroom floor gets flooded.

Two days later, brain metastasis is confirmed. Mom is hospitalized and given drugs to repress the inflammation, but they will only remain effective for a week or two.

Friday January 25

Maarten picks me up from Schiphol airport in Amsterdam and we drive to meet Dad at the hospital. We all go upstairs together.

Mom is sitting by herself at a table near the window as we enter. She throws us a tearful smile. “My boys,” she says, as Maarten and I give her a hug. “To think that this all started in that bloody womb of mine … but I am glad I had it, to bear you two.”

The hospital staff all do a great job and Mom seems content with her care. After two hours with us, though, she becomes more demanding. She asks Dad to put things into her bag, then take them out again. She snaps when he can’t find her mobile phone.

When the palliative care coordinator, Carola, comes in to discuss the option of home care, I take Dad outside. “Dad, I’m wondering – here, Mom is in the capable hands of staff whose authority she accepts. At home, she’ll just try to be the boss.”

“Hmm. You may be right,” says Dad. We walk back, just as Mom is asking Carola whether home care really does not include vacuuming.

When I repeat my concerns to Maarten, though, he is adamant: “She ought to come home. It feels more natural if she dies there and I want to be around her for a bit. I don’t want to drive to this depressing hospital every day and leave her alone at night.”

And so the question is settled. The four of us will go home together on Monday.

Saturday January 26

In Dad’s study, I find a draft version of a mourning card saying “bye dear”. My name is on the card, along with my brother’s and Dad’s. These are meant to be our words, but I have had no part in writing them and I struggle with the bottom line: “We prefer not to receive telephone calls, visitors or flowers.”

Monday January 28

After arriving home with Mom, we struggle to share a harmonious moment. She asks again if we’ve thought about what we are going to say at her funeral. When I answer that I haven’t, Mom insists that time is short. I should look at her “expression of wish” statement – her wish to die. It needs editing. I go upstairs to the study.

The statement begins: “I, Mieneke Weide-Boelkes, am terminally ill.” It ends: “As soon as this medication loses its efficacy I request euthanasia.” Dad joins me and reassures me the text has genuinely been written by Mom.

I start editing. Then Mom calls from downstairs. “Weren’t you going to make dinner?!”

I go downstairs and start cooking with Maarten. Anything for a quiet life … because that is how it’s always been and now is not the time to change it.

When dinner is ready and I go to fetch Mom and Dad, I find them sitting in our bedroom with a man I have never seen before.

Mom introduces me to the doctor, Martin. He is holding the statement I have just edited, but all I can think is how he got in so quietly and why Mom and Dad have not bothered to let us know he is here.

Wednesday January 30

8.15am: Maarten has a run-in with Mom. He asks what on Earth she is doing with the Hoover at “stupid o’clock” in the morning. Mom does not appreciate being spoken to like that.

Things still simmer at breakfast. Mom finds fault with all the shopping we bought the previous day: the gouda cheese is too soft, the bread too sweet and why is there fruit juice in her fridge?

Monday February 4

We are just about to have lunch when Mom, who has been complaining about headaches this morning, gets up from the table. Tearfully, she shuffles to the kitchen sink. “I am so sick of it,” she says, “so sick.” She begins to make retching noises.

As Dad gets closer, Mom begins to thrash around. “It’s starting again!” she cries. “Call a doctor, quickly!”

Maarten manages to calm her down a little. Dad picks up the phone to call the doctor. Mom wants to go back to the table, but I take her upstairs to bed.

A moment later we hear feet shuffling down the stairs. The door opens and Mom appears. “I’m sort of OK now,” she says.

She has just sat down when the doctor arrives. As he sticks his head round the dining-room door and sees Mom sipping coffee, his face is all surprise.

So this is the moment Mom has specified: initial symptoms back; medication losing its effect.

The doctor says euthanasia can take place next week. Another doctor first needs to verify, though, that Mom cannot be cured, that her wish to die has been consistent, and that her suffering is unbearable.

Martin is convinced of the first two conditions but not of the third. If Mom is too energetic to stay in bed, then how is her suffering unbearable?

Mom puts her coffee down. “Well, I have to die anyway, don’t I?” Then she asks us what we think.

I interrupt: “It should be your own decision. None of us is to say anything.”

But Mom struggles to say she wants to die. Eventually I say, “I think what she finds unbearable is not so much her pain and sickness, but the fear of it getting worse and of losing control.”

When Martin is finally satisfied that Mom wants to end it, he agrees to contact the second doctor. He leaves with an empathetic nod to us all.

Thursday February 7

I wake up in the middle of the night. Mom is standing in our bedroom. She opens a drawer and takes something out. She shuffles items across the desk until she is pleased with their arrangement. Then she leaves, quietly closing the door behind her.

It is at least the third time she has been busy tidying up our room that I’ve seen this evening.

Mom’s youngest sister and her husband are visiting today. Everybody sits at the dining-room table with drinks and nibbles. Mom is giving an animated demonstration on how to polish silverware with her special gloves.

Then the secondary opinion doctor phones to say he will be with us in 10 minutes. There is a brief panic. Mom wants to change into her nightwear and get into bed before the doctor arrives, but we persuade her otherwise.

The doctor speaks privately with Mom in the dining room. After he leaves, Mom looks decisive. She says it was “a very good talk”, but does not give any further details.

Later, when the guests have gone, Dad tells me that the doctor asked him to leave the room. “Yes,” Mom interrupts, “the doctor had to ascertain if I was not being forced into euthanasia.”

Friday February 8

Doctor Martin is due to come in the afternoon to discuss further plans, but I do not see him. My brother has to fill me in over the phone because I am staying at a friend’s after a fight with Mom.

Over the last week or so, she has been complaining about my shoes and the damage they do to her floor and has been badgering me to buy a new pair at her preferred shop this weekend.

“Mom,” I say, “I was planning to stay with some friends this weekend.”

“Oh, were you!” she snaps. “And who has got more priority then, your friends or your terminally ill mother?”

I decide to go sooner rather than later. But Mom pursues me as I get my things. “Why don’t you stay with your friends next week, when I’m dead? You’ll have all the time in the world then!”

“I was planning to spend time here, with Dad.”

“Oh no you won’t,” she says. “When I’m dead, it’s just going to be your dad and me here. I don’t want you and Maarten around. And anyway, you don’t do diddly squat … ”

I lose my self-control. I shout and swear at her and storm off in a rage.

Later, at my friend Petra’s, I get a phone call from Maarten about the outcome of the doctor’s visit. Mom’s death has been scheduled for Monday February 11, at 6.15pm.

Sunday February 10

Mom’s sisters and their husbands are there for a last family dinner, together with Dad, Maarten and me – wearing my expensive new pair of shoes. Mom, even more energetic than the week before, decorates the table lavishly.

My uncles shake their heads with incomprehension. As Mom shows off her china plates, my aunts have distracted looks on their faces.

Whispering to Dad and me in the hallway, they struggle to understand why Mom is choosing to die the next day when she is bouncing around like a 40-year-old instead of a terminally ill 65-year-old. But there is also shock at her fixation on material objects and the little interest she shows in how the people around her actually feel.

Monday February 11

Again, I wake up early when Mom comes into the bedroom. It is disturbing to see her take the stones and shells from the windowsill and place them on the desk. She had only moved them on to the windowsill the previous morning.

Mom leaves and comes back again three times. After the last visit, I can hear she is hoisting the vacuum cleaner up to the attic. It is just after 6am.

It is the start of an increasingly mad day, during which Mom hoovers the whole house and does six loads of washing (one of which consists of a single white shirt). She scrapes all the woodwork on the outside of the house clear of moss and cleans the windows.

After breakfast, I find Dad fuming after Mom has given him grief for not ironing fast enough. I ask him if it helps to see her as a mental patient instead of his wife. He grumbles.

I think of what was said the night before, about Mom’s relative physical fitness and her obsession with material objects and cleanliness. I feel an increasing tension as the day progresses and I still don’t know whether it is going to be Mom’s last.

I overhear Mom’s conversation with the flower shop. After the crematorium confirms the date of her funeral, she phones to order flowers for her coffin. It is an hour and a half before the nurse comes to put the catheter into Mom’s hand.

6.15pm: The doctor arrives shortly after the scene with the toilets. Mom greets him, then disappears upstairs, saying, “Best let me potter for a bit.” Nobody sees her for another 20 minutes.

“Does it happen at all that people pull out at the last minute?” I ask.

“Yes,” Martin says. “Quite often I go home again and a new appointment is made. But in many cases the patient passes away between visits.”

When Mom comes back, listing things she has put in bags and boxes, Martin gently interrupts her: “Can I just ask you something? Is there still a lot you feel you need to do?”

“Yes,” she says, “I mean no. I’m just nervous.”

“I can always come back later if you are not ready,” says the doctor.

Mom sits down and listens to the doctor. Then she takes a deep breath and says, “OK. I am ready.”

At 7pm, with my father, brother and me around her bed as well as Martin, who has given her the injection, Mom goes to sleep.

Saturday February 16

People at funerals often say that the deceased would have approved of the ceremony. In my mother’s case, she had literally approved everything – the music, the flowers, the guest list and the restaurant we went to afterwards.

My main regret is that there were such clashes between us in the run-up to her death. Perhaps if we had challenged Mom more over the years, keeping her ever-increasing demands in check, we could have been at peace as a family, instead of at war over shoes and toilets, right to the bitter end.

We all need to be sensative to someone who is terminally Ill. Although it may be hard for all of us as we all will struggle in the end, both patient and family and friends, we need to honor the wishes of our loved one.

The only thing missing here was prayer and love abounding. I missed seeing any hugging or love being shown from either direction.

If you have a loved one who is terminal, you can never give them too many hugs or words of encouragement. Don’t be afraid to tell them you are committed to loving them until the very end, or you don’t know how you will live without them.

Anger is a natural feeling for both the terminally Ill and their friends and family. All feel they have been cheated and are looking for who to blame. Even when you don’t feel they deserve it, because of their behavior, continue to hug them, and encourage them. Sometimes they just need to be held and if they begin to cry just keep holding them in silence. You’re just being there for them will help!

Tareque Masud and Mishuk Munier amongst five killed in road accident.

Drik mourns the death of two dear friends, the injuries of three others and the numerous deaths of their colleagues and the thousands of uncounted others who regularly die as a result of negligence, corruption and the wanton irresponsibility of those who are in charge of keeping our roads safe.

Tareque Masud, one of the finest film makers this nation has produced. Mishuk Munier, a talented cameraperson and a media professional who had both the dreams and the ability to change the way reporting was done, died a brutal death as they were returning to Dhaka having chosen the location for their next film.

Catherine, Tareque’s equally talented wife, the producer of the Oscar nominated film Matir Moina, artist Dhali Al Mamoon, who had given the inaugural Golam Kasem Daddy lecture on Drik’s 20th anniversary, and his painter wife Dilara Begum Jolly are in hospital recovering from multiple injuries. Dhali’s condition is critical.

Obituary on Guardian UK

By Abbas Faiz – South Asia researcher for Amnesty International

It was a welcome opportunity to meet Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina during her official visit to the UK. Three of us, Lord Eric Avebury of the UK House of Lords, Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch and I met the Prime Minister on 30 January at her hotel suite in London.

Bangladesh Foreign Minister, Dr Dipu Moni and the Bangladesh High Commissioner to the UK, Dr Sayeedur Rahman Khan were also present at the meeting.

We began with a discussion on the war crimes trials, restrictions on human rights groups visiting Chittagong Hill Tracts, and the continued delay in implementing the Chittagong Hill Tracts Accord (CHT) that was signed in 1997 during Sheikh Hasina’s previous tenure as Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister said she was committed to implementing the CHT Accord and had set up a committee to advise her on how to implement it.

The Foreign Minister said the government was aware of the concerns the International Bar Association had raised about the law under which war crimes will be tried. She said the government had sought the opinion of legal experts on those concerns and that the amended law incorporates their advice. She said the process is to heal wounds, and the government is looking at all issues in relation to the trials, and the rule of law would be followed.

The law denies, among other things, the right to challenge the jurisdiction of the Tribunal and the right to the possibility of bail but it was not clear if the government would move to amend the law.

I told the Prime Minister that Amnesty International welcomes the government’s move to make the National Human Rights Commission permanent and asked for her assurances that it would remain independent and well resourced. Also, the government’s move to try Bangladesh Rifle mutineers in civilian courts, as against courts martial, was welcome.

I expressed concern that the government’s move to address some of the human rights concerns appear to favour only members of her own party, the Awami League. There is a long, unwelcome legacy in Bangladesh for governments to go soft on the criminal activities of members of their own party and harsh on the opposition. I asked why the only known cases of the government pardoning death penalty convicts were 20 convicts, 19 of whom were members of the governing Awami League. I also expressed concern about the activities of the Bangladesh Chattra League (BCL), the student wing of the Awami League, and the serious allegations of human rights abuses by this grouping, which have gone unpunished.

The Foreign Minister said the deaths sentences had been politically motivated and for that reason the prisoners have been pardoned. I was dismayed as I had hoped to hear a commitment to pardoning more death penalty convicts and the exercise of utmost impartiality in choosing who to pardon.

The Prime Minister said she had taken action against the BCL members. Some have been arrested for committing crimes and some have been expelled from the Awami League.

I explained that torture continues to be widespread and asked the Prime Minister if her government would consider implementing the 2003 Supreme Court ruling that provides guidelines for torture free investigation of suspects. This question remained unanswered.

I referred to statements the Prime Minister had made before and after the 2008 elections that extrajudicial executions would end. Yet, they continue and nothing seems to be done to stop them.

The Prime Minister said extrajudicial executions have been happening since 2004 and she has been very vocal on the issue from that time. She said they could not stop overnight. She said all incidents are investigated, and if any officer is found to have committed a crime “immediately we take action against it”.

I agree that extrajudicial executions cannot stop overnight, but work to stop them can begin straight away. While the Prime Minister’s comments generate the hope that the government might be prepared to address the issue, the Home Minister’s comments last week that extrajudicial executions were not happening undermines that hope.

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At a time when Bangladesh is being asked (against the wishes of its citizens) to send troops to Afghanistan, an interesting article on the complex forces that are at play in the region.

related article: Sitting on a man’s back

By MATTHIEU AIKINS
Published1 October 2010
CARAVAN

Matthieu Aikins is a journalist whose feature writing and photography have appeared in such US, Canadian, British and Indian publications as Harper’s Magazine, the Globe & Mail, the National Post, the Coast, the Toronto Sun, The Caravan, Progress Magazine, the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, the Kingston Whig-Standard, Bad Idea Magazine, SAIL Magazine, and on CBC’s ‘The National’ and Global TV’s ‘National News’.

THEY WERE BOTH YOUNG. One had just the first wisps of hair on his cheeks, like an adolescent. The other was not much older, his short-trimmed beard caked with dried blood. There were gaping exit wounds in his shoulder, and in the pale skin of his belly, where his undershirt had been pulled up to reveal the damage. The two boys were lying dead amongst scattered bricks, at the feet of a crowd of gaping onlookers and journalists, in an abandoned construction site in Kabul.

“Where do you think they’re from?” a reporter asked the policeman who was taking a picture of the bodies with his cell phone, his assault rifle dangling from his other hand. The glaze of adrenaline still shone on the cop’s cheeks and eyes. “Pakistan,” he said. “Definitely not Afghans.” They always say that here, as if you could tell. They looked like Pashtuns, at least.

It was just one of several attacks in Kabul this summer, unremarkable in its execution and impact, but as a result, a series of extraordinary events had been triggered that would serve as a bellwether of India’s waning influence in Afghanistan. It was 29 May, the first day of the National Consultative Peace Jirga, and the two militants had managed to set up in the empty site and fire rockets at the Polytechnic University, the site of the peace jirga—a carefully stage-managed event that had brought handpicked tribal elders and civil society figures to endorse President Hamid Karzai’s plan to reconcile with the Taliban.

Karzai was furious that the jirga had been disrupted, in the middle of his inaugural speech, no less. One of the rockets had severed the leg of one of his personal bodyguards, and the two attackers had held out for several hours in a gun battle with police before finally being shot to death.

The following week, Karzai called a meeting with Hanif Atmar, the Minister of the Interior, and Amrullah Saleh, the chief of the National Directorate of Security (NDS)— the Afghan intelligence service—where he accused them of deliberately failing to provide adequate security in order to undermine the jirga. In a heated exchange, both offered their resignations. It wasn’t the first time that either of them had offered their resignations in response to an angry outburst by Karzai, but this time the president accepted.

Of course, there was more to the forced resignations than just the incident at the peace jirga. Both Atmar and Saleh were favourites of Afghanistan’s Western donor countries, particularly the United States. They had been responsible for Western-backed reforms in Afghanistan’s internal security agencies. They were also officials who had been seen as very friendly to India, in particular Saleh, who had shown a marked and public hostility towards Pakistan, and was a strong opponent of reconciliation with the Taliban.

“It’s clear from what’s been said around the palace that the president had issues with Atmar and Saleh and suspicions that they were too loyal to the foreigners,” said Kate Clark, a political analyst in Kabul. “He’s tried to get rid of Atmar before and the foreigners said no.”

The incident showed how much India’s fortunes have been bound to the US-led nation-building project in Afghanistan, and how much the downward spiral of that project has diminished India’s position here. Saleh’s ouster was particularly damaging to India, as it has hampered co-operation between the NDS and India’s external intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), and was seen as a significant milestone in the rehabilitation of Karzai’s once-tense relationship with Pakistan.

“By and large, India for a long time has put all its eggs in one basket and that is American presence,” said Harsh Pant, a professor and expert on Indian foreign policy and security issues at King’s College London. “America will sort everything out and will not leave Afghanistan until it’s achieved its objective. Suddenly, that has come crashing down because of the West’s desire to leave.”

Today, almost nine years after a US-led invasion deposed the Taliban regime, large swaths of the south and southeast have fallen under Taliban control, while Kandahar city, the linchpin of the south, has become a battleground of targeted killings, air strikes and improvised explosive devices. Even once-safe areas in the north and west have become dangerous. The rising insecurity is not simply a function of the insurgency, but a revival of centrifugal forces that have plagued the Afghan state for centuries, with local warlords and criminal gangs increasingly emboldened to defy a corrupt and ineffectual central government.

The final elements of the US military surge arrived at the end of this summer without any significant gains. The Taliban in Baghlan Province is now threatening the main highway north from Kabul to Mazar-e Sharif, as well as the road south to Kandahar, and the result is an atmosphere of pessimism and mounting panic that has reached even into the relatively secure bubble of the capital. In September, when the top officials of the country’s largest private bank, Kabul Bank, were removed over revelations they had made hundreds of millions of dollars in bad loans to politically connected businessmen, thousands of Afghans mobbed bank branches around the country, desperately seeking to withdraw their deposits. The incident added to the ‘end of days’ sensation in Kabul and cast a pall over Eid-ul-Fitr.

In several months of conversations over the course of this summer—many of them off-the-record—in Kabul and Delhi with current and former Indian bureaucrats with the Ministry of External Affairs and with India’s intelligence services, as well as with Afghan, Pakistani and Western officials and observers, the consensus was that India’s policy in Afghanistan is facing the seemingly impossible task of managing the collapse of the nation-building project in Afghanistan and containing Pakistan’s rising influence. Despite a massive commitment of 1.3 billion dollars in Indian aid, the Karzai administration and Pakistan have drawn closer, both as a result of the failure of US-led efforts to contain the insurgency, and the rising momentum for negotiations with the Taliban. There was confusion, however, over India’s basic interests in Afghanistan and what sort of plausible situations might be imagined. One thing was clear though: the growing fragmentation of Afghanistan could conceivably herald a return to the chaos of the civil war in the 1990s.

IF YOU VISIT THE BORDER CROSSING at Spin Boldak, between Kandahar city and Quetta in Pakistan, you’ll find a sort of semi-organised mayhem. Here, hundreds of local Pashtuns pass back and forth without documentation each day. This is, in fact, one of the best controlled places along the Durand Line, demarcated by the British Empire and the Emir of Afghanistan,
Abdur Rahman Khan in 1893, which extends through the Pashtun heartland—rugged tribal country where clans overlap the border, on up through to the Khyber Pass and then into the western reaches of the Himalayas.

Like they were in the time of the British Empire, the lands skirting the Durand Line are barely controlled or controllable, and are rife with smuggling and militancy. They have been a continual source of contention between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Relations between the two countries worsened when Daoud Khan, who in 1973 deposed his cousin King Zahir Shah to become the first president of Afghanistan, revived the Pashtunistan issue. Pakistan began to support traditional Islamic rebels who were resisting Daoud’s attempts at state modernisation, while in turn, Daoud hosted thousands of displaced Baloch and Pashtun fighters.

The Soviet Union first supported the Afghan communist groups that led a coup in Afghanistan in 1978, and then, 20 months later, invaded in order to prop them up. India, though initially uneasy about the wisdom of the invasion, gave its support. “We were taken by surprise, they hadn’t told us they were going to invade,” said Vikram Sood, a former head of RAW who retired in March 2003. “Both of the superpowers have made a mess for our policies.”

Although a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement, India had then moved into closer co-operation with the Soviet Union, signing the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in 1971 and receiving significant Soviet military aid. Pakistan, for its part, had fallen into the US sphere of influence, signing a security agreement in 1959 and, in time, becoming the conduit for billions of dollars in US aid to the mujahideen.

With the war in Afghanistan fuelled by the two competing superpowers, the border also became another front in the conflict between India and Pakistan, which after flaring into full-scale wars in 1965 and 1971, was then being carried out in several parts of South Asia. As RAW already had a close relationship with the KGB, this extended to cooperation with Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, KhAD, the predecessor to NDS. They had a common enemy in Pakistan.

“It was a close relationship,” said Sood of the three intelligence services, KGB, RAW and KhAD. “It was a closeness that flowed from the political closeness of our governments.”

The KGB and KhAD carried out assassinations and sabotage in Pakistan, and RAW found its cooperation with them useful; in particular for intelligence on Sikh groups training in militant camps, according to the memoirs of Bahukutumbi Raman, a former RAW officer.

When, after ten years of a fruitless counterinsurgency campaign, the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from Afghanistan, a brutal civil war broke out between mujahideen factions. It was the sudden rise of the Taliban, a group of strict Islamic fighters who brought order to the south of Afghanistan, as the country’s pre-eminent military force that coalesced the conflict into sharp geographic, ethnic, and regional battle lines. The Taliban had indigenous beginnings that stretched back through the anti-Soviet jihad, but once they began to gather momentum, Pakistan threw its support behind them, supplying them with weapons, logistics, and battlefield guidance.

“There was a feeling in Delhi at the time that all was lost,” said Sood. “We were the guys who said ‘no, it’s not over, something can be done.’”

To counter the Taliban, Russia, Iran, and India gave weapons, money and supplies to the United Front, commonly known as the Northern Alliance, which included in a loose confederation Abdul Rashid Dostum and his Uzbek militia in the northwest, Ismail Khan in the west in Herat, and Karim Khalili in the Hazara-dominated central highlands, along with the forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud, whose Shura-e Nezar, or ‘Supervisory Council,’ drew on a core of loyalists from the Panjshir Valley, a Tajik-inhabited valley north of Kabul that successfully held out against both the Soviets and Taliban. Massoud, a charismatic leader, soon became the most prominent figure in the Northern Alliance.

“He was a man who could have easily disappeared with a lot of money but he stayed and fought until the end,” said Lieutenant General Ravi Sawhney, who was the director general of Indian military intelligence throughout the 1990s until his retirement in October 2001. He would meet Massoud in Iran and Tajikistan, where India has a small airbase and field hospital at Farkhor, through which they brought in supplies. “There was no contiguity of the borders, we couldn’t do much besides financial aid.”

Dostum and Ismail Khan were eventually forced to flee Afghanistan, while Massoud’s forces were pushed by the Taliban into a tiny northern corner of the country. A Taliban victory seemed near, but the attacks of 11 September and the US military intervention abruptly altered the course of Afghanistan’s history. Though Massoud had been killed by al-Qaeda in a suicide attack two days before those at the World Trade Center (he died in Farkhor’s field hospital), his deputies swept into power on the back of the US-led bombing campaign that led to the rapid collapse of the Taliban regime.

Pervez Musharraf, then Pakistan’s military dictator, had offered his support to the Americans, but according to recently declassified diplomatic correspondence, he repeatedly expressed his concerns that the Northern Alliance would take over Kabul. His fears were realised when, despite US pressure, forces led by the Shura-e Nazar entered Kabul in strength and occupied the ministries.

The northerners consolidated their strong position on the ground at the 2001 Bonn Conference, which charted a roadmap for Afghanistan’s political future. The most important ministerial positions in the interim government were entirely occupied by Shura-e Nazar figures, who simply took on the roles they had had under Massoud’s administration: Marshal Fahim as Defence Minister, Yunus Qanuni as Interior Minister, Abdullah Abdullah as Foreign Minister, and as head of the newly-formed NDS, Muhammed Arif Sarwari, who had been the CIA’s primary liaison under Massoud. With the exception of Qanuni, who became the Minister of Education and the Special Advisor on Security to Karzai, all of these figures kept their positions through the Transitional Authority that oversaw the Constitutional Loya Jirga in 2003, up to the first presidential elections in 2004.

For the first time in Afghanistan’s history, you had an interior minister, defence minister, a foreign minister, and a chief of intelligence who were all from the Panjshir Valley. These were men who had been, a month before, fighting desperately against a Pakistani-supported Taliban while taking military and financial aid from India. Now they were the masters of Kabul, far more powerful than Karzai, who had just arrived from exile in Pakistan and had no military base of his own.

These were good times for Indo-Afghan relations, and India reciprocated with substantial support, committing 1.3 billion dollars in development projects such as roads, dams, the Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital, a power line between Kabul and Uzbekistan and sponsoring hundreds of scholarships for Afghan students to India, making it the largest bilateral donor in the region and the fifth largest overall, after the US, Britain, Japan and Germany.

Even the new parliament building on Darulaman Road is being built by India for 83 million dollars, though Afghans are beginning to wonder when it will ever be finished (the government says 2011). The Manmohan Singh administration has also embraced co-operation in security matters with Afghanistan, seeing it as a crucial battleground in fighting terrorism in the region. Though India, primarily due to US objections stemming from Pakistan’s concerns, has not sent its military to take part in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, it has helped build the capacity of the Afghan security forces, providing pilot and counterinsurgency training and even mentoring the Afghan Army’s marching band.

The NDS figured prominently in this scheme. The CIA, which directly controlled the NDS’s budget until 2008, has worked to grow what is widely regarded as one of the most effective and cohesive institutions in Afghanistan, outperforming the Afghan Army and the dismal Afghan National Police. “It’s been a tremendously powerful institution in Afghanistan, certainly since the 1978 revolution,” said analyst Kate Clark.

The basic material for the organisation came from two sources: Shura-e Nazar’s pre-existing intelligence men, and former members of KhAD. They had previously been merged during the short-lived Rabbani government in 1992, when Fahim was put in charge of the intelligence service. After the Northern Alliance took Kabul in 2001, that setup was reconstituted. It was not unusual for communist-era figures with experience in security or bureaucracy—particularly those associated with Najibullah’s rule—to participate in the post-2001 regime, as they represented some of Afghanistan’s most well-trained talent.

Both the Panjshiris and the former KhAD members had experience working with Indian intelligence against Pakistan and its proxies in Afghanistan. RAW picked up these pre-existing relationships after 2001. “We knew a lot of these guys from their KhAD days,” said a former Indian intelligence official who recently retired. According to current and former intelligence officials within RAW and the NDS, the relationship between the two agencies had been co-operative, though less close than in the KhAD days, with NDS officials visiting India for training and RAW maintaining information gathering operations in Afghanistan.

Saleh, who took over as NDS chief in 2004 and had been groomed for the position by the Americans, is also from the Panjshir Valley, though at 38 he had been a relatively minor figure in Massoud’s administration. As a director in the Northern Alliance’s office in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, he had been a liaison with foreign intelligence services. “One of the most brilliant people I’ve met,” said Sawhney. “Slightly short-tempered, but if there’s anyone who knows the Taliban and Pakistan’s hand in the game, it’s him.”

During his tenure as NDS chief, Saleh would publicly accuse the Pakistani government of waging an active campaign of support for militant groups in Afghanistan. “The tribal agencies of Pakistan, like Bajaur and North and South Waziristan, are kept by the government as a strategic pool of fighters. From there, fundamentalist warriors are sent to fight in Afghanistan or elsewhere,” Saleh told Der Spiegel, a prominent German magazine, in 2009.

“Amrullah Saleh was very hostile,” said a senior Pakistani official. “He gathered Panjshiris and Karmalists [former communists] around him who were ideologically opposed to Pakistan.”

The extent of the NDS’s operations in Pakistan is a matter of dispute. As a function of its counterintelligence and counterterrorism roles, the NDS has been working actively to penetrate the Taliban and other insurgent groups, both within Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where the CIA has active intelligence gathering operations as well. (A key figure in this had been Dr Abdullah Laghmani, the Pashtun deputy head of the NDS who was killed in a suicide attack in Mehtar Lam in 2009.) However, Pakistani officials claim that NDS under Saleh has gone further than that, taking the fight to Pakistan by cultivating links with militant groups on Pakistani soil.

One Pakistani official in Kabul accused the NDS of actively supporting elements of the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan that had turned against the Pakistani military, namely groups in Orakzai, the Swat Valley and South Waziristan— all locations of Pakistan’s selective military campaign in the tribal regions. “They were working very closely in Orakzai with NDS,” he said. “NDS had contacts with Maulana Fazlullah and with Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan.” Afghan officials denied providing any support to militant groups.

The NDS has also been accused by Pakistan of harbouring militant Baloch separatists, including Brahamdagh Bugti, leader of the Baloch Republican Party. In November 2007, Balach Marri, a key militant separatist leader, was killed in Afghanistan, according to some news reports at the time, due to a NATO air strike that mistook him and his men for Taliban. The Pakistani source claimed that Marri had in fact been killed in a suicide attack in Uruzgan. “They brought his dead body here to the military hospital in Kabul. The family got in touch with us and they wanted the body.” Initially, the Afghan government was too embarrassed to give up Marri’s remains, but, the source said, “eventually they gave us the body.” Marri was later buried by his family in Balochistan.

Pakistan’s further suggestion is that RAW has been working with the NDS inside Pakistan. “India was essentially using Saleh’s networks,” said the Pakistani official. In the minds of many in Pakistan’s military and intelligence community, today is a replay of the jihad period, when KhAD and the KGB launched assassination and sabotage campaigns in Pakistan, and RAW played an active, if minor role, in the covert war against Pakistan. Yet the NDS today is not what KhAD was at its full strength. For one, it has a far less effective penetration of the current Taliban than KhAD did of mujahideen groups, due to its relative weakness as an institution and its lack of the same deep links among Pashtuns. For another, the NDS’ close co-operation with the CIA would likely place limits on actions that might be seen to jeopardise American co-operation with Pakistan.

Indian intelligence officials denied any active involvement in Pakistan, a contention that has been supported in public by the US. Regardless of their truth, however, allegations that India has been meddling in Balochistan have been effectively used by Pakistan to pressure India over Afghanistan and Kashmir.

DELHI HAS SEEN a number of high-profile visits from Afghan politicians since this summer. The most significant, of course, was President Karzai’s two-day visit at the end of April, his last stop on a circuit of Islamabad, Tehran and Beijing. Karzai discussed his plans for the reconciliation process and the then-upcoming peace jirga with Manmohan Singh, who expressed cautious support, and their joint statement expressed their intention “to combat the forces of terrorism which pose a particular threat to the region.” This was followed up by Delhi visits from Foreign Minister Zalmay Rasul and National Security Advisor Rangin Dadfar Spanta, both of whom are considered friends of India.

One visit that was not announced, however, was that of one of Karzai’s principal rivals among southern Pashtuns— Gul Agha Sherzai, Governor of Nangarhar. Sherzai arrived the first week of this August and met with a number of Indian officials, including YP Sinha, the Ministry of External Affairs Joint Secretary in charge of Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan and Alok Prasad, the Deputy National Security Advisor, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the visit.

A garrulous bear of a man with a popular touch, Sherzai is a former mujahideen commander and the Karzai family’s strongest rival in their home province of Kandahar. Originally installed as governor of Kandahar by the Americans in 2001, he was transferred to Jalalabad in 2003 after losing a power struggle with Ahmed Wali Karzai. Despite his reputation for brutality and corruption, he is looked favourably upon by Western donors, particularly the Americans, for his relatively trouble-free tenure in Nangarhar Province that has seen, among other things, a drastic reduction in opium cultivation.

Sherzai had been considered one of the leading contenders to Karzai in the 2009 presidential elections, but the two brokered a last-minute deal that saw Sherzai withdraw his candidacy just prior to the end of the nomination period. Nangarhar, whose capital city of Jalalabad sits astride the Kabul-Peshawar route, is a strategic province in which India has heavily invested in infrastructure and development projects, as well as provided support for media and broadcasting.

Sherzai’s visit is part of India’s new strategy of broadening its outreach to better include southern Pashtuns, in response to increasing concerns about Karzai’s reliability as an ally and to the prospect of future peace negotiations that will bring groups associated with the insurgency back into power. “I think one thing that has gotten through to the government is that you have to talk to absolutely everybody,” said Radha Kumar, an Indian academic and expert on Afghanistan.

Karzai, who received his postgraduate degree in political science at Himachal Pradesh University in Shimla, has long been considered a friend of India, something that had been strengthened by the intense personal animosity that developed with Pakistan’s former military dictator.

“He had a personal rift with Musharraf,” said a Pakistani diplomat who had been personally familiar with the relationship between the two. “There was a personal angle to that bad relationship between the two countries.”

But India’s close relationship with Karzai has been overshadowed by the even closer relationship with the US that the Manmohan Singh administration has charted both in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The deterioration of the US-Karzai relationship has thus brought significant negative fallout for India.

As part of its strategy of shaping up Afghanistan enough to begin to effect a withdrawal, the Obama administration has been determined to pressure Karzai into reducing corruption, which it sees as fuelling the insurgency. Part of this has involved a shift in public rhetoric right from the beginning, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referring to Afghanistan as a “narco-state” during her confirmation hearings before the US Senate. The choice of Karl Eikenberry as ambassador was seen as another move towards getting tough on Karzai. Eikenberry had been the top American commander in Afghanistan during the period that saw Karzai’s increasing estrangement from the West, when Karzai had been forced by the internationals to remove two of his allies that he had appointed as the governors of the key southern provinces Helmand and Uruzgan: Sher Mohammad Akhundzada and Jan Mohammed Khan. In a leaked set of classified cables to Washington sent in November 2009, just prior to the decision to surge in 30,000 additional US troops, Eikenberry criticised the military’s counterinsurgency strategy and argued that “President Karzai is not an adequate strategic partner.”

Relations further deteriorated as a result of the presidential elections, when high-ranking US officials such as Richard Holbrooke openly met with opposition candidates, in particular Abdullah. India came along for the ride, offering its own measured support for other candidates, as well as Karzai. At the Independence Day celebrations at the Indian Embassy on 15 August 2009, five days before the presidential election, Abdullah Abdullah was the most prominent Afghan guest in attendance. India’s then-ambassador, Jayant Prasad, took him from table to table, where he posed for pictures and chatted in his fluent Hindi with the guests, according to a source present at the event.

“Perhaps because the West was so critical of Karzai, India thought that perhaps the West would have enough leverage to bring in another candidate,” said Pant. “To balance that possibility, India started its outreach to other candidates, and that damaged the relationship with Karzai.”

In the end, India and the West miscalculated badly. Karzai hung on to office, and indeed, there was little chance that Abdullah could have won, especially in the south of the country. After all, despite the massive fraud, it was clear that out of all the candidates, Karzai had received the most support from the populace. The battle between Karzai and the international community only served to delegitimise both parties.

Even more serious damage to US-Karzai relations has been done by aggressive US efforts to tackle corruption within Karzai’s government, which was almost certainly an important factor in precipitating Atmar and Saleh’s downfall. Over the summer of 2009, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration moved to create two new units within the Ministry of the Interior: the Major Crimes Task Force (MCTF) and the Sensitive Investigations Unit (SIU). The idea was to insulate them politically from the rest of the government by providing them with their own judges, prosecutors, police officers and investigators, operating in conjunction with international mentors. Around the same time, the CIA helped the NDS and the Ministry of the Interior establish a joint wiretapping centre on the northern outskirts of Kabul. Karzai was reportedly unaware of the nature of these developments.

In January this year, the MCTF and the SIU raided the hawala money-transfer agency, the New Ansari Exchange, and seized some 42,000 documents. New Ansari was Afghanistan’s largest hawala company and had deep connections with the administration, including to Mahmoud Karzai, the President’s brother. Karzai was furious about the raid, summoning Hanif Atmar to an emergency cabinet meeting to complain, where he threatened to disband the investigative units, though Atmar himself had not been notified of the raid until moments before it occurred. There was a sense in the palace that these were American-controlled units that were running amok.

In March, Karzai issued a presidential decree bringing the Electoral Complaints Commission, which had been a thorn in his side during the election, under his direct control. In response, the White House revoked an invitation to visit that month, and Karzai, tit for tat, invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit, who flew to Kabul and delivered a speech laced with trenchant anti-American rhetoric.

In May, the White House and Karzai patched things up enough for Karzai to visit and hold a joint press conference with Obama. Then in June, at the height of international goodwill over the peace jirga, Karzai provoked Atmar and Saleh into resigning. The internationals were completely blindsided by the move.

“The peace jirga, even though it was political theatre, it did actually empower Karzai,” said Kate Clark. “The foreigners were not in any position to go against him.”

Now Karzai had cleared the way for the coming showdown: In late July, the investigative units made their first move against a member of Karzai’s inner circle, arresting Mohammed Zia Salehi, Head of Administration in the National Security Council. Included in the evidence for the arrest were recorded conversations provided by the wiretapping centre set up under Atmar and Saleh. Karzai reacted immediately, personally ordering Salehi’s release and opening a commission tasked with an investigation into the MCTF and the SIU for, among other things, “human-rights abuses.”

The battle that ensued between Karzai and the US escalated to a level of open, public animosity not seen since the presidential election, with US officials leaking to the press that members of Karzai’s administration, including Salehi, were taking payments from the CIA. (Salehi, incidentally, is a former aide to Dostum who spent several years post- 2001 in Delhi serving as a key liaison with India.) In August, Karzai fired Fazel Ahmed Faqiryar, the Deputy Attorney General, for his resistance to blocking the investigations, and the Western-mentored corruption inquiries have been frozen, according to news reports. As a replacement for Saleh, Karzai selected the little-known engineer Rahmatullah Nabixl, a protégé of Ibrahim Spinzada, another Karzai loyalist who has become the eminence grise on the National Security Council and now the NDS. The appointment of Nabil, who had been head of Karzai’s security detail at the Presidential Palace, was a move seen to weaken the NDS and bring it more directly under his supervision. “He worries most about the Americans,” said a non-Western diplomat who meets regularly with Karzai.

The other factor behind India’s decline in influence in Kabul is that its erstwhile Northern Allies in the civil war, so dominant in 2001, have been gradually but inexorably pushed out of that position in a process that has been on one hand a natural reflection of the Pashtun plurality, and on the other a testament to Karzai’s cunning for consolidating his own power base. In the early years, Karzai deftly used international support for ‘institution-building’ to sideline mujahideen-era figures he found troublesome. In addition to pushing out Sherzai from Kandahar, Karzai had Ismail Khan removed as governor of Herat in 2004, and Dostum was forced to spend a year of exile in Turkey after he was nearly put in jail for kidnapping and assaulting an opponent in 2008, before Karzai enlisted him in his re-election campaign. Karzai has also succeeded in splitting and weakening many of the former northern blocks, a task made easy by the voracious corruption endemic to Afghanistan’s ruling elite, fuelled by international cash. For his vice presidents in the 2009 election he chose Karim Khalili, the Hazara warlord and Fahim, whose family’s business interests have become tightly interwoven with Karzai’s. The move put Khalili at odds with the leading Hazara politician, Mohammad Mohaqiq, and Fahim—who is now seriously ill with diabetes— has since fallen out with Abdullah Abdullah and Massoud’s two brothers, splitting the Panjshiris.

In his search for alternate allies, Karzai has made common cause with a number of former members of Hizb-e Islami, particularly at the district and provincial level. He’s also brought some political operators who have helped build closer connections with elements of the former Taliban regime into his inner circle. One of the most important examples is Omer Daudzai, from Qarabagh, a former UNDP officer in Peshawar during the jihad. “He had very good relations with the Taliban when he was with UNDP,” said a UN staffer in Kabul who had been present then.

Daudzai became Karzai’s chief of staff in 2003, and apart from a stint as ambassador to Iran from 2005 to 2007, has kept his influential position. He is now considered to be one of Karzai’s closest and most trusted aides, and India has watched his rising influence with anxiety. “Close to Iran, close to Pakistan, rumoured to still have good links with the Taliban,” was how a current Indian intelligence official categorised him.

Of course, Karzai continues his deft balancing act on the contradictory forces around him, and India doesn’t remain without friends in his government. Appointed as interior minister was the friendly figure of Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, a senior Shura-e Nazar figure close to Fahim, whose children are studying in India. “India insisted on someone who could guarantee their interests,” said a source familiar with discussions between Indian and Afghan officials in the wake of Saleh and Atmar’s resignations.

And Spanta—who went public with his unhappiness at Saleh’s resignation—remains Karzai’s designated man for moments when anti-Pakistan rhetoric needs to be cranked up. In a recent blistering op-ed in The Washington Post titled, ‘Pakistan is the Afghan war’s real aggressor,’ Spanta downplayed Afghan corruption as a cause of the insurgency and stated that “Pakistan continues to provide sanctuary and support to the Quetta Shura, the Haqqani network, the Hekmatyar group and Al Qaeda.”

Still the long-term trend seems clear to most observers. Karzai and Pakistan have powerful interests in common, given the American withdrawal. Nor is it just Karzai who is interested in improving relations with Pakistan. One Pakistani diplomat in Kabul ticked off a list of powerful northern figures who he claimed had made overtures to Pakistan, and then explained how the surge in ‘stabilisation’ funding for insurgency-afflicted areas in Afghanistan—most of it US money—has created powerful incentives for Afghan government figures to get a cut by working with Pakistani companies that could operate in Taliban-held areas. “Even Fahim has accepted the situation, and we’re getting along,” said the diplomat. “India can’t compete with Pakistan.”

THE HAMID GUESTHOUSE sits on a busy side street in the heart of Kabul. It feels about as far away as you can get from the war in Afghanistan, but this February two gunmen rampaged here for hours, killing six Indian nationals, including two army officer and an engineer, as well as eight Afghans, a French filmmaker and an Italian diplomat.

According to statements by Afghan and US intelligence officials, the attackers, who spoke Urdu to each other during the raid, were members of Lashkar-e Taiba that had been brought into the city via the logistics lines of the Haqqani network, an Afghan militant group based in North Waziristan in the Pakistani tribal areas that has close links with the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Like the massive suicide car bomb attacks on the embassy in 2008 and 2009, Pakistan was a prime suspect, though the accusations were more muted than in 2008. At that time, immediately after the bombing, Manmohan Singh announced an additional 450 million dollars in aid to Afghanistan, a sign to Pakistan that India would not be deterred from its involvement there, but also a move that had some scratching their heads at the perverse incentives this involved. “What are we rewarding Afghanistan for?” said an Indian observer in Kabul. “Every time India gets attacked, the government responds with another pledge of millions of dollars.”

The lack of success of the US military’s surge and counterinsurgency campaign, and President Obama’s commitment that July 2011 will mark the beginning of the US troop withdrawal, has focused the region’s attention on a post-US Afghanistan. A high-level strategic review scheduled for December could bring additional impetus for a faster drawdown of US forces. While, given American concerns over the potential for terrorist attacks against the US emanating from the tribal regions, it seems implausible that the American military will completely leave Afghanistan in the near future. What has been abandoned is the hope of a military victory over the Taliban. In June, Admiral Michael Mullen, the highest-ranking officer in the US military, stated that there were no purely military solutions in Afghanistan and that “the only solution” was a political one.

“It came into focus earlier this year at the London conference,” said Pant, “where it was clear that India was marginal to the strategic landscape.” At the top-level London Conference on Afghanistan this January, it was established that a negotiated settlement was necessary, and that there should be a two-tiered process—a reintegration process where low-level combatants would be encouraged to quit fighting via economic incentives and the promise of amnesty, along with a reconciliation process whereby the Taliban leadership would be engaged in negotiations.

The problem, from India’s perspective, is that Pakistan retains close oversight over the senior Taliban leadership within its territory and thus an effective veto over the negotiation process. While Karzai has held discreet talks with members of the Taliban and other insurgent groups in the past, including recent meetings with delegates from Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s group, this January, Pakistan arrested Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the number-two figure in the Quetta Shura, the Taliban’s senior leadership council. Afghan, US and Pakistani officials told The New York Times, among other newspapers, that Baradar had been arrested because he had been overly independent in his approaches with the Karzai administration.

Pakistan’s message seems to be: you go through us, or not at all. And the carrot has followed the stick: both General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and ISI chief Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha stepped up their visits to Karzai in Kabul this summer, reportedly offering to broker a deal with Mullah Omar and Sirajuddin Haqqani. At the same time, there have been persistent rumours among palace insiders that Daudzai might be appointed as special emissary to Iran and Pakistan, a position that would put him in a key position in reconciliation efforts. Daudzai has played an active role in the past in organising the Karzai’s administrations contacts with insurgent groups.

One response to the increasing likelihood of a negotiation process is that India has sought greater cooperation with Iran and Russia on Afghanistan. “If the West is going to leave, if Pakistan retains an upper hand, we would once again see the kind of alliances and the kinds of things that were happening when the Soviets left,” said Pant.

Iran in particular has deep ties—it once hosted Gulbuddin Hekmatyar for six years after he fled the Taliban regime— and US and Afghan officials have accused it of low-level support to militant groups fighting in Afghanistan. Recently, there has been an increase in high-level diplomatic activity between Iran and India. “Suddenly there is a new momentum in the relationship,” said Pant. “Afghanistan has been big factor in cementing this relationship.”

A series of meetings held over the past three years in Dubai and the Maldives between current Afghan politicians and prominent figures linked to the Taliban and Hizb-e Islami have been partially funded with Iranian support via Hekmatyar’s son-in-law Humayoun Jarir, according to Afghans who have participated. But the US has been wary of a regional peace process, not least because Russia and Iran would both like to see the Americans eventually withdraw their troops from the region, a point of disagreement they have with India. There is also serious friction over one of India’s largest projects in Afghanistan, the 116 million-dollar Salma Dam in Herat, delayed by years because of insecurity and political issues, which Iran is disputing because of its effect on the Hari Rud, a river which flows across the border into eastern Khorasan.

The prospect of a US withdrawal, a collapse of the Karzai government in the face of an emboldened Taliban and increasing interference from regional actors has also raised the spectre of a resurrection of the centrifugal dynamics that plunged the country into its brutal civil war during the 1990s. In July, after his resignation, Saleh toured northern Afghanistan, holding public meetings where he warned of the danger of Karzai’s negotiations with the Taliban (he’s also started a popular Facebook page).

At the beginning of September there were rumours, carried by local television, that Abdullah, Saleh and Dostum had been in Delhi to receive Indian endorsement for the formation of a northern coalition, which were denied by Abdullah and Saleh. (Dostum had in fact visited Delhi during the last week of August, according to an Afghan source who met him while he was staying at the Taj Palace Hotel, though he said at the time that it was just to get his liver looked after.)

Some have even suggested that splitting Afghanistan along ethnic lines—an impossible task in reality—would be a solution to the country’s troubles. Robert Blackwill’s recent op-ed in the Financial Times, which called for a de facto partition of Afghanistan, has been well read and much discussed in Delhi. Blackwill, the US ambassador in Delhi during the first George W Bush administration, has worked as a paid lobbyist for the Indian government. There seemed to be the sentiment in Delhi that this was an eventuality that was at least no longer unthinkable. Of course, there is an element of strategic communication in the suggestion that a revival of a post-Soviet proxy war might be in the cards.

“The idea is that by making the threat of a post-West Afghanistan look like a post-Soviet Afghanistan,” said Pant, “America can be forced to pressure Pakistan into some sort of accommodation with the other regional powers.”

The prospect of a divided Afghanistan, thrown back into brutal civil war, or a Taliban-governed Afghanistan, no longer so friendly to India, begs the question of what India’s vital interests in Afghanistan really are. The Indian government says that it wants a stable, democratic Afghanistan friendly to India, but the prospect of one that has all three characteristics is looking increasingly dim. Others would say India’s interest is access to Central Asian energy, or reducing the potential for terrorism such as the attacks in Mumbai. But on those grounds, India has little to show for its investment. Of course, one can make the case that the violence and destabilisation in Afghanistan has actually benefited India by weakening Pakistan and tying up its resources and military forces on its western border.

“When has a stable, strong enemy ever been to your benefit?” asked Sood. “That being said, they’ve diminished in a very dangerous kind of way.”

Of course, India has staked so much on its play in Afghanistan— its very role as a rising regional power—that its involvement has become something that justifies itself. “It has become almost a test case for India,” said Pant. And some wonder whether it has blinded India to larger concerns.

“Is it not our stakes in Afghanistan that have made us take Pakistan more seriously than they perhaps deserve to be seen nowadays?” asked one veteran Indian observer in Kabul.

If Afghanistan returns to a state of chaos, India may once again reap the whirlwind. But in preparing for the worst, whether with covert or overt action, might India hasten its onset? The tragedy, for ordinary Afghans, Indians, and Pakistanis alike, is that the Great Game might once again go from a nation-building project to proxy war.

Our first date was the last day of his life
When we met online, it was as if we’d known each other forever. Then came the tragedy I’ll never forget

BY LORRAINE BERRY

A photo of Yves.

I woke up when Yves thrust himself off the mattress. “My head is killing me,” he said. “I’m going to take some more Tylenol.”

I heard him open the cabinet door, turn on the water as if pouring himself a drink. Then a loud bang startled me from bed.

Yves slumped on the floor, his back against the wall, his side against the bathtub. Tylenol was scattered on the tiles.

“Help me stand up,” he said. But when I wrapped my arm around his waist and pulled him toward me, we both fell forward, my back hitting the vanity as I struggled to cushion him from the fall. His eyes fluttered. He was clearly in pain.

“I think we should call a doctor,” I said.

“No, no,” he said. “I just need to get back to bed. Give me a minute.” Then he closed his eyes.

“Yves,” I said. No response.

I sat beside him, stroking his back, letting him know that he was not alone, while we waited for the ambulance. I had only met Yves in person that day. But it felt like we had known each other for a lifetime.

I’m not sure what made me get in touch with Yves when I saw him on Salon personals. How can we untangle the mysterious calculus that is attraction? I liked how he playfully listed the languages he spoke as “French, English, and Body Language.” I liked the description of the woman he was seeking: “sensualist a must. a self-confident goddess too. a mermaid is also welcomed.”

I’m sure other women looked at his profile and thought “nope.” But I read it and saw a kindred spirit. He lived in Montreal, and I could tell from the way he wrote that he was Quebecois. I liked the idea of the two of us communicating in two languages. “This online dating thing is well … difficult,” he e-mailed me early on. “And I’m a bit ‘clutsty’ at it.”

It was the “clutsty” that clenched my heart.

E-mails turned into phone calls that went way past my bedtime. Each time we talked, we seemed to find another point of connection. His desire to live in a big house out in the countryside, “somewhere the leaves would crunch under my feet when I walk with my love” (I owned such a house). Our intense devotion to our daughters, our aspirations that they grow up strong and independent and fierce. Rrrrriot grrrls, he called them.

The approaching weekend was Veteran’s Day, and after much haggling about where to meet, sleeping arrangements, who would pay for what, we agreed on a plan. I would drive to Montreal to meet someone who already felt like a part of me.

I’ve never gotten over my apprehension about meeting in person: It doesn’t matter how much communication you have with someone via e-mail or phone. Physical chemistry will not be denied.

And what did I see? A man who looked much younger than his 43 years. A dark man — his hair charcoal, his eyes almost black but welcoming and open. He was smiling, and the only thing I wasn’t expecting was that his teeth were crooked — in every photo he had sent me, his mouth had been closed, but after the initial reaction of “I haven’t seen this before,” I almost immediately forgot it.

I had dressed carefully: black hip-hugger pants and thick-heeled boots that gave me a little height, a scarlet camisole and a cardigan. It was unseasonably warm for November. As we were climbing the stairs to his apartment, Yves was behind me, and he made some comment about enjoying the view as I mounted the stairs. I didn’t take offense. I was already feeling a buzz from him, too.

We sat on the couch and began to talk. I turned my body toward his, one of my knees pulled up on the couch. We talked about what to do with the afternoon. He had not had time to go shopping for food, so we decided to take a trip to the market to pick up groceries. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and when I came out, he was standing in the middle of the living room. I walked toward him, and he pulled me near and kissed me.

We kissed as if we were drowning. I threw my cardigan on the floor, unzipped my boots, kicked them off. Everywhere his hands touched, his mouth followed.

“Do you think we’re going too fast?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “But I don’t want to stop.” He picked me up and carried me to his bed.

I know the difference between lust and love. I’ve had more than my share of sex dates in my life, dates in which I know the only thing I’m after is mutual pleasure. I knew what was happening between Yves and me in that bed was something far different. And he knew it, too. Yves had been alone for two years, had not gone on a single date since his divorce.

“I think I’ve won the lottery,” he said.

“How did this happen?” we kept asking.

I was breathless with happiness. As the sun went down, and my stomach started to rumble, we set out for the market. We had only walked a couple of blocks when Yves made a slight change in direction.

“That’s my daughter,” Yves said.

We stopped in front of a stroller and the woman pushing it. The little girl clambered out. “Papa,” she said, and Yves crouched down so that they could hug each other. Speaking Quebecois, she displayed her banana popsicle triumphantly.

Yves spoke to his ex-wife, and then introduced me. We said “hello” to one another, and then Yves gave his daughter a big squeeze and told her that he’d see her soon.

Yves beamed as we walked away. “Running into my daughter has made my day even more perfect,” he said. “She is everything to me.” He and his ex-wife had been having some issues; he had not seen his daughter for two weeks.

Earlier in the afternoon he had mentioned feeling a little off. He also said, maybe about 4 o’clock, that he had a mild headache. So it didn’t seem strange to me when he asked to skip the market and head home.

We were kissing by the time we got in the front door. But I insisted that he take some Tylenol, and go lie on the bed. He did as he was told, took off his shoes, and lay down on his stomach. I wanted to make him feel better. I began to knead his shoulders and his upper back. I stroked his scalp, too, and he relaxed under my hands.

“Lorraine,” he said, “I’m really sorry, but I think I want to take a nap for a while. Would that be OK with you?”

I dug around in my bag for the book of Yehuda Amichai poetry I had brought with me. He came back to bed, and he tucked his head next to mine, closed his eyes as I began to read to him. I stroked his hair, kissed the top of his head, held him as he drifted off to sleep, his legs wrapped around mine. I read for a while before dozing off beside him. That’s when Yves woke me up. That’s when I called the ambulance.

Yves was quiet, although he had begun to seize. His legs were shaking. Even though I knew he wasn’t cold, I bundled him up in the duvet, told him that help was on the way. By then, I knew this was not a headache or a migraine; I somehow intuited it was an aneurysm. His breath was raspy and gargled, and I slowed down my breathing, hoping to set a rhythm he could imitate, as though he were a child and I was trying to teach him a hand-clap game.

Death was coming. I could sense it in the room. But I also felt something comforting, too. Something that told me that I could do this, that I could help Yves ease from this life to whatever was to follow. I had always thought I’d be a panicked mess in a moment like this, but all I felt was stillness. It was like watching a home movie of someone I recognized as me but didn’t know.

I’m not sure how long it was before the medics finally arrived. Time is fluid in extraordinary circumstances. How long is a minute when someone’s life is draining away? How long is an hour when you’re making love? How long was the week that Yves and I knew each other?

The ambulance crew loaded Yves onto a gurney, pointed a flashlight in his eyes. I heard one of them say to the other that his pupils were fixed. I knew what that meant: Serious brain injury.

Inside the E.R. the tobacco-stained light frightened me. I was numbed out and hyper-vigilant at once, waiting for some word, any word about what was wrong with Yves. Two young interns came out and explained that Yves had been put on a respirator, that I couldn’t see him. I felt Yves’ apartment keys in my pocket and went home.

Alone in Yves’ apartment, alone in his bed, I stripped down to my camisole and panties. I clutched his pillow to my face, smelling him there. The call came at 2:32 a.m.

“Is this Lorraine?”

“Yes.”

“I’m afraid I have some bad news. The MRI revealed a massive brain bleed.” He was slipping away. “Do you know how we may contact his family?”

Once again, I became still. How could I tell her that I didn’t know Yves’ family, didn’t have a clue how to reach them? And then I remembered his cellphone sitting on the kitchen table. I fumbled through the address book until I found what I recognized as the name for his ex-wife. I gave it to the nurse and asked her to pass on my phone number to the family.

I lay in the bed, the light on the floor glaring up at me. The book of poetry I had read to Yves before he dropped off to sleep was beside it. I made a cocoon of the sheet from the bed, buried my head underneath it. I still felt nothing.

Shortly before 7 a.m., the phone rang again. It was Yves’ ex-wife. She was at the hospital with Yves’ mom, dad and best friend. She wanted me to come.

“I’m so sorry I couldn’t have done more,” I said over and over again, when I came to join them at the hospital. Yves’ mouth was covered by a plug, and unlike the panting that I had heard coming from him before, his breaths now were normal, peaceful. His skin tone was beautiful: He was a luminous pink.

Someone gave me a hug. Told me I had done everything that could have been done. And then someone explained to me that the doctors said there was nothing to be done for Yves. That even if he were to wake up from his coma, he would be “comme un haricot.” And I remembered noticing that where we say “vegetable,” they say “bean.”

The room emptied, and I was granted some alone time with Yves. I wanted to kiss him. But the medical-green plastic tube in his mouth blocked access. He had tubes in his arms, too, and I was afraid to touch him for fear of knocking something loose. So I leaned over the bed and I kissed his hand. It was warm. It didn’t feel like cold, about-to-die flesh. It felt vibrant.

How does anyone prepare themselves for a moment such as this? What is the right thing to say to someone when it’s the last thing that he’ll hear from your lips?

I suppose gratitude was an odd emotion to have at that moment, but Yves had shown me something I had never before understood. Death terrifies me. And yet, as Yves lay dying, I felt privileged to be with him. I was going to miss him, the possibility of us. But I also knew that all that fear had been taken from me. He had needed me to be with him that night as much as I had needed to bear witness.

I whispered to him, “Thank you.” I told him that his daughters would thrive and be loved. I told him not to be afraid. I told him, “Goodbye.”

I left the room and did not return. I wanted Yves to be with his family when the respirator was turned off. I had given Yves everything that I could, and now, it was time for me to learn to live with everything he had left to me.

Lorraine Berry blogs on Open Salon as fingerlakeswanderer. She has recently completed a book-length memoir manuscript.

Do you look away from images of real-life horror, or look closer? A series of shocking photographs from Somalia asks disturbing questions about the ethics of bearing witness

Sean O’Hagan

Monday 8 March 2010 14.23 GMT

“To catch a death actually happening and embalm it for all time is something only cameras can do,” writes Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others, “and pictures taken out in the field of the moment of (or just before) death are among the most celebrated and often reproduced of war photographs.”

Sontag goes on to describe the context in which Eddie Adams took what was arguably the most shocking image of the Vietnam war: the moment in which a South Vietnamese police officer executes a Vietcong suspect by shooting him point-blank in the head. She points out that the picture was both authentic and staged – “by General Loan, who had led the prisoner, hands tied behind his back, out to the street where journalists had gathered. He would not have carried out the summary execution there had they not been available to witness it”. Wearily, Sontag concludes that “one can gaze at these faces for a long time and not come to the end of the mystery, and the indecency, of such co-spectatorship”.

I was reminded of that final quotation when, a few weeks ago, I navigated the winner’s gallery of the World Press Photo of the Year website. There, amidst the many dramatic images of conflict, death and destruction, was a series by an Associated Press photographer, Farah Abdl Warsameh, entitled Stoned to Death, Somalia, 13 December. The four images are shocking in a way that even the most graphic war reportage seldom is any more. The first shows the victim being buried up to his neck in earth. The second shows a group of men, their faces concealed by headscarves, raining rocks down on his head. The third shows his bloodied torso being dragged out of the soil. The last shows the men hurling large rocks at his prone and lifeless body to finish off their gruesome ritual. There are no captions; we are left to guess the context.

One’s immediate instinct on coming upon the photographs is to recoil in horror, which is what almost everyone I showed them to did. A colleague described them as “a kind of pornography of suffering”. (The Sunday Times ran the series last week in their Spectrum section devoted to the World Press awards. Many readers were outraged and appalled.)

Last week, in a blogpost for Foto8 magazine, the veteran picture editor, Colin Jacobson, wrote that “the rather disgusting pictures … raised some interesting ethical matters”, which is one – somewhat understated – way of putting it. More problematically, Jacobson said that “obviously there was collaboration between the photographer and those carrying out this gruesome death sentence”. Perhaps. But what kind of collaboration? Unlike the shooting of the Vietcong suspect, the dreadful execution of the Somalian man would seemingly have gone ahead at that time had the photographer not been present. (Other images from the series, not included in the World Press selection, show an audience of villagers who had gathered to witness the execution.) On that level, the photographer did not collaborate with the killers, though he almost certainly gained permission from someone to shoot the stoning. He also shot every stage of the killing in all its protracted and torturous barbarity. What it takes to do that, and at what personal cost, only he can say.

Images as extreme as these beg so many questions about the morality of reportage. Did the photographer, one wonders, have any communication with the victim in the time leading up to the event? Would our reaction to the photographs be different if we knew that the condemned man granted the photographer permission to bear witness to his dreadful death? Would it be different if we knew that the photographer risked his own life to travel though strife-torn Somalia to bear witness, which, as one of the respondents to Jacobson’s blog points out, was probably the case. Does such extremity diminish us or enlighten us? Or simply shock us into a kind of impassioned helplessness?

Part of the complex power of these photographs comes from what Sontag calls the “provocation” inherent in all images of real suffering. The first of many questions they ask is: “Can you look at this?” Perhaps Sontag comes closest to articulating the moral dilemma at the heart of extreme images of suffering when she writes: “There is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it … or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.”

6th July 2005

‘This man lying here, brought me to this world. He educated me, clothed and fed me, stood by my own bed in hospitals, stood in the gap for me at school, prayed for me unceasingly, blessed me, guided me and counseled me and gave me strength to take the next step. Yet, I watch him lying here, and there is nothing I can do to stop him from dying’ These were my thoughts on a chilly morning in the last room on the left wing of Lakeside Medical Centre in Kandy five years ago. I felt helpless and useless.

Here I was seated and watching his life ebb away and I could do nothing. What use was I? Or anything else in this world, if it can’t save the life of a man such as him – my father. ‘God, are you really there?’ I asked a blank wall. It was also Terryll’s birthday, so I had plans to go back to Colombo that day and return the next day, to uselessly stand by him. Yet I wanted to be there, in my desperation to share whatever he was going through. To let him know I was there, because I believed that even in his comatose state, he heard our voices.

For only a week before, I had spent the whole day with him near his bedside and sang all the old Tamil songs we used to sing as children. And I saw a smile and a tear run down his cheek. So he heard me. And that tiny factor was comforting. What was I trying to do? Ease my conscience? For all the time I did not spend with him? For the trouble I put him through as a teenager? For the anxiety I gave him as an adult? I didn’t know. Perhaps he knew. We bonded that day like never before. Even in his state, we connected. Like we always did. My father and I.

I stood up to leave, my eyes never leaving the respirator and his one hand on his belly moving up and down which was the only sign of life. And suddenly the movement stopped. Just like that. I knew the end was here. I handed my baby (Zoe was then nearly 2 years) to the nurse and although we were asked to leave the room, I wanted to stay by his side. To make sure they did everything right.

Suddenly everything was clear to me. This was the end. It was time to let go. This man lying here will no longer be my strength. I had to be his. I cradled his head in my hands, I whispered ‘Dada I love you. We all love you. Go in peace.’ The medics turned him face up. He grimaced with his eyes closed. I put his hands together, straightened his legs and once again held his head up so the blood would flow out and not block his throat. I didn’t cry. I wanted him released.

His pulse had already stopped. The doctor asked if they could use the electric shocks on him as a routine procedure. I told them to leave him alone. His face relaxed, he looked so peaceful. I put my head down on his chest. There was nothing. My everything was suddenly nothing. I still didn’t cry. I helped the nurses take out the tubes and clean him up.

He looked so peaceful, in a long time. Yet through the 7 months since diagnosis, he never once complained. Not even when they stuck needles in his stomach to release the fluids. He would smile and thank the nurses and compliment on a good job done. I turned around and held the doctor’s hands and thanked for the efforts, I held the nurses hands one by one and thanked them too. That is what he would have done. Blessed them and thanked them profusely. The pathologist covered his face with his arm and sobbed against the wall. Dada had coaxed him several years ago to pursue his studies and make a man of himself. There were nurses in the room he had recommended for jobs.

I filled out the death certificate calmly. Everything was so clear and programmed. Name of deceased: Walter Jonathan Sinniah. Time of death: 1.45pm. Cause of death: General System Failure due to multifocal carcinoma of the liver. Parent’s name: Peter Murugesu Sinniah and Mary Sinniah. Place of Birth: Deniyaya. Place of burial: General Cemetery, Mahiyawa. Witness of death: Jeevani Fernando. Relationship to deceased: Daughter. I couldn’t write anymore. I wanted to remain a witness to his life rather than his death. I had witnessed 35 years of it that day. And even now, it is his extraordinary life that challenges me on a daily basis. Not his death.

Jeevani Fernando

It was only when the uniformed men with guns boarded the bus and prodded him that he raised his eyes. Scared, tired, hurt, angry eyes. But he knew enough to not express his anger. Meekly he obeyed the commands. His humiliation was also ours, but we did not complain. We were tourists in our own land, but the constitutional guarantees enshrined in our laws, while not fully respected anywhere, was particularly absent here. As well-connected Bangalis, we were far more safe than he was. But the rules of occupation are never generous, and they had guns. They left. We breathed more easily. He continued his journey with his head bowed. I took no photographs.

Walking through Rangamati as Bangali tourists was a disconcerting feeling. Many of the Bangalis here were also poor. Displaced from their homes in far away places, they had been dumped here with promises of a happy life. Left to fend for themselves, they joined the power chain well above the Paharis, but very low down all the same.

At the top of the chain was the military. Then the wealthy Bangalis, the ones who made the deals, then came the Paharis who had sided with the government. The Bangali settlers (the poor ones anyway), were quite a bit further down. The Paharis never dared to reach for the rungs of that ladder.

Rangamati was still a beautiful place. The homes buried beneath the lake when the Kaptai Dam was built, the tropical rain forests that had been destroyed, the hill people who were forced to leave their ancestral land, were things that never made it to our history books. The Hill Tracts featured in the picturesque postcards and tourism ministry books and the well rehearsed cultural programmes in the government Tribal Centre.

Occasional photographers from the lowlands came to discover the ‘authentic tribal lifestyle’. A bare chest woman bathing by a waterfall, backlit women with children strapped on their backs, a wrinkled old woman smoking a pipe and other photographic trophies were potential award winners.

As anticipated, the tiktikis (lit: geckos, local term for government spies, generally members of ‘Special Branch’) soon found us. They followed us everywhere. Asked stupid questions. Made notes. Questioned the people we had spoken to or visited. We consciously stayed away from friends. No point in getting them into trouble.

At a later visit, Drik’s printer Nasir and I had gone to Bandorban. Amongst the photographs I’d taken on that trip was this one of a mother weaving. Perhaps I was repeating what the trophy hunters had done, but the poster above the window, part of a UNICEF blindness prevention campaign, had words that seemed poignant. “hai re kopal mondo, chokh thakite ondho’.  (oh what irony we find, we have eyes but are blind.)

My eyes had shown me the military operations in the hill tracts. The deer being taken to the major’s home. The all Bangali military. The timber being taken to the military camp. While we did see Paharis, carrying loads, and doing odd jobs, most of the shop owners were Bangali settlers. It was Bangalis who had access to the government. They who obtained the local contracts. Menial labour was generally, all that Paharis could aspire to.

Kalpana Chakma’s abduction followed (12th June 1996). Friends got arrested. Some were released, but killed upon release. The violence continued, more murders, more rape, more displacement.

On 2^nd December 1997 the newly elected Awami League (1996) signed the ‘Peace Treaty’ with Jana Samhati Samiti (JSS). This had led to divisions amongst the hill people. Many felt that the core concepts of:

1.            Autonomy for the Chittagong Hill Tracts.

2.            Withdrawal of the Bangali settlers.

3.            Demilitarization of the Chittagong Hill Tracts.

were being compromised. Others were more pragmatic. Even those who questioned the signing of the treaty by JSS, despite their demands not having been met, recognise that peace in CHT is the ultimate goal, and that the land disputes that resulted from the government aided settlement of Bangalis was the core cause of the conflict.

The sole purpose of a nation’s military is to protect the sovereignty of all of its citizens, not to suppress them. The need to protect a nation’s borders cannot justify the forced eviction of people from their ancestral land. The disregard for even the commitments made, exposed the government’s lack of sincerity to the peace deal. Imperfect though it may be, for those clinging to the flimsiest of promises, the treaty still held hope.

The irony of the military and the settlers – in the second term of the Awami League – choosing the month of February, to remind the Paharis of how brutal they could be, was not lost on the survivors of the massacre. Salauddin, Jabbar, Barkat, Rafiq and Salam had died in 1952 to protect our mother tongue. In February 2010 many Pahari names joined the list of people who died for their mother tongue. But these different sounding names would never make it to that official list.

These were names that probably didn’t exist anyway. Without rights to land, citizenship and protection of the state, they were second class citizens at best, fugitives to be hunted, raped and killed at worst.

matri bhasha (mother tongue), has a very different meaning when your mother is Pahari. Kalpana, I failed you as a brother, when they abducted you. I failed you as a friend, when they killed your brothers Mantosh, Samar, Shukesh and Rupan. I fail you now as a citizen, when my military and my government burn your villages, murder your families, take away your land. I fail you all as a human being, when you are prevented from laying flowers at the Shahid Minar in your village home. amar bhaier rokte rangano, ekushey february. ami ki bhulite pari. This month, red with your warm blood. I cannot, will not, must not, ever forget.

Shahidul Alam

Dhaka

28^th February 2010

A story in Croatia with similar concerns:

For the past few months, I have been preparing for an almost meaningless exam, one which graduate students in the US have to take, called ‘comps’ (short for comprehensive/PhD candidacy exam). During moments of sarcasm, we also call it the intellectual boot camp. While preparing for the exams, I have created a bubble around me, a self-imposed isolation, as if the Atlantic Ocean between me and Dhaka is not vast enough. Inside this carefully constructed bubble, I allow myself to read Bangladeshi newspapers or reply to emails only during periods of protracted procrastination. Friends’ requests to read their pieces pile up. The news of a launch capsizing on the eve of Eid-ul-Azha, news headlines of RMG workers’ awful plight remotely catches my eyes – shamefully so. I rapidly read emails, I quick-read news from home and elsewhere, whether good or bad, I don’t have moments to react and reflect. It is in this privileged insulated life of mine, that I get an email from Rahnuma that Jashim Uddin Manik, the ‘alleged’ rapist, has died of cardiac arrest in Italy.

In the next few days, I get many emails, all from old friends from the anti-rape movement. In 1998 the students of Jahangirnagar University took to the streets for two months protesting against campus rape, and demanding punishment of the rapists, many of whom were Bangladesh Chhatra League activists. These emails bore witness to those nights when we sat in front of the university’s administrative building shouting, ‘Amar boner apoman shojjho kora hobe na, dhorshonkari jei hok bichar take petei hobe’ (We will not tolerate our sister’s dishonor, the rapist must be punished, whoever he may be). I would not read the letter but only its subject heading, and flag it to read later. An email from Jashim Uddin Manik’s friend incidentally landed in my mail box, forwarded by a friend. It expressed shock and grief at the untimely death of a close friend. It contained routine details which follow such news. Jashim Uddin Manik died in Padova, Milano at around 10:30pm local time (which I guess, on the basis of email exchanges, would be January 5). His body lies in a morgue while his Italian friends are making arrangements to send his body back to Bangladesh. Manik’s wife took the news very badly, she’s still not herself. In the email, Manik’s friend writes how hard it is for him to stop his tears, he urges everyone (the recipients of his email) to pray for the departed soul. In a way, there’s nothing striking about this email. A grief-stricken friend is breaking to others the news of the death of a close friend. Yet, the ordinariness of the news sends a chill down my spine.

In 1998, during the anti-rape movement in Jahangirnagar University, Manik had been identified by the disciplinary committee (fact-finding committee) as having been one of the rapists. We knew of him as the Chhatra League cadre who was said to have distributed sweets to ‘celebrate’ his 100th rape. I re-read the last line of his friend’s email – please pray for the departed soul. I stumble at each word, did the man who committed many rapes, if not a hundred, one who had the heart to celebrate it, have a soul? But it’s for a few seconds only, and I close my email window.

I try to thicken the bubble around me. I must pass this exam.

My indifference towards Manik’s death makes me start thinking about death. Any news of death is supposedly saddening. But here I am, sitting in front of my laptop, recollecting the details of his sexual offences, and flinching. His crime had been proven in front of the university administration. He had been punished for what they had termed ‘misconduct’; his studentship had been cancelled. However, no legal case had been filed against him. I remembered those days when many of us, those for whom the anti-rape movement in Jahangirnagar University had been a political turning point, had shared hours of rage as we had read news of Manik fleeing/flying to Italy. In those shared moments of rage and despair, we had learned to recognise the gendered nature of the university, and of our legal system. Since the movement ended, in the decade that has gone, the rage which we had felt has presumably turned into indifference.

I mean no disrespect toward his grieving family and friends. I am sure it is an irreplaceable loss for them. His death matters to me only in the larger historical context of Bangladesh. What does this particular fate of the alleged serial rapist tells us about the legal system? How does it write the history of violence against woman? If I remember correctly, many national dailies printed headlines during the movement that the incidents of rape on Jahangirnagar University campus are for us a matter of ‘national shame’ (jatir kolonko). I cannot help but wonder what is the state of national shame when known rapists are never brought to justice? When the sexual harassment policy on Jahangirnagar University campus still remains not enacted, officially?

The clock ticks away… my exam is only a few months away. I try harder to thicken the bubble. I succeed but only for two and a half weeks.

On January 28, the convicted murderers of Bangabandhu, five former army men, were hanged at Dhaka Central Jail, after midnight. They were proven guilty of killing the country’s founding president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and all but two members of his family, on August 15, 1975. And yet again, emails overflowed my mailbox. A friend called a number of times, finally, leaving a Facebook message: ‘I see that they executed Sheikh Mujib’s killers. It must be a good thing? It was weird going to his house and seeing the blood stains and thinking they were still about.’

Her question leaves me perplexed. More than a week after the event, I visit the online archives of daily newspapers to retrieve the issue of January 28. I watch ATN news clips posted on the Daily Star website. Most of the reports try to walk us through the execution night, covering each moment of waiting at the jail gate between 11:00pm to 3:00am. As I read along, I feel uneasy at news of the celebratory chants, and the flashing of V-signs. Members of the public had gathered at the jail gate, they had chanted slogans as the serial executions had been completed. I think, what would have been an acceptable response to the execution of the death penalty of Sheikh Mujib’s killers? Amnesty International has condemned the executions for being ‘hasty’ while a European Union delegation to Bangladesh has found the trial ‘respectable’ (New Age, January 29), but it added a twist. The EU statement said, it was, in principle, opposed ‘to all death penalty in all cases and all circumstances’ (New Age, January 29). Their principled opposition to death penalty, interestingly enough, excludes cases like Saddam Hussein and Chemical Ali. In the final months and days of this trial, a debate on death penalty had surfaced, but I don’t want to engage with that debate today.

Colonel Jamil’s widowed wife’s narrative of August 15 reminded me that at issue was not only the healing of the surviving daughters of Bangabandhu, but that there are others too, who had faced similar losses, had equally waited for the execution (Daily Star, November 19, 2009). For a split second, I thought about the emotional wound and the healing of the family members of Siraj Sikdar. Is it time to talk of other extrajudicial killings? To talk about Cholesh Richil? But, maybe, I am moving too fast, in both directions, past and future. Let me dwell on the present – on the night of the execution, the chants and the flashing of V-signs.

I go to blogs which I have not dared to visit the last couple of weeks or more, may be months. Activist bloggers and Facebook friends express similar discomfort at the celebration, the flashing of V-signs. Involved debates trace the missing pieces to reconstruct the political context which had led to the killing of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. A friend who had gone to the jail gate had posted a video clip on Facebook. I watch it a few times to see what people had chanted – ‘ajker ai dine mujib tomay mone pore’ (On this day, today, we are thinking of you Mujib). A comment on the video-post caught my eyes, ‘Shouldn’t Henry Kissinger have been somewhere in there?’ Implicit in this question is the alleged ‘foreign involvement’ in the coup. I remember reading in Willem Van Schendel’s History of Bangladesh (2009) that ‘by the spring of 1975 the Indians knew about the possible coup and warned Mujib about it’ (p 182). I believe, by ‘Indians’, he had meant the Indian intelligence, the government. The fact that a neighbouring state knew suggests that the coup of 1975 had involved far more political stakeholders than those who had been convicted, and hanged. The execution of Mujib’s killers may have healed the trauma of his family and followers but the ‘national wound’ is far from being healed. Imperial links with the assassination of Sheikh Mujib remains undisclosed. It remains outside the circle of our political concerns.

We have been witnesses to two kinds of death, one was natural, the other unnatural. The wounds to the nation in both cases remain open. Unattended.

Saydia Gulrukh is a PhD student at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), USA and a faculty member of Pathshala, The South Asian Media Academy

Published in New Age February 11, 2010

Piloting a drone requires much less talent or experience than piloting a real plane. It is more like doing well in ‘a video game’

If Smedley Butler was living, he’d probably have agreed with Peter Ustinov the playwright, who said recently, ‘Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.’

And what about those who decide? Those who push the bigger joystick? In Shakespeare’s plays, says Stephen Greenblatt, the ruler serves as a model and a test case. ‘If his actions go unpunished, then, to paraphrase Dostoevsky, everything is permitted.’

Has everything already become permitted? For, as Macbeth had said, ‘I am in blood; stepp’d insofar that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as to go o’er.’

First published in New Age on 7th December 2009