Not Yet the Jewel of Asia

General Manegy’s luck turned one day when he spotted a fallen rock at his feet while watching over his goats on a winding mountain path.

Inside a broken shell of quartz was a small stone glittering green in the sunlight. The goatherd had never seen an emerald before but knew this rock was beautiful, and rare, and that some people paid for such things. So he picked it up, turned his flock around and let his imagination carry him down the steep mountainside.

It was springtime 1974 and Afghanistan was at peace. Perhaps a simple man’s fate could shift as suddenly as an ancient rock split apart by snow and ice. “I thought I was going to be the richest guy in the world,” Manegy, 78, said recently. “Of course I dreamed. I still am dreaming that I’ll find some more emeralds. Back then, I thought I’d buy a car and more animals and build several houses.

“I thought of buying the best apartment in Kabul. I even thought of going to Saudi Arabia, to Mecca,” Manegy added. “But I never went.”

Manegy says it was God’s will that he discovered Panjshir’s emeralds and God’s will that he remained too poor to make the journey for the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca required of all Muslims who are able to go to the site of Islam’s holiest shrine.

Much of his life since finding the precious stone has been a lesson in how fickle fortune can be. So, too, has it been for Afghanistan, whose mineral wealth is both a blessing and a curse.

Few Afghans have become rich from the country’s vast reserves of emeralds, rubies and other precious stones, but many have fought and died trying to control the mountains that conceal them.

Afghanistan’s interim government is now interested in the riches. If Kabul could wrest control of the Panjshir region’s mines, and others across a long stretch of Afghanistan, the war-ruined country could earn billions of dollars a year from its minerals, said Mohammed Mahfooz, the acting minister of mines and industries. Some gem mines near Pakistan are funding Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, Mahfooz added.

The Panjshiris insist that they will fight any efforts to move in by the central government, multinational corporations, the Taliban or terrorists, just as they once fought off Soviet soldiers.

It was in 1979 that the Red Army invaded, and Manegy and his family fled with the rest of the village into the mountains to escape the bombing that leveled entire towns.

The war didn’t end for another decade, and then another war began, and then another. The emerald miners have kept digging through it all, and as with Manegy, most of their dreams were undone by Afghanistan’s harsh reality.

Manegy was never a military man, but friends kept calling him “general,” so he took the title as his first name. It suits him well. In a land beaten down by more than 23 years of war, he stands with shoulders back, chin up, as straight and proud as a soldier.

Time couldn’t bow Manegy, but it ate away at his teeth. Making the best of the three he has left, he welcomes a foreign visitor to his small farmhouse with a broad smile and a high honor of Panjshiri hospitality: “I will serve you milk!”

Over cups of milk drawn fresh from the family cow, warmed in a copper kettle and sweetened with teaspoons of sugar, Manegy’s mind drifts back to the day when fate, and his 50 goats, led him to the broken rock.

After trekking down the mountain with what he hoped was a fortune in his pocket, Manegy went to a trusted friend who was an experienced trader.

Straightaway, he informed Manegy that his green stone was a precious emerald. The gem rush was on.

Within three days, villagers were on the mountainside, chipping away with hammers, shovels and steel bars. Almost 30 years later, many of their grown children are still at it, working largely in village consortiums searching for the mother lode.

Manegy got around $160 for his emerald, which seemed a lot to him for a rock.

He would get at least $20,000 for that stone today, said Abdul Mahbood, a local gem trader, who did the math on a solar-powered calculator he carries in a vest pocket. From another, he took out a ball of cellophane crumpled around emeralds, several bigger than sugar cubes.

Mahbood spilled them into his palm, tilting it back and forth so the emeralds could catch the soft afternoon light. They clicked in his hand like a child’s marbles. Mahbood smiled.

It was seven years after Manegy’s discovery before Panjshiris realized they had been selling the precious stones cheap to the steady stream of foreign buyers riding through the mountains on donkeys from neighboring Pakistan, Mahbood said. As demand for Afghan emeralds grew, so did the price, and Panjshiris became more savvy gem dealers.

With his $160, Manegy bought rice, wheat and other supplies. Four days after cashing in his bonanza, he was broke. He kept looking for more emeralds but never found many. He gave up after three years and returned to working 24 acres of terraced fields next to the Darkhenjab River and selling car parts on the side.

“The richest thing I have is my faith,” he said. “Even if someone gives us east, west, north and south, we can’t lose our faith.”

The Panjshir emerald mines are part of a gem belt stretching hundreds of miles, from the edge of the Himalayas at Afghanistan’s northeastern border with Pakistan to Laghman province, northeast of Kabul, and then to the west of the Panjshir Valley, in Parwan province. International experts say the best of Panjshir’s emeralds are among the world’s finest.

Afghanistan’s government believes that billions of dollars worth of emeralds, rubies, lavender kunzite, violet-blue lapis lazuli and other precious stones are waiting to be extracted from the rock and insists anyone mining them is taking state-owned property.

But Afghanistan hasn’t had an effective central government for at least 24 years, and the miners defying the current government’s ban are applying the age-old rule of finders keepers.

The Hindu Kush mountain range, which runs hundreds of miles southwest from the edge of the Himalayas and has peaks as high as 17,000 feet, is Afghanistan’s treasure chest.

The mountains’ serrated peaks and narrow gorges offer outsiders few paths into the Panjshir Valley emerald mines. The tunnel mouths form honeycombs on the mountains anywhere from 7,000 to 14,000 feet up, and the Panjshiris know how to get rid of uninvited visitors.

Heavy bombing opened a route for Soviet troops to seize some of the mines during the occupation, but the moujahedeen fighters with the late Ahmed Shah Massoud always expelled them within a few days.

Massoud, the legendary “Lion of Panjshir,” helped fund his guerrilla army with the more than $1 million he earned annually from emeralds. A Soviet tank, embedded in the riverbank where it was blasted off the road, marks the Red Army’s farthest advance into the valley.

When the Taliban tried to invade the valley, Massoud’s guerrillas drove them back too. Massoud was murdered, apparently by Al Qaeda operatives, with a bomb hidden in a TV camera on Sept. 9, 2001. With Massoud gone, about 350,000 Panjshiris living in the valley lost their greatest defender but not their vigilance against intruders

Interim President Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul is talking with potential foreign investors, including U.S. companies, to take over the emerald mines as partners with the Afghan state. But they will have to find a way past the Panjshiris, who think they own the rock they work -- and the gems locked inside.

Mahfooz insists that the miners will have to settle for jobs with the corporations. So far, however, no foreign companies have made offers for joint ventures in mining, he added. Even so, quiet exploration may have begun.

Three months ago, a Frenchman climbed up a mountainside blanketed with blasted rock to reach the mines at Khirskanda, about 8,000 feet above Khenj, a farming village and small trading center in the valley.

He spent three days there, scrutinizing the rock with an electronic device none of the miners had seen before.

“We were all following him around, and wherever he pointed, we found lots of emeralds,” said miner Zia Urahman, 22. “When he looked up at the mountain, you could see the emeralds in green on the screen. He also bought $10,000 worth of emeralds. He said they were a gift for his family.”

Manegy has little left to offer his family but the labor of an old man’s hands, and his prayers. His second wife is in a Kabul hospital with heart trouble. His first was killed 18 years ago, when a Soviet warplane bombed the mountain cave where she was hiding. A son and daughter died with her.

He is left with one son from his first marriage and a son and two daughters from the second. Mohammed Ghazi, 20, is the only one of them who followed the lure of emeralds up the mountain, but he didn’t stay long.

“Because I’m old, I won’t let him go up there anymore,” Manegy said. “He just tends the farm down here with me.” The men hammering relentlessly at the mountainside are driven by the same certainty that keeps marathon gamblers going. Today, they tell themselves, is my day.

Mohammed Edrees, 25, tunneled into various sections of the granite for three years -- half of his mining career -- and found only worthless sludge.

The miners work natural fissures that are supposed to mark the best places to find emeralds, especially the clearest crystalline gems that grow in tiny beds of sand sandwiched between rock. But every yard Edrees and his partners dug deeper into the mountain, and each wheelbarrow-full of muck that they sifted through, yielded nothing.

“We just didn’t have good luck,” Edrees said, squatting in the shadows of a sooty hut that he shares with 10 other miners at Khirskanda. “We just kept digging -- and prayed.”

Edrees and his team would bend over in dark, dripping tunnels from dawn until sunset with two days off each week, just enough time to go down the mountain, wash their clothes, stock up on supplies and climb back up again.

Energized by a sugary cake of compressed mulberries called talkhan and rich Afghan hashish, they worked through bitter winters, when the snow was chest deep and streams running through the tunnels turned to ice. Edrees finally hit pay dirt in the spring of 2001, when he dug out a 500-carat emerald, worth $50,000 on the local market -- a king’s ransom in Afghanistan.

The team’s 54 members each got a cut, with the biggest going to a few bosses who paid for the dynamite, the gasoline-powered rock drill that was imported from Japan, the flashlights and other overhead. The miners got several hundred dollars each. They didn’t waste time celebrating. Their competitors were still digging all around them.

About 500 miners, working for approximately 50 groups, are searching for emeralds in the Khirskanda area. For every worker, there are roughly four more shareholders waiting in villages and cities for their piece of the profit.

The tunnels are as deep as 300 yards and connected in warrens of a dozen or more. None have structures to reduce the risk of collapse. One caved in last year, fortunately on a Friday when miners were off work for the Muslim holy day.

Noxious gases that seep out from the mountain’s bowels killed at least four miners two years ago and have knocked many others unconscious. At least six miners have died in blasting accidents in recent years, the workers say.

A green flag on a wooden pole marks the grave of one miner who was buried alive under a rockslide set off by blasting. Farther down the mountainside, a small circle of rocks reminds villagers who trek by that one of their own, a boy, is entombed below.

Not all are unlucky. Abdul Qassar is Afghanistan’s king of emeralds, a man of few words with a sparkle in his eye and a cryptic smile, like someone with a very big secret.

Three years ago, Qassar’s team found an emerald so big that people named it after him, a stone the size of a pocket tape recorder -- before it broke in half.

The pieces of that emerald, thought to be the biggest ever found in Afghanistan, are only a small part of his stash. Qassar says he has hidden emeralds weighing a total of almost 10,000 carats and has been patiently waiting for three years for a buyer to show up with $5 million. The clear, crystal emeralds all came from one place, so Qassar wants to sell them as a set. Sold separately, he said, they would earn half that price.

Qassar reached into his vest pocket and untied a torn strip of plastic bag, which covered a scrap of note paper. It unfolded to reveal a piece of toilet paper wrapped around a dark green, uncut emerald as big as a half-smoked cigar.

He held the 30-carat stone up to a window, and with one eye closed, peered through the crystal and breathed a faint sigh.

“Because the circumstances in Afghanistan are not good, big dealers do not come here,” Qassar, 40, said in Kabul, where he has a small jewelry shop.

“The other day, I talked to a German dealer on the phone and he said, ‘If you bring those emeralds, and twice as many, I’ll buy them from you.’

“But I said, ‘No. I cannot come there. If you want to buy them, come here.’ I don’t know the area, so it’s dangerous for me.”

Both Manegy and Qassar know that what happened to them is God’s will. Both men know that if God wishes it, they will have nothing. That is why, despite all that might have been, Manegy figures he is a fortunate man.

He has his farm and what’s left of his family. He has beaten the typical Afghan life expectancy by a good 30 years.

“I have been lucky,” he said. “I am alive.”