A Rogues’ Gallery of Foreigners : For Expatriates in Kabul, Hard Times on War’s Edge

When Father Angelo Panigotti celebrates Mass these days at his tiny church in the deserted Italian Embassy compound, the 20 or so worshipers have to help themselves to the wafers.

There are no altar boys. Nor is there an organist or a choir. So Father Panigotti, for 24 years the only Roman Catholic priest in Kabul, is too busy at his battery-powered miniature organ to distribute the Host.

The faithful scarcely mind. They are constantly reminded, by the roar of jet fighters overhead, that there is a war going on. They are among a handful of foreigners still in Kabul after the Western embassies were closed and the personnel evacuated earlier this year.

Among the expatriates who stayed on is a collection of characters as colorful as the diminutive, red-cheeked Italian priest, a kind of rogues’ gallery of tough diplomats, missionaries and entrepreneurs, including a grandson of the late Lord Minto, who from 1905 to 1910 was viceroy of India.

On the surface, Kabul is one of the most internationally isolated cities in the world, all but abandoned by the people who once made Afghanistan a kind of Switzerland of Asia.

In the three months since Jon Glassman, charge d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy, lowered the flag and sent the American personnel back to Washington, the merchants who catered to the expatriates have been going out of business.

“No one else can afford these things,” a merchant on Chicken Street told a reporter, gesturing toward shelves still filled with canned American ham, Russian crab meat and Mongolian vodka. “No one is making money on Chicken Street anymore. We feel lonely without the foreigners around. And, yes, some of us are angry.”

Afghan President Najibullah is also angry about the way the Western diplomats pulled out of his embattled capital. At a recent press conference, he assailed their departure as “psychological warfare” meant to sow panic and help the Muslim rebels who are besieging the city in an effort to overthrow his Soviet-backed regime.

Many of the diplomats still here, representing for the most part East Bloc governments but also including nonaligned Yugoslavia and Turkey, which is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, are privately critical of the other nations’ decision to pull out.

Referring to the rebel rockets falling in the capital now, one of the diplomats said: “There were 10 times as many hitting Kabul six months ago, but no one talked of evacuation then. Almost everyone here agrees that the embassy pullout was calculated to help topple the government quickly after the Soviet troop withdrawal in February, and now that we see it didn’t work, most of us would like our wives and families back.”

For the diplomats who stayed, it is this separation from their families that has made life so hard. They are restricted to a security area less than 20 miles in diameter, and alcoholism and “cabin fever” are said to be growing problems.

Among the 250 or so Soviets still in Kabul, either diplomats or advisers to the government, life is described as even less pleasant. Most of them are restricted, for security reasons, to the Soviet Embassy compound.

For the other diplomats and the expatriates, there is only one meeting place left, the bar and restaurant at the United Nations staff residence. There, diplomats from as ideologically different nations as Pakistan and Bulgaria can be heard debating the latest rumors and reports from the fighting fronts.

Among the regulars, at the U.N. house and at Father Panigotti’s church, is Guy Willoughby, a British entrepreneur and retired military officer whose private Halo Trust is among the international aid agencies assisting the Najibullah government.

Willoughby, whose grandfather was the viceroy of India, is the subject of endless rumor and speculation, but his principal role here is organizing a program of training Afghan peasants to locate and defuse millions of land mines scattered across the country.

But Willoughby is a relative newcomer. Father Panigotti and his Christian cemetery provide a better guide to Kabul’s past as an international gathering place. There are 80 graves--of Germans who helped build dams and power stations, of Canadian and European hippies whose search for paradise ended here, of British soldiers who died in the centuries-long effort to subdue the Afghans’ fierce spirit of independence and of tourists who died for lack of adequate medical care.

Panigotti pointed to the unmarked grave of a Brazilian hippie, Evaristo da Souza, as an illustration of Kabul’s heyday as a capital of illicit drugs, principally hashish.

“The boy had stolen the passports of five British hippies, and he confessed the crime to me in the hospital, where he had been taken for a drug overdose,” Panigotti recalled. “An hour after I left his hospital room, the five British boys slipped in and injected him with poison.

“I buried the boy and put a cross on his grave, but the next day the cross was gone. The hippies had come to the cemetery, replaced the cross with a stovepipe and ringed the grave with hashish cigarettes. I have never replaced the cross.”

Panigotti was asked whether there are any Soviet nationals buried in his little cemetery, and he smiled impishly and shook his head. He guided his visitors to the grave of a Chinese diplomat who died in Kabul, and said:

“The Russians wanted to bury their dead here, but they wanted to put red stars on the graves. You see, this Chinese man, Comzou Xing Zhi, is the only Communist I ever allowed to be buried here, and, well, you can see what happened. That star on his tombstone was red when he was buried. And you see what the rain has done. It is no more red. So I told the Russians no.”

Changes Take a Toll

But for the little priest, who is 64 years old, moments of humor are few and far between these days. After more than two decades, the changes have taken their toll.

“I was in Chile,” he said, “and I got a telegram saying go to Kabul. I am a soldier, so I went, and I’ve been waiting for another telegram ever since. Kabul looks like it is not Kabul anymore. Before, you could go anywhere, day or night. A decade ago, it was the most open city of the world. On any given day, there were 10,000 hippies here. There were 320 restaurants where they would smoke hashish openly. You could do anything here.”

Even now, Panigotti said, Kabul is a city of tolerance--”like this little cemetery, a Christian graveyard in a 100% Muslim land, and the Afghans still respect and accept it as sacred ground.”

Yet he is clearly troubled by the deep political divisions that continue to fuel the decade-old war. And he tries to speak out about it. In his Mass last Sunday, the Day of the Ascension, Father Panigotti delivered a sermon on power-sharing.

As Soviet military supply planes took off and landed at the airport not far from his church, occasionally drowning out his words, Father Panigotti told his tiny congregation:

“Look at us in this miserable life in which we live now. What we do all the time is try to dominate life, dominate others. Everywhere in the world today it seems you have a civil war or a revolution. We must all realize that the real power we have is the power over life, the power of peace, not war.”