On Day of Rest, the Only Battles in Kabul Are in Cockfight Ring

The scene in Babur’s Gardens on Friday, Afghanistan’s official day of rest, hardly befit a city on the eve of destruction.

With just 48 hours left before a deadline for surrender or war, the betting was as fast and furious as ever in the garden’s daylong cockfights, a century-old tradition that is a fitting metaphor for a country so long at war.

Old men sat in clumps nearby, betting on dice and cards. There were jokes and laughter, smiles and hugs and a line of children waiting for a rickety carnival ride.

Friday seemed an ordinary day in the park of Afghanistan’s ancient warrior king--except for a brief and telling scene at Babur’s simple hillside tomb.

A moujahedeen commander loyal to the hard-line rebel leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the man who has threatened to take this city by force, approached an American correspondent.

Commander Mohammed Abdul Gaffar was cautious at first. It was, after all, the first time in 13 years of guerrilla war he had legally entered his enemy’s stronghold unarmed. And it was just hours away from his leader’s promised hour of destruction: Hekmatyar had vowed to attack Kabul if its isolated regime fails to yield it to the moujahedeen by Sunday.

Gaffar wore his black beard long and his turban wrapped loose in the style of his fundamentalist party leader. But he had a message far different from the threats issued from Hekmatyar’s camp.

“We commanders have thought it over and decided that if Hekmatyar does not agree to form a coalition with all the other moujahedeen groups, we will go ahead and start it without him,” Gaffar said in whispered tones, referring to a moderate rebel coalition that has been negotiating an orderly transfer of power to the Muslim guerrillas since the fall of Afghan dictator Najibullah last week.

“We can come to Kabul. We can come into town. In fact, we can capture Kabul anytime we want to now. But we commanders don’t want there to be any fighting.”

In fact, the mission that brought Gaffar into the capital was to negotiate, to meet surreptitiously with Afghan army officers from his home region of the Ghorban Valley north of Kabul and persuade them to join forces with the coalition.

“I don’t know the future,” he concluded, stressing that he deliberately left his weapons behind in his village. “But our mission is finished. We have made these contacts to make Afghanistan one country. Now, we are just watching and waiting to see what happens.”

So, it appeared, was the rest of Kabul on Friday.

Outside the nation’s only television station, a single sentry guarded the outer compound wall. Another soldier was stretched out asleep atop the tank posted outside the country’s telecommunications center. Markets bustled, the traffic jammed, and colorful weddings filled the city’s hotel ballrooms.

But with a dizzying array of heavily armed moujahedeen groups--known as moderates in the spectrum of Afghan guerrilla politics--now in firm control of every entrance to the city, Friday had another quality to it just below the surface. It was a day most people spent discussing and considering the implications of the Islamic “moujahedeen government” that seems imminent in a city long ruled by secular, socialist regimes.

A merchant on Kabul’s famed Chicken Street, where beer, liquor and imported food are abundant, simply slashed his forefinger across his throat when asked what will happen to his trade the day the moujahedeen come to power in the capital.

Abdul Qadir, who has been running his carnival ride in Babur’s Gardens for the past year, also seemed deeply concerned. The crude, homemade merry-go-round, made of rickety iron, wobbly fan belts and an aging Russian engine, is a big personal investment, he said, an attempt to augment his meager government salary of 10,000 Afghanis per month (about $12.50).

“I don’t know,” Qadir said, when asked whether the moujahedeen will shut down his ride. “I hope not. It’s nice for the children.”

But when asked whether he is afraid to live under a government of Islamic rebels, Qadir added: “Yes, of course. I am a traffic policeman. And already, the salary is not enough for my family. It’s not even enough for bread.”

But over at the cockfight ring, there was much more optimism.

As the two birds chosen for the morning match pecked each other ferociously, with dozens of men screaming out wagers and odds and passing tens of thousands of Afghanis from hand to hand, one of the regime’s technocrats concluded that the moujahedeen probably will not shut down the fights.

“It’s tradition,” said Mohammed Razaq Zada, the general director of the foreign department of the state-owned Bank of Afghanistan, who said he comes each week, as his father did for nearly 50 years, because he enjoys the action and the gambling.

Zada was asked whether he is concerned that a new Islamic-based leadership will change the nation’s fundamental principles, including the banking system that has been his life.

“I’m not a political man,” he said. “I’m a banking man. And the way I see it, maybe the persons in charge change, but the system will not change.”

Suddenly, there were shouts. One of the birds had taken a large chunk of flesh out of the other.

“You see?” shouted an elderly man in a wool fez and sunglasses seated on the ground nearby. “Always fighting in Afghanistan.”

But on the hillside overlooking the cockfights, one could see a far more dramatic image of the war that has already killed nearly 2 million people and maimed 2 million more. A 14-year-old boy named Sakhi was playing with his friends beside Babur’s tomb. Their sport for the day was a practical one: shooting birds with homemade slingshots to augment their evening meal. But it was hard for Sakhi to join in.

He leaned on a battered old crutch as he explained that he had been a shepherd before his family was forced to flee the fighting in the Parwan Valley north of Kabul. He was walking with his sheep one day when he stepped on a land mine, one of the estimated 10 million mines strewn across the Afghan countryside. He lost his left leg. He was 11.

“No work,” he said, when asked what he does all day. “No offers.

“I’m just here.”