KANDAHAR, 9 August — Gul Agha knows how to handle the United Nations. He smiles, he praises, he loves the UN and he is immensely grateful for the advice of undersecretary-general and special representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, the diminutive Ugandan Olara Utunnu. Every time Utunnu talks about democracy and peace and the need for children to receive proper schooling, the governor of Kandahar beams with delight.
In one corner of his office, the chief of police sits, a massive, high-peaked Soviet-style hat on his head, a Czarist leather strap across his military blouse. In the other, the thin, rather weedy looking director of education reclines nervously on a sofa, his hands fidgeting constantly with his tie.
Utunnu wants to know about the governor’s "vision". And there was just the slightest narrowing of Gul Agha’s eyes when this was translated into Pushtu as "puhaa". Warlords don’t have a lot of visions but the whiskery Agha, clad in the kind of overtight Marxist brown tunic and trousers that the PLO used to wear, quickly got the idea.
"When I became governor of this city," he told Utunnu, "the doors of education opened." Why, Agha had even spent his own money in opening a special computer school for students, an academy to which he did not invite us but upon which he intended to lavish further personal funds. "This has not happened anywhere else in the country — not even in Kabul, only in Kandahar."
At which point, the fearful director of education took the floor, standing with hands clasped in front of him while delivering a homily on the generosity of the governor of Kandahar, his foresight, his wisdom and, of course, his vision. It was all of six minutes before Utunnu could thank the director so profusely that he was forced to sit down. No, Gul Agha assured the special representative of the secretary-general, there were no under-age soldiers or policemen in Kandahar.
"We have invested a lot in our police and intelligence forces — we are continuing our efforts to combat terrorism along with the coalition forces." The problem is that Gul Agha, like almost every other governor in Afghanistan, is a bit of a rogue. Taxes do not all go to the central government. His own militias are better paid than government soldiers. But his claim that his schoolteachers were paid twice the average salary of those in Kabul was untrue. They are paid half the salary of Kabul teachers.
His references to "our president, the esteemed Karzai" may have satisfied Utunnu — a boy with a treble voice later serenaded the UN’s expert on kid soldiers with paeans of praise for both Karzai and Gul Agha — but it’s no secret in Kabul that the governor is a loose cannon. A couple of weeks ago, uneasy at the US Air Force’s propensity for bombing wedding parties, he summoned regional leaders to a meeting at which he wished to demand prior knowledge of American operations in the Kandahar governorate. Most of his fellow barons declined to attend. So instead we got a lecture on Agha’s love of constitutional law and human rights.
Utunnu and his cortege drove through the fog of diesel smoke and sand to Kandahar’s central prison, a rickety barracks with a heavy machine gun mounted on a tripod over the front gate. "Unspeakable things happened here under the Taleban," one of the governor’s minions muttered to me as we entered. I could believe it. In fact, I could believe anything in this prison. The stone floor had been newly scrubbed and the inmates sat in their bright little cells, red and golden carpets on the floor, flowers and pot plants in the window to keep out the sun. Utunnu strode inside or rather widows — of the same husband whom they had allegedly just killed. The third had run off with a boy she loved, in preference to the old man to whom her dead father had allegedly betrothed her at birth. The offense of the fourth was unclear.
Again, a short walk round the other cells revealed a rather different story. Many of them were packed with hundreds of sacks of US-donated wheat and rice and processed peas. Many others were stacked floor to ceiling with hundreds of Kalashnikov rifles, light and heavy machine-guns, boxes of ammunition and shells. I asked the Czarist policeman for an explanation. "This is really a police compound," he said. "We let these four women stay here because it is more comfortable. What you saw were our stores."
So where, I wondered, was the real women’s prison? Where were the children who were supposedly staying with their mothers? Utunnu was unfazed. An intelligent, sharp if slightly short-tempered man, he was an opposition leader in Uganda who — had he not made a judicious exit from his country a few years ago — might have ended up in an institution just like this one. But he declared himself reasonably satisfied. He had talked to the prisoners. (The Independent)
