The Massacre in Mazar-i-Sharif

T. Glavin: Massacre in Mazar

ON APRIL 1, thousands of Afghans surged into the streets of Mazar-i-Sharif following Friday Prayer at the city’s Blue Mosque, in protest of American pastor Terry Jones’ mock trial and burning of the Koran nearly two weeks earlier, on March 20. In the ensuing demonstration, some in the crowd stormed a UN compound and killed seven foreign staff members. Five Afghans died during the protests that day, and at least twelve more in the days that followed.

Of all places in Afghanistan for a UN compound to be turned into a human abattoir, we’re supposed to be shocked that it would be in the contented little metropolis of Mazar-i-Sharif, the capital of the peaceful northern province of Balkh. We’re supposed to be astonished that the murderers of those seven UN workers arose from a frenzied mob at the head of a procession that started out at the city’s famous Blue Mosque.

We should not be surprised at all.

For centuries, Mazar’s glorious Shrine of Hazrat Ali was the journey’s end for Shia pilgrims from afar and an everyday refuge of gardens and esplanades for the local Sunni majority. The Blue Mosque, where everyone prays together, is a fountainhead of Sufi cosmopolitanism. It is a marvel of classic Islamic architecture built in the grand Timurid style on deep Zoroastrian foundations. This is no grim, radical madrassa.

Mazar has survived as a rebuke to the Islamist orthodoxies that have stultified civilized life from Persepolis to Peshawar. It is the epicenter of everything that jihadists hold to be heretical. During the late 1990s, the city put up an especially fierce resistance to Taliban tyranny. Since 2004 the province’s bare-knuckle governor, Atta Mohammed Noor, has cleaved to a law-and-order ferocity that terrifies the Taliban-friendly Pashtuns who form Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s base of power.

It was not in spite of these things but precisely because of them that about three years ago, Shia Khomeinists and Sunni Wahhabists teamed up in their efforts at subversion in Mazar. During my visits in the city last June, the smartest young Afghans I spoke with were worried that it was just a matter of time before these efforts would spill out in blood.

From accounts of last Friday’s massacre that I’ve received from several Afghan human rights activists and journalists, what emerges is a picture of an opportunity that was just waiting for a pretext. What happened did not simply result from a protest march that began at the Blue Mosque and got terribly out of hand.

The protest began with an Iranian propaganda initiative that was set in motion more than a week earlier, on March 24. Hamid Karzai himself played a central role in the affair. The bloody skirmishing that has left at least two dozen people dead across Afghanistan has gone so far as to cast a shadow over the future of the UN’s operations in the country. In other words, it’s working.

WHEN THE Florida churchman Terry Jones merely threatened to burn a Koran last September, widespread news coverage set off dozens of riots in several Muslim countries. Scores of people were killed. So it was just as well that when Jones staged his Koran-burning pantomime on Sunday, March 20, the U.S new media, this time around, mostly ignored him.

After a video depicting Jones in a judge’s costume “passing sentence” on the Koran in a mock courtroom started making the usual Internet rounds, there was a brief flurry of news reports. After the usual denunciations from American politicians and church groups, the story was more or less dropped, and there the matter might have ended. But that’s just when things started to gather steam.

On March 24, the Iranian foreign ministry, Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, and Karzai’s office issued simultaneous alarms about Jones’ Koran-burning. Iranian ministry spokesman Ramin Mehman-Parast said the incident was part of American “hegemonic plots.” Karzai called for Jones’ arrest and prosecution.

Karzai’s statement was widely reported in Iran’s government-controlled press but got limited play even in the Afghan news media. Then the Netherlands-based BNO News got involved. After making its mark in 2007 when it sold Reuters a videotaped speech by Osama Bin Laden, BNO went on to become a popular Twitter feed and is now a low budget social-media hybrid, part press-release clearinghouse and part amateur-journalism vector. When BNO began circulating a report headlined “Afghanistan, Iran condemn Koran burning in US,” the story went viral.

The first Afghan protests about the Koran-burning were staged by the Shura-e Olama-e Shiia, the Kabul-based Shiite religious council dominated by Asif Mohseni, the leading Khomeinist Ayatollah in Afghanistan. Mohseni is best known for having persuaded Karzai to sign off on the incendiary Afghan “rape law” in 2009 (which effectively legalized marital rape), an event that prompted protests by Afghan women and howls of international indignation. The Khomeinist-led Koran demonstrations in Kabul were the first that most Afghans had even heard about Jones’ vulgar escapade. (You always know it’s a Khomeinist event by the tell-tale slogan, Marg Bar Yahood—Death to the Jews).

This brings us back to Mazar, to the Tomb of the Exalted where most Afghans prefer to believe that the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed is buried, and to the famous Blue Mosque.

During my visit to the shrine last June, I was told it was just a matter of time before push would come to shove. The day before my visit to the Blue Mosque, the plaza had been filled with Khomeinists demanding the firing of all foreign university professors. The demonstrators chanted, Death to America, Death to Israel, Death to the Jews.

An embarrassed mosque guardian expressed his sincere regrets and denied me entry: the new Sunni hardliners were making him enforce a rule barring non-Muslims. At the time, one of the mullahs who was rapidly rising in influence around Mazar was the Sunni reactionary Mawlawi Abdul Qahir Zadran. He’d spent time in Pakistan, he had his own mosque, and he seemed to have a lot of money to throw around. He had a well-earned reputation for oratory and a habit of referring to girls who attended school as prostitutes. You could buy his CDs and tapes in the markets.

According to a journalist from Mazar I spoke with Sunday, who asked out of fears for his own safety that I not report his name, Zadran was the ringleader of Friday’s frenzy. Zadran’s followers were the “insurgents” that are reported to have infiltrated the march to the UN compound in Mazar.

Early last week, officials at the Blue Mosque had been persuaded to apply for a police permit for what was intended to be a peaceful demonstration. By then, the hysterics making the rounds had convinced even the head of the Blue Mosque, the widely respected Aqitullah Ansari, that America’s Christians and the entire American political establishment were behind the Koran-burning stunt.

“That’s right, even Ansari, even he thought it was true,” Fahim Khairy, a former UN worker in Mazar who conducted a taped interview with Ansari over the weekend, told me. Khairy, now living in Arizona, said: “I told him that President Obama and everyone was against burning the Koran, and that Jones has hardly any members even in his own little church. He was surprised. He knew nothing about this.”

Nevertheless, Ansari said he would never have countenanced violence and had no reason to expect that things would deteriorate so rapidly after Friday prayers. There were some radical mullahs who were allowed to speak in the mosque, and some issued outrageous exhortations to jihad. But violence was never the intent of any of the mosque’s regular clerics, Ansari insisted.

In a statement released on Saturday, Ansari declared: “This was a crime, and also a heartbreaking incident, like the suicide attacks that take the lives of our people every day. We are deeply sad and we condemn such action…we share the sadness of the families of those who were killed, and we send our thoughts and condolences to them, their friends, and their colleagues.”

Another young journalist from Mazar, Sohrab Samanian, confirmed the account of Friday’s tragedy that had emerged from several interviews and e-mail exchanges with Mazar journalists and human rights activists. He had something of his own he wanted to say: “The event on Friday was designed by people who are the enemies of humanity, as well as the enemies of Afghanistan. The Afghan people cannot fight against them alone.”

Ansari and Samanian make perfect sense. Staffan de Mistura, the head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, does not. “I don’t think we should be blaming any Afghan,” he declared. “We should be blaming the person who produced the news, the one who burned the Koran.”

What a ridiculous thing to say.

We are all hostages to religious fanatics, the world round. The only thing that makes Afghanistan any different is that people there tend to be easier to butcher.

Terry Glavin is a journalist and cofounder of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee.

Image: Blue Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif (Michal Hvorecky/2010/Wikimedia Commons)