Posted on 01/11/2002 3:41:19 PM PST by Pokey78
Our correspondent sees the gay capital of South Asia throw off strictures of the Taleban
NOW that Taleban rule is over in Mullah Omars former southern stronghold, it is not only televisions, kites and razors which have begun to emerge.
Visible again, too, are men with their ashna, or beloveds: young boys they have groomed for sex.
Kandahars Pashtuns have been notorious for their homosexuality for centuries, particularly their fondness for naive young boys. Before the Taleban arrived in 1994, the streets were filled with teenagers and their sugar daddies, flaunting their relationship.
It is called the homosexual capital of south Asia. Such is the Pashtun obsession with sodomy locals tell you that birds fly over the city using only one wing, the other covering their posterior that the rape of young boys by warlords was one of the key factors in Mullah Omar mobilising the Taleban.
In the summer of 1994, a few months before the Taleban took control of the city, two commanders confronted each other over a young boy whom they both wanted to sodomise.
In the ensuing fight civilians were killed. Omars group freed the boy and appeals began flooding in for Omar to help in other disputes.
By November, Omar and his Taleban were Kandahars new rulers. Despite the Taleban disdain for women, and the bizarre penchant of many for eyeliner, Omar immediately suppressed homosexuality.
Men accused of sodomy faced the punishment of having a wall toppled on to them, usually resulting in death. In February 1998 three men sentenced to death for sodomy in Kandahar were taken to the base of a huge mud and brick wall, which was pushed over by tank. Two of them died, but one managed to survive.
In the days of the Mujahidin, there were men with their ashna everywhere, at every corner, in shops, on the streets, in hotels: it was completely open, a part of life, said Torjan, 38, one of the soldiers loyal to Kandahars new governor, Gul Agha Sherzai.
But in the later Mujahidin years, more and more soldiers would take boys by force, and keep them for as long as they wished. But when the Taleban came, they were very strict about the ban. Of course, it still happened the Taleban could not enter every house but one could not see it.
But for the first time since the Taleban fled, in the past three days, one can see the pairs returning: usually a heavily bearded man, seated next to, or walking with, a clean-shaven, fresh faced youth. There appears to be no shame or furtiveness about them, although when approached, they refuse to talk to a western journalist.
They are just emerging again, Torjan said. The fighters too now have the boys in their barracks. This was brought to the attention of Gul Agha, who ordered the boys to be expelled, but it continues. The boys live with the fighters very openly. In a short time, and certainly within a year, it will be like pre-Taleban: they will be everywhere.
This Pashtun tradition is even reflected in Pashtun poetry, odes written to the beauty and complexion of an ashna, but it is usually a terrible fate for the boys concerned. It is practised at all levels of Pashtun society, but for the poorer men, having an ashna can raise his status.
When a man sees a boy he likes the age they like is 15 or 16 they will approach him in the street and start talking to him, offering him tea, said Muhammad Shah, a shop owner. Sometimes they go looking in the football stadium, or in the cinema (which has yet to reopen).
He then starts to give him presents, hashish, or a watch, a ring, or even a motorbike. One of the most valued presents is a fighting pigeon, which can be worth up to $400 (£277). These boys are nearly always innocent, but such is the poverty here, they cannot refuse.
Once the boy falls into the mans clutches nearly always men with a wife and family he is marked for life, although the Kandaharis accept these relationships as part of their culture.
When driven around, ashna sit in the front passenger seat. The back seat is simply for his friends. Even the parents of the boys know in their hearts the nature of the relationship, but will tell people that their son is working for the man. They, like everyone else, will know this is a lie. They say birds flew with both wings with the Taleban, Muhammad said. But not any more.
This may have been Atta as a teenager. Atta was though to have a "special friend" in San Diego who took another flight.
This is a way of life with the people in that part of the world. I want to say mus***ms but it is mostly arabs but not contained only to arab states. They think that having sex with a women is a sin before marrage but packing fudge is not a sin so they go this route until they take a bride.
I know many military people who have many stories from the Turks, Saudis, Egypt etc..
They offer a years pay to be the fudge packer to our boys in uniform and thankfully everyone I know threatened to kick their ass instead!
I bet you won't see this in the American Press anytime soon !
Iraq was about oil, trade and simple common sense. The strikes on Afghanistan are not about oil, or trade, or commerce, or any other thing than terrorism, and would take place even if al-Qeada had holed up in Antarctica or Cuba, without oil even in the picture.
The idea that is was 'about oil' is as absurd as saying it was all about goat-herding. Virtually 100% of the countries the US has bombed in the last 30 years were populated by goat-herders. Many countries on the planet have oil or natural gas, and even more have areas suitable for pipelines, or refining, or seaways through which the stuff flows. Any time we deal with ANY country someone can point to all kinds of 'evidence' that oil could be 'the reason,' and there are always our friends from the former eastern block who love to post about 'oil,' as if it was the only industry on the friggin' planet, as if getting attacked wasn't sufficient reason to respond. The presence of oil doesn't always have great importance in the scheme of things. Sometimes it has no importance at all. Sometimes enemies simply need to be blown up.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,7-2001344218,00.html
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Repressed homosexuality? |
Michael Griffin The Taleban |
Seven years after the Taleban movement was founded, the features of its leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, are unknown outside Kandahar, where he lived with his wife and children until the events of September 11. He has been described as about 44 years old and unusually tall for an Afghan; alternatively heavy-set or distinguished. His right eye is stitched shut, the result of an encounter with Soviet soldiers when he was a Mujahidin commander with the Harakat-I Inqilab-I-Islami Party. The left eye, his few visitors allow, has a hawk-like, unrelenting gaze. He assiduously cultivates this air of enigma in a refusal to be photographed, and by delegating all but the most crucial encounters with non-Afghans to colleagues or underlings. He has visited Kabul once since the Taleban captured it five years ago. What scant media access the Mullah permits tends to reinforce his image as a sphinx-like visitor from another plane of being. The atmosphere in his immediate court, by contrast, is relaxed and informal. Commanders come and go, dipping their fingers into the communal cooking pot and contributing at liberty to whatever discussion is going on. The Mullah keeps a strongbox by his side, handing out expenses as and when required. This is expected under the Pashtun tribal code, known as pashtunwali, in which relations between men are seldom hierarchical. Muhammad Omars first explanation of the Talebans mission was that it had arisen to restore peace, to provide security to the wayfarer and to protect the honour of women and the poor. But the rise of the mullah under the Taleban proved to be less a return to the elusive values cherished in pre-communist times than the stupefying of a spiritual tradition that once traced its origins back to the footsteps of the Prophet. The sayed, the pir and the alim, Afghanistans spiritual aristocracy, comprised a legacy that combined High Church trends in Islamic thought with a popular belief in spirit possession and anchored them in the everyday life of the village. The Taleban buried them all and the mullah, a cross between a country parson and a Shakespearean clown, recited the funeral rites. The young taleb, or religious students, who rallied to the cause were the product of the Deoband school of Sunni thought, founded 130 years earlier in Uttar Pradesh, India. The Deobandis represent the extreme of attempts to regulate the personal behaviour of their pupils, having issued nearly a quarter of a million fatwa on the minutiae of everyday life since the beginning of the 20th century. Boys enter the system as wards, exchanging life in a poor family for bed, board and an austere catechism that will one day lead to life as a mullah. It is tempting to identify in this early separation from female relatives the origins of the extreme misogyny that, even more than the objective of a pure Islamic state, lent cohesion to the Taleban as they marched into and subdued non-Pashtun lands. But Taleban misogyny went so far beyond what is normally intended by the word that it qualified as a kind of gynaeophobia so broad that a glimpse of stockinged foot or varnished nail was taken as a seductive invitation to personal damnation. Women had to be covered, closeted and, where necessary, beaten to prevent more sin from being spewed into society. Part of this anxiety was sexual and could be attributed to the highly charged rules of pashtunwali under which girls embark on the perilous road to puberty at seven when they are separated from boys and men. From then until marriage, youths have no permissible contact with the opposite sex beyond the members of their own family. In Kandahar, the custom of seclusion had given rise to a rich tradition of homosexual passion, celebrated in poetry, dance and the practice of male prostitution. Heterosexual romance, by contrast, was freighted with the fear of broken honour, the threat of vendetta and, ultimately, death by stoning. In Pashtun society, man-woman love was the one that dared not speak its name: boy courtesans conducted their affairs openly. The taleb grew to maturity on the gruel of orthodoxy, estranged from the mitigating influence of women, family and village. This made early recruits to the movement disciplined and biddable. If their gynaeophobia appeared the product of a repressed homosexuality on the march, Taleban cohorts also conjured up echoes of a medieval childrens crusade, with its associated elements of self-flagellation and an innocent trust in the immanence of paradise. The versatility of the Taleban elite, who alternate as military chiefs, governors and ministers, as well as mullahs, combined with the ingrained Afghan practice of adopting noms de guerre, argues in favour of the thesis that the movement merely clothed its membership in ecclesiastical titles to disguise their origins. This process of clericalisation similarly transformed each enemy defection into a Damascene conversion, just as the enforcement of Sharia-based edicts in non-Pashtun regions added a patina of religion to what was essentially the imposition of martial law. It also veiled a coat rack of skeletons. Mullah Muhammad Hassan, the Governor of Kandahar, had nothing to do with the religious world before his emergence as the Talebans number three, while Mullah Borjan, the movements Rommel until his death in 1996, was a former Afghan army officer who had served under King Zahir Shah. Other military figures were in the Afghan Army until 1992, making a mockery of Mullah Muhammad Omars claim that his goal was to rid Afghanistan of time-serving communists.
Michael Griffin is the author of Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan, Pluto Press (www.plutobooks.com). |
If you hate hypocrisy, you're welcome to SHUTUP.
EODGUY
Not taking bin Laden when the Sudanese offered him to us has got to rank with the worst actions a president ever made. If the world wants to say forever Nixon=crook let it also say Clinton=coward.
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