His friend Hidayatullah told him to stand firm. ‘Ziauddin, you have charisma; you can speak up and organise against them,’ he said. ‘Life isn’t just about taking in oxygen and giving out carbon dioxide. You can stay there accepting everything from the Taliban or you can make a stand against them.’
My father told us what Hidayatullah had said. He then wrote a letter to the Daily Azadi, our local newspaper. ‘To the Fedayeen of Islam [or Islamic sacrificers], this is not the right way to implement Islam,’ he wrote. ‘Please don’t harm my children because the God you believe in is the same God they pray to every day. You can take my life but please don’t kill my schoolchildren.’ When my father saw the newspaper he was very unhappy. The letter had been buried on an inside page and the editor had published his name and the address of the school, which my father had not expected him to do. But lots of people called to congratulate him. ‘You have put the first stone in standing water,’ they said. ‘Now we will have the courage to speak.’
10
Toffees, Tennis Balls and the Buddhas of Swat
FIRST THE TALIBAN took our music, then our Buddhas, then our history. One of our favourite things was going on school trips. We were lucky to live in a paradise like Swat with so many beautiful places to visit – waterfalls, lakes, the ski resort, the wali’s palace, the Buddha statues, the tomb of Akhund of Swat. All these places told our special story. We would talk about the trips for weeks beforehand, then, when the day finally came, we dressed up in our best clothes and piled into buses along with pots of chicken and rice for a picnic. Some of us had cameras and took photographs. At the end of the day my father would make us all take turns standing on a rock and tell stories about what we had seen. When Fazlullah came there were no more school trips. Girls were not supposed to be seen outside.
The Taliban destroyed the Buddhist statues and stupas where we played, which had been there for thousands of years and were a part of our history from the time of the Kushan kings. They believed any statue or painting was haram, sinful and therefore prohibited. One black day they even dynamited the face of the Jehanabad Buddha, which was carved into a hillside just half an hour’s drive from Mingora and towered twenty-three feet into the sky. Archaeologists say it was almost as important as the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which the Afghan Taliban blew up.
It took them two goes to destroy it. The first time they drilled holes in the rock and filled them with dynamite, but that didn’t work. A few weeks later, on 8 October 2007, they tried again. This time they obliterated the Buddha’s face, which had watched over the valley since the seventh century. The Taliban became the enemy of fine arts, culture and our history. The Swat museum moved its collection away for safekeeing. They destroyed everything old and brought nothing new. The Taliban took over the Emerald Mountain with its mine and began selling the beautiful stones to buy their ugly weapons. They took money from the people who chopped down our precious trees for timber and then demanded more money to let their trucks pass.
Their radio coverage spread across the valley and neighbouring districts. Though we still had our television they had switched off the cable channels. Moniba and I could no longer watch our favourite Bollywood shows like Shararat or Making Mischief. It seemed like the Taliban didn’t want us to do anything. They even banned one of our favourite board games called Carrom in which we flick counters across a wooden board. We heard stories that the Taliban would hear children laughing and burst into the room and smash the boards. We felt like the Taliban saw us as little dolls to control, telling us what to do and how to dress. I thought if God wanted us to be like that He wouldn’t have made us all different.
One day we found our teacher Miss Hammeda in floods of tears. Her husband was a policeman in the small town of Matta, and Fazlullah’s men had stormed in and some police officers had been killed, including her husband. It was the first Taliban attack on the police in our valley. Soon they had taken over many villages. The black and white flags of Fazlullah’s TNSM started appearing on police stations. The militants would enter villages with megaphones and the police would flee. In a short time they had taken over fifty-nine villages and set up their own parallel administrations. Policemen were so scared of being killed that they took out adverts in the newspapers to announce they had left the force.
All this happened and nobody did a thing. It was as though everyone was in a trance. My father said people had been seduced by Fazlullah. Some joined his men, thinking they would have better lives. My father tried to counter their propaganda but it was hard. ‘I have no militants and no FM radio,’ he joked. He even dared to enter the Radio Mullah’s own village one day to speak at a school. He crossed the river in one of the metal boxes suspended from a pulley that we use as makeshift bridges. On the way he saw smoke so high it touched the clouds, the blackest smoke he’d ever seen. At first he thought it might be a brick factory, but as he approached he saw bearded figures in turbans burning TVs and computers.
In the school my father told the people, ‘I saw your villagers burning these things. Don’t you realise the only ones who will profit are the companies in Japan, who will just make more?’
Someone came up to him and whispered, ‘Don’t speak any more in this way – it’s risky.’
Meanwhile the authorities, like most people, did nothing.
It felt as though the whole country was going mad. The rest of Pakistan was preoccupied with something else – the Taliban had moved right into the heart of our nation’s capital, Islamabad. We saw pictures on the news of what people were calling the Burqa Brigade – young women and girls like us in burqas with sticks, attacking CD and DVD shops in bazaars in the centre of Islamabad.
The women were from Jamia Hafsa, the biggest female madrasa in our country and part of Lal Masjid – the Red Mosque in Islamabad. It was built in 1965 and got its name from its red walls. It’s just a few blocks from parliament and the headquarters of ISI, and many government officials and military used to pray there. The mosque has two madrasas, one for girls and one for boys, which had been used for years to recruit and train volunteers to fight in Afghanistan and Kashmir. It was run by two brothers, Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rashid, and had become a centre for spreading propaganda about bin Laden whom Abdul Rashid had met in Kandahar when visiting Mullah Omar. The brothers were famed for their fiery sermons and attracted thousands of worshippers, particularly after 9/11. When President Musharraf agreed to help America in the ‘War on Terror’, the mosque broke off its long links with the military and became a centre of protest against the government. Abdul Rashid was even accused of being part of a plot to blow up Musharraf ’s convoy in Rawalpindi in December 2003. Investigators said the explosives used had been stored in Lal Masjid. But a few months later he was cleared.
When Musharraf sent troops into the FATA, starting with Waziristan in 2004, the brothers led a campaign declaring the military action un-Islamic. They had their own website and pirate FM station on which they broadcast, just like Fazlullah.
Around the same time as our Taliban were emerging in Swat, the girls of the Red Mosque madrasa began terrorising the streets of Islamabad. They raided houses they claimed were being used as massage centres, they kidnapped women they said were prostitutes and closed down DVD shops, again making bonfires of CDs and DVDs. When it suits the Taliban, women can be vocal and visible. The head of the madrasa was Umme Hassan, the wife of the elder brother, Abdul Aziz, and she even boasted that she had trained many of her girls to become suicide bombers. The mosque also set up its own courts to dispense Islamic justice, saying the state had failed. Their militants kidnapped policemen and ransacked government buildings.