-Caveat Lector- Afghan Angst Bay Area community watches Taliban depredations from afar Jonathan Curiel, Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, March 18, 2001 ©2001 San Francisco Chronicle URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/03/18/MN180590.DTL In Kabul, Herat, Kandahar and other cities in Afghanistan, Now-ruz -- the traditional Afghan New Year -- will pass on Tuesday without fanfare. In the Bay Area, scores of Afghan men, women and children will dress up, make special food and play music, just as their Persian-speaking ancestors have done for thousands of years. "We will celebrate our tradition over here," said Suraya Ahmadzai, 40, who arrived in Fremont last year with her two daughters and three sons. "We're not going to forget about it." Although the Taliban's recent destruction of Afghanistan's biggest Buddhist statues has captured world attention, for many of the Bay Area's estimated 60, 000 Afghans it is just the latest evidence of horrors that have befallen their homeland since the fundamentalist religious group gained control. Less widely reported, for example, are the Taliban's strict rules against celebrating Now- ruz. Five years ago, Mohammed Najibullah, Afghanistan's widely hated Communist- backed president, was hung from a noose in Kabul, his flesh poked and prodded by angry Afghan men. When the Taliban killed and castrated Najibullah in 1996, they began a reign that still has repercussions in the Bay Area, which is home to the largest Afghan community in North America. Many with relatives in Afghanistan fear the Taliban and refuse to speak out publicly against them -- but for Sediqullah Rahi, one of Najibullah's two surviving brothers, hatred outweighs any other concern. "They're very primitive, close-minded people," Rahi said during an interview in his Fremont home. "They are not allowing anything progressive in Afghanistan. Our economy is destroyed, our social life is destroyed, our people's lives are nothing. And, now, they're destroying our cultural life, too." Rahi's three-bedroom apartment has turned into a refuge for 13 people, including his cousin Ahmadzai and her family. In Afghanistan, she taught history, geography and other high school subjects. One daughter, Illai, 26, was studying to be an engineer. A son, Faheem, 22, was preparing to be a doctor. Uprooted but happy to be away from the daily threat of death, they are taking English classes and hoping to resume a normal life, 7,300 miles from the land that nourished them since childhood. Waves of Afghan refugees have come to the Bay Area for 20 years. Concentrated in Fremont, Hayward and other East Bay cities -- and lacking highly visible political organizations that lobby city halls -- Afghans here have been hidden to most of the wider Bay Area population. That's beginning to change. With the building of new Afghan mosques, the opening of more Afghan businesses and the emergence of a generation of Afghan children reared and educated in the United States, the Bay Area's Afghan community might soon metamorphose into a more prominent ethnic body. When the first large wave of refugees arrived in the United States shortly after Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in 1979, they thought they would return to their country within months or a few years. Today, Afghans in the Bay Area realize that peace may never completely prevail, and that "home" is now here. "As they say, Fremont is happening," said Feraidoon Mojadidi, a Herat- born man who owns the Rumi Bookstore in Fremont. In the past 10 years, so many Afghan businesses have opened near the intersection of Fremont and Peralta boulevards that Afghans jokingly call the area "Little Kabul." Within walking distance of Mojadidi's bookstore are shops that specialize in all things Afghan -- jewelry, pottery, newspapers, music, rice and bread. Lining the stores are posters that show smiling Afghan men in native hats called pakol, posters that show the armed mujahideen who terrorized Soviet troops until they left Afghanistan in 1989, and posters that show one of Afghanistan's most famous faces: the girl from a refugee camp who graced the cover of National Geographic in 1985. If there is a sad symbol of the Afghan diaspora, it is the girl with traumatized eyes who has not been seen since the photo was published. Prompted by the Soviet occupation and the subsequent internecine warfare among rival Afghan groups, more than 5 million people have fled the country in the past 20 years, most going to Iran and Pakistan. About 50,000 Afghans live in Russia, 40,000 in Germany and a lesser number in other European countries, Afghans say. Most who came to the United States settled in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and the Bay Area. How did Fremont become the de facto capital of Bay Area Afghan life? Afghans attribute the influx to three factors: comfortable weather, hilly surroundings that remind refugees of Afghanistan and a word-of- mouth effect that started two decades ago and hasn't stopped. As more refugees arrive here, more social services and organizations for them are started, drawing even more Afghans to the Bay Area. Along with their arrival come ethnic, language and religious differences that have badly divided the Afghan community. The Taliban are mainly Sunni Muslims and Pashtuns -- Afghanistan's majority ethnic group -- who speak Pashto. The language is different from Dari, the Persian language that was the lingua franca of pre- Taliban Afghanistan and is spoken widely today among Bay Area Afghans. Afghanistan's non-Pashtun minority groups -- Hazaras, who follow Shiite Islam, Uzbeks, Tajiks and others -- form the opposition to the Taliban. In Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Masood, a Dari-speaking Tajik general, heads the military units fighting the Taliban, who control 95 percent of the country. In the United States, some people of Pashtun descent virulently oppose the Taliban, but some like Najia Hamid, a prominent Afghan American leader who lives in Union City, herald the Taliban's rule. Hamid said the Taliban have eliminated the crime, sexual attacks, opium cultivation and other lawlessness previously widespread in Afghanistan. "The Taliban government has established rehabilitation of the country," she said. "Unfortunately, U.N. sanctions (against Afghanistan) have stopped all activities and progress. . . . They should have more sympathy for them. It's not fair. You have to help them, not just hurt them." Hamid is visiting Afghanistan next month and plans to meet with the Taliban's minister of foreign affairs, minister of education and minister of health "to ask what I can do for them. (Perhaps) I can help collect money. Because there are (U.N.) sanctions, other countries will not help them. I can collect some money to help schools, remodel them and start students to go there." Two weeks ago, Hamid and other Taliban supporters met in the Bay Area with Rahmatullah Hashemi, a visiting Taliban representative who briefed them on events in Afghanistan, including the recent destruction of the Buddha statues at Bamiyan. "Afghans are important for us wherever they may be," Hashemi said. "We have many Afghans here who need to know about their country. They have a right to be informed." Because of the Taliban's regressive policies and their reported atrocities (last month, Human Rights Watch said the Taliban slaughtered about 300 unarmed Hazaras), many Afghan women refuse to meet a Taliban leader. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a prominent Pakistan-based organization with supporters in the Bay Area, has publicly protested the Taliban's policies. In Afghanistan, women are required to wear net-faced burkas, cannot freely attend most schools and are usually prohibited from working outside the home. Men are forced to grow long beards. "There are some groups here that are pro-Taliban, but it's not representative," said Rona Popal, chairwoman of the Fremont-based Afghan Women's Association International. Popal, who left Afghanistan in 1977, said she is not opposed to the burka as a clothing option for women who wish to cover themselves from head to toe. "People have no problem with the burka, but when it comes to forcing people to wear it -- that's what we're opposed to," Popal said. "Or you have to speak a certain language or you're out -- that's what we're opposed to." It would be rare to see an Afghan woman in the Bay Area wearing a burka. More common are women in head scarves and clothing that covers arms and legs, and women in Western dress and makeup. At the new $2 million mosque on Mission Boulevard in Hayward, some Afghan men who go there sport long beards and wear traditional turbans and hats, but most have no facial hair. The younger men attend in fashionable jeans and jackets. Some wear baseball caps and sweat pants. "Most of the young (Afghan) people have assimilated into the culture, into the American dream," said the 30-year-old Mojadidi, who attends prayer services at the new Hayward mosque. "The adults -- that's not their dream. Their dream is family values -- that you have to respect your parents." If there is anything that unites Afghan people in the Bay Area, it's the feeling the United States abandoned their country after the Soviets were finally driven out 12 years ago. The U.S. government used Afghan fighters as a bulwark against Soviet expansion in Central Asia and the Middle East, and when the Soviet Union subsequently collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down, U.S. officials celebrated while millions of Afghan refugees remained in squalid camps in Pakistan and Iran. Afghanistan has never recovered, Afghan's say. The presence there of terrorist Osama bin Laden and the fact that Pakistan backs the Taliban are signs, they say, that outside forces still run the country. Returning to Afghanistan brings sadness to those who remember the 1970s, when there were few military problems, little begging on the streets and no such thing as an Afghan diaspora. During those days, tourists from the United States, England, France and elsewhere would stop in Afghanistan and visit Kabul, Kandahar and Bamiyan, where the 1,500-year-old Buddha statues were carved into a cliff face. "Tourists used to come to (Bamiyan) and spend money -- money that went to Afghanistan and the poor," said Amin Mehdavi, a 31-year-old mechanic from Union City who grew up in Kabul. "Even when the Russians were there, people would come to Bamiyan." When Mojadidi returned to Afghanistan in 1998 to visit his family, he found few of the townspeople from his childhood. "I visited a lot of graves," he said. "Most of my friends got killed during the war" against the Soviets. To recapture a more stable sense of identity and culture, Bay Area Afghans flock to the Afghan storefronts along Fremont Boulevard, attend Afghan music concerts at Fremont's Flamingo Palace and other venues, and read Afghan books, papers and poetry. (Rumi, who is the best-selling poet in the United States, was born in Balkh, Afghanistan, in 1207.) For news, Afghans here scroll the growing number of Afghan Web sites such as www.afgha.com and www.afghan-web.com, and listen to radio shows broadcast here in Dari and Pashto. Said Faizi, an Alameda man who produces a two-hour Saturday program called Radio Voice of Afghanistan, said his show is particularly important for older Afghan refugees who don't speak much English. "They need something in their own language," said Faizi, 61. "And (the program) is good for me because I am busy with it. Otherwise, what should I do? Sit home and get depressed?" Many Bay Area Afghans tell wrenching stories of fleeing Afghanistan in the middle of the night and having to walk for miles on dirt roads to avoid detection. Despite all the pain they associate with their country, older Afghans talk about returning some day, even if it's just to be buried there in peace. Sher Ahmad, 54, who grew up in Kandahar and is now director of a Fremont organization that helps refugees, went to his hometown in October and made arrangements for his final resting place. "I went to the graveyard of my parents," Ahmad said, "and I chose a graveyard for me. I said, 'Here is where I should be buried, right next to my mother.' 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