FWD: Kabul Zoo

[Guest guest]

By Pamela Constable

Washington Post Foreign Service

Saturday, March 31, 2001; Page A14

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The aging, half-blind lion gnaws indifferently at a

bucket of camel meat. The bear paces in a too-small cage, his snout rubbed

raw by the rusted bars. The falcon spreads flightless wings and stalks among

months of droppings.

There are monkeys, too, half-mad from boredom and torment, in the

bedraggled, shell-pocked prison that is the Kabul zoo. They are the favorite

targets of the boys who steal a few hours from shining shoes and peddling

candy and gathering firewood to come here.

The ragged street urchins poke at the monkeys with long sticks, hurl

handfuls of dirt into the cages, offer them food and then snatch it away,

put lighted cigarettes in the animals' mouths and snicker when the monkeys

drop them with a singed snarl.

" It's our only fun, " one shoeshine boy says with a shrug, jabbing a

sharpened branch into one cage. The ancient zoo guard runs toward the

children, raising his cane and shouting at them to keep away. How would the

boy feel if he were put in a cage and tormented with sticks? " I would cry, "

he says.

The Kabul zoo is not so different from the rest of this once elegant

capital, where European palaces built by benign kings are now heaps of

graffiti-scarred rubble; where two decades of war and six years of religious

fanaticism have driven out most educated inhabitants and left a moonscape of

refugees and beggars sleeping in abandoned ruins. Afghanistan, a brutalized

and desperate country of 25 million, is ruled by a radical Islamic militia

called the Taliban, whose principal goal is to forge a nation of puritanical

conformists.

The enforcers of this extreme Islamic ideal are the Taliban's religious

police, an autonomous and feared force of black-turbaned men with guns and

whips who career through the city streets in open trucks. They answer only

to their employer, the powerful Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the

Prevention of Vice.

In bazaars, they shout through loudspeakers that everyone must shut their

shops and head to mosques to pray. At traffic checkpoints, they leap out of

their trucks and drag people from taxis and buses, lashing hapless drivers

as they search for forbidden music cassettes and grabbing male passengers'

beards to see if they are long enough to meet Taliban rules.

When night falls, Kabul becomes a silent and deserted city of a million

invisible people, where virtually no one dares venture out after curfew and

the only vehicles on the streets are the feared trucks with their armed

squads of religious police.

Taliban officials, who took control of the city and most of the country in

1996, often claim that the Afghan populace is grateful to them for bringing

peace and security to the country after the end of Soviet occupation gave

way to factional fighting, chaos and brigandage in the early 1990s. Many

Kabul residents do express relief that the city is no longer awash in

weapons and crime, but now everyone lives in terror of the religious police.

Taliban courts mete out draconian physical punishments for infractions of

religious law. Men or women convicted of drinking alcohol or committing

adultery may be lashed 100 times in a public stadium. Thieves have their

hands amputated; homosexuals are crushed beneath toppled walls.

Kabul today is also a far less educated and cultured city than it was just

25 years ago, with schools and museums still lying in the ruins of war. Most

of the capital's middle class fled abroad years ago, replaced by an army of

exhausted rural refugees fleeing drought, poverty and civil conflict.

Like other urban institutions, the zoo was badly damaged in the factional

fighting of the early 1990s. Many animals died of hunger and neglect, and

the only elephant was killed by a rocket; other animals were sold to zoos in

Pakistan. Now many of the cages are empty and only a handful of creatures

remain, including a pair of vultures, two restless wolves, a clutch of

rabbits and a small, lone deer. A foreign charity provides food for the

animals, and a veterinarian is called when one falls ill.

The zoo's most famous inhabitant, Marjan the lion, survived the war but was

maimed after a rural guerrilla commander, fresh from combat with Soviet

troops, climbed into his enclosure to pose for a heroic picture. The annoyed

beast mauled him to death, and the guerrilla's brother, bent on revenge,

hurled a grenade inside and blinded Marjan in one eye.

Then last year, the old lion's longtime mate died of a mysterious illness.

" After that, he didn't eat for a week, " says Abdul Sattar, an elderly man

who has tended Marjan for 19 years. He earns $15 a month and lives in a dark

hut on the zoo grounds.

Each day Sattar strolls into Marjan's grassy den with a bucket of camel

meat, utterly unafraid. " He was the sultan of the forest, but we have a

peaceful coexistence, " he explains. The children watch for a while, then

wander over to investigate the other source of amusement here: BB guns and

targets set up among the exhibits.

In the old days, Sattar recalls, " this was a beautiful zoo, and

knowledgeable people came here. Now there are only rustic people who have

come to the city. They don't know anything about animals or their rights.

All I can do is try to keep them away from the cages. "

It is small wonder that a generation of urban children who have grown up in

fear and flight, scavenging on the streets to survive, illiterate because

their parents cannot afford to send them to school, beaten by police for

begging or loitering or snatching food, become the tormentors of smaller

caged animals.

Small wonder, too, that the zoo's half-dozen rhesus monkeys respond in kind.

They stare back defiantly at the crowds, menacingly baring their teeth and

grabbing away candy trays with nimble speed. Sometimes they take more

serious revenge, clamping onto outstretched fingers through the bars and

biting down as hard as they can.

In other Asian countries such as India, where they are revered as sacred

spirits and pampered by devout Hindus, wild urban monkeys accept proffered

bananas with grave and delicate politeness. In Afghanistan, where they are

poked and spat at by youngsters who have never known a stable or civilized

life, the monkeys have become a different species altogether.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company