UN workers warn killings in surge of anger prompted by Qur'an burning could end Afghan mission
Syed Jamal had a front-row seat for Friday's sacking of the UN compound in Mazar-e-Sharif. The small building containing offices for the provincial mission are separated from the bread shop owned by the 17-year-old's family by just an open drain and a few dozen yards of rutted, unpaved road.
The day after the attack, a group of 20 bored policemen were lounging around in the front of the gutted building, biding their time by reading UN leaflets that had become strewn in front of the building, and standing guard in front of a pair of burned-out trucks.
But the dramatic events of Friday – events that shocked the world, imperilled the entire UN mission and raised serious doubts about how Afghanistan will handle the handover of power from its foreign backers – were of marginal interest to Jamal and the boys messing around on the corner.
And there were mixed feelings about the rights and wrongs of an incident that cost the lives of seven UN staff – four Gurkha security guards and three European UN diplomats – making it the worst crisis to hit the international organisation in Afghanistan.
Yes, they thought what happened on their doorstep was wrong – particularly the beheading of two UN staff, who they accepted were only in Mazar to "serve Afghanistan". But, they said, "the foreigners" needed to understand the level of anger at the desecration of the Qur'an by a Christian extremist on the other side of the world.
"Why do they not respect us?" asked Jamal. "We do not burn their Christian books, so they need to understand that the Qur'an is our most holy book."
It was a question repeated in other parts of Afghanistan as anger over the Qur'an-burning fuelled a second day of violence, sparking riots in the southern city of Kandahar in which nine protesters died and more than 80 were injured. Demonstrations in cities such as Kabul and Herat against Florida pastor Terry Jones's stunt were reported to have stayed peaceful, in stark comparison to Friday's drama in Mazar.
It was in the city's exquisite Blue Mosque, where Jones's Qur'an-burning was the subject of a Friday-prayers sermon, that the afternoon's bloody sequence of events began to unfold. Upon leaving the mosque, worshippers found another set of religious leaders in a Toyota Corolla kitted out with loudspeakers urging people to join them at the burning of Jones in effigy.
But then the crowd turned and started walking the one-mile journey towards the UN compound.
Atiullah Ansari, head of the Blue Mosque, said there had been no plan to do that and claimed that radical madrasa students from outside the city were to blame. These "agents of the Taliban and Hezb-e-Islami [a Taliban-allied insurgent group]" were solely responsible for the violence, he argued.
That view was also being pushed by provincial government officials keen to blame a small minority for inciting the violence, although few analysts accepted it. Unusually, one of the Taliban's spokesmen, Zabiullah Mujahid – a man not usually given to missing an opportunity to claim credit for mayhem – sent a text message to the Observer denying involvement.
If the glimmer of popular sympathy for violence in Mazar is disturbing, so too is the fact that such a terrible attack on western civilians should have happened there at all. Mazar is a highly secure city of ordered streets, where cars are regulated by traffic lights which, almost uniquely in Afghanistan, not only work but are obeyed.
When Liam Fox, the defence secretary, toured Afghanistan, he made a point of adding Mazar to the usual British itinerary of Kabul and Helmand. "It was a totally unthreatening environment," he said at the time. "It's a city the size of Bristol and it felt just like any safe city in Central Asia."
Indeed, there are few signs of the concrete bastions and blast walls that encrust important buildings in other Afghan cities. The newly opened US consulate, which has taken over an old hotel, does not even have razor wire along its not particularly high walls.
And the UN compound looks, with hindsight, absurdly under-protected. Little stood in the way of Friday's crowds except a metal car barrier and a couple of Gurkhas who, on being overwhelmed by the crowds, were beaten with the butts of their own assault rifles, eyewitnesses said.
The image of a furious mob cutting down the white men who had come into their midst conjured up parallels with the west's previous forays into the country, not least the first Anglo-Afghan War, which was preceded by a crowd overwhelming a British position and killing the famous diplomat Alexander Burnes in 1841.
That incident had in part been due to the dissolute behaviour of foreigners that had been gradually enraging the locals in the conservative Islamic country for some time.
Many believe the same is happening again. "There is a lot of anger after years in which western military operations have caused an accumulation of civilian casualty cases," wrote Thomas Ruttig, director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network. "Afghans are tired of the repeated initial denials, then admission that something may have gone wrong and then apologies. Paying compensation might be nice gestures but cannot bring anyone back to life."
Politicians, including the president Hamid Karzai, tap into public anger in order – claim his many critics – to mask his own shortcomings. The day before the Mazar riots, the Afghan president fuelled the controversy by condemning the Qur'an burning and calling for Jones to be arrested.
In days gone by, the UN liked to think it stood above the many conflicts in Afghanistan, working as a vital independent arbiter. Today, however, the international organisation is regarded as too weak to be truly useful by the Americans and partisan by both the government and much of the insurgent movement.
The Karzai government's displeasure with the UN was illustrated earlier this month when Ban Ki-moon, the organisation's secretary general, received an extraordinary letter from the Afghan foreign minister demanding radical changes to its mandate in the country. The government demanded that the UN close down many of its offices, limiting its presence to just "six recognised zones throughout the country."
The tragedy is that the UN had just started preparing for potentially greater risks to its staff in future, as the country starts a multi-year process of "transition" from Nato to Afghan security control.
By the end of 2014, the entire country is meant to be in the hands of the Afghan National Army and its police force, with certain cities and provinces due to be transfer this year – including Mazar. But in a sign that they are not fully confident in Afghanistan's security services, UN officers have been looking at ways to improve the safety of their staff in areas that are soon to be handed over.
Even in Bamiyan, by far the most benign and anti-Taliban area in the country, which is also slated to be transferred away from Nato control this year, the UN has drawn up plans to move from the compound that has served it well for years to the other side of the town and a more secure area.
It is the sort of development that is likely to further erode already rock-bottom morale among many UN staff who, over the last two years, have seen their freedom to operate drastically curtailed in the name of security. Today they live and work in increasingly fortress-like facilities and only see everyday Afghanistan through the thick glass of their armoured vehicles.
Now things could get even worse, with many UN staffers predicting that – as with the aftermath of an attack on a Kabul guesthouse in 2009 that left five dead – many people might be sent out of the country altogether to work remotely for Afghanistan from Dubai.
Writing on her personal blog in response to Friday's attack, one aid worker called Una Moore said that the episode did not represent the beginning of the end of the international presence in Afghanistan; "this is the end," she wrote.
"Unless we, the internationals, want our guards to fire on unarmed protesters from now on, the day has come for us to leave Afghanistan."
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