لر او بر یو افغان

The last will and testament in the title of this poem is very apt and a fine reminder of where we are. It comes from this fine collection of poems by Basheer Ghowakh that I have been reading of late and is an appeal for unity for Pashtuns, Lar and Bar - from Pakistan and Afghanistan. Given that the Pashtun masses face multiple challenges and that all is not well on the home patch, a periodic reminder of what binds us in commonality is no bad thing. This poem is especially poignant as it takes the form of a short piece of advice given to the poet by the Sun - a waseeat. The message contained herein makes a lot of sense.

تور خان

 وصیت

بشیر ګواښ

دا د تېر

مازیګري لمر

په تلو تلو کې

راته وایي

سره یو شئ لرو برو

کنه زما په شان ډوبېږئ

Badshah Khan: A Torch for Peace

Yesterday evening, I saw the film The Frontier Gandhi: Badshah Khan, A Torch for Peace, which played at the Marina Mall as part of the Middle East Film Festival, Abu Dhabi 2009. The film is an amazing documentary on the life of the Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a towering giant of heart and stature who was, is and will always remain a Pashtoon King of Peace, known as Badshah/Bacha Khan. He was a key figure in the Free India movement and this of course, invited the wrath of the British, even towards his peaceful cause.

As a Pashtoon, Bacha Khan showed the people that he loved a very different way - he challenged the opinion that Pashtoons could only be known for the gun and as a result could only remain backward. Bacha Khan was a good friend of Mahatma Gandhi and, like Gandhi, managed to mobilise the masses to resist injustice through peace. His movement of Khudai Khidmatgars (Allah's helpers) were taught to stand on their feet and bring about a positive change in themselves and their society through peace and social work. In the film, his daughter talks about his 'love for the poor people'.

Peace: Long live the King

His peace movement invited trouble and for a third of his time on earth, Bacha Khan was prisoner of conscience - in 1962 he was named by Amnesty International as Prisoner of the Year - overall for every three days of his life, he spent one day in British or Pakistani jails, often in solitary confinement. He continually challenged the validity of the British laid-down borders and later found sanctuary in Afghanistan - a natural home for the Pashtoons, travelling extensively and asking to be buried in Jalalabad when he was dying. When Bacha Khan's family said it would be difficult to arrange visas to cross the border, his reply to his family was "One day all this will be one".

Malang Jan - وطن ژاړي - The Homeland Weeps

Malang Jan's poetry is amongst my favourite and in the wake of 9/11 reflection, I think his words capture the mood of a homeland* that is divided and asks questions of why this is so. I take these two lines from Watan Jaree وطن ژاړي (The Homeland Weeps).

وطن به ژاړي په قيامت زمونږ نيکونو ته

عرض کوي پلورنو ته، زه مو چا ته وم سپارلى؟

Watan ba jaree pa qiyamat zamung nikuna ta
Arz kawee plornoo ta, za mu cha ta wam sparley

On judgement day our homeland will weep before our grandfathers,
We ask the sellers, who handed us over?

Tor_Khan تور خان

On this very day, back in 2001, the Americans felt wounded following the attacks that the world now knows about and invaded Afghanistan shortly after. In 2009, I can safely say that the American plan for Afghanistan and Pakistan is in a state of confusion. Osama Bin Laden seems to have dropped off the agenda and instead Americans and NATO have strained relationships with the people on the ground. Crowds, at weddings, funerals and prayers are vulnerable to missile attacks from the skies and US intentions are met with a genuine scepticism. What happened to the confident promises of development and reconstruction?

The Taleban, never fully dismantled, emerge from the shadows as a "credible" resistance force. That the Americans don't admit that they are losing the battle in the Pashtoon heartlands troubles me. The Americans are not the only ones wounded. Today, the Pashtoons are being bombed back to the stone-age, our supplies are interrupted, we are forced to flee our homes, our tribal leaders are slowly being killed off and we are punished in a manner that the British colonialists called Collective Punishment (i.e. it's indiscriminate - we're all blamed for the militants).

Eric Margolis calls this a war on Pashtoons. Malang Jan Baba was right - who sold us out?

*In much of his poetry, Malang Jan writes about Pashtunistan.