[Mb-civic] Lessons of life and death - The Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

  Lessons of life and death


    Afghan schools under siege as Taliban maintain grip

By Declan Walsh  |  March 16, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

SARKH DOZ, Afghanistan -- Remnants of the ousted Taliban regime have 
launched a campaign of arson, intimidation, and assassination targeting 
schools and teachers in southern Afghanistan, forcing some 200 schools 
to close in recent months, local officials say.

Five teachers have been killed, said Hayat Allah Rafiqi, head of the 
education department in Helmand province. Hundreds more teachers have 
received ''night letters" -- threatening notices nailed to their houses 
under darkness, warning them to quit teaching or die.

''Our teachers are helpless because security is so weak," Rafiqi said. 
''By day the government rules, but by night it is the hand of the Taliban."

The attacks, which President Hamid Karzai estimated have idled 100,000 
students in the south, have undermined attempts by the government to 
revive the country's educational system and teach both boys and girls -- 
a key to Afghanistan's recovery from decades of war. Girls were barred 
from attending school when the fundamentalist Islamic regime ruled the 
country in the 1990s.

While schools in Kandahar and Zabol provinces also have been targeted, 
Helmand has been particularly hard hit. Sixty-six of Helmand's 224 
schools -- many of them built or repaired with American aid -- have 
closed, and others have reduced classes as parents move pupils to the 
safety of the main towns. Even there, protection is uncertain.

In one of the Helmand attacks, assassins dragged a teacher from his 
classroom in the village of Nad Ali and shot him at the school gate. His 
crime: teaching girls.

Two days later, gunmen burst into Karte Laghan secondary school in the 
provincial capital, Laskhar Gah, killing a watchman and a student. The 
attack occurred less than a mile from the new British military base.

''We are always afraid of being shot or attacked on our way home," said 
Gul Ali, a female teacher of chemistry and biology at the school.

In rural areas, schools are particularly vulnerable.

An arson attack in January destroyed the lone school in the sleepy 
settlement of Sarkh Doz, near the sluggish Helmand river. Now the 
playground is ghostly quiet, the gate is bolted shut, and all that 
remains of the yellow classrooms is a charred shell of cinders and ash.

Residents say militants in a station wagon pulled up, doused the 
building in gasoline, and struck a match. Then the car roared up the 
rutted road to the next village, Mangalzai, and torched a school there, too.

The attacks on the schools have dealt a blow to aid efforts in Helmand, 
the volatile southern province where US troops are currently handing 
control to a 3,300-strong British force.

''Terrible," said police chief Ahmed Samonwal, shaking his head as he 
walked past the blackened building in Sarkh Doz. ''This is the work of 
our enemies."

While some teachers have quit, most of Helmand's 1,500 teachers are 
defying the threats. For some, it is a matter of patriotism; for others, 
the security of a $50 monthly salary.

''Of course we are afraid," said one teacher, Abdul Hakim. ''But this is 
our duty. For the sake of the next generation, our country, and our 
children, we cannot quit our jobs."

Hakim, a man with piercing gray eyes under a dark turban, teaches 
12-year-old boys at a school in Garmser district, a 90-minute drive 
south of Laskhar Gah. An atmosphere of fear pervades the town.

The police station is peppered with bullet holes since an attack by the 
Taliban in December that left nine dead. The town's school for girls is 
shut, Hakim said, and one of his colleagues who had received a night 
letter fled to Laskhar Gah. But the boys' school has not been targeted 
by the Taliban and remains open.

The Taliban's anti-education offensive is consistent with its virulent 
opposition to schooling for girls. But the campaign also serves a 
broader purpose -- to erode the tenuous authority of Karzai's government.

''This is not just about girls. The Taliban are against all education," 
said Sardar Muhammad of Mercy Corps, one of just five relief agencies 
operating in Helmand. ''Ignorant people are easier to control. When they 
were fighting their way to power [in the mid-1990s], only the uneducated 
were sent to the front."

The climate of terror also suits the province's drug barons with whom 
the Taliban have allied in recent months, local officials say. As a 
result, heroin and opium flow across the border into neighboring 
Pakistan and freshly trained insurgents travel from Pakistan in the 
opposite direction.

At his office, the newly appointed governor of Garmser, Haji Abdullah 
Jan, displayed an antitank mine rigged to a remote control device 
intended to kill him along a roadside earlier this month. ''Some 
villagers called me with a warning. Otherwise I would have driven into 
it," he said.

As NATO forces prepare to assume control in the south, securing the 
schools of Helmand will soon be a task for British paratroopers, about 
2,500 of whom are expected to start arriving in early May, backed up 
with Apache attack helicopters. But the British commander in Laskhar 
Gah, Colonel Henry Worsley, said their principal role was to train and 
support the fledgling Afghan security forces. ''In a place like Garmser 
we might help mount a check post, put a soldierly look on it, and tell 
them how to defend it," he said.

Haji Karim Khan, 65, considered his family's educational history. Four 
decades ago, he graduated from Kabul University, he said. During the 
bloody Soviet occupation, just one of his sons completed secondary school.

Now his six grandsons may not even make it that far -- they have just 
been moved to the town of Goreshk since all four local schools closed 
down. The people of Helmand say the Karzai government has abandoned 
them, he said.

''You just hear a small item at the end of the news saying the situation 
in the southwest is bad these days. But that is not enough. They need to 
tell us what they are going to do," he said. 

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2006/03/16/lessons_on_life_and_death/
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