[ALBSA-Info] NYTimes.com Article: Why Peshawar's Youth are Tinder for Islamic Extremism

[jetkoti at hotmail.com]

This article from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by jetkoti at hotmail.com.



Why Peshawar's Youth are Tinder for Islamic Extremism

October 21, 2001 

By PETER MAASS


 

Emroz Khan destroys for a living. He dismantles car
engines, slicing them open with a sledgehammer and a
crooked chisel, prying apart the cylinders, tearing out
pistons, dislodging screws and bolts and throwing the metal
entrails into a pile that will be sold for scrap. He is 21
and has been doing this sort of work for 10 years, 12 hours
a day, six days a week, earning $1.25 a day. 

His hands and arms are gnarled works of body art, stained a
rich black like fresh asphalt and ribboned with scars. As
dusk falls on Cinema Road, where Emroz works in a shop that
is so poor it has no name or sign, he rolls up his sleeve
and asks me to put my finger along a bulge on his forearm;
it feels as hard as iron. It is iron, a stretch of pipe he
drove into his body by mistake. He cannot afford to pay a
doctor to take it out. 

''I've had it for three years,'' he says. 

He opens his
left palm and places two fingers alongside what looks like
a crease, then pulls apart the crease to reveal a two-inch
gash that runs an inch deep. I hadn't noticed it because
the raw flesh was covered with grease, like the rest of his
palm and arm. The wound is two years old. 

''We work like donkeys,'' Emroz says. ''That's what our
life is like. It is the life of animals.'' 

Javaid Khan watched with apprehension. Javaid, who is 17,
began chopping up engines three months ago, when he dropped
out of school because he could no longer pay the fees. He
is new at this work, so he earns just $2.50 a week. His
hands and arms have not yet been mauled, but it will
happen. A hospital is nearby, and Javaid wishes he could be
one of the clean-cut medical sales reps he sees in the
neighborhood. ''I do not have the education,'' he
acknowledges. ''It makes me sad to think about it.'' 

There is much sadness on Cinema Road, so named because of
the movie theaters at the bottom of the street. A few feet
from the shop where Javaid works, children who don't know
their ages (they look 5 or 6) sift through the scraps of
the scrap merchants; one of them squats on the ground and
pounds the remains of a light socket, hoping to find a
morsel of tin or copper. A few dozen yards farther down the
road, boys who might be 10 or 11 clean out goat intestines
that have been discarded by a slaughterhouse; the
intestines, once dried, can be turned into ersatz leather.
The boys reek of offal. 

If you want to understand why the world no longer feels
terribly safe, you would do well to stroll down Cinema
Road. You would hear the chants of the muezzin, the shouts
of peddlers selling bruised bananas, the heavings of buses
so overloaded that passengers ride on roofs and the cries
of mutilated beggars pleading for a few rupees. You would
taste curry and dust on your tongue at the same moment, and
you would feel heat and energy in the air; at night, you
would hear gunfire. The sights and sounds would make you
think you had walked into a third-world ''Blade Runner,''
exhilarating and grotesque. And all around, you would
notice young men for whom life is abuse. The population of
Peshawar reflects the population of Pakistan as a whole --
63 percent are under the age of 25. To varying degrees,
that holds true for the Middle East, too; everywhere you
look in Cairo or Amman or Gaza or Baghdad or Damascus or
Tehran, you see young men. You need not visit these cities
to know this; just look closely at the crowds in a protest
or funeral; the faces are young, very young. And they are
very angry. 

Television often distorts matters, and that's the case with
the crowd scenes. Most young men in Pakistan are not
burning effigies of President Bush or fighting riot police.
Their anger is only loosely articulated, often because they
are struggling to survive and cannot afford the luxury of
taking an afternoon off to join a demonstration. But the
young men you see on television and the ones you don't see
belong to the same deprived generation. 

They live where globalization is not working or not working
well enough. They believe, or can be led to believe, that
America -- or their pro-America government, if they live
under one -- is to blame for their misery. Many are adrift,
cut off from their social foundations. Perhaps they moved
into the city from dying villages, or were driven there by
war or famine. There is no going back for them, yet in the
city there is not much going forward; the movement tends to
be downward. As they fall, they grab hold of whatever they
can, and sometimes it is the violent ideas of religious
extremists. 

Peshawar, one of the oldest cities in Asia, was conquered
by Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, and the Sikhs and
the Afghans, and, in the 19th century, the British. The
conquering ceased when Pakistan was born in 1947, but the
city remained the gateway to the Khyber Pass and to
Afghanistan. That was a curse, because 22 years ago
Afghanistan entered an era of warfare that has yet to end.
Nearly half of Peshawar's two million inhabitants are
refugees, most of them living in camps that are several
degrees below squalid. The local economy revolves around
smuggling -- of guns and ammunition, of VCR's and
televisions, of heroin and hashish. 

Aziz ul Rahman is a product of Peshawar. He is 18, a
vocational-school dropout. He has a job at a tire shop,
where he works in the mornings. In the afternoons he
studies the Koran at a madrassah, or religious school. The
one he attends is of the extreme variety, as most are these
days. I meet him at a protest, in the Khyber Bazaar, that
was organized by a pro-Taliban religious party. 

''The American leaders are very cruel to Muslims, so that
is why I am taking part in the demonstration today,'' he
says, politely, as we stand in a shaded alley to get out of
the noise and heat. ''I hear that the Americans are not
doing anything good in Palestine or Bosnia or Chechnya.
They are being cruel to Muslims.'' 

In the background, the speaker of the moment is inciting
the crowd against Pakistan's military regime, which is
backing Washington's anti-terror campaign. ''The generals
are stupid,'' he shouts. Then, like a rock star inviting
crowd participation, he calls out, ''Generals!'' and the
crowd roars back, ''Stupid!'' They are quick learners. 

Aziz wants to get back to the demo, so we part ways after a
half-hour. He did not fall into religious extremism by
choice; his preferred path, of becoming an engineer, was
closed off by poverty. This is common in Pakistan. Poor
families do their best to send a son to school, but in the
end they cannot manage. The son will get a backbreaking job
of some sort or, in some cases, keep the donkey's life at
bay by enrolling at a madrassah, most of which offer free
tuition, room and board. And that's where they learn that
it is honorable to blow yourself up amid a crowd of
infidels and that the greatest glory in life is to die in a
jihad. 


Politically-engaged youths are a minority, the tip of the
iceberg. They are the ones whose anger you see, whose
danger you sense. But the upset of Peshawar's youth is
manifested in many ways; in, for example, visits to
graveyards, where, among the newly dead and the long-dead,
they sit on bamboo mats and sing about their despair as
they smoke hashish. 

The Pinza Piran cemetery is a shrine of sorts, holding the
remains of five famous elders. If you wish to pay your
respects, you take off your shoes and walk into a tiled
yard, where tinsel hangs from trees and incense burns next
to the burial mounds. You say a prayer, give a few rupees
to beggars as you leave and walk across the dirt road to a
large yard from which musky smoke is issuing. 

Nearly 100 men lounge around, most of them in their late
teens or 20's, though some are in their 40's and 50's. They
sit in groups of four or five, passing around cigarettes
spiked with Afghan hash. Some share pipes, known as chilum,
which resemble small hookahs, and their bowls are filled
with chunks of hash that throw off smoke and flames like a
campfire. A man sitting near me says, ''You have your bars,
we have ours.'' 

Unless someone is singing, there is little noise. Some of
the youths are too drugged to do more than slump against a
tree. Others, emaciated looking, are lying down,
glassy-eyed; these are the heroin addicts, wasting toward
death. There is a man with a tame bird on his shoulder and
another with dreadlocks, which are rare in Pakistan. 

The best hash, known as tirra, costs about 35 cents for 10
grams. Smoking hashish is against the law, but because
Islam does not condemn hash as strongly and explicitly as
alcohol, it has become the drug of choice. There is nothing
secretive about the activities at Pinza Piran; the police
ignore it, especially if 50 rupees (about 80 cents) are
slipped into their palms when they nose around. 

I sit next to a youth, Malik, who says he is a student at a
technical college. He also says that he is forming his own
political party, that he has 450 followers across the
country and that he is in discussions with Saudis who might
provide financial support. He pulls a two-inch thick set of
worn business cards from his pocket; evidence, he says, of
his network of contacts. He is stoned and perhaps mad, but
he echoes public opinion when I ask why he wants to become
a politician: ''Because all of our leaders are corrupt, and
we have to get rid of them.'' 

Usually someone is playing the rabab, a traditional
stringed instrument, and someone is singing, usually a
plaintive song about an aching love. There are no women at
these gatherings, as the women of Peshawar tend to spend
their lives at home, donning a burqa if they venture
outside. That is why posters of the uncovered faces of
Indian starlets draw eager stares from men as they pass by
on the street. The segregation of the sexes is deeply
ingrained, but it's not easy to live with, as the lyrics of
one love song I heard indicated: 

''Show me your face/Show me your face/Where are you?/Where
are you?'' 


In the many circles of hell that exist for young men in
Pakistan, the lowest is found at Dabaray Ghara, on the
outskirts of Peshawar. It is an expanse of pits, dug out of
the sunbaked earth, in which several thousand men, mostly
refugees from Afghanistan, make bricks. It is the hardest
of labor because it takes place outdoors, no matter how hot
or cold, pays next to nothing and is, literally,
backbreaking. 

You see children as young as 4 or 5 in the pits, except
they are not playing. They are making bricks. There are few
men beyond the age of 30 or so. Horses carry bricks from
one pit to another, and they do so without being led; they
walk back and forth on dusty paths, too tired or too
hopeless to imagine trotting away to freedom. 

It is the humans, though, who suffer the most. Bakhtiar
Khan began working in the pits when he was 10. He is now 25
or 26. He isn't sure, because nobody keeps close track;
time passes, that is all. He works from 5 in the morning
until 5 in the afternoon, making 1,000 bricks a day, six
days a week, earning a few dollars a week. He is thin, he
wears no shirt or shoes and he cannot believe a foreigner
is asking about his life. 

''Life is cruel,'' he says. ''You can see for yourself. You
wear nice clothes and are healthy. But look at us. We have
no clothes to wear and we are not healthy. Your question is
amazing.'' 

The situation is worse than it appears, because the youths
at Dabaray Ghara carry an invisible burden. They don't earn
enough to live on, so they must borrow, especially when
there is a wedding or funeral. They borrow from the men who
own the pits, but the interest rates are so high, and their
wages so low, that they have no hope of paying back the
loans. Bakhtiar and his friends are only vaguely aware that
they are indentured slaves. 

They are illiterate, and the world of politics is beyond
their grasp. In a sense, this is encouraging, because they
have no time for polemics or protests. Yet it is
discouraging too, because they can be led to rally behind
any person or idea that promises to improve their lot. 

''I don't have the knowledge to blame a government,''
Bakhtiar says, as a dozen work mates gather around,
squatting in the bottom of a pit. ''I don't know about
politics, but for our problems, I blame the world
community. All humans should be equal, but we are not. You
ask me who is to blame. You find out who is to blame.'' 

He is not without hunches. 

''We arrived from Afghanistan
15 years ago. Since then I blame America, because it used
to support us, but now it leaves us in a place like this.
So if someone is fighting a jihad against America, I would
support them. But if America is willing to help us, we
support that, too.'' 

In Peshawar, even the lucky are damned. Ihsan u-Din is
enrolled at a civil engineering college. Before that, he
attended a private school. His brothers and sisters are
enrolled in school, too, thanks to their father's steady
income. Ihsan speaks good English, and he has the ultimate
luxury in Pakistan -- pocket money, which is why I ran into
him at a video parlor. 

Ihsan is in the first year of a five-year engineering
program. Compared with Emroz and the brick makers, and most
youths here, Ihsan has it good. But there's a catch.
Pakistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. Even
with a degree, it's very hard to get an engineering job.
You need connections and money. Ihsan's family doesn't have
enough of either. 

''It is a game of money,'' he explains. ''Even if you are a
good engineer, you will not get a positive response when
you apply, unless you pay. This has been the truth for 20
years. It hasn't changed.'' 

Did I say there was a catch to his life? Actually, there
are two. The second one is this: Ihsan's father is in the
United Arab Emirates, where he works as a taxi driver
earning infinitely more than he could in Pakistan. He sends
money to his family so that his children can eat well and
go to school. But Ihsan's father does not earn enough money
to buy a plane ticket home once a year, or once every two
years -- or hardly ever. 

''I have not seen my father for eight years,'' Ihsan said.
''Is that right? He sends pictures and calls. But we don't
want calls. We want to see him. That is the problem of my
country. My father is far from me.'' 

They might not be separated for long. Ihsan is thinking of
leaving school and joining his father in the U.A.E., where
he can drive a taxi, if he's lucky. That's the best he can
hope for -- not to work in his country as an engineer but
to drive a cab in a foreign land. It may not be the U.A.E. 

''America is such a fine place,'' Ihsan says. 

Haroon
Bilour has the answers. a lawyer who serves on the town
council, Bilour reels off statistics like a computer
spitting out mathematical equations. Nearly half of the
city is without running water. Away from the main roads,
which are in horrible shape, there are few paved roads. The
majority of the city's inhabitants live below the poverty
level. They have run their miserable infrastructure right
into the ground. 

''Peshawar has suffered rather than benefited from
globalization,'' Bilour says, sitting on a couch in his
office. He has bolted the door, because the flow of
assistants and colleagues and needy citizens cannot be
halted otherwise. ''No aid package or special package of
any kind has been provided by the world at large, or by the
government of Pakistan. This is a very sorry state.'' 

For Bilour, the answer to Peshawar's problems comes down to
one issue: schools. Building them and ensuring that parents
can afford to enroll their children. Not counting refugees,
only 52 percent of the city's school-age children attend
school, and of those, nearly one-third attend madrassahs.
If the city had the infrastructure to encourage investment
and create jobs, and if it had more schools to neutralize
the madrassahs, youths might not be tempted to spend their
days chanting ''Death to America.'' 

But Bilour is a realist. He knows how reluctant politicians
in the West are to lower tariffs, ease quotas or raise
foreign aid, even though, currently, foreign aid accounts
for only a tiny fraction of government spending. He also
knows that the government in Islamabad is unlikely to be
much help; corruption is endemic, and a large portion of
state revenues go into military spending. So as the United
States begins fighting a war that has Afghanistan as its
target, Bilour, whose city is the traditional gateway to
Afghanistan, is not in a joyous mood. 

''We are not against our territory being used for the war
against terrorism,'' he says. ''We fear only that Peshawar
will be ignored again. We are petrified that we will have
to shelter more refugees, that there will be more bomb
blasts here and that we will have no help from the world
community. If we are again asked to make sacrifices for the
West, we must be able to show our young generation that we
can get schools and hospitals and a properly developed
city.'' 

Pause. 

''I am not hopeful.'' 



Peter Maass is the author of ''Love Thy Neighbor: A Story
of War,'' his memoir of the conflict in Bosnia.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/21/magazine/21PESHAWAR.html?ex=1004969650&ei=1&en=08355f61c4dc5e4f



HOW TO ADVERTISE
---------------------------------
For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters 
or other creative advertising opportunities with The 
New York Times on the Web, please contact Alyson 
Racer at alyson at nytimes.com or visit our online media 
kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo

For general information about NYTimes.com, write to 
help at nytimes.com.  

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company