Afghanistan: torch transfers from King to People
Mohammed Zahir Shah, Afghanistan’s last king, was interred today. At al-Jazeera, the obituary notes that the King, who abdicated in 1973, presided over a forty-year period of stability and peace in Afghanistan. After the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, he returned briefly to his home state as a figure of unity.
Not everyone found the king to be an estimable person. Robert Fisk writes a somewhat self-personalized account of the King’s failings:
And what did our favourite Afghan king do as his country descended into foreign invasion, occupation, mass murder, civil war and Islamic puritanism of the least educated kind? He enjoyed Rome. Just as he ignored the possibility of war with Pakistan when he was King, so he largely ignored the catastrophe of his country when he was enjoying his long years of exile. His life in Rome, his visitors reported back to Kabul, was very much like the life he had lived in his royal palace at home. He was happy with his art and archaeology books and sport, and with his friends among the Italian upper classes. True, he occasionally – very occasionally – expressed his sorrow at the chaos of Afghanistan. But he was a man of the past, a victim of politics rather than a leader, a long-forgotten figurehead – until the Americans rediscovered him – for whom the dramas of his homeland were . . . mere ghosts of the titanic tragedy played out 2,000 miles from Rome.
The funeral included a period where tribal leaders, political leaders, and others could attend in concert and participate in the ceremonies. Afghanistan will be observing a three-day mourning period for the late King, and he will be buried near Kabul. Our condolences to the Afghanistan people, not just for the king, but for the loss of a symbol of what seems, now, to be a far-off stability: an imperfect stability, surely, because it was based upon nostalgia. With the death of Zahir Shah, it becomes important to find a living symbol of stability and peace–discarding what cannot be again–and finding a new hope. That hope should reside in appreciating the capabilities the Afghanistan citizens of the present: any and all of those much-beset people who desire and work daily toward a prosperous, peaceful life.