Caretaker of Kabul's British cemetery, Rahimullah dies

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Caretaker of Kabul's British cemetery, Rahimullah dies

Postby dawud » Mon Mar 22, 2010 7:05 am

Caretaker of Kabul's British cemetery Rahimullah dies

Rahimullah looked after the British cemetery in Kabul for almost 30 years
Jerome Starkey, Kabul

To a shopkeeper with a few sheep in a part of Kabul, a well-watered patch of grass with high walls to fend off the urban sprawl was prime city-centre grazing. It didn’t matter to Rahimullah that it was an old British cemetery.

It was a few years after Russian troops had invaded and the previous caretaker had died. Most of the foreign diplomats had fled and the hippies had long since moved on. According to his son, Abdul Samay, the newly married Rahimullah took it upon himself — and his sheep — to keep the grass in check. So began a new career.

Last week, after almost 30 years of tending the graves in the British Cemetery — through a second foreign invasion, Taleban rule and a civil war — the elderly caretaker was laid to rest in a Muslim graveyard not far from where he worked.

His son has taken over. He gets paid a few pounds a day by the British Embassy but now the sheep are rarely, if ever, seen inside.

Rahimullah’s death, from natural causes, marked the end of a chapter in the cemetery’s history that charts, through broken stone and marble memorials, the changing fortunes of Afghanistan and its many visitors.

On the slopes of what was once an old British cantonment — now a trendy residential district — the high-walled cemetery is an oasis of verdant calm. In 1879, however, it was a hive of military activity; it was still outside the city, which was clustered on the far side of the Kabul river, and the cantonment’s defences were only half-built when it was attacked and besieged during the second Anglo-Afghan war.

The earliest graves include that of the Victoria Cross winner Captain John Cook, of the 5th Gurkha Rifles, killed in December 1879 after leading a bayonet charge to defend the British camp. According to a report in the London Gazette at the time, he had earned his VC a year earlier for charging out of a trench under heavy fire “with such impetuosity that the enemy broke and fled”.

The graves from the middle of the last century tell of explorers, missionaries, aid workers, journalists and even some children — a reminder of the expatriate families who once used to fill entire neighbourhoods in Kabul.

Sir Aurel Stein, the Hungarian-born British archaeologist, was buried there in 1943 after finally winning permission from the King, Zahir Shah, to study Alexander the Great’s Afghan campaigns. He died the same year that he arrived.

There is an American engineer who was sent to work on the Helmand irrigation project in the 1950s, a British family killed in a car crash and a French aviation engineer. At least two women there were murdered, including the British aid worker Gayle Williams, shot as she walked to work in 2008.

Other graves date from happier eras. In 1972 a man identified as William Joseph Jahrmakt, 36, was buried under a gravestone proclaiming “Billy Batman loves Joan, Jade, Hassan, Caldoannia and Digger” — a reminder of Afghanistan’s historic place on the hippy trail from Europe to India, from a time when it was more famous for mountains and marijuana than Mujahidin and war.

Rahimullah would tell visitors with glee an anecdote about how Mullah Omar, the Taleban’s one-eyed supreme leader, visited him a few months before the regime collapsed in 2001. Mullah Omar asked him why he tended the graves of infidels; Rahimullah replied that, at his age, a blind man would have more chance of finding a new job — forgetting for a moment that Mullah Omar was half blind.

The most recent additions include the large black memorial stones commemorating the British servicemen killed since 2001. Soldiers are not buried there any more but aid workers and missionaries are. An Italian woman was buried there last week. There are also memorials to Canadian, German and other Nato forces. British officials usually hold a service there every year.

A spokesman for the British Embassy in Kabul paid tribute to Rahimullah. “Through his diligent work, he preserved the dignity and honour of all those buried or commemorated there,” he said. “We are delighted that his son has agreed to continue the fine work of his father.”

Officials paid Rahimullah about $150 (£100) a month. Abdul Samay said that he gets $200. “As soon as I knew left from right, I knew this place,” he said. “From here is where I went to school. From here to the shops. It’s like home to me.”
Religion is often criticized for its heavy-handed approach to guilt and shame. The Ford fiasco convinces me that there is an important place for both.
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dawud
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