- "Drink as much as you can," says a tubby man
in lederhosen as you push your way through the narrow entrance. It's not
the sort of thing you expect to hear in Afghanistan. Inside the doorway,
there is a small beer garden crammed with people who have taken his advice
to heart. Foam is flying as drinkers try to dance to the music and cradle
their giant beer mugs at the same time.
-
- Deafening traditional oompah music blasts from a stereo,
and a large group of men piston enthusiastically to the beat. From a table,
someone strikes up a German folk song, and soon a crowd is joining in.
-
- One woman is wearing a Bavarian barmaid's blouse with
plunging neckline, and has squeezed herself into too-tight shorts. She
would raise eyebrows in Piccadilly Circus, let alone Kabul, where outside,
Afghan women still scurry past hidden in the all-covering blue burka. Welcome
to the brave new Afghanistan, complete with German beer festival and, in
a week's time, the first democratic election. However, scan the crowd at
the beer festival again, and all is not as it seems. The drinkers are all
"internationals". The only Afghans present are waiters pouring
the beers. Only foreigners are allowed to drink in Kabul.
-
- Arriving at Kabul airport, the first impression is striking.
It is no longer the familiar war-ravaged city of bombed-out buildings.
Construction sites are popping up all over town. The upmarket districts
where the internationals live are spick and span. But it's only skin deep.
Just drive out to the edge of the city and amid the dust-blown tents of
refugee camps, you can find the old Afghanistan. It is unchanged, say international
human rights monitors. The poll is being heralded as a major triumph in
Afghanistan's path to peace and democracy, and the Western-backed President
Hamid Karzai is widely expected to win.
-
- President George Bush trumpeted voter registration figures
- 10.5 million - as a major success at the first televised debate of the
US presidential election. The only problem is that the figures are flawed
by huge numbers of voters registering themselves two, three, or even four
times. Saifullah, a baker in central Kabul, said he had registered four
times, even travelling five hours on foot to his village in Panjshir province
to pick up a registration card there. He insists he will only vote once,
but wanted the other cards as mementoes.
-
- A plan to mark voters' fingers with indelible ink should
prevent multiple voting, if it is enforced.
-
- But the problems don't stop there, according to John
Sifton of Human Rights Watch. "Just about everywhere we went we had
people complaining of political repression and intimidation at the hands
of the warlords," he said.
-
- ©2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd. All rights reserved
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=568038
|
