Where Russians buy Chinese kitsch from Afghan exiles

MOSCOW -- Thirty years ago this week, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Ten years later, the Afghans invaded the Soviet Union. Not being numerous enough to occupy the entirety of the world's largest country, they settled for a pair of downtrodden high-rises a few miles south of the Kremlin that are known collectively as the Sevastopol Hotel.

The Russians washed their hands of their tragic Afghan misadventure in 1989. But in Moscow, the Afghan exiles remain, probably forever, numbering in their tens of thousands.

What a scene the Sevastopol is!

Picture two identical crumbling 16-storey grey concrete monoliths, their pocket-sized parking lots smeared with slush and crammed with trucks, vans, cars, hand carts and tradesmen laden to the eyebrows with corrugated cartons of sundry goods, all of them steering against a tsunami of Muscovite housewives, hoodlums and babushki who are here not to attack the aliens with pipes and brass knuckles -- though this happens, too -- but to bargain for the biggest hoard of kitsch this side of the Ural Mountains.

There are at least 200 separate stores within the buildings, selling everything from barber's supplies to figurines of the Buddha. Take Room 701, for example. Here we find dozens of three-dimensional plastic panels with images of baying wolves, prancing stallions, tumbling waterfalls and snarling tigers.

"Welcome to the Sevastopol!" chirps a young capitalist as we enter, hurrying to offer tea and chickpeas. "Where Russians come to buy from Afghans everything that is made in China!"

He is wrapping up a transaction with a jobber named Munir who is bench-pressing a wad of U.S. hundred-dollar bills as thick as his leg. Munir says that he has not seen his homeland in more than 10 years, that he personally fought alongside the Red Army "on all fronts," and that his wife and kids remain in Afghanistan. So he is probably typical of the lonely hearts of the Sevastopol Hotel.

"What do you say to the mothers of Canada who have lost their sons in your country?" I ask him.

"What can I say to them?" he replies. " 'Good health to you?' How painful it must be to lose in a strange land a child that you raised in a civilized country."

"Should Canada stay or go?"

"To invade Afghanistan is a stupid mistake," Munir says. "But to leave is a criminal act."

In the other tower sits the Mister Big of the Afghan diaspora. He is a hearty soul named Ghulam Muhammad, with four telephones on his desk, a wide-screen TV tuned to a speech by President Medvedev, Saddam Hussein eyebrows and a (Groucho) Marxist moustache. He hands me a business card that identifies him, simply enough, as "The Chairman."

"This war can be won but there's no will, no desire," he is saying. "I can one hundred per cent guarantee you that if the U.S. was really fighting to win, then the Taliban wouldn't be there.

"I lost half my relatives. I was wounded. Afghan people are dying and your sons are dying. For what? They died to save criminals. You can bring in a million more people but if the Afghan people won't fight the Taliban, then nothing will change."

Muhammad smiles and says, "We had at the Sevastopol for the first time in the history of Afghanistan a free election and I won." That was in 1997. Since then, the former governor of Kunar province and the former Communist Party boss of Kabul University has been waiting in the bullpen for any of his four handsets to ring with the summons to go in and pitch.

"Those who are now in power are not educated, and those who are educated are sitting here waiting," he says. "There are three hundred generals here, eight thousand professional officers, and one hundred journalists."

"It takes eighty officers to control one journalist?" I muse.

"They call us the Government-In-Exile," Mister Big says. "But nobody ever asks us for advice. If Bush or Canada would have asked us, we would have created a government of intelligentsia. But billions of dollars will not change the fact that the Afghan government is corrupt."

"Will Obama's surge succeed?"

"Obama will be the second Gorbachev," Ghulam Muhammad sighs.

"To America, that sounds good," I suggest.

"But bad for the world," says Mister Big.

Allen Abel is a Brooklyn-born Canadian journalist based in Washington, D.C.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 2, 2010 H6