When is a fact not a fact? The blog post last month about Red Colour News Soldier touched on that. Now I find myself unexpectedly revisiting it through two recent events connected to my life four decades ago.
British Embassy, Kabul, 1979. In fact, this bit was the Ambassador’s Residence, believe it or not.
It started with an obituary. Obituaries always seems unsatisfactory when they are of someone you once knew, even if only slightly: a life summarised in a few hundred words somehow cannot do justice to the personal memory. This obituary was of the journalist Robert Fisk and it immediately sent my mind scurrying back to a brief acquaintance I had had with him in Afghanistan some forty years before.
After the Soviet occupation in 1979, the crowd of western journalists reporting on events, would do the rounds of embassies in Kabul to pick up information. I was a junior diplomat in the British Embassy and so they came to my office and listened and made notes and asked questions and left again. I enjoyed chatting to them because they were new faces and intelligent people. I think that I had vaguely heard of Robert Fisk from his reporting in Northern Ireland. One morning my office door crashed open and in he walked. He sat down, started talking, and didn’t stop for about an hour, telling me exactly what was going on and how I was wrong about almost everything. I couldn’t get a word in edgeways, but he was very entertaining and I took to him.
Shortly after that he filed a report which The Times published about a trip he had made north of Kabul, up the Salang road. He either went in a Soviet troop carrier or was picked up by one, I can’t remember which. Anyway, they had come under fire, according to the report, and he had been given a gun by the Russian soldiers and told to defend himself. I discussed this report with other journalists and eyebrows were raised very high. I had no idea whether that was professional jealousy or seasoned judgement.
I was eating a meal with him in a local restaurant shortly after and I thought I would mention this report. Maybe I didn’t show sufficient respect, but he was very, very touchy about it. His brow darkened. “You can go too far, you know.” he said and there was an awkward silence for a few moments. I saw him a few more times but the report was never mentioned again.
What actually happened? Does a report in a western newspaper of repute establish authenticity? It’s those slippery facts again – the ones that Li Zhensheng and Zhan Xianliang wrestled with. Our lives are underpinned by certain suppositions but outside of a courtroom – and maybe not even there - very little is established beyond reasonable doubt.
The second coincidence stemmed from a doppelganger who has made odd appearances in my life. Someone whom I had known in Kabul and who now edits an academic journal on Afghan affairs contacted me a couple of months ago to say that I figured in a piece that had just been published in his journal about the history of the British Institute of Afghan Studies (BIAS) in Kabul. He sent me a copy and I found it very odd. It was well researched, meticulously annotated and it did indeed refer to my name and my job title and it quoted a couple of memos with my name at the bottom. To understand why it was odd we have to take a step back.
When I first arrived in Kabul I met an older, very cultivated, man, Ralph Pinder-Wilson, who was head of the BIAS. I became good friends with him: he had a great influence on me and I learnt a lot from him about attitude and conduct. One day in 1982 he was suddenly arrested by the Afghan authorities on very unlikely charges. It turned serious when after a brief trial he was condemned to death.
I was a bit distressed by the article in this academic journal because the memos quoted and the account of these events suggested that I had more or less left Ralph to stew in his own juice; no one from the Embassy had visited him in jail, it said, and the memos cited were not very sympathetic to his plight. But here’s the thing. This all happened in 1982 and I had left Afghanistan in 1981. The trial, the sentence, the memos: all of that happened a year after I had resigned from my position and gone back to the UK. I certainly didn’t write those memos: when Ralph was in jail I was thousands of miles away in the UK, my short diplomatic career just a memory. Who then was this other shadowy Peter Barker still operating in my absence? He certainly seemed to have written the memos and was active in advising various government departments and committees. What was going on? I pointed out this apparent rent in the fabric of reality to the editor of the journal but he knew no more than I and neither of us could explain the curious sequence of events. Doppelganger? Coincidence? Spooks?
In the end, Ralph was released from prison shortly after his trial and put on a flight back to London so all was well. It must have been a frightening ordeal but he turned it into a polished and very funny anecdote which always amused me when I heard him tell it in later years.
But still. When our own lives become a playground for unruly factoids spilling through from some other shadow realm what is left for us to depend on?
Here are some photos from those times. They seem much less complicated.
I was just a poor northern boy……I’d never seen so many melons in my life before. He was selling them. Well, obviously.
Uncombed cotton. You could buy it and fill old grain sacks with it to make great floor cushions. We had some in our house for many years.
Look at the colouring of the little girl on the left. You saw many Afghans with straw coloured hair and blue or green eyes. They were said to be the genetic descendants of Alexander The Great’s armies. That’s romantic enough to be worth believing, I think.
These children will be in their fifties now and it is hard to imagine the lives they will have led in their unhappy country over the last forty years.