A British man, Old Etonian Rory Stewart (dubbed Lawrence of Belgravia after the British soldier known as Lawrence of Arabia famed for his liaison role during the Arab Revolt between Britain, their Allies the Hashemite Arabs against the Ottoman Empire in 1918 ), aims to preserve some of Kabul's ancient monuments and buildings...
Lawrence of Belgravia fights to save old Kabul
By Tom Coghlan
12/07/2007
The Telegraph
An Old Etonian former British diplomat is leading moves to preserve the mud and timber heart of the Afghan capital
Brit Rory Stewart aims to preserve Kabul: 'You don't flatten historic cities'
Between the open sewers and bullet-scarred walls of Kabul's old city a perpetually hurrying Englishman in a battered but impeccably cut Savile Row suit is a familiar yet incongruous site.
Many Westerners in the city choose to travel in armoured four-wheel-drive vehicles surrounded by armed guards. Rory Stewart eschews such caution.
A 33-year-old Eton and Oxford-educated former diplomat, affectionately known as "Lawrence of Belgravia", Mr Stewart arrived in Kabul in March last year on a mission to save what remained of the city's ancient centre.
He came with just two employees as the head of the Torquoise Mountain Foundation, a fledgling charitable trust boasting the Prince of Wales and Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, as patrons.
Now the foundation has grown to 200 employees, including 15 foreigners, who swarm across eight acres of the old city. Restoration is under way on 40 of its 300-year-old mud and wood buildings and hundreds of tons of debris have been cleared from the streets. Many of the buildings were close to collapse.
"Three very beautiful buildings went this past winter," said Mr Stewart. "One falling wall sadly killed a child."
The foundation has also set up a school housed in an old mud fort in an effort to resurrect Afghanistan's long traditions of wood carving, calligraphy and pottery with a view to generating revenue by exporting to Europe and America.
It has been an exercise in high-profile aid work in which Mr Stewart's fund-raising skills, media-savvy and impeccable establishment connections have been key. To achieve its aims, next year he estimates that they need another £2 million.
Stepping lightly over pools of sewage and delivering instructions in fluent Dari to the Afghan engineer at his side, he is greeted by many of the shopkeepers in the old quarter of Murad Khane.
Its maze of jumbled streets is almost all that remains of a once beautiful ancient city, famed for its unique carved wood buildings and shaded courtyards.
The inhabitants of Murad Khane have remained almost unchanged for 300 years, a tight-knit community of minority Shia Muslims known as the Kizilbash. They are the descendants of Persian soldiers who invaded India in 1727 and ended up settling in Kabul, where they acted as a Praetorian guard to the Afghan kings.
Quite apart from the ravages of age, the threats to the old Kabul are man made.
To the horror of many, Kabul's city municipality still holds dear a 1978 East German-designed master plan that would flatten the entire old city and rebuild it as a utilitarian utopia.
Replacing the ancient wood and mud walled homes would be a four-lane highway flanked by 16-storey "workers' accommodation".
Mr Stewart argued that, quite apart from the destruction to Afghanistan's heritage, the local government has no money to build the replacement housing. Instead it would probably be given over to predatory local businessmen whose jerry-built flats and garish "wedding halls" scar much of the skyline.
"This type of planning is discredited everywhere, you don't flatten historic cities," said Mr Stewart. "We are trying to convince the authorities that as elsewhere in the world we can make these historic buildings assets and make them generate money."
That means attracting tourists to the old city, which in the current environment is a task bedevilled by the activities of the Taliban and their frequent suicide bombs.
It also means convincing many local people who are not overly keen on draughty mud and wood houses without modern facilities that knocking them down and building high-rise concrete blocks isn't a step in the right direction.
The strategy has been to offer new drainage systems and modern lavatory facilities, running water and electricity to those who will keep their old mud brick homes; homes which Mr Stewart claimed are far warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer than their modern concrete equivalents.
Tucked away at the end of an antique passageway, the home of Nasrullah Khan, 48, and his five brothers is one of the most beautiful old houses in Kabul. Random bombardment during the civil war destroyed two of the four homes that once lined the secluded garden courtyard and shrine.
But the survivors are fine if dilapidated examples of the ornate 18th century style that once housed the merchant classes.
Last year when Mr Stewart came to Murad Khane the brothers were divided. Nasrullah suggested that if they knocked down the whole area and built a single skyscraper the entire community could live in it and still rent the rest for profit.
However, that line of thought appears to be in retreat these days. He now agrees with his brother Khalil, who claims: "This is the true Kabul. For us these houses are better than a golden palace. My father's grandfather lived here and we are perfectly comfortable."
Mr Stewart knows the country well. He walked across Afghanistan by himself in early 2002, on an eccentric journey to retrace the footsteps of the Mogul Emperor Babur the Great; a venture that became a book called The Places in Between.
Another book, Occupational Hazards, emerged from his depressing experience as the acting governor of an Iraqi province in the wake of the Iraq invasion.
He left the Foreign Office in 2004 convinced that to be successful post-war reconstruction work must operate within existing social structures and communities, not on the back of Western-imposed forms.
Occasionally swapping Savile Row for traditional Afghan garb, he spends long hours over green tea ensuring the support of grizzled local community leaders in the old city.
With the sun setting over the roofs of Murad Khane, the view takes in the rubbish-clogged Kabul river and the encroaching tower blocks of the Soviet era and post-2001 construction. The air is full of the cries of street sellers and the beat of Bollywood tunes.
Waves of invasion have broken over Afghanistan almost continuously since Alexander the Great passed through in 330BC. However, no nation can match the British record in Afghanistan for frequency.
Between 1840 and 1919 Britain invaded Afghanistan three times; though the Taliban would like to see the British presence since 2001 as a FOURTH Afghan war.
The Battle of Maiwand, 1880, during the Second Afghan War between Great Britain and Afghanistan
In 1842 British troops laid waste to Kabul's bazaar as punishment for the destruction of a 10,000-man British army a year earlier, from which there was only one survivor. In 1879 the British destroyed much of the main fortress in Kabul, the Bala Hissar, this time in punishment for their defeat at the Battle of Maiwand.
"Perhaps part of what we are doing here is redressing some of those historic grievances," said Mr Stewart.
telegraph.co.uk
Lawrence of Belgravia fights to save old Kabul
By Tom Coghlan
12/07/2007
The Telegraph
An Old Etonian former British diplomat is leading moves to preserve the mud and timber heart of the Afghan capital
Brit Rory Stewart aims to preserve Kabul: 'You don't flatten historic cities'
Between the open sewers and bullet-scarred walls of Kabul's old city a perpetually hurrying Englishman in a battered but impeccably cut Savile Row suit is a familiar yet incongruous site.
Many Westerners in the city choose to travel in armoured four-wheel-drive vehicles surrounded by armed guards. Rory Stewart eschews such caution.
A 33-year-old Eton and Oxford-educated former diplomat, affectionately known as "Lawrence of Belgravia", Mr Stewart arrived in Kabul in March last year on a mission to save what remained of the city's ancient centre.
He came with just two employees as the head of the Torquoise Mountain Foundation, a fledgling charitable trust boasting the Prince of Wales and Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, as patrons.
Now the foundation has grown to 200 employees, including 15 foreigners, who swarm across eight acres of the old city. Restoration is under way on 40 of its 300-year-old mud and wood buildings and hundreds of tons of debris have been cleared from the streets. Many of the buildings were close to collapse.
"Three very beautiful buildings went this past winter," said Mr Stewart. "One falling wall sadly killed a child."
The foundation has also set up a school housed in an old mud fort in an effort to resurrect Afghanistan's long traditions of wood carving, calligraphy and pottery with a view to generating revenue by exporting to Europe and America.
It has been an exercise in high-profile aid work in which Mr Stewart's fund-raising skills, media-savvy and impeccable establishment connections have been key. To achieve its aims, next year he estimates that they need another £2 million.
Stepping lightly over pools of sewage and delivering instructions in fluent Dari to the Afghan engineer at his side, he is greeted by many of the shopkeepers in the old quarter of Murad Khane.
Its maze of jumbled streets is almost all that remains of a once beautiful ancient city, famed for its unique carved wood buildings and shaded courtyards.
The inhabitants of Murad Khane have remained almost unchanged for 300 years, a tight-knit community of minority Shia Muslims known as the Kizilbash. They are the descendants of Persian soldiers who invaded India in 1727 and ended up settling in Kabul, where they acted as a Praetorian guard to the Afghan kings.
Quite apart from the ravages of age, the threats to the old Kabul are man made.
To the horror of many, Kabul's city municipality still holds dear a 1978 East German-designed master plan that would flatten the entire old city and rebuild it as a utilitarian utopia.
Replacing the ancient wood and mud walled homes would be a four-lane highway flanked by 16-storey "workers' accommodation".
Mr Stewart argued that, quite apart from the destruction to Afghanistan's heritage, the local government has no money to build the replacement housing. Instead it would probably be given over to predatory local businessmen whose jerry-built flats and garish "wedding halls" scar much of the skyline.
"This type of planning is discredited everywhere, you don't flatten historic cities," said Mr Stewart. "We are trying to convince the authorities that as elsewhere in the world we can make these historic buildings assets and make them generate money."
That means attracting tourists to the old city, which in the current environment is a task bedevilled by the activities of the Taliban and their frequent suicide bombs.
It also means convincing many local people who are not overly keen on draughty mud and wood houses without modern facilities that knocking them down and building high-rise concrete blocks isn't a step in the right direction.
The strategy has been to offer new drainage systems and modern lavatory facilities, running water and electricity to those who will keep their old mud brick homes; homes which Mr Stewart claimed are far warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer than their modern concrete equivalents.
Tucked away at the end of an antique passageway, the home of Nasrullah Khan, 48, and his five brothers is one of the most beautiful old houses in Kabul. Random bombardment during the civil war destroyed two of the four homes that once lined the secluded garden courtyard and shrine.
But the survivors are fine if dilapidated examples of the ornate 18th century style that once housed the merchant classes.
Last year when Mr Stewart came to Murad Khane the brothers were divided. Nasrullah suggested that if they knocked down the whole area and built a single skyscraper the entire community could live in it and still rent the rest for profit.
However, that line of thought appears to be in retreat these days. He now agrees with his brother Khalil, who claims: "This is the true Kabul. For us these houses are better than a golden palace. My father's grandfather lived here and we are perfectly comfortable."
Mr Stewart knows the country well. He walked across Afghanistan by himself in early 2002, on an eccentric journey to retrace the footsteps of the Mogul Emperor Babur the Great; a venture that became a book called The Places in Between.
Another book, Occupational Hazards, emerged from his depressing experience as the acting governor of an Iraqi province in the wake of the Iraq invasion.
He left the Foreign Office in 2004 convinced that to be successful post-war reconstruction work must operate within existing social structures and communities, not on the back of Western-imposed forms.
Occasionally swapping Savile Row for traditional Afghan garb, he spends long hours over green tea ensuring the support of grizzled local community leaders in the old city.
With the sun setting over the roofs of Murad Khane, the view takes in the rubbish-clogged Kabul river and the encroaching tower blocks of the Soviet era and post-2001 construction. The air is full of the cries of street sellers and the beat of Bollywood tunes.
Waves of invasion have broken over Afghanistan almost continuously since Alexander the Great passed through in 330BC. However, no nation can match the British record in Afghanistan for frequency.
Between 1840 and 1919 Britain invaded Afghanistan three times; though the Taliban would like to see the British presence since 2001 as a FOURTH Afghan war.
The Battle of Maiwand, 1880, during the Second Afghan War between Great Britain and Afghanistan
In 1842 British troops laid waste to Kabul's bazaar as punishment for the destruction of a 10,000-man British army a year earlier, from which there was only one survivor. In 1879 the British destroyed much of the main fortress in Kabul, the Bala Hissar, this time in punishment for their defeat at the Battle of Maiwand.
"Perhaps part of what we are doing here is redressing some of those historic grievances," said Mr Stewart.
telegraph.co.uk
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