Up in the mountains above the city, the Margalla Hills, in the copious parks with their close-cropped lawns and magnificent crowns of Jacaranda trees sits a little grey monkey. His shoulders are drooping. As if the strength had been beaten out of his muscles. He is standing with his feet close together. As if each had to seek protection with the other.His green eyes are gazing along the leather leash, which connects the too-tight collar with his master.
The latter sits on the ground of the paved path to the terrace with the panoramic view over Islamabad and waits for the visitors: pairs of lovers holding hands or elegantly dressed extended families with overtired children. Every time somebody comes here in order to see the capital lying below in the orange-colored light,the man tears at the leash, a jolt of fearful recollection runs through the little monkey and it stands up like a trembling toy soldier.
Doing this, he looks somewhat bewildered at his master, who clumsily plays on a squeaking wooden flute,and he collapses the moment the smiling promenaders have passed by. Thus it squats until the next visitor and until the next tug at the leash. A farce the tortured little monkey with its scrubby fur seems to have understood long ago, only the human beings around it want to hold on tothe rites and games of the staging.
On the observation platform policemen in dark blue uniforms stand next to man-sized telescopes, and after every single viewer they clean the inner lenses of the glasses. A small kiosk offers milky, sugared tea. Everywhere, employees are nimbly picking garbage from the paths, bored guards stand ready, without purpose, but in every place.Everything is organized and prepared, cleaned and put in order for the constructed view of the constructed city.
Perhaps this is what the visitors expect of their capital, perhaps they come here in order to find exactly this reconfirmed:that this city is being worked on, that it is being newly prepared every day, that it remains a permanent invention – Islamabad, abad, the city in which Islam finds a place, perhaps they want it to stretch and rise for them like the little monkey on the leash.
And perhaps they come here in order to search for it, the city from which their country is governed, perhaps they want the view from above, in order to organize what seems to drown in ever greater chaos and violence every day. Perhaps they ask themselves the same questions from nearby as the foreign observer from afar: what kind of city is this, which suddenly moved from the margins of the strategic map to the center, since the American president George W. Bush made himself independent of Pakistanin his "War on Terror." What kind of city of an Islamic state is this that is being threatened by Islamists at its borders and within? What kind of capital is this, in which a general reigns in a more and more lonely way in a labyrinth of repression and corruption?
There are cities one best approaches from the sea, in this gently rockingmode, with a view of the city as at a promise that is suddenly being fulfilled. There are cities that are best discovered via their periphery,across the frayed and sprawling margins and rings, which have laid themselvesaround the original village in the course of the years. There are cities that can be exploredonly from their innermost core, the embattled mountain with its holy places, from a hilltop, which rises above its winding lanes and their respective pertinacity. The stories of these cities are the stories of their inhabitants, the people who shaped and extolled, defended and bewailed them, as well as their traces and signatures, with which they have engraved themselvesinto the texture of their city.
Islamabad, the Pakistani capital by the foothills of the Himalayas, refusessuch approaches. Its waters are artificially laid out lakes, its periphery is already the beginning of the nearest, considerably older city, Rawalpindi,and its innermost core is hollow. There are no people whose stories or songs could tell the story of the city. All are newcomers in Islamabad, migrants from other parts of the country, who had to leave their former lives and references behind,in order to dare a new beginning in this newly designed city. Islamabad is most easily explored with the help of the architectural master plan of the Greek company Doxiadis Associates, which was commissioned with the construction in 1960, when President Ayub Khan decided to move the capital from Karachi to the central plateau. Islamabad is a grid, a chess board with exact fields, a topographic utopia.
Every block measures one and a half miles square and encompasses a market place like a fruit its kernel. The square blocks and the streets have no names. Not of historical events, not of famous personages. The addresses tell no stories. Islamabad consists of timeless letters and numbers: mathematical brand marks on an urban body. A typicaladdress in Islamabad runs:H-4, St. 87, G-6-3. That is house number 4 in the 87 street in grid squareG-6, in the third quarter of the square. One begins with E,directly at the feet of the mountains in the North, and spells one's way down southward until the last letter, I.
The city's alphabet not only knows no end, but also, no beginning. A to D are missing. As if one's own lack of history were supposed to be included in the narrative.Three large, multi-lane boulevardscut through the layoutand subdivide the city into enclaves designated for specific purposes: a diplomatic quarter, a business quarter, a university quarter – a collection of guarded housingestates subdivided by function that are in no need of gates, because background and shame create higher thresholds than any fence.
The fine differences become apparent in the tense backs. The higher ranks of the president's mounted guard are sipping their tea seated under the pine trees. The common soldiers stand in knee highblack boots, and the stricthierarchy of the military has been hurting the small of their backsfor hours, up here in the courtyardof the newly built national cenotaph, where the body guard of the president are waiting for their deployment at the flag parade.Until the generals drive up,the bony horses' backs are groomed and the brittle horseshoes are coated with black varnish. When it finally starts, the army band in its green jackets begins to play,the legion of honor consisting of Navy, Army and Air Force with the respective coat of arms comes marching in front of the spectator stands in goose step, the generals delegated for this service are sitting somewhat apart from the parade ground with their naughty children in front of the flag.
It is a spectacle in which everyone participates, even the shy spectators, for every staging needs its backdrop.Especially a junta playing government. In power without democratic legitimation, the regime assures itself of itself in permanent symbolic acts. Even if it is only a flag that is taken from the pole and folded up.
They have condemned the country to being in a state of eternal provisional status,the military brass in Pakistan, a state that never comes to peace, not since its declaration of independence from India 60 years ago. They did not tolerate any constitution, not that of 1956, which General Ayub Khan invalidated, not that of 1962 and not the tentativelylast constitution of 1973. They havesuspended them or declaredmartial law or bereaved them of their democratic principles through creeping additionsand made them amenable to their respective rulers. The division of powers was gradually undermined, the federal structure limited, the authority of the legislature expanded and the time in office of the sitting head of stateextended.
In this, the military governments were hardly different from their civilian counterparts. Whether through a direct putsch of the army, as in 1958, 1969, 1977 and finally through Musharraf in 1999, or through indirect misuse of civilian rulers: every institution, every movement, every law that could have given Pakistan internal stability and legal transparency was weakened.
And thus, the rulersin Islamabad have been overexerting themselvessince the summer, now in brutal repression and now in symbolic rituals. The entire country holds its breath and looks on as General Musharraf seeks to defend his power against the constitutional courtand against the opposition. In parallel, they are performing the play of the military up here at the national monumentin full costume and with brand-new scenery."We want to teach the people something," says the mustachioed young general in the end, when the national flag has finally been folded and transported off under loud fanfare. By then, the people have long disappeared. The guard of the Pakistani national monument has already swiped up the pathetic sea of horse piss from the marble tiles. He is a little surprised about the question of what purpose this whole ritual serves. "So that the people know what we are doing," he says, and for a short moment it seems as if he himself were stunned by the honesty of this answer.
Hamjadali knows what he is doing. He knows nothing of the general, nothing of the flag lowering ritual in the capital, he knows nothing of thestate of emergency or its cancellation, he does not even know the capital itself. Only two kilometers separate the eleven year-old boy from Islamabad, and yet he has never seen the city. Not even the word can he write: Islamabad. He tries. With his index finger, he draws in the granulardust in front of his feet. And stops."No time," he says, and that is not even a lie. All too long already he has interrupted it, the welltrained sequence of movements,of which his entire life consists: with one grasp he plucks a lump from the wet, heavy clay,beats and kneads it into a red-brown roll,with one toss he slaps the mass into the metal frame in front of his naked toes, taps on it, until it yields according to his will, turns around the frame with its loose, earthen pedestaland hits it once more from above, so that the rhombic pattern of the earthen slabis impressed in the clay, then he removes the lid, pullsaway the frame from the red rectangle and cleans the metal frame for the next wet heap of clay.
Hamjadali knows what he is doing. Each grasp hits home. Measure clay, knead roll, press into the mold, loosen from the mold, on to the next lump. The rhythm of his hands structures his day. Already for five years. He has no time to teach his younger brother how one can protect the skin of one's hands from cuts and festeringwounds.He has to line up the bricks in rows of ten and heap the rows of ten one above the other.Every row is applied against the figures on the piece of paper that his father once signed with his thumbprint more than twelve years ago.
What exactly a promissory note is, the boy does not know; nobody has explained to him how the owner of the brick yardforced his illiterate father into bondagewith it. But he knows that he will have to mold these bricks beyond his father's death.The alleged debt is larger than both of their lives. That much he knows already now.
The money earned by families like that of Hamjadali,invisible to others, becomes visible in the elegant residential quartersof Islamabad, the E-numbers at the foot of the Margalla Hills with their multi-storied, bougainvillea-overgrown villas. Private security firmspatrol up and down here or protect the richesof the wealthy elite of the capital from little watchtowers on the sidewalk. A class of its ownhas settled here. "Military inc.," the scientist Ayesha Siddiqa, in her eponymous book, calls this autonomous caste of former senior military officials,who have become a tremendous economic power in Pakistan.
They operate in the shadow of the official fiscal policy of the military government, their capital is not listedin the defense budget, but they establish their enterprises with the help of sinecuresand privileges granted to them by the military. Thus, national real estate wanders into the hands of former officers. Local communes are divested of their fishing rights,and rangers are put in charge of licensing.
Perhaps this way the military brassare securing their forced withdrawal from politics in provident caution.But perhaps they are only taking over the next sector of social power alongside government and are penetratingeven the last remaining civilian sphere of this fragile country.
In front of the club house of the Shalimar Cricket ground with its red slate roof, Rizwan Ahmad sits on the lawn and watches his colleagues from the Midas Advertising Company. Every six months they play against each other here: the creative department and the marketing department of Midas. They are in the first inning.A winner is not yet predicted.But theemployeesof Midas belong to the winners in any case. They write the campaigns for the military brassas well as for the parties of the opposition.
Whether the military brasswill remain in power, whether the next elections will bring a change, Midas will profit from the winners and from the losers. "We do nothing creative," says Rizwan's colleague, Hassan Ahsan, dryly. He stands on the sidelineswithout the white cricket outfitand watches the match with as much distanceas his own work in a military state. "We do propaganda. Nothing else."
It is this slightly melancholy tone that permeate sall conversations in Islamabad. They talk about their country as if it weren't theirs. They analyze the fateof the government as if it did not decide over their lives. They criticize the despotic conditions, as if they did not suppress them, too. Perhaps this is what this story of corruption and putsch, this story of strung together states of emergency has done to the people: they live de-coupled from a state that is maintained and manipulated by a detached military elite. And they watch the public spectacle, how this elite is suddenly getting nervous.How this inventedcity, Islamabad, which was supposed to demonstrate pride and self-assurance, suddenly betrays insecurity and doubt.
The red mosque ceased being red a long time ago. Barbed wire twinesin front of the closed off area like thorn bushes. Civilian police officers clad in white arelingering behind it. Anti-terror units in uniform and full armor and severalhundred police are standing in front of it. The notorious mosque is closed, the leaders of the Islamic resistance were killed or arrested in July, when the military stormed the house of God.The place is surrounded today and secured – and yet the building, which in the meantime has been painted over in yellow ocher, does notprojectMusharraf's powerbut rather his powerlessness; not his military invincibility,but only his medial vulnerability.
For he could not prevent these images that were spread throughout the entire country: how the surviving and remaining believers of the red mosque painted the yellow façade red again and how the government had it painted yellow again.
He could not control the images, which unfoldedbefore the eyes of the citizens of the capital and could be seen in the news: how hundreds of believers assembled for Friday prayer, peaceful Muslims, in front of whose mosque the national police were standing in armor – in Islamabad, the city that wanted to give a place to Islam – and who are now kneeling on the pavement and bowing towards Mecca.
The fear of these images produces new images that spread fear. With ever growing brutality, the head of government actsagainst attacks on his power and thus creates more and more of a target.This is how the latest images of elegant citizens of the capital came into being, men without beards, women without headscarves, intellectuals, lawyers and journalists, who demonstrated against Musharraf. Now it is no longer only the believers whom the secular military can dismiss as backward or Islamist,now it is the members of the urban middle class chanting the same slogan, "Go, Musharraf, go!" He can have them arrested and imprisoned, he can try to divide the opposition by means of a state of emergency, but he cannot prevent the images that are going around the world.
For months, attacks on army strongholds and police units have been on the rise. Not only on the margins of the country, but in the capital, at the center of power. The times during which their headquarters could project quiet and order are over.
They are dependent on each other, the lonely General Musharraf in his government palace in Islamabad and the terrorists who are threatening his country at the disputedexternal boundaries and in the embattled interior.As long as the undefined fighters spread terror, they intentionally or unintentionally confirm the right of existence of the overduegeneral, and as long as Musharraf actsagainst the Islamists with exaggerated brutality and in so doing also harasses uninvolved believers or has them killed, he intentionally or unintentionally strengthens the radicals' resolve to resist.
The state of emergency has only worsened the general's situation: the opposition, which he tried to suppress, has now consolidated all the more.Benazir Bhutto, who while still in exile had come to a dubious agreement regarding her division of powers with Musharraf, had to yield to the pressure of the street and her own party and declare herself to be an opponent.
For what purpose, people in Pakistan and in the West could ask themselves, should an undemocratic military regime be supported, if it cannot even guarantee security and order? Why tolerate a general if he cannot even win the military battles? Why support a despot who cannot even control his fear?
"The highest representative of Pakistan does not represent Pakistan," says Nasira Iqbal, a retired judge and one of the most important voices of opposition withinciviliansociety. She is sittingin the exclusive Islamabad Club for the classic British afternoon tea. She has put her membership cardon the table to protect herself from uninvited questions fromthe waiters. She is not afraid to deny the sovereign his sovereignty.
Nasira Iqbal can afford such courage:she bears the name that makes herunassailable.The history of her family protects her like an inherited shield. For like hardly any other, the name Iqbal embodies the idea of Pakistan: it was Muhammad Iqbal, her father-in-law, who had dreamt the dream of a Muslim state of one's own. In a speech before the All-India Muslim League in 1930, he had praised the organic unityof spirit and form, of faith and state. Allah's lost city
published in ZEIT Magazin LEBEN, January 3, 2008