King is ready to sacrifice all for Afghanistan

THE last hereditary monarch of Afghanistan sits in the quiet, heavily guarded royal palace from which he was ousted after a coup, and where he now intends to die.

He has received death threats, but says: “I am ready for any sort of sacrifice — the biggest sacrifice for my country.” The 88-year life of King Mohammed Zahir Shah is, in some ways, the turbulent and contradictory history of Afghanistan itself.

His word was once law here. He ruled for 40 years as an absolute monarch, mixing on equal terms with other crowned heads, including Queen Elizabeth; but he became increasingly liberal and reformist. His education was French, his manners English, his sartorial tastes Italian.

Then, in 1973, came the putsch and a long, anonymous exile in Italy, as his country was invaded, brutalised and steadily torn apart by ideology, foreign interference and power-hungry warlords.

Finally the cycle of conflict brought September 11, the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a fresh flood of foreign soldiers, and this year, after 29 years abroad, Zahir Shah found himself returned to Afghanistan, a figurehead for a nation clinging to a flimsy peace.

Everyone speaks of “His Highness The King”, although he is now technically “Father of the Nation”, but Zahir Shah himself prefers another designation. “They call me ‘Baba’, which means grandfather. That is the title I like best,” he says, in perfect but antique French, reduced to a whisper by ailing lungs. “There was only one other they called Baba.”

He refers to the founder of the Durrani royal house, the 18th century Afghan empire builder Ahmed Shah. History still weighs heavily on the aged shoulders of Ahmed Shah’s descendant: the last of the dynasty recalling the first. In the king’s study there are mementoes of a life of inherited privilege: hushed, humble servants, gold-embossed shotguns in a glass case, walls mounted with hunting trophies.

Outside is very different world: jumpy US bodyguards wearing wraparound sunglasses and armed with Colt Commander assault rifles; a series of once-stunning presidential palaces, now semi-ruins surrounded by barbed wire; a city ravaged by 23 years of fighting, policed by foreigners, and beyond it a country returned by civil war to an almost medieval way of life.

A formal, elderly man with a distinguished air and gentle, modest courtesy, Zahir Shah remains a widely revered, but deeply controversial figure in Afghanistan.

To many, perhaps the majority, his rule now seems a halcyon age; to others, he is a wealthy escaper who spent years in comfortable exile while his country imploded.

Increasingly frail, he did not have to come back. But last April, with the Taleban removed, he returned and has since played a pivotal role, more emblematic than political, in the fledgeling transitional Government, for Zahir Shah is one of the few unifying figures in Afghanistan widely perceived to be above politics.

Without formal power but presiding over the supreme tribal council or Loya Jirga, he provides the sort of historical weight that President Karzai, installed as head of a transitional Government after the successful coalition assault on the Taleban, still lacks.

King and President have become close friends. “Their relationship is almost like that of father and son,” one Western diplomat said.

“I am very happy,” the old king says, “with Monsieur Karzai. From the first, we were on the same wavelength. He comes here every day.”

But there are many people who would like to bring that relationship, and the transitional Government, to a swift and bloody end. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the hardline fundamentalist leader, has allegedly threatened to kill both king and President.

One assassination attempt on Mr Karzai was foiled by his American minders, monosyllabic US Navy Seals whose granite-eyed expressions are not there for show.

On one side of Zahir Shah’s armchair is an oxygen machine to aid his breathing, and on the other General Abdul Wali, the loyal aide who followed him into exile and back again; his other life support.

The once huge royal entourage has effectively become two old men with grey moustaches and identical new Italian leather jackets.

The king has always lived with death. He was born in the year that the First World War began and, at 18, had ascended to the throne after witnessing the public assassination of his father; at the age of 59 he lost the throne when his cousin ousted him while he was on holiday and declared a republic; at the age of 87 he came home, but his wife, Queen Homaira, died in Rome before she could join him.

When he was still a young monarch, Zahir Shah built a tomb for his father on a hill outside Kabul, a great blue dome clad in white marble, a visible expression of royal power and filial piety. Today the monument is stripped to brick, shot full of bullet holes and covered in graffiti. Zahir Shah brought his dead wife from Italy this year, and buried her in the wrecked tomb of his ancestors. “One day perhaps the mausoleum will be restored, but there are more urgent things to be done,” he says.

And yet he also exudes a simple, undemonstrative optimism. “When I came back, I passed a garden and there was a little boy. He was charming. That gave me much hope.”

He has six children, but Zahir Shah has renounced any ambition to restore the monarchy for himself or his heirs. His son, Mir Wais, and his grandson, Mustafa, are reported in any case to be divided over who should take over his role after his death.

The king is happier looking back. “When I came to England in 1971, Her Majesty took to me to Clarence House and she said, ‘King Zahir, we have some of your compatriots’. There, lined up, were about 30 Afghan hounds.”

The royal reminiscences are now flowing. “Then I was a guest at the Lord Mayor’s banquet. It was very, very difficult. Five trumpets behind me, suddenly blaring in my ears, and all these people in ancient costumes. It was much easier seeing Queen Elizabeth.”

Is Bin Laden still in Afghanistan? He shrugs. “If we find him, ‘bam-bam’,” he says, with a machine-gunning gesture. “The Americans would like it very much.”

He points to the vast mounted horns of an Afghan wild sheep. “Do you see those?” he asks. “I shot those in the mountains, in Nuristan,” the wild and still-mysterious land in the Hindu Kush.

The implied link is clear: even in the most remote regions of Afghanistan, the game can be hunted down.

But the king himself is now beyond hunting. He seldom leaves the royal compound and has not set foot outside Kabul, except to fly to Europe for medical attention, since his return. He is instead the rarest and most protected of species, almost an exile at home, a figure from an old world thrust back into the modern one.

In his bedroom, an old fashioned single-bar heater burns. But the room is otherwise unchanged from the royal era, with wonderfully ornate, hand-painted walls and a four-poster bed. Through the window, he must gaze on the derelict, empty palace of his forebears within the presidential and royal compound. But if he closes the curtains he might be back in the 1930s: except that there is in the sumptuous onyx window frame an unmistakable bullet hole.

• Student protest: Police opened fire to disperse thousands of students protesting in Kabul yesterday against the authorities’ handling of a university riot on Monday in which at least two students died. The protests marked the first major demonstration in the city since it was liberated from the Taleban. (AFP)