Inläggav Fromm » 20 aug 2009 09:57
Går vidare med stycket Land as Power
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Just as illegal transactions have become the hallmark of the new Afghan economy, the dubious or blatantly illegal acquisition of land has become a dominant real-estate practice in the capital. Tracts of land on the outskirts of Kabul are routinely confiscated by warlords and militia commanders and then sold off to the highest bidders. Since an exact survey of new construction in Kabul does not ex-m. it is difficult to calculate the number of buildings illegally constructed on these expropriated sites, but conservative estimates put the total number, including privet c homes, in the thousands.
Many areas of Kabul have experienced radical transformations over the last 1cw years. In the centrally located district of Sherpur, for example, land belonging Iii the Ministry of Defense had been occupied since the 1950s by squatters who had streamed to Kabul from outlying villages. Their simple mud-brick dwellings had always been tolerated until 2003, a year following the establishment of the Transitional Administration, when the minister of defense suddenly ordered the mass demolition of the entire squatter community. Giving residents only one day's notice, the ministry bulldozed Sherpur, injuring several residents who resis-ted these actions. The cleared area was subsequently converted into a new resi-dential district for powerful politicians, warlords, and businessmen. The land was divided and sold in large parcels, which in turn were further subdivided and resold at immense profit. A report by RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) alleged that in Sherpur "300 plots [amounting to] around 120 hectares (120,000 square meters) were distributed among senior government officials including ministers, deputy ministers, governors, commanders, generals, intelligence (KHAD) administrators, and businessmen."' The group who seized the land offered a few "land grants"—a common practice employed by the Afghan government—to civil servants and senior officials in order to dispel any potential resistance to the illegal acquisition and to serve as a decoy while it actu-ally sold the majority of the plots at market rates. Several ministers in the Hamid Karzai interim government were implicated in the ensuing scandal when it was exposed that they had received free plots of land in Sherpur in return for expul-sion of the poor residents.
It was only when the international news media reported on the takeover of Sherpur that the Karzai administration hesitantly referred the matter to the newly established Human Rights Commission in Afghanistan. The Special Rap porteur on Adequate Housing to the UN Commission on Human Rights, Miloon Kothari, concluded in a public interview: "essentially what we have found there is that ministers and people at the highest level are involved in occupying land and in demolishing the homes of poor people.... In fact a number of ministers, in-cluding the minister of defense, [are] directly involved in this kind of occupation and dispossession of poor people, some of whom have been there for 25 to 30 years." Kothari went on to warn that "there is a great climate of insecurity that is being created across the country, which is for reasons other than armed conflict; it's for reasons of occupation, it's for reasons of land speculation, it's for reasons of property conflict," and he predicted that "unless these issues are addressed at the judicial level, at all other levels, what we are seeing in Afghanistan today is that we are sowing the seeds for decades of conflict ... due to a land and prop-erty and housing crisis."'
Kothari's forthright denunciation of land piracy enraged the perpetrators: that is to say, the powerful ministers, bureaucrats, and warlords who supposedly represent "democracy restored" in Afghanistan. They complained to UN Special Representative Lakhdar Barhimi, who punctually reprimanded Kothari for daring to criticize the land grab. But the abuses were too blatant to be easily swept under the rug, and eventually pressure from international human rights groups and the foreign media forced the Karzai regime to undertake a token redemption: the land pirates were formally required to pay the government the equivalent of 20% of the market value of the property wrested from the poor residents of Sherpur. Yet it is unclear if any reparation has actually been received, and for most poor Kabul’s the Sherpur scandal continues to epitomize the reign of greed,
corruption, and extravagance that has followed the expulsion of the Taliban and the advent of the pro-Western Karzai regime.
Despite their occasional criticisms of slum evictions, the international community in Kabul has become hopelessly entangled in the city's sinister real-estate econ-omy. The demand for first-class accommodations and offices for the UN, the NGOs, hiring contractors, and major aid agencies generates much of the inflation in land values and, indeed, has spurred strategic land grabbing by high officials and war-lords. The international entities (as our fieldwork in Sherpur and similar districts re-veals) seek high levels of physical security as well as standards of First World luxury rarely available in the world's fifth-poorest country The result of this quest has 14-en the creation of informal colonial enclaves or "green zones," new fortified segregation of space that belie the noble mission statements of foreign agencies.
Foreign tenants spend a majority of time in the security of their homes and of-lit us, so their properties are characterized by the ubiquitous and menacing pressurize of heavily armed guards. Within these compounds, luxury is defined by the presence of en suite bathrooms adjacent to each room, and by kitchens designed %% it h plenty of storage space for food and supplies, so as to minimize the need to have the house too frequently (as a local realtor explained to during a guided tour ,I the district). Some houses are even equipped with underground parking, of-lei mg secure and direct access to the house. These self-sufficient, inward-focused worlds are designed to maintain their subjects in isolation and security, and are offered at extravagant premiums. Rents approach US$15,000 per month, or ap-proximately twenty times the average annual income in Afghanistan, according it) the U.S. government."
Following a coordination meeting at ACBAR (the Agency Coordinating Body hit, Afghan Relief) in 2002, members of the NGO community in Afghanistan sent an e-mail to Ashraf Ghana, the then director of the Afghanistan Aid Coordination Authority and later minister of finance. They complained that:
Housing costs have escalated dramatically in the past few months, sometimes by twenty or thirty times and more.... A major cause of housing costs has been de-mand at the high end of the market triggered by demand from the UN, INGOs, in-ternational financial institutions, donors, and embassies. A trickle-down effect results as those evicted from high-end residences seek new accommodation further down the scale, leading to further evictions as landlords seek to profit from this un-controlled market. NGOs are concerned that many of these evictions are illegal, and tenants, particularly the poor, have no practical legal recourse to protection. Some landlords are making fraudulent claims that high taxes are forcing them to raise rents. They are then insisting that tenants sign two leases in order to avoid these taxes (one for the tenant at a high rent and one presented to the government at a lower rent)."
The international community's complicity in rewarding the criminal land grabs by Afghan elite’s has become increasingly intolerable in the eyes of the poor—who constitute the majority of the population in Kabul. The realization that the international presence is increasingly helping the rich and powerful to consoli-date their positions by exploiting and evicting the poor is creating new levels of
resentment toward the foreign forces and local criminal elements who collec-tively control the city"
To complicate matters further, many local power brokers feel that the confis-cation of land is their "God-given right," a reward for fighting the holy war to re-pel the foreign invaders (by which they mean the former Soviet Union and the Pakistani-backed Taliban). The Karzai government continues to turn a blind eye to this incessant plunder, preferring to pamper the powerful (including members of the recently elected parliament) instead of bringing them to justice.
When you play the fiddle at the top of the state, what else is to be expected but that those down below dance?
Karl Marx
