Turkomans in Exile

Sawabi camp is not outstanding from the initial impression. It could be almost anywhere in rural northern Pakistan. There is a dirt road and a small crowded bazaar lining both sides with countless small shop fronts. The construction is all mud-packed earth. Only the people are different. The faces, the clothing, indeed the entire feeling here is not Pakistan but Afghanistan in exile. The faces are oriental -- Turko-Mongol Central Asian. The behavior is reserved, not aggressive as one comes to expect among Panjabi Pakistanis or Pashtuns, whether from Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Finishing a new carpet in Sawabi Refugee Camp

All of these people are Turkoman, and the clear and unmistakable feeling is that one has entered a Turkoman village or small town somewhere in Central Asia, Northern Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, or Uzbekistan. This is Faisal Camp actually, the Turkoman subdivision of the greater Sawabi Camp. (The Afghan refugee camps are generally divided according to ethnicity and local origin, just as if it were Afghanistan.) I have said village, but as we proceed the fallacy of this initial impression also becomes evident. There is no village in the world like this. It goes on and on and on. Six hundred thousand people live in this amorphous, infinitely expandable Central Asian village sitting on the Panjabi plain. Although there are 600,000 people here, there is no center, just a small bazaar, more earth houses and lanes, another small bazaar, more of the same. None of this was constructed longer than a maximum of eight years ago, but it seems already quite timeless, not much different in form from any Central Asian or Near Eastern village in any way other than scale.

We continue -- Salaam-i-Alaykum, Alaykum-i-Salaam, Yakshimisiniz, Yaksi. My friend Jora knows everyone. He is an Agha, a chief, of one of the Turkoman groups from Aqcha. In the small bazaars half of the shops hold carpets, new carpets woven here in the camp. There is not much other work here in any event; either weave carpets, or dye wool for them, or shear them, or sell them. The Turkomans were predominant, at least in numbers, in the carpet trade in Afghanistan, so it seems a somewhat natural development for them. In this case they are probably much better than the Pashtuns who comprise the remainder of Sawabi camp and who never wove many carpets, only bought and sold them and now have little if any work to do if they are not in some business outside of the camp.

Today is the 15th of February, a long-awaited date. Indeed the last Russian soldier does leave Afghanistan on this day but the war seems to be over. But in talklng to men here In the camp the mood is decidedly low key. If a war has been won, no one seems to be celebrating it. Or perhaps the feeling is simply one of realism: the struggle is not over until the Afghan Communist regime falls, which everyone fully expects to happen, and until the parties of the Mujahideen agree on some type of consensus government, which I'm not so sure everyone expects. In any case, there is certainly no talk in the air about packing up and heading for home, not for the time being anyway.

Everyone continues to do what he has been doing for the last five or eight years, which for the Turkomans is primarily weaving carpets. For lack of other work practically everyone, not just the women and girls, has become involved in carpet weaving or other steps in the production process -- everyone, that is, except middle aged and older men, whose function is to sell the goods once they are ready. Personally, I was surprised by the number of boys and young men who were weaving here, something which I had not expected to see in a society which is as traditional in other respects as that of the Turkomans. It is to the credit of these people that when the occasion demanded they were able to adjust their strictly defined sex roles while, in other respects, keeping their culture intact.

Turkoman weaver showing a war design rug still on the loom

Carpet weaving being practically their only means of livelihood here, an effort has been made by the Turkomans to exploit almost every conceivable niche of the carpet market accessible to them. Sizes range from 2 inches by 2 inches (carpet beverage coasters?) to approximately 10 by 14 feet. From traditional Turkoman designs they have branched out within the last year or so into Persian city, village, and Caucasian designs. War rugs, that is with tank, helicopter and gun designs, seem to have made quite a hit in the West and they are being knocked off the looms in prodigious numbers. One may hope that this is a passing phase but it is in any case, for the time being, very much a commercial enterprise, not the eccentric inspiration of the odd Mujahid's wife or daughter. Another new item is bicycle seat covers, i.e. carpets woven in the shape of a bicycle seat, probably for the Pakistani market.

Six young Turkoman male weavers working simultaneously on a new "Bokara" design Turkoman carpet in Sawabi Camp.

Afghan refugee camp carpet production usually closely resembles carpets produced inside Afghanistan before the war or, in some cases, during the war. Of the two major types of Afghan carpets, Turkoman and Baluch, it is generally easier to distinguish those Baluch rugs woven within Afghanistan from the obviously new refugee camp production. Turkoman carpets can be more tricky. When traditional designs are used, there are few distinctions that can be made between new camp-woven pieces and those woven previously in Afghanistan. The same can be said in regard to colors; aside from Afghan pieces more than 40 years old, the dyes will not be natural in either case. The texture of the weave generally shows consistency with tradition and thus is unchanged. The sole point of difference is the wool. Carpets woven in the camps usually contain machine-spun wool of non-Afghan origin, i.e. wool available in Pakistan, which is either of Australian or New Zealand origin. A blend wool, while quite luxurious, is too soft and resulting carpets, especially in Persian designs, too much resemble other Pakistani produced carpets.

Two days later I visited Khurasan Camp, a much smaller camp nearer to Peshawar. The population here is almost equally divided between Turkomans and Pashtuns. There is carpet production here but not on the scale of Sawabi Camp. Again I come with Turkoman friends, however our intent this time is not business but to view a Buzkashi match. Buzkashi, or olak in Turkmeni, was developed on the steppes of Central Asia by the Turkomans as well as other horse-riding, pastoral, nomadic, Turkic peoples. It is a sport with a minimum of rules and a maximum of action, action intended to display the skills most valued by a horse-riding and herding people.

While there are teams here -- in this case a Baghlan and a Kunduz team, the concept of team actually has little meaning, as the reality of the sport is more or less every man for himself. The object is to grab the dead sheep or, in this case, calf skin, carry it to one end of the field and then back to the first, and deposit it in a circle. There is no set number of players; 30 to 40 struggle at once for the skin. Spectators crowd the mud walls surrounding the field, and many impatient for a better view also move out onto the field. The thundering pack of horses continually careens into the spectators, sending them scattering and sometimes almost crushing people against the mud walls. With the traditional Buzkashi garb worn by the horses and riders and the bone crushing action, it is a spectacle that could easily attract an even larger audience under the right circumstances.

Before the match there is a moving speech in which it is said that this match is to be played to commemorate the victory of the Afghan people over a superpower and is being played with a mind to ever greater matches in Afghanistan in the future, Inshallah. This is the only clear mention of victory I heard in two weeks among Afghans on this trip.

The match ended when everyone had had enough, in this case after two or three hours. There were four scores, that is the buz or olak was placed in the circle four times, by four different riders. Each of them receives a prize of 500 rupees. No one seemed to be concerned about which "team" had won.

Peshawar may be considered the capital of Afghanistan in exile. It is the central command post of the Mujahideen, the locus of most of the relief organizations, and also the largest market for Afghan carpets, both new and old. The flood of refugees has turned this always crowded but previously moderate-sized city into an unplanned metropolis of maybe 2,000,000 plagued by noise, dust, air pollution -- in short, bursting at the seams. Even so, given the above conditions, as well as the somewhat intimidating number of weapons on display, it is probably one of the more interesting places remaining in the East to do business. There are no large dealers, just hundreds of small Afghan dealers, most of them either Turkoman or Persian-speaking Afghans, each in his own tiny cubicle/shop, where they not only do business but also eat and sleep, in short, spend 24 hours a day. These small shops are for the most part grouped in markets of from 10 to 40 shops, each market area being a sort of community unto itself.

The other aspect that makes doing business in Peshawar interesting is the presence of non-new rugs, an increasingly rare commodity in the East these days. While one should not expect to find any real antiques in Peshawar, there are at least semi-antique rugs, say 15-50 years old, available in numbers that have not been seen in Turkey, for example, for at least five years. Even these, however, are quickly drying up. The source, Afghanistan, has been stripped fairly clean of even semi-antique rugs and it is said that there are fewer available now in Kabul than Peshawar. In addition to this, the road from Afghanistan is now closed due to the impending siege of Kabul and Jalalabad, thus putting a further crimp on the supply.

A surprise to me on this trip was the quantity of Iranian goods now on the market in Pakistan. With the current shortage in the Afghan supply, Iranian rugs are almost equalling the supply of Afghan goods. Most of what can be seen are semi-antique South and West Iranian village rugs and kilims -- Shiraz, Qashqa'i, Afshar, and the like -- but almost anything woven in Iran does seem to turn up here, including the finer town rugs. Most of these rugs are smuggled into Pakistan through Baluchistan. This activity exists on such a large scale because of the great discrepancy between the official Iranian bank-export rate and the black market rate for hard currency. Although I refrained from buying these rugs because of the U. S. embargo on Persian goods, according to dealers here many of them are destined for America. The majority, though, probably go to Europe, particularly the kilims, which are very popular on the Italian and Spanish markets.

The current level of activity and interest not withstanding, a close examination of the situation reveals that, while lagging a few years behind some other source countries like Turkey in terms of the rate of depletion, the old rug market is essentially all but finished here as well. The same, unfortunately, must be said for Afghanistan itself, even given an end to hostilities there. For this reason I believe that now is the most propitious time for embarking on endeavors that can result in the production of authentic, traditional, and beautiful new rugs, as well as in the preservation of an invaluable part of the cultural heritage of Afghanistan. The very successful vegetal dye weaving revival projects in Turkey, such as DOBAG, as well as the efforts of private entrepreneurs in Yuntdag, Konya, and other areas, provide us with an excellent model for such undertakings.

We look forward in the coming months or years to the resolution of the Afghan conflict and the gradual resettlement of the Afghan people in their homeland. With this in mind, we believe that now is the time to establish a basis for economic self-sufficiency that will be developed upon return to Afghanistan. Carpet weaving has always been a major means of income among many of the people of Afghanistan, particularly the Turkomans, and during this period of exile from their homeland it has continued to be. They are certainly not lacking in enterprise among themselves in regard to expanding and diversifying their production and thus increasing their market, as the last few years have shown. The reintroduction of vegetal dyes for the weaving of traditional carpets, however, is not an idea that occurred spontaneously and thus may require some small push from the outside.