Close-up of the book cover. Photo: Hardie Grant Books.
‘The Kabul Peace House’ by Mark Isaacs
Review by Reg Naulty
This book tells the story – and tells it well – of a house set up in Kabul, Afghanistan, by a community of volunteers pursuing nonviolence and equality. These volunteers were young; the originator, a medic called Insaan, seems to have been in his thirties. At the house they taught and learned many valuable things: how to speak consistently and firmly to troubled people, how to negotiate threats, how to be humane to others, how to empathise and, crucially, how to become part of a community.
These things were not easy to learn. Afghanistan has been in a state of war for forty years, beginning with the Soviet invasion in 1979. In the decade the Russians were there, an estimated 1.5 million people died: Afghans have experienced all the horrors of conflict.
Afghanistan is a country traumatised. Almost every older man there is a war veteran, having lived through decades of conflict. The small number of people in Insaan’s house were up against almost everything: the religious elite, the warlords, the Taliban, their government, their own communities, and even their families. In the case of equality for women, neither their families nor their communities believed in it. When a young woman from their house went on a bike ride, an onlooker shouted: ‘You are a disgrace to Islam!’
Astonishingly, Insaan, whose name means ‘human’, believed in love, and didn’t think that was idealistic. He felt that the atomic fusion of love was one of the strongest forces in the world. He made his own the words attributed to Gandhi: ‘First of all they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they oppose you and then you win.’ And he did win some: the education of his companions – they built a peace park, and opened a school for street kids.
But it was heavy going. In the house there were disputes about domestic arrangements. Some people were left with the cooking, others with the cleaning up; some preferred to talk, others to work; some were reliable, some were not. There were ingrained ethnic suspicions, and the residents had all been traumatised. A US psychiatrist who had spent seventeen years working with ex-servicemen with PTSD, and who visited the house, said to Insaan: ‘You have a full-blown psychiatric ward here. How do you manage?’
It wasn’t easy. It is probably impertinent for someone living in Canberra to make a suggestion, but there is this. Insaan’s appeal to his community was fundamentally ethical, but it may have been stronger had it been religious. Yes, in Afghanistan, religion is part of the problem, but religion is a house with many mansions. Surely there is something there that could have bound his community more deeply?
In any event, the house has been abandoned in favour of a community centre, and that seems to be working better. Mark Isaacs’ book reminds us that many of the West’s values are in the wrong place. All that money spent on defence, and all those cruise ships in the harbour.
