Finding the Greeks in Afghanistan’s Alexandria

IASON ATHANASIADIS, a British Greek journalist covering the Middle and Near East bumps into a Greek woman in Kandahar.

The Greek soldier scanning my bags at Kabul’s military airport was as surprised to encounter me as I him. As he checked me in for the C-130 night flight to Kandahar, he regarded me with a mixture of pity and compassion.
“You know that’s where the war is, don’t you?” he asked. “Ante ke sto kalo.”

This was my first trip back to the region since my imprisonment last summer in Iran, when I was held for three weeks during the post-election unrest on bogus espionage charges in Evin Prison. Now back in Afghanistan, I was hoping to avoid the unhappy symmetry of two Greeks ending up in Taliban hands.

At the time, Thanassis Lerounis, the great humanitarian released April 8 after seven months in Taliban hands, was still being held.

This was my first trip back to the region since my imprisonment last summer in Iran, when I was held for three weeks during the post-election unrest on bogus espionage charges in Evin Prison. Now back in Afghanistan, I was hoping to avoid the unhappy symmetry of two Greeks ending up in Taliban hands.

The Greek NATO soldier needn’t have worried about me. A few hours later, I was strolling around the Boardwalk, a bizarre entertainment district in the heart of NATO’s largest military installation in the world. Kandahar Airfield is a mammoth base of 25.000 servicemen and contractors lying just next to Afghanistan’s second largest city, Kandahar.

A Pashtu-language corruption of Alexandria, the city was founded by the Macedonian general as he passed through the area in 330 BC. Today however, Kandahar is better known for being the spiritual heartland of a resurgent Taliban threatening a weakening government barricaded in the capital Kabul.
Apart from a general militarism, Alexander would not recognise much in Kandahar’s NATO base today.

The rapidly expanding desert is littered with trailers, attack helicopters, armoured vehicles and rows and rows of tents and semi-permanent structures.
But Alexander’s ghost was definitely presiding over the Boardwalk’s bizarre French Patisserie when I bumped into Dimitra Kokkali.

It was the last place I expected to hear Greek being spoken. The woman in the orange Ralph Lauren shirt, sunglasses and an ID badge studded with AFGHANISTAN in large capitals, chatted on her phone while ordering a baguette.

If it wasn’t for the line of armed soldiers queuing alongside her, we might as well have been in Kolonaki.
“I was expecting to arrive in a warzone but instead here I am wearing sunglasses in the sun and eating a baguette,” Kokkali told me once I’d introduced myself.

“On my first night I surprised my family by calling them from an outdoors rock concert.”
Fresh off a flight from Brussels, Kokkali was starting a stint working as a logistics officer for NATO.

She came prepared for war, having received first aid and firefighting training, coaching in recognising dangerous weapons, and immunisation to a host of exotic illnesses.

But nothing could prepare her for her first 24 hours in Afghanistan.
On the first night, she dined with colleagues at a brand new TGI Fridays festooned with cheesy Americana and some pretty questionable stabs at black humour: signs with NO WATERBOARDING ALLOWED and DEAD MAN’S CURVE. Then they watched a Canadian rock band serenade thousands of armed soldiers in an open area the size of a soccer pitch, over which hung the unmistakable odour of human waste.
“Oh, the Poo Pond!” Kokkali exclaimed, unperturbed.

“It’s an open-air reservoir for all the waste from the camp and when the wind changes we catch a whiff of it here.”

Kokkalis made the move to Brussels after studying Finance at Exeter University and spending a frustrating few years working in the family business, a company supplying spare parts for vehicles used by construction companies.

Greece’s sad news hurts her so she avoids the TV: whether the forest fires of 2007 or the string of tough years when her business suffered as government protectionism allowed indebted companies to skip paying creditors.
Kokkali was not surprised when the economic crisis struck Greece, and like many Greeks, she holds the government responsible.

“Since the fish stinks from the head, it is its head that must be cut off,” she said, pointing out the shock with which she discovered that members of parliament receive 16 salaries annually, none of which were cut by the recent austerity measures.

There is little sense of economic crisis in Kandahar Airfield, where Western luxury and electronic goods on sale at the American, French and German markets combine with open-air Starbucks-style cafes, hip-hop party nights and the filth and unceasing dust of southern Afghanistan into a potent mix.

“It feels like a beach, albeit the most militarised beach in the world,” Kokkali said as she watched Blackhawk helicopters and skeletal surveillance drones take off from the nearby airport.

There were macabre touches too, such as the enormous flying cemeteries, airplanes that carry the remains of men killed in action in the killing fields of Helmand and Kandahar back to Europe and North America.

“I don’t think there has ever been a Greek woman in Kandahar,” Kokkali said, and added: “If I die, I die. I take the same risks here that I go through in Brussels, where the drivers are terrible.”

 

Iason Athanasiadis is a writer and photographer who covers the Middle East. He was detained in Tehran on June 17, 2009 in the course of his reporting on the disputed Iranian elections. No details of his alleged crime were released, and no charges were made public. He was released after twenty days of incarceration on July 6, 2009.