Mullah Mohammed Omar: man, myth, malefactor, messiah?
A man as notorious as Osama bin Laden, the Afghan Amir of Pax Islamia, Mullah Mohammed Omar, has never been photographed and interviewed only once, says V K Shashikumar, trying to flesh him out
New Delhi, September 19
Who is the one-eyed Mullah Mohammad Omar, the terrible Cyclops of the Taliban?
Michael Griffin, who has written an authoritative account of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan, describes him as the Taliban's "presiding genius, the saint on the satellite phone". Omar is a compulsive recluse, a shadowy figure whose authority comes from the secrecy in which he has shrouded himself and not from forceful leadership.
Everything about Omar ends in a question. For instance: what does he look like? Apart from his close confidants, not many have seen him. Along with his wife and children, he lives in the city of Kandahar, which is also the headquarters of the Taliban.
One version of his physical description says that he is "unusually" tall and in his 40s, in the gerontocracy of Islamic ideology a relatively young man with a black beard and a black turban. Another description says he is thickset and "distinguished". In January 1997, a Guardian report said that he spoke Dari with an Iranian accent, despite being a Pashtun from Maiwand in Kandahar.
According to Griffin, he is one-eyed in the sense that his "right eye is stitched shut, the result of an encounter with Soviet soldiers when he was a mujahideen commander with Harakat-I-Inquilab-I-Islami". In March 1997, Time reported that his left eye has a "hawk-like, unrelenting gaze".
An Indian Foreign Service (IFS) officer who served in a frontline Central Asian country told tehelka.com, "Omar is more of a fictional character and not what he is in real life." Myths about him have been created to deepen the air of enigma around him. Now, his stubborn refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden to the Americans is perhaps another addition to his artificially created enigma.
So, again, who is this mullah who is willing to accept American retribution for the sake of protecting a proclaimed terrorist?
Omar and bin Laden go back a long way. They were both mujahideen colleagues in the Afghan resistance against the Soviet occupation forces. On Black Tuesday, September 11, he vigorously defended his cash-rich supporter, who not only bankrolls the Taliban's stated objective of establishing a global Islamic emirate, but is also related to him. It is thought that Mullah Omar has taken bin Laden's eldest daughter as a wife, and that bin Laden may even have taken one of Mullah Omar's daughters as a fourth wife.
Why is it that there is no authoritative account of Mullah Omar in spite of the definitive accounts of a handful of people who have met him?
Following the obscurantist ways of a supra-orthodox version of Sunni Islamic belief, Omar refuses to be photographed. Neither is he comfortable enough to be seen in public. So there are varied accounts of his physical features. Compounding the mystery is the fact that no Western journalist has ever met Mullah Omar, who leaves virtually all contact with the outside world to his foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil.
Griffin writes, "Dr Norbert Holl, the UN envoy charged with coordinating peace efforts in Afghanistan, cooled his heels for six months after the fall of Kabul before being granted a meeting with a de facto head of the new government."
Omar's only connection with the world outside Kandahar is through a satellite phone. He regularly keeps in touch with key Taliban officials and apparently speaks to bin Laden every day. He rarely stirs out of his house reportedly built for him by bin Laden. He made an exception when he met Islamic ulema (scholars) from around Afghanistan on Wednesday, September 19, and decided not to hand over bin Laden to the US.
Most of his supporters have never seen him face-to-face because he makes it a point to sit behind a screen. In one of his rare interviews, he spoke to BBC's South Asia Correspondent David Lyon (Observer, March 9, 1997) from behind a curtain and through the circuitous route of a third party seated inches away. The first - and only - newsperson to have interviewed him is Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusuf Zai.
In one of the early reports on the Taliban, even before the Talibs had marched into Kabul in September 1996, The Guardian interviewed one of Omar's key aides, Mullah Mohammad Hassan, governor of Kandahar. Griffin writes about it in his book, Reaping the Whirlwind: "Despite his near-messianic status, Mullah Mohammad Omar, has not too much religious knowledge…a lot of scholars know more than he does."
Indian diplomats who have worked closely with the anti-Taliban resistance leaders say that Omar's personality is fictive. They say that he has been "created" by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and that the Taliban has deliberately sustained this image.
But why would the Taliban propagate Mullah Omar as a myth? The answer, according to diplomatic sources, may be bizarre - the myth of Mullah Omar sustains Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
Think about it. In a religion that decries icons, Omar is today its most enduring icon.
tehelka.com |
