Colonel Rasoul Safi fought against tradition and fundamentalism. He joined school without his family knowing; and, he stood his ground against false claims that he was not religious. A testimony:
Rasoul Safi was born in 1957 in Kala village of Chapadara district, Kunar province. His mother died when he was only six and his father married again. His father owned some 300 goat and sheep and Rasoul took them to graze in the mountains every day. When Hakim, his friend, told him about the school he went to, Rasoul wished he could go too. “The name of the school sounded very sweet to me so I went to my father and told him I want to enroll. My uncle who was sitting next to him gave me a tight slap and told me never to mention school again. ‘Who will take the flock to graze every day?’ he asked. I came home crying,” he recalls.
But his dream of going to school did not die. He told his aunt he wanted to study and she gave him some wheat to barter for books and stationery. “It was the time of King Zahir Shah. Most deals took place with wheat barter,” he says. Rasoul enrolled secretly in the school, but one day when he was returning home his uncle saw him with notebook and pen. “If I had not run away to my aunt, I might have been beaten a lot. My aunt was like my mother.”
After this Rasoul made sure he kept his family satisfied by grazing the animals. “After school ended I would give my books to my friend Hakim and go home to take the flock up into the mountains.” It was only when he came fourth in class that his father got to know what he was up to. “Father told me I should also graze the flock and do all the other chores around the house,” the colonel recalls. Soon he was excelling not only in studies but also in the school volley ball team. In grade five he topped the class and the volley ball team won a prestigious tournament.
But at the end of grade six, Rasoul’s father decided he had had enough of schooling. “There was a general exam at the end of grade six to go to grade seven. I was not allowed to attend the exam. I suffered all day. When I came home late afternoon after grazing the animals my aunt was waiting for me. She had persuaded my father to let me continue. She told me to tell the teacher that I had made a mistake and that he should let me take the exam. My aunt was an angel! The teacher let me sit for the exam. I was successful.”
Perseverance pays
In grade seven, Rasoul had more courage. He told his family that if they insisted he does house work he would leave the village. “Anyway my aunt was paying for my school. My family was too poor even though they had lots of sheep,” he says. The family relented.
Rasoul’s life changed in grade nine. Before the annual exam, his teacher’s son who was in the military came to school in uniform. He fell in love with the uniform, and decided to join the military. On his teacher’s advice that every year in fall a team from the military school in Kabul visited to select children, Rasoul signed up. He went against his father’s wishes and joined the Kabul school. He did not come back to the village for three years. When he graduated, he says he “put on a good suit and cap and caught the truck to the village. Those days only one truck travelled from Nangarhar to Kunar, I sat on top so that everyone could see me. When I reached the village, people gathered around calling me Zabet (first military officer). Women and children climbed on roof-tops to welcome me. My father came running to me, gave me a big hug, there were tears running down his cheeks.”
As an army officer, his first posting was Herat. After some time he returned to Kabul and became commander of the guard detachment in Sardar Dawood Khan military hospital. There were many other postings during the government of Dr Najibullah. When civil war broke out in the early ‘90s, he returned to his village to be with his father but things had begun to change even there. “We were at a mosque for Friday prayers, listening to a mullah when a gunman came on stage and said without identifying me that people from the government who have come from Kabul should get on the stage and accept Islam. I did not grow a beard, and that was considered un-Islamic by them.”
Changing course
Rasoul left the village and joined Haji Qadeer (he is now first deputy in Parliament) as garrison commander in his brigade in Nuristan. (Qadeer was a jihadist commander and minister of public works in the previous Hamid Karzai government). But he was betrayed and sent to prison in exchange for an imprisoned Taleb.
It was under the Karzai government that he was rehabilitated and returned to the Sardar Dawood Khan military hospital, where he remains.
