Abdul Hamid Saaee looks back at a lifetime of research with quiet satisfaction.
“My father was illiterate but he wanted me to study,” he says. A topper through school, he passed the university admission exam and studied literature.
He says he was diffident at first because his clothes were shabbier than the others in class. “I used to sit at the back of the classroom,” he says. Slowly the teachers realised Saaee was bright, and one lecturer made him sit in the first row. That and the attention his teachers showered on him made all the difference, and Saaee began doing very well.
While still in school he had published his poetry in some magazines. In grade eight, an essay he wrote was awarded the first prize. His school recommended his name to the Ministry of Education, and he got a chance to visit museums and libraries in Kabul.
His journey as a researcher and writer took off. He published pieces on various topics from why industry was weak in Ghazni to Islamic art in Afghanistan. The pieces were published in a journal called Caravan.
Some of his writings have provided the background for new work by historians studying Ghazni for instance. He says an American scholar asked him for a copy of a paper published 40 years before, and said he was willing to pay anything for it. The other topics he has researched are Buddhist art, physical and cultural geography of Kandahar, and the reign of Ahmad Shah Abdali, the founder of the Durrani empire, which includes part of modern Afghanistan, that stretched east and west into India and Persia respectively.
Permanent job
In 1972, he applied and got a job in the Ministry of Mines. He was first appointed as head of academic documents. He says he worked sincerely and honestly despite political pressures. For instance, two Canadians once applied to the ministry for access to reports by Russians and Germans on ruby resources in the Jegdalak mine. Saaee declined their application, and told his minister that the two Canadians should be told to do their own research, and thereafter they could take a look at the reports submitted by Germans and Russians. “But they (Canadians) were adamant and got their way (with the minister),” he says. “I had read the earlier reports and knew that the Germans and Russians had concluded that it was not realistic for the Afghan government to think they can control ruby mining since the precious stone is tiny and miners can easily smuggle out pieces by swallowing it,” he adds. An experience he says in some African countries according to the earlier reports, he says.
In fact, and here Saaee tells Killid, the African experience was that some miners fed rubies to pet birds in the hope of avoiding detection.
As it turned out the Canadians could not benefit from reading the earlier report because the mine minister was replaced and his successor gave Saaee a patient hearing at the end of which he was asked to be secretary to the minister.
After his stint as secretary, he worked as head of secretariat (writings) of the minister until the time that he was sent to Japan by the minister for capacity building training. He trained in construction technology for 32 months in Japan after which he returned to Afghanistan. “When I returned I was employed as the head of planning commission in the municipality and my career graph shot up a lot if you consider my success. I was appointed head of direct cooperation with Moscow. When bilateral relations were cut off with Moscow I was appointed as the head of documents department of Kabul municipality.” Saaee has worked in key posts of Kabul municipality and says that he faced many problems after the mujahedin took over power in Kabul in April 1992. And when the Taleban took control, he quit his job in Kabul municipality.
New beginnings
For a while he worked with a nongovernmental organisation (NGO) called International Organisation for Migration (IOM), but eventually left for Pakistan as a refugee, returning only when the Taleban were ousted by US-led foreign troops.
He rejoined IOM, and now, on retirement, receives a pension from the organisation, having served it for a total of 14 years.
He has put his retirement to good use, and has written a book that he has titled Gul Wazha e Kher (the good words of an ass) for which he is trying to find a publisher. He also plans to put together the poems he has written over the years into a diwan (collection of poems).
He ends the interview with an anecdote from his schooldays. He says he was a classmate of Zalmay Khalilzad, the American diplomat and former US ambassador to both Afghanistan and Iraq. He says while he always topped the class, Khalilzad who went to study in Beirut after graduating from school, was consistently ranked second.
They were classmates from primary school in school number six in Kabul, the Sayed Jamaludin Afghani school for grades 5 and 6, and thereafter at the Ghazi High School from where they both graduated.
