Under the absolute Amir

The Amir once told me, when speaking of the unruly character of the people, and the difficulty of making them, by the example of others who were punished, become peaceful and law-abiding, that he had ordered over a hundred thousand to be executed since the beginning of his reign, and that there were still others who thought they could set his laws at defiance. The Amir ruled his people with an iron hand, and, considering their character, such is necessary, if order is to be maintained. I was one day in durbar at the Bagh-i-bala palace, and one of the soldiers committed some offence, and was ordered to be brought in by the Amir, who inquired into the circumstances, and then instructed one of his officers to take the man down the hill adjoining the palace, and cut his throat there. This was done, and two little slave boys, who went with the executioners to see the tamasha, came back with white faces and trembling limbs. It was the first time they had seen such a sight, but those who were attached to the Amir’s court, were not long in his service before becoming used to happenings of this sort.

Although the Amir punished many small offences with death, he was not always enraged when one man killed another, unless the murdered person happened to be one whom he knew and liked, then his anger was ungovernable, and the murderer was generally ordered death in some particularly horrible manner. One of the slave boys, of whom the Amir was very fond, and had raised to a position of influence and power, and who consequently became arrogant and overbearing in manner to others, and so gained for himself a good many enemies, was shot by a soldier one evening while riding across the square in Sherpur cantonment. When the soldier was brought before the Amir, the latter, suspecting that he could have had no enmity against the slave boy, questioned him as to who instigated him to commit this deed, and the soldier refused to answer. This further enraged the Amir, and he gave orders that the man was to be tied to the bough of a tree by his hair in the palace garden, and so many square inches of skin taken off his body daily until he confessed.

The man died on the third day without confessing anything to incriminate another, but the name of one of the generals was mentioned freely by the people as the instigator of the crime, in revenge for the slave boy insulting him in the Amir’s presence shortly before.

Another case showing the severity of the Amir towards the relatives of those who escaped his vengeance was that of an old man brought before him, whose son had run away from the country. The old man’s son, with two or three others, had been concerned in, or accused of, swindling the treasury, and knowing what was being said against them, and the fate in store should they be convicted, they determined on escaping to India. The Kotwal, however, got wind of their intention, and came on the night proposed for escape with some twenty of his men, and posted them outside the gate, where some horses belonging to those in the house were standing ready saddled. The son, and those with him, discovering that the Kotwal and his men were lying in wait for them, determined on cutting through them, so, suddenly opening the door, they rushed out armed with swords and revolvers. The Kotwal was not noted for personal courage, and the Kotwali sepoys generally are seldom courageous, perhaps through being of mixed races, and they gave way after one or two of their men had been cut down, and then the young fellows made a dash to the horses, and cutting down those who held them, mounted and got away, and were not heard of again. The father, who was left in the house, was seized by the Kotwal and taken to the Amir, where, not knowing whether his son had escaped or not, he begged the Amir to forgive him, urging that he was guiltless of the crime of which others had accused him, and offered his own life if his son’s might be spared, saying the Amir might kill him himself where he stood. The Amir, enraged at the young men escaping his vengeance, seized his stick and struck the old man down with it, and then ordered others there to go on beating him; and in the Amir’s presence the old man was thrashed until he was dead, and his body was afterwards exhibited on a charpai (bedstead) in the bazar for two days, as a warning to others. The Amir invariably punished the nearest relatives of those who ran away to escape punishment, and knowing this, many a man returned and gave himself up in order that his relatives might go free.

Beating with sticks is a common punishment, so many blows being given on the man’s back as he lies spreadeagled on the ground, two soldiers, one on either side, administering the blows, while others hold the man down, and sometimes the Amir orders the blows of such a number that the man shall die under the punishment. A master carpenter, who did not get on with the work ordered in a new part of the palace, was given a hundred and fifty blows with sticks, and died the day after, but the sticks used are at times so heavy that the bones of the back are broken and the flesh mortifies, so that a less number of blows will sometimes cause death.

The present Amir had fifteen Kotwali sepoys beaten for neglect of duty, in not reporting the transgressions of their superior officer, until eight of them died under the blows, and the others were unable to move for weeks after, and being kept in prison received no medical treatment to alleviate their sufferings. On a later occasion, when one of his attendants had committed some mischief, with the object of getting the blame put on another fellow-servant, and was detected, the Amir, who was at the time on the temporary roof covering the new palace in the Arak garden, had the man brought before him, and there beaten with sticks until partly insensible, then the man was hauled to the edge of the roof and thence thrown to the ground, after which he was dragged by a rope fastened to his legs from where he lay to the Kotwali, but life was extinct on arrival, though he was still living after being thrown from the roof.

The present Amir is very scrupulous about all things surrounding him being kept clean and tidy, not only in the house and garden, but the roads leading to the palace must be kept swept and clean too. He was one day passing out of one of the smaller gates in the wall of the Arak garden, and noticed that the ground round the gateway was unswept; so, stopping there, he sent for the man whose duty it was to sweep the place. A woman came in reply, and said that she was the man’s wife, and her husband was too ill with fever to get up, and she had been so busy attending him that she had found no time to sweep the place herself, and also she was, as he could see, heavy with child. The Amir replied that he would relieve her of her burden, and ordered the woman fifty strokes with sticks on the abdomen. The woman was accordingly laid on her back, on the ground, and beaten, and died almost immediately afterwards.

The late Amir was very savage in punishing those who falsely reported his death. When the cholera epidemic broke out in 1900, the Amir went to live at Paghman, which is situated at the foot of the Hindu Kush, while the epidemic was raging, for the Amir and all his family greatly fear cholera, and run away at once from the affected area. Towards the close of the epidemic, two men came in to Kabul from Paghman, and gave out in the bazars that the Amir was dead of the disease; and when the Amir returned to the city a few days after, he had these men caught and brought before him, and said the wish was certainly father to the report which they had spread; so he ordered them to be cut in pieces, and their remains to be exhibited in the bazars as a warning to others. On another occasion when he had again been reported dead, he ordered the man who spread the report to be taken to the top of the Asman Heights, and there, on a part overlooking the river which is very precipitous, be put into a barrel and rolled down the mountain-side to the valley below. A similar case, but more brutally executed, was that of an old man, a moullah, who had given out that the Amir was not a true Mussulman, and was ordered to be thrown down the mountain from the same point. When thrown over the cliff, by the Kotwali sepoys, his clothes caught on a jutting rock, which suspended him, and prevented further fall, and the sepoys, releasing the clothes, took the man back and threw him over again, this time successfully.

The Amir, after the style of the Mikado of dramatic fame, always tried to let the punishment fit the crime, although his punishments were sometimes such as to make one think that he greatly exaggerated the crime. For instance, a man who stole the food of some poor children, leaving them nothing, was put in a cage, in the bazar, and there starved; but to make the punishment fit his crime more closely, bread and water were brought to him two or three times each day, and placed just out of his reach, and this was continued until the man died of starvation.

In another case, a man and a woman, who loved not wisely but too well, both being married people, determined on running away together, hoping thereby to secure their future happiness in each other’s society, but in their endeavour to reach India, where they intended living together, they were caught and brought back. The Amir, in ordering their punishment, said that, as the man was so fond of the woman, he should have her as completely as was possible. So the woman was thrown alive into a huge cauldron of boiling water, and boiled down to soup, and a basin of this soup was given to the man, who was forced to drink it, and after drinking it he was hanged. In this case the Amir’s object was to punish, not only in this life, but in the next, for a cannibal cannot enjoy the delights of Paradise as depicted in the Koran.

Another man and woman, who were caught in the act of loving unwisely, were, by the order of the Amir, who appropriately said he would let them live together until death, put on top of the Asman Heights, tied back to back with ropes, and kept there until they died of exposure and starvation, and sepoys were put on guard to see that no one interfered with the fulfilment of the punishment. The woman died first, and the man was allowed a day longer to die in, but as he lingered he was helped on his journey.

In ordinary cases, when a man and woman are caught, as in the last instance, both are ordered to be taken to the scaffold, and there the rope is adjusted round the man’s neck ready for him to be strung up, and he stands there while the woman is put in a sack, the mouth of which is tied, and the sepoys thrust their bayonets through it and the woman until no further cry being heard it is known that death has occurred; then the man, who has witnessed his mistress’s death, is hauled up and hanged. In similar cases where the relatives of the ruling family are implicated, the man is imprisoned, and no one knows what becomes of him, except that he is never heard of again, and the woman is blinded or has her nose cut off, or some similar disfiguring punishment is inflicted, and after the punishment she is allowed to die or get well as nature orders without being nursed; mostly they die, and it is said that those who were once fond of them, help them to death with a dose of poison, which is perhaps the kindest thing they could do.

It is a common matter for a man who has grave suspicion that his wife is unfaithful to cut off her nose; sometimes they bite it off, as a sign to all of her unfaithfulness, and to spoil her beauty. This is, of course, when the lover cannot be located, and there are no proofs obtainable of her wrong-doing.

In those cases where men were convicted of outraging girls or women, the Amir was very savage in his punishments. In one case three men, so convicted, were buried in the ground up to their chins, and left there until dead, after which the dogs were allowed to come and eat them, or as much as they could get of them. For the body to be eaten by dogs is regarded as worse than the punishment causing death, because it cuts off all hope of Paradise.

“To fit the crime,” the Amir has in some cases where men are very much married, and are too fond of spending most of their time with their wives to the neglect of their Government duties, given camphor to the men as a punishment, camphor being known in the country to be antiaphrodisiac.

As a means of putting a stop to the constant robbing of Government money in the different factories, the late Amir had some men who were in charge of the soap shops and were convicted of swindling, thrown alive into the soap boiler (which is one of a large capacity) when in full blast, to make up the deficit by boiling them down into soap. The Amir also had men thrown into boiling oil on occasions; but this was as a punishment, and had nothing to do with the manner of the crime.

To punish stealing, one of the usual penalties ordered by the Amir, besides hanging, was to have the hand cut off. On the occasion of my first visit to Kabul in 1889, I was given tents in the garden adjoining the workshops to live in, it being summer time; and one day one of the workmen, who are always searched before being allowed to pass through the gate when work is over, was found to have a piece of leather the size of a man’s hand concealed under his coat. The Amir ordered the man to be hanged in the factory as a warning to the others, but on representations being made to him by the Englishmen who were working in the shops, the Amir commuted the sentence to the man’s hand being cut off. Hands are cut off by a butcher, and usually the stumps, when the hands are off, are plunged into boiling oil to stop the hemorrhage. This workman died a couple of days afterwards.

Another common punishment is that of blinding people. This is the usual punishment of those who try to escape from prison or from the country—synonymous terms almost. The manner of doing this is to lance the pupils of the eyes, and then put in a drop of nitric acid, and, to guarantee no sight being left, quicklime is afterwards added. The agony endured must be frightful, and in one case when fifteen men were blinded together in Sherpur cantonment, where these punishments are usually carried out, the men were seen on the third day after being blinded all chained one to the other, and sitting in a row on the ground; they were unable to go elsewhere to obey the calls of nature, and consequently were filthy beyond description. Three of them were lying dead still chained to the living, and some of the living, too, were lying unconscious, while the others were moaning and rocking themselves backwards and forwards.

Running away was not always punished with blinding, as was exemplified in the case of five Kafri boys. These boys, who were part of the regiment formed of the prisoners brought from Kafristan after that country was taken by the Amir, tried to get away to India, for Kabul and enforced Mohammedanism were little liked by them; but they were caught while doing so and brought back. As a punishment the Amir ordered the Kafri regiment to be paraded and the boys bayoneted in front of their fellows. There had been a good deal of dissatisfaction among the Kafris, and the Amir probably deemed a severe example necessary.

One form of execution, but which is very rarely used, is to bend the tops of two young trees towards each other and fasten them to the ground. The person to be executed is tied, one leg and arm to one tree, and the other leg and arm to the other tree, and, when all is ready, the ropes binding the trees down are cut simultaneously, and the body of the person tied to them is disrupted.

There are three common methods of execution in use—blowing from guns, hanging, and bayoneting.

The latter is mostly done in the prisons at night, when those to be executed are taken by guards to some secluded spot, such as the rased portion of Bala Hisar, and there bayoneted, their bodies being afterwards thrown into an old well or ditch close by, and earth thrown over them.

When a person is ordered to be blown from a gun, he is taken to the one which is fired daily to announce the hour of midday, and is fixed on a small hill close to the Sherpur cantonment. He is there tied to the gun in such a manner that his back is against the muzzle, and on the explosion of the charge the greater part of his body is blown into pieces. Blowing from guns is a punishment intended to strike terror into the hearts of others, but it is no doubt a preferable death to other forms of execution, inasmuch as it is sudden. Men who rob or swindle Government funds are served this way, and the Amin-Nizam, or paymaster to the army, is sometimes the central figure on these occasions, also highway robbers and spies frequently end their days by being scattered from the gun.

For hanging the ordinary gallows is used, i.e. there is no drop given to break the neck, the man being hauled up by means of a pulley and hanged till he dies of strangulation. Two gallows are used, one T-shaped, and very high, is for a man who is hanged and left hanging until the following day; the body being left on the gallows as a warning to others. The other is a frame similar to the frame of a table with the top planking removed, the legs being fixed in the ground, and each side of the square so formed, has three or four wooden pulleys depending from it, over which the ropes pass for hauling the body up. It sometimes happens that several have to be executed at one time and this gallows was made large enough to take sixteen persons together. Those who are condemned to be hanged are not blindfolded at the time of execution; their arms are tied to the body by a rope which passes over the arms above the elbows, and their legs are secured above the ankles. While a man is being hanged, his forearms work up and down, one after the other, struggling to break the cords and get at the rope round his neck, until he becomes unconscious, and it is a rather gruesome sight to watch his fruitless struggles to relieve the agony of strangulation. On one occasion a burly Afghan who was being hanged managed to break the rope binding his arms, and then clutching the rope, above his neck, pulled himself up and let go again, probably with the intention of ending the torture by breaking his neck; but the rope broke instead, and the man fell to the ground, and lay partly unconscious at the foot of the gallows for twenty minutes or so, while another rope was being brought from the bazar, and when that arrived, he was again strung up, and the execution completed. On another occasion when a man was being hanged the rope broke three times, and each time a new rope had to be brought from the bazar. When the third rope broke, those standing by said it was a sign from God that the man was innocent and should not be hanged, and the officer in charge of the execution despatched a messenger to the Amir with the particulars of the case, and asked if the man was to be reprieved; but the Amir’s message came back that the man must be hanged as ordered, so they had no alternative but to pull the man up for the fourth time and hang him until he was dead.

The lesser punishments for offences committed, besides those already mentioned, vary according to the caprice or humour of the Amir. In some cases noses are cut off, beards are plucked out, men are made to stand for several days and nights without moving. Snuff is rubbed into the eyes, and in different other ways they are made to feel the Amir’s displeasure. Any butcher who was convicted of giving short weight was, by Amir Shere Ali’s orders, nailed by the ear to the door of his shop.

In one case, where false witnesses were produced before the Amir, and were detected, the emissaries of the man who engaged these witnesses at a certain price each to give false evidence were ordered to be hanged by the heels in the Arak bazar from sunrise to sunset for eight days; but the men had friends, and the power of money is great, so the police sepoys allowed them to rest with their chests on the ground and legs up in the air until some officer was seen approaching, when they were hauled clear of the ground until he had passed, and were then lowered again, but even with all this indulgence, the men fainted several times. The strange part of the sentence lay in the punishment of the man who wanted, and paid for, the false witnesses, for he was fined only. No man knows the mind of the Amir, they say in Kabul, and it would be interesting to know by what process of reasoning the chief offender was considered less guilty than those who did his bidding.

Another punishment, which was also a huge joke in the court for many months, was that of a slave boy who had asked the Amir several times to give him a wife, until at last the Amir said, “Yes.” It was a usual thing for the Amir to give a slave girl from his harem for a favourite slave boy to marry. The marriage of this boy was celebrated in the usual way; a large khirgah or bamboo tent was fixed in the palace garden for the use of the newly married couple on the night of the ceremony, and all passed off with the firing of guns and feasting, as is usual. When at last the bridegroom hurried to the tent to see his bride for the first time face to face (the bride is never seen by the bridegroom until after the marriage ceremony is over), he found the tent in darkness, but passed in. Shortly afterwards he rushed out yelling, and fled to the Amir’s presence, saying that a great calamity had befallen him, and that it was a shaitan and not a woman he had married. It transpired that the Amir, to punish the boy’s importunity, had secretly ordered another of his slave boys to be dressed up and put in the place of a girl during the ceremony.