Mullah and the Icecream Seller

Mullah and the Ice Cream Seller

by

Ruth Nguyen & Emily Sutherland

All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual people and circumstances is coincidental.

Copyright 2010 Ruth Nguyen & Emily Sutherland

Smashwords Edition

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ISBN 978-0-9808511-6-8

FOREWORD

MULLAH AND THE ICECREAM SELLER:

THREADS OF TERROR

There is an eerie set of connections linking various acts of terror enacted on trains, from the killings near Broken Hill in Australia on New Year’s Day 1915 through to the bombings on the London Tube on the Seventh of the Seventh 2005.

While it must be said that none of the actions of the terrorists can be justified, an important clue to the underlying cause is that most of the terrorists (or their families) have been subject to subtle and sustained discrimination and degradation over the years. This may have contributed to their mental condition leading up to their despicable actions, murdering and injuring countless innocent civilians.

It is chilling to the core, as well as instructive and totally absorbing, to travel the pathway of two humble capable people, from the Khyber Pass and the region along the Afghanistan Pakistan border all the way to Broken Hill, near the NSW South Australian border. This is where they carried out their acts of terror, ambushing the Silverton Picnic train with a hail of gun fire designed to kill and injure many.

The trail is meticulously laid out by the authors, in a way which adds greatly to understanding the plight of the early Cameleers and first Moslems to migrate to Australia in the nineteenth century. The bare facts are there to behold and clearly affirmed by vital copies of publications of the era. (This is courtesy to the hot metal letter press and the Great Libraries with their penchant for preserving the earliest copies of many publications now long gone).

However the authors take you much further with their writings, including some well based, albeit speculative, coverage of the trials and tribulations encountered along the way. Clearly some sympathy is extended to both sides as they all had to wrestle with very harsh conditions along their respective trails leading to Broken Hill and the New Year’s Day shootout.

So was the shootout a settling of local scores, a deeper hit back at discrimination or something else. It is something to ponder carefully, armed by these vivid part fiction but also part fact accounts. What is known is the origin of the Cameleers and many of the early Mullahs, it is Afghanistan and for many from the area around the western end of the Khyber Pass.

Curiously enough, the mighty Khyber Pass and surrounds was the cradle for a great deal of terrorism in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is familiar territory for great tribal feuds, massive armies such as those of Alexander the Great and large trading caravans like the one led by Marco Polo along the spice route to the Middle East.

Even the pillaging tyrants of Genghis Kahn and Kublai Khan led their raiding armies through the Khyber, heading east and making it all the way to the Danube. British armies in three bloody wars known as the Anglo Afghan wars swept forward and then retreated time after time through the Khyber, causing them to build a famous defence supply railway from Jamrud on the plains up the Khyber to just short of the border. I commend a ride on it up through the various zig zags, but do choose your time carefully.

Winston Churchill and Lawrence of Arabia both took their turns of duty at the main Guard Posts in the mouth of the Khyber Pass, and today elements of the Taliban and al-Qaeda are still said to float around the area, moulding into the harsh terrain when need be.

Decades of violence and foreign invasion have impacted heavily over time. Then and now, graduates of the area think nothing of revenge killing and killing anyhow. This leads to the utterances of local tribal leaders and preaching mullahs that foreigners, be they white Russians or Americans or British or the UN troops, cause trouble, creating death and destruction and foreigners have done so for generations. It is payback time with every terrorist action that can be mounted, often by infiltrating or converting numbers small and discrete, taking out soft targets such as trains, ferries and large crowd events.

This was the attitude that unfolded in the eighteenth century, which included one particularly horrific battle and retreat to the Khyber in 1842 when Afghan tribes killed 4430 British soldiers, sparing one assistant surgeon to tell the tale. It continued through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it continues to this day.

Whilst history repeats itself often enough, it has to be said one can learn much from its study. One small step to turning things around is to better understand various cultural and religious make ups. It might also help to remind all protagonists that the Christian faith, the Jewish faith and the Islamic faith have points in common, for example all revere Abraham and Moses.

The other useful step in the era of the internet and world.wide.web is to ensure more accurate information is disseminated and quickly, as we do battle with terrorism.

However a letter to the London Times in the early nineteen twenties is food for thought and I quote: They have been tricked into it by the withholding of information, the Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told. We are today not far from a disaster, signed T.E.Lawrence!

There are two great reminders of the Cameleers in Australia today and set to continue, the passenger train plying the world’s newest transcontinental railway between Adelaide and Darwin is known as The Ghan, short for Afghan. The Pichi Richi railway operates The Afghan Express between Port Augusta and Quorn as a tourist train. Both offer superb journeys of renown, under positive nomenclature, that salute the great Cameleers of yesteryear from Afghanistan.

I invite you to engage with this thoughtful and colourful text, then think carefully about the then and the now.

Tim Fischer

(Former Trade Minister Federal Government of Australia, Author and Company Director)

17 July 2005

Preface

At Broken Hill on New Years Day, 1915, two Afghani men fired on a train carrying a group of people travelling to a picnic. A number of these holiday-makers were killed or injured. The Afghani men fled to a spot known as the White Rocks, where they, in turn, were fired on by the citizens of Broken Hill. One, Mullah was killed there. The other, fatally injured, died later in the Broken Hill hospital.

Was this an act of terrorism? Did the assailants see it as shots fired in the war between the British and Ottoman empires? Was it an act of revenge against the treatment of the Afghani cameleers who had done so much to enable the development of the outback and mining communities in Australia?

Ruth Nguyen and I set about trying to find out the answers to these questions. We began our research at Broken Hill, to find out what actually happened. We read newspaper accounts of the time, and then looked further into the history of the cameleers in Australia. In addition we sought to learn more about Afghanistan, where they had come from, and the way of life there. We found out a great many things, but we did not find the answer as to why these two men had shot at picnickers celebrating the New Year.

This book is our recreation of the background that may have led up to this incident. It is neither totally fictional nor factual – rather what is known as faction. Many of the people in this account really lived. A few, such as Brigid, did not. We set out to give Mullah and Gool their ‘day in court’, denied to them by death. On the other hand we did not wish to mitigate the seriousness of their crime, nor make light of the suffering of the people who were killed or injured and their families.

In the end it remains as part of our early history. As such we should not forget it.

Emily Sutherland

ABDULLAH DREAMS OF THE PAST. GOOL IS THERE.

Ghost like the white poppies rise up from the earth

threads of white light hovering o’er the edge of wakefulness.

Oh my dear ones

It is today that we proffer our turbans for your shrouds

and gather these poppies with which to strew your graves.

May your pathbe illuminated.

May darkness not cloud your way.

May God’s grace be upon you as the prophet lights your way.

The old man leans back, taking the pressure off his bad leg. The sun has long set; no moon shines tonight, only the glimmer from the fire, where the embers will soon glow. A slight puff of wind as he closes his eyes to the thread of smoke. Night sky arches above, stars hanging as if by invisible threads, familiar constellations, yet unfamiliar… the black zone.

As he begins his night journey to a place he would never wish to go, the Pleiades tilt in their path, changing course in the erdun, the Afghan snow capped peaks, veiled against a sky that is about to engulf him.

There is blood. So much blood is surprising, shocking. Staining their clothes, staining the earth, reaching out to stain him as he takes a step back. Noise fills his head, his heart beating. His mother beating herself, flailing her breast, accusing.

Honour. Such a simple word, such a difficult ideal. The word echoes, reverberates, to finally merge with the shrill wailing. Honour demands that he avenge this crime, but circumstances have crippled him. The British are his paymasters for now. Maimed in body and in spirit he feels powerless, mute.

He had warned them. He and Ali had risked leaving their ranks to warn them of the impending action.

‘To the caves. Go, hide there. Do not leave for any reason until there is no longer dust on the horizon’, they had cautioned. Some had refused to go. Some tried but could not. The very old, the very young, failing to make the climb up the rocky, precipitous mountainside, stones falling as they went, battering those below, not able to keep up.

His mother was now running towards their smouldering dwelling. What was she doing here? He and Ali had taken all his family to the caves. Slightly apart from the main heap of bodies he saw the three that caused his heart to miss a beat. His sisters, torn and bloodied, lying with their arms protectively about each other. And Ali. His throat had been cut from behind. His eyes stared in accusation and disbelief. In front of him, the Welsh sergeant he had already felled. They lay there scrunched like so much bloodied cloth, legs and arms protruding. Incomprehensible. The flies were beginning to swarm.

Ali’s formation in battle had preceded Abdullah’s. This was the British attempt to split them up and thus control any opposition that might arise from within. Sympathies and allegiances were changing daily. Ali had gone to the aid of Abdullah’s sisters in a spontaneous gesture of defence. He, Abdullah, well back from the first onslaught, had been spared.

His mother weaves back into view and falls on the bodies of her daughters.

‘Forgive me, forgive me my girls, I sent you back for the amulet but you did not reach it in time. It should have protected you. I must die of shame and sorrow at what has been done to you.’ She weeps quietly, the full-throated grief now replaced by desolate, despairing sobs. The sound reaches Abdullah with all its poignancy as he stoops over his beautiful Ali to close his eyes.

‘Ali?’ he says in wonder as he opens his eyes.

‘Not Ali, old one, peace be upon you. It is your friend Gool Badsha Mohammed, Afghan Afridi. I’m sorry to disturb your sleep but we need to talk.’

‘I was dreaming’, said Abdullah, ‘Of Afghanistan. Of the old times. A dream I am happy to leave.’

While the young man waits patiently the old man stands up slowly and stretches, his bones cracking audibly as he does so. The morning sky, pink tinged clouds hovering on the horizon, denies any hope that the day would be cool. This is my reality, thinks Abdullah. Scrub country. Broken Hill in summer. Australia. Not that bitter night in Afghanistan. Not my country to which I can never return. The Durand line had been created by the British in 1893, their calendar. It was running for at least two thousand miles from one mountaintop to another cutting into dozens of Pashtun tribes from the Afridi to the Waziri. Yes, the British had done their mischief and his homeland had been divided. With their politicking they had sought to create a buffer zone between the Raj and Afghanistan as part of their ‘Forward Policy’ to block the Russians in their attempt to gain access to certain parts of India. Abdul Rahman, weak ruler, had let it all happen as he saw his purse grow fat with English gold. His mother had died soon after from all that had happened to her immediate family and by separation from the rest, a division that the Durand line had so neatly created! That was all in the past. Now it was 1914 by the calendar of the West, the new calendar as he had come to think of it.

Gool offers him some of their precious water. ‘Clear your head. It was good bhang last night. Forget about the past. You were younger then, young in Afghanistan. The British were there.’

‘You’re right. I was twenty-five. My father had died when I was an uncircumcised boy. He married my mother when she was only seventeen years old. My mother was a good woman but she let her superstition override her attention to our Prophet’s teachings. When my father died, my brother became the head of the family. He was killed when I had just turned twenty, not yet having found husbands for my sisters. My mother died too, still beautiful despite her misfortunes in life. Anyway you are right, the British were there and I fought for them. Would that they had never set foot in our country.’

‘It is good that you recognise the British for what they are.’ Gool hesitates until Abdullah says, ‘What else did you want to say, Gool?’

‘It’s about Brosnan. I want to talk to