Where Streets Have No Name

Friday, 18 November, 2005

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IWPR staff

There’s no poultry on Chicken Street, and Flower Street sells more pirate videos than blossoms. And the Flower Street Café is actually located on the other side of the city.

But even these confusing designations are an improvement on the great mass of Kabul roads, which have no names whatsoever.

“Sometimes when we get called out to a fire, we can’t find the address. We have to wait until we can see the smoke,” said Colonel Mohammad Kazem, who heads the disaster readiness office at Kabul’s fire department.

Fire trucks, mail carriers, taxi drivers and ordinary citizens are in the same boat when it comes to navigating the city’s chaotic streets. After two decades of conflict, parts of the capital are in ruins. And the most fundamental guides to location – street names – are conspicuously absent, often creating havoc in a city of well over three million people.

Although Mohammad Ayub, 45, a Kabul native, says that he still has a hard time finding his way around.

“One day a relative of mine in Kart-e-Now died and I was trying to go to his house. I left home at eight in the morning and looked for the house until noon, but I couldn’t find it,” said Ayoub.

Small wonder. Most streets are known only by their proximity to landmarks or major intersections, and giving an address requires a certain amount of hand waving and high-decibel instruction. This can be a challenge for businesses and other professional organisations, since lengthy directions do not fit comfortably in the corner of a business card.

But now the government is finally taking steps to remedy the situation.

Minister of Information and Culture Sayed Makhdum Raheen said he planned the street-names project himself.

“Afghanistan has 34 provinces, so each one will have a street named after it,” he said. “The names of poets from before 1919 will also be used.”

There will be exceptions, however.

According to Raheen, Mohammad Zahir Shah, who was king of Afghanistan from 1933 to 1973 and now has the title Father of the Nation, will have his own street. But so will his cousin Sardar Mohammad Daud Khan, who overthrew him and ruled until the communist takeover in 1978.

Politics intrudes on every aspect of life in Afghanistan, and street naming is rife with the potential for conflict. Raheen should expect that whatever names are assigned to the city’s thoroughfares will prove controversial.

Ahmad Shah Massoud, the mujahedin leader turned civil war commander, has his own street - Great Massoud Road - where the American embassy is located. Massoud’s assassination two days before the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States earned him martyr status among part of Afghanistan’s population - but others revile him as a warlord who helped reduce Kabul to rubble. His ubiquitous photos are often defaced, and many city residents refuse to call the street by its given name.

Haji Qadir, a former vice-president and military commander, who was assassinated in 2002, has his own crossroads. Qadir’s legacy is also disputed. In his native Jalalabad, he is buried alongside of King Amanullah, who ruled in the Twenties but died in 1960. This has so offended some Afghans that they have repeatedly tried to blow up his tomb.

There has been talk in the presidential administration that a road is to be named in honour of Abdul Ali Mazari, a commander who led the main ethnic Hazara faction, Hezb-e-Wahdat, but the Kabul municipality insists no such plans are afoot.

Mohammad Ayub laughed when IWPR told him about the project. “If the streets are named after the murderers of the Afghan people, like some crossroads in Kabul have already been, it would be better if they remained nameless,” he said.

The street-naming project will cost money but no one is forthcoming about the details. “So far we have 172 signs ready to set up on the streets,” said Mohammad Zahir Rezayee, a senior official with Kabul municipality. “Each sign cost the municipality 18 [US] dollars, and the total comes to 3,096 dollars.”

He added that the International Security and Assistance Force, ISAF, has set up 500 signs at a cost of 10,000 dollars in Kabul’s 11th and 15th districts two months ago.

Rezayee declined to give the overall budget figure allocated for street naming.

Meanwhile, Kabul residents and visitors alike are struggling to find their way.

Gulab, 50, has come from his native Baghlan province to Kabul for medical treatment, and has had to stay in a hotel for a week because he was unable to find his nephew’s house in western Kabul.

”If the streets and crossroads were named, I wouldn’t have this problem,” he said. “I’ve spent all my money on this hotel.”

Taxi drivers also have a hard time coping. Mohammad Wali, a Kabul cabbie, says most of his passengers give him directions rather than addresses.

“Since the streets don’t have specific names, it is difficult to set the fare in advance,” he said.