After Decades of Civil War, Kabul Is Left With an Empty Zoo and Looted Museum

By ALAN CULLISON

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The bird collection at the Kabul Zoo has mostly been eaten. So have the goats in the petting park.

Goldfish that graced the zoo entrance were poisoned years ago when the water was cut off. Today, their former home is a bone-dry basin of dust and wind-blown trash. Nearby, a caged monkey, beaten through the bars by children, huddles in a corner, cradling the shard of a broken mirror someone has thrown into his cage. "It's hard to care for animals when you have no money," said Sherago, deputy director of the zoo who, like many Afghans, uses one name.

The West is just beginning to size up the task of rebuilding Afghanistan. During 20 years of civil war, the country has seen its bridges and power stations blown up, pumping stations idled and power lines cut and sold for scrap metal. "The total reconstruction needs have got to run into the billions -- how many billions I can't say," said Knut Ostby, senior deputy resident representative for the United Nations in Afghanistan.

But the country's breakdown can be measured in other ways. Most telling has been the violation of the grace and civility cherished by most modern societies.

Kabul's National Museum, famous for its manuscripts, miniatures and baubles of former royal families, has been looted at least a half dozen times in the past 10 years, curators say. The Taliban put an end to the looting when they took power in 1996 -- but smashed a collection of 2000-year-old figurines after ruling that they were blasphemous. The museum was looted again last week, when the Taliban were pushed out of Kabul -- ban***s backed a pickup truck to the museum's front door and made off with a collection of antique guns.

Today, the museum's main remaining exhibits are a huge stone door and a stone cauldron, each weighing half of a metric ton. "They have taken everything that they can carry," said the curator, Nural Hak.

Like the museum, Kabul's zoo is an especially painful reminder of the city in better days, when buses ran on time, theaters showed movies and when "you could take your children for a walk and someone didn't point a machine gun in your face," said Usain, an unemployed engineer who lives next to the zoo.

The second floor of the zoo's main annex held a panoramic taxidermy exhibit, and in the early 1960s the German government gave the zoo two African lion cubs as a present. But the veneer began to wear thin when the communist government of Mohammed Najibullah collapsed in 1992, and rival mujahedeen groups fought over the capital. The zoo's sole elephant perished the following year, when Pashtun warlord Hekmatyar launched a rocket attack on Kabul that destroyed one-third of the city. The zoo's main annex was also destroyed, and Sherago moved his office to the ticket booth. Mujahedeen groups moved into the zoo itself, and the grounds fell under the control of Hazaris, Uzbeks and Tajik groups fighting for control. Overrun by bands of machine gun-toting fighters, zookeepers got used to stepping back and no longer enforcing the rules of the zoo, Sherago said.

Sometime after the fall of Mr. Najibullah -- Sherago doesn't recall when, exactly -- a young man crawled into the tiger lair and was eaten. The man's brother, enraged, threw a hand grenade into the enclosure and blinded the tiger in both eyes.

Sherago says that soldiers stopping by for culinary pleasures have been the zoo's biggest scourge. First to disappear, he said, was the bird collection: They roasted the ducks and the ostriches. Then fell the domesticated animals like sheep and mountain goats. "They ate everything that was tasty," he said.

Zamir, a former mujahedeen who fought under the Tajik general Massoud, said he helped eat the American buffalo that graced the pastures at the far end of the zoo. "There were only soldiers in the zoo back then, so you were allowed to eat anything you wanted," he said. "It wasn't that people were hungry. It was just more interesting to eat there."

The Taliban, Mr. Sherago said, appeared to be mostly against having a zoo.

Once, he said, the Taliban's justice minister stopped by the zoo and, after taking a tour, told him he should let all the animals free. "He said it was not written anywhere in the Quran that they should be kept like this," he said.