I lived and worked in Afghanistan in the 1970s, but got to know Qayum Karzai when he and his wife Patricia opened The Helmand restaurant on Charles Street 35 years ago. I later worked with the Karzais on Afghans for Civil Society, a nonprofit doing relief work in southern Afghanistan, starting in 2001. A report of his death late last month at age 77 at his home west of Baltimore leads me to add the following to Jacques Kelly’s warm obituary in the Sun (“Qayum Karzai, owner of The Helmand restaurant and Afghan politician, dies,” May 31). Jacques saluted the unique culinary and cultural addition his restaurants brought to Baltimore and how this made him such a respected figure in our community. And at the same time, Qayum was living a challenging life in two countries.
He was born into a world of complexities. The aristocratic Karzai family heads the Pashtun tribe called the Popalzai and it is a subset of the Durrani royal dynasty. The Karzais, from a homeland base near Kandahar in the south of Afghanistan, are politically and economically involved tribal leaders and confidants of a royal family that ran the country until 1973. Qayum’s father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, was a leader in the Afghan parliament who tangled so aggressively with the socially conservative Taliban movement they assassinated him in 1999 as he left a mosque in Pakistan after Friday prayers. Qayum has six brothers and one sister, and all are striking individualists, devout Muslims but mostly socially and politically progressive, pursuing careers from restaurants to banking to molecular biology to government.
As the Taliban was taking over his home country for the first time, Qayum was obligated to deal increasingly with his Baltimore and Afghan families and Afghan political issues in global dimensions. He founded a diaspora nonprofit called Afghans for Civil Society to lobby internationally against restrictive Taliban rule. And then after 2001, while Americans were on the ground in Afghanistan chasing Osama Bin Laden, and while Qayum was attending an international meeting in Germany, his younger brother Hamid was chosen to lead the country. A good-hearted soul, elemental toughness, superior political skills, and Baltimore family support helped keep Qayum going.
Things didn’t calm down. Everybody is sadly too familiar with the roller coaster ride of the next two decades in Afghanistan. Bouncing back and forth to and from Kabul and trying to serve in Afghanistan’s parliament began taking a toll on Qayum’s health. His “Afghans For Civil Society” was rebuilding Kandahar, starting independent radio and TV stations there, creating an embroidered clothing cooperative for over 400 war widows and more. Far more tragically, Ahmed Wali Karzai, Qayum’s younger brother and district governor, and Gholam Haider Hamidi, Qayum‘s childhood friend who he had convinced to come back from America and be mayor of Kandahar, were both assassinated in 2011 by suicide bombers. Amidst all this and more, in a heating up war zone, inevitable charges and countercharges, hearsay and innuendo, and more started to fly. Qayum was mentioned but never in anything substantial. One of his most important involvements was still kept a secret, which was an assignment to build back-channel dialogue between the Afghan government and the Afghan Taliban. This just meant more and more travel for him, some of it undercover.
Then came 2014. Under the Afghan constitution, Hamid’s term limits were up. And Qayum’s name naturally came up to follow him as Afghan president. Qayum’s wife and family, which up to now had been giving a master class on family loyalty, expressed strong concerns, as did friends such as I. Given that, and his health, he withdrew from the presidential race. He used “I am just too idealistic for politics” as his excuse. And in that he may have had a point.
With his dignity, his honor and his respect intact, he had to watch things unravel in his home country. There was a new restaurant in the Johns Hopkins health complex in East Baltimore. There was a getaway farm in the Pennsylvania mountains. There were friends and a garden to tend at his home west of Baltimore. I find comfort in the knowledge that the weekend before he died was spent with his family and four grandchildren.
Legend has it that Alexander the Great, who visited Afghanistan in 330 BC, said “God must have loved Afghans because he made them so beautiful.” It is a fitting tribute to Qayum Karzai. He certainly was one beautiful human being.
— Stan Heuisler, Baltimore
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