KABUL: If you are looking for a Hugo Boss suit and just happen to be in Kabul, Hamed Stores may be the place for you.
At $200 each, the suits that hang neatly from racks in the store are far cheaper than in the West. Owner Mohammad Rafi insists they are the real thing, imported from Turkey and Dubai.
The suits, the $14 shirts and the $8 ties also symbolise a growing wealth gap in Afghanistan, where 70 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line on less than $2 a day.
“It's the way it is everywhere,” Rafi, 32, said with a fatalistic shrug. “You have rich and poor but you have to keep on doing business.”
Rafi pays $5,050 a month rent for his store in Kabul City Centre, the capital's swankiest mall and home to shops selling high-end clothes, jewellery, electronic goods and brand name shoes.
The mall opened 18 months ago, in better times for Afghanistan, and is a world away from the dusty streets outside.
Guards frisk visitors who pass through a metal detector but they also deter all but the better dressed Afghans from venturing into the mall's marble and glass interiors.
“It's too expensive here for 90 per cent of the Afghans who come in,” said Mohammad Yahya, an assistant in a store that sells Ecco shoes at $60 to $200 a pair.
“A lot of the people we call 'gawkers',” he said. “They ask how much the shoes cost and when we tell them, they leave.”
Until a year ago, Yahya said he had been selling clothes to ordinary Afghans in one of Kabul's bustling bazaars. This, though, was better, he said.
Many of Afghanistan's wealthy few are citizens who returned from abroad after the US-led invasion toppled the Taliban in 2001.
Others are senior government officials and warlords. Some have grown rich on corruption or the illegal trade in opium, which some estimates say accounts for 60 per cent of Afghanistan's Gross Domestic Product.
The disparity frustrates many Afghans, who see the ostentation and ask themselves what happened to the promise of a better life after the 2001 invasion and the billions of dollars of foreign aid pumped into reconstruction. — Reuters
