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QUETTA, Oct 16: Visitors to Pakistan have frequently been taken for a ride when buying hand-woven carpets, but the current Afghan crisis has pulled the rug from under the merchants’ feet.
“This Baluch, sir. Feel it, sir. Very fine quality. For you I make very special price,” hisses one desperate salesman to any foreigner passing his stall in a commercial centre here.
No visitor to south Asia can have failed to hear similar pleadings - the sales patter doesn’t change, whether it is Karachi or Quetta, Lahore or Peshawar.
“This very old, sir. From Mazar-i-Sharif, sir. Uzbek. For you, $400. This Turkoman, 100 years old, very special.”
There are bargains to be had these days as the US-led attacks on Afghanistan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden and his Taliban protectors have upset the supply chain to markets here.
What used to be a steady supply of merchandise has all but dried up, and merchants are having to cut prices to attract buyers.
“I’m slowly selling my stock,” said Haji Autallah, father of nine children and owner of a carpet shop in an upmarket hotel mall.
“My grandfather started this business, maybe 60 years ago. I don’t remember it as bad as this. No one’s coming to the border with carpets now, not since the airstrikes started. They are afraid. They don’t know what will happen next.”
LOOMING CRISIS: During the decade-long Soviet occupation of Afghanistan starting in December 1979, and the guerrilla war against Moscow’s forces, the prayer mats, rugs, runners and carpets kept coming over the frontier.
Haji Autallah said he had an agent in Kandahar as well as having commercial links with Kabul and Jalalabad.
Achtar’s carpet shop is little more than a kiosk in a gloomy concrete building off Jinnah Road, the main commercial thoroughfare in Quetta.
“There’s no retail trade. There are no tourists. Business has fallen maybe 80-90 per cent,” he said. And so too have prices.
SALESMEN WEAVING FOR BUSINESS: A young Afghan from Kandahar known only by the initials KD had a particular knack for winning over customers, and had managed to fit up several members of the large foreign press corps in town.
Other dealers appeared to envy his ability to talk the talk and lure that increasingly rare species, the dollar-denominated Westerner, into his father’s shop for a cup of tea.
“We’ve had virtually no new supplies since Sept 15,” KD said.
That was four days after the suicide attacks on New York and Washington.—Reuters
