Fariba Nawa – AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST

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  • My first blog: Egypt on the verge of change

    I spent nearly two years in Egypt in the late 1990s. I was a study abroad student for one semester at the American University in Cairo, and two years later, I returned to teach journalism and help advise the student newspaper at the university. AUC is in Tahrir Square where the demonstrations are taking place daily. The time I spent there was filled with laughter, sumptuous food, sight seeing, learning Arabic, visiting relatives (my sister’s in-laws), and meeting some of the kindest and fun-loving people I’ve ever come across. Those people became friends and although I haven’t returned to Egypt since 1997, my memories and relatives have kept me connected to the country. One day trip I took with friends in Cairo was to the Southern Cemetery where impoverished Egyptians have turned a graveyard into a slum city. When I watch the demonstrations on TV and youtube now, I look at my photos from the cemetery to understand why Egyptians have risen. In one picture, a woman cleans the sewage from her tin made home with a straw broom, her headscarf wrapped around her nose. I could take the photo because her home had no door and the cloth curtain she had installed was slightly drawn to reveal her sweeping. In another photo, a woman in a large, purple headscarf holds one child’s hand and another toddler is propped on her shoulder. She holds a plastic container with the other hand. She has to walk miles to fill the container with water because she has no running water in her home. These are not the worst images of poverty I have seen, but they stand out at a time when Egypt is on the verge of change.

    Dissent and debate against government corruption and injustice was alive when I lived there but the momentum for a movement and a mass uprising wasn’t. The protests in Tunisia that overthrew the dictatorship has inspired Egypt and other countries to speak out and fight for their rights. It’s easy to become excited as I read my Egyptian friends’ posts on Facebook. They are passionate, hopeful and rejuvenated to improve human rights, curb high level corruption and decrease the gap between the rich and poor. But my experience with uprisings and revolutions has seen nothing but violence. Living through the communist coup in Afghanistan, I recall university students demonstrating against imperialism and feudalism, against the gap between the rich and poor, against corruption and nepotism. The slogans were different then but the reasons behind the uprisings were the same. Many of the idealists who had become communist believed in justice and equality but their vision was shattered. The communist government in Kabul was brutal and the insurgent Mujahideen who replaced them were drug dealing warlords. Afghanistan and Iran have both gone through Islamic revolutions and the people of both countries are now struggling to establish a civil society outside of a religious theocracy. The Afghan communist coup of 1978 began the demise and unraveling of my homeland to what it has become today — one of the most dangerous and impoverished places to live. I can no longer live there to raise a family.

    To compare Afghanistan and Egypt is perhaps callous — the two nations are vastly different historically and economically. Egyptians may succeed in overthrowing their leader Hosni Mubarak and the current government, but what kind of leadership will replace them? I fear the next government might be more cruel and repressive like Afghanistan and Iran. Afghan and Iranian intellectuals of the 1970s seem naive and overly idealistic in the pages of history. I encourage my Egyptian friends to protest but to be aware of the consequences that may lie ahead: beatings, torture and imprisonment. I implore them to proceed with caution and a healthy dose of skepticism. I want to see them victors of long term reform for a democracy that protects its people. I only hope their vision is not destroyed like those of my compatriots. I hope they don’t have to become refugees in foreign lands to raise their families like Afghans have.

  • The ghosts of Pul-e-Charkhi

    Since the Taliban were ousted, 86 mass graves have been uncovered in Afghanistan — their occupants the victims of torture and murder. Fariba Nawa went in search of her uncle — a professor who dared to teach

    By Fariba Nawa
    February 24, 2008
    Sunday Times Magazine (UK)

    We were in territory off limits to civilians. The Afghan army Jeep suddenly braked after a 20-minute ride through unpaved roads on the outskirts of Kabul. The ministry-of-defence spokesman started to point into a shallow ditch. I braced myself. Mina Wali, an Afghan-American woman who had also journeyed from the United States, anxiously exited the vehicle. I wasn’t brave enough to go first; I wanted to see her reaction before I looked where he was pointing.

    We were at one of Afghanistan’s newly uncovered mass graves in search of skeletons from nearly 30 years ago, dumped there when I was just six years old. Wali’s father and my paternal uncle were two of the tens of thousands imprisoned by Afghan authorities during the communist regime – 1978 to 1992 – who were never seen again. We called them gomshoda, or the disappeared. Since the ousting of the Taliban in 2001, 86 mass graves have been dug up, though the authorities seem to know little about who was buried in them. Most have been discovered unintentionally, as a result of workers digging to erect new buildings as part of the extensive reconstruction of the country.

    Wali and I had chosen to begin our search at a grave near the notorious Pul-e-Charkhi prison, where many of these prisoners were taken – a desert outpost used for target-shooting by the Afghan military. Human bones had begun to surface as workers dug on the site. But as nobody was willing to start the process of identifying the bodies, the digging had stopped.

    There were two human bones inside the ditch, probably from the thigh and back Strewn next to them were lapis-coloured pieces of fabric and a pair of black, close-toed plastic shoes. Poor Afghan men wore this type of shoe. The wind had blown empty plastic water bottles on top of the ditch near mounds of fresh dirt.

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    Wali crouched near the ditch and sobbed. I held back my tears. Stories I had heard over the past 29 years about how the disappeared were executed and some buried alive in this desert raced through my mind. I was standing on ghosts who held on to secrets of torture and atrocities. We sensed our relatives were among them. I had met Wali while reporting on Afghan-Americans who had returned to Afghanistan to do good – she had built a school – and we discovered both of us had family who had been missing from the communist era. Now, here we were.

    My quest was to find out what had happened to my uncle – his death has scarred my family – and to come face to face with the man who sealed his fate. It proved to be an uncomfortable but revelatory journey.

    I had warm memories of my uncle, Fazel Ahmed Ahrary. He was balding, always reading something or playing with his daughter, Ariya, his favourite. Sometime in spring 1979, a couple of months after the mujaheddin uprising in Herat, I remember my father telling us his brother had been imprisoned. It was the first time I saw my father weep. He knew his brother wasn’t coming back. But Fazel Ahmed’s wife and children refused to believe it. They searched for him for the next three years and then emigrated to the US, with no answers but still hoping he was alive. Last year I told Aunt Roufa, who lives in Hawaii, of my interest in continuing their search and she was enthusiastic: perhaps individuals who had information but had been too scared to talk in the past would be willing to open up now.

    The key to unlocking those secrets of the past was held by Assadullah Sarwary, the head of the Afghan secret police in 1978 and 1979, the time at which most people disappeared. There are no reliable statistics, but from nearly every large family in the Afghan diaspora, from Britain to the US, at least one member was jailed during that period. On documents that list names of prisoners who didn’t come back, it is Sarwary’s signature. Today he is the only representative of the communist regime in prison in Kabul on charges of mass murder. Many of his colleagues are either dead, in the West, or rising to the ranks again in today’s western-backed Afghan government. An Afghan court sentenced him to death in February 2006, but human-rights groups and the United Nations objected to the trial, calling it unfair. He has pleaded not guilty and appealed against the sentence. He’s waiting for the Afghan Supreme Court to grant him a military trial because he was in the air force.

    The fact that so many linked to the past regime are still in power and that the country is enmeshed in a new war doesn’t bode well for justice. People are still afraid to talk. “There’s a culture of fear. People from each era are still in power, which prevents civilians from coming forward with proof against past criminals. People don’t trust the system,” said Rahimullah Rameh, a lawyer who investigates war crimes for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.

    My uncle was my father’s younger brother – there were five brothers and three sisters – and came from a family of intellectuals and writers from the city of Herat. But Fazel Ahmed was the star. He won a scholarship to study pharmacy in France and then became the head of the pharmacy faculty at Kabul University. He was known among the family as a bookworm, quiet, honest and warm. His marriage was arranged to a cousin, Roufa Ahrary, a poet and teacher, and they had four sons and a daughter. In 1978, when Soviet-backed Afghan revolutionaries staged a coup against President Daud Khan, my uncle was at the height of his career and uninvolved in politics.

    But Afghanistan rapidly destabilised after the coup as the American-backed mujaheddin began a fierce guerrilla war against the communists. Kabul University was the hub of political activity, with daily demonstrations against capitalism and imperialism and seminars discussing Marx, Lenin and Mao. But there were tensions among the Afghan communists. There were three communist parties: Khalq, the party in power; Parcham, a more elitist, intellectual party backed by the Soviets; and the Maoists, supported by China, who were outlawed but met in secret. The Khalq party did not accept the other two and imprisoned their more influential members. Punishment of the Maoists was more severe, usually execution, while some in Parcham were spared because of Soviet support. The Khalq formed a strong secret police called Agsa, which Sarwary ran, similar to the East German Stasi.

    Students and professors disappeared by the hundreds from the university. My uncle, who was not a member of any party, was demoted from his job as the head of the faculty.

    Before visiting that dreadful graveside, I had begun my quest at Kabul University, at the faculty of pharmacy where his students and the classmates who studied with him in France are now professors. Fazel Ahmed’s younger sister Nafisa Masomi and two of my cousins went with me. There, one of his colleagues, Qamaruddin Saifi, and two of his students, Nasim Siddiqi and Hassan Frotan, agreed to talk.

    My uncle was a different personality at the university – vivacious and vocal. He stayed behind the scenes politically, but attended various leftist meetings and discussed political crises with his colleagues. The problem was that some of his closest contacts were Maoists, and they were on the government’s hit list. Saifi said the head of the faculty at that time was in the Khalq party, and informed him and several others to stop interacting with Maoists. Saifi listened, but apparently Fazel Ahmed continued talking to these Maoist friends. This could have been the reason he was jailed: guilt by association.

    Siddiqi stayed quiet for most of the meeting with us, but said that he kept his mouth shut then and he was even scared to talk now. Frotan, a handsome man in a suit, said he was the last person in the department to see my uncle. Frotan noticed the infamous government black car with tinted windows outside their faculty – the Russian-made vehicle took prisoners who didn’t return. Then he saw Fazel Ahmed, wearing his sheepskin hat and a black suit, walking down with a bureaucrat. “He gave his briefcase to somebody and told them to give it to his wife and our eyes met. I was standing downstairs, too afraid to say anything, as he was being escorted down by another man. The colour in his face was gone. He knew where he was going. He went without any resistance,” Frotan recalled.

    Fazel Ahmed Ahrary disappeared at 43 and was never seen again. “We asked the head of the faculty after the regime changed [nine months on] what happened to our professor,” Frotan said. “He knew because he was in the Khalq party, but he wasn’t a killer. He said sadly, ‘Mr Ahrary died under torture. He never made it out of the interrogation room.’ We didn’t ask any more questions.”

    I made Frotan repeat “died under torture” a few times before I could digest it. The others in the room tried to share happier memories of my uncle, but I had the answer and I wasn’t going to let it go. Where can I find this head of the faculty? What kind of torture? Who did it? I threw these questions at Frotan and he stared back blankly and shook his head. All he could give was the name of the head of the faculty: Hossain Hilali.

    It was the same name that Saifi and Murad Ali Roshandel, another colleague who lives in Germany but has returned to teach in the pharmacy faculty in Kabul, had mentioned earlier in a separate interview. Roshandel said Hilali had warned him to stay away from the Maoists, and that Hilali had seen Roshandel’s and my uncle’s names on a list of professors who were to be arrested. But from the 12 professors at the faculty, my uncle was the only one who was arrested and disappeared. I had to find Hilali if he was alive.

    ) ) ) ) )

    My companion, Wali, had endured a longer and more painful search than I was experiencing.

    She was also keen I meet Sarwary and confront the man she believed had ordered the execution of her father. Now 47, she is from my Afghan diaspora community in the San Francisco Bay area, the largest population of Afghans in the United States. She’s here to find her father, Shah Wali, nicknamed “Pilot”, or his remains.

    He was a high-profile air-force pilot in charge of Bagram air base, where western troops are now stationed. One night in 1978, in front of his family, authorities showed up at their holiday home in Jalalabad and took him in his pyjamas. Wali was 17 and newly engaged. Her mother was crying and Wali was shaking as he was being taken, but he told them to be brave. That was the last time Wali saw her father.

    In her Kabul home, Wali brought out her photo albums. The first photograph was of her father, a striking man with a moustache and smiling eyes. Wali is the mother of three grown children, but she reverts to childlike innocence when she speaks about her dad. He was her hero and as the only daughter, she was his princess.

    Two months after the famous pilot was jailed, he sent his family a letter asking for cigarettes and medicine. For the next year, Wali wore black and talked to influential members of the government to release her father.

    The same day that Wali and I visited the mass grave, we went to Pul-e-Charkhi. I shivered when I saw the structure inside – four-storey, grey triangular buildings with small, barred windows and stone walls riddled with bullets. It holds 4,000 inmates, including criminals and political prisoners, and despite laws against torture now, authorities still do it, according to inmates. On October 7, 2007, 15 people were killed by a firing squad, the first executions announced during the current president Hamid Karzai’s leadership.

    Wali held up her father’s photograph to all the guards in the hope that one might remember him from 29 years ago. The guards who were present at that time seemed uncomfortable, but one of them said that at night they heard moans from the back yards of the prison, which they believed were the restless spirits of the past.

    There had been an amnesty in 1979. Families lined up at Pul-e-Charkhi to see who made it out alive after two years of arrests. Wali stood behind the prison door from 8am until 8pm while inmates were driven out in buses and freed. “It was like a zoo,” she said. But her father was not among them. Instead she saw her maternal uncle Ehsan Pattan, the former King Zahir Shah’s royal pilot, who had also been jailed. He told his niece her father was no longer in the prison. Wali left Afghanistan shortly after that. Later, Pattan escaped into exile, but his experiences in Pul-e-Charkhi have turned the 70-year-old into a temperamental and distressed man. He was the last to see Wali’s father, but he has not disclosed details of their time together in prison with Wali yet. “I didn’t want her to suffer.”

    The communists took him prisoner on charges of plotting a royal counter-coup, which he denied. Before he was taken to Pul-e-Charkhi, he was holed up with 1,000 men at the ministry of defence for five days. There he watched soldiers throw five men into a well alive and pile dirt on top of them. Pattan says Sarwary, who used to be his student in flight school, came in with a friend, now a member of the Afghan parliament, and called the names of 15 members of the Afghan royal family. Then Pattan heard numerous shots fired in the parking lot of the ministry. All 15 were reported dead, he said.

    Eighteen buses carried the prisoners from the ministry to Pul-e-Charkhi, where Pattan spent two years. After two months in a cell, Pattan said in an unaffected tone, Sarwary interrogated and tortured him inside the prison. Wires were clipped to his toes and electric shocks zapped through his body. “He asked how I was planning to bring the king back, what were my plans with Shah Wali [Wali’s father]. He hit me and broke my ribs and two of my teeth.”

    After a year, Shah Wali was brought to Pattan’s cell, where they spent three nights, and the brothers-in-law swapped stories. Shah Wali had also been tortured. Pattan said that on the third night, Said Mohammad Gulabzoy, a key Khalq member, called 12 inmates, including Shah Wali, to be taken to the desert target range, the killing fields. “He looked at me and said, ‘Don’t forget your God.’”

    Pattan thinks he was saved because he wasn’t important enough to kill. Shah Wali was more powerful and high-ranking. Pattan said he had gone from a celebrated pilot to a security guard in the US, but he has put the past behind him. Yet he would like to see justice against Sarwary. “They should try him again fairly and then execute him in front of the victims’ families.”

    ) ) ) ) )

    But how to reach Sarwary? I spread the word to friends who were connected to the Afghan government that I wanted to interview him. I was told it would be impossible because he was on death row and those inmates were not allowed to be interviewed. But connections can override most rules in Afghanistan. A friend introduced me to a man who knew Sarwary and would be able to get me inside his cell. He took me to the prosecutor handling Sarwary’s case and got permission for the interview.

    When I saw him, I felt a surge of anger. But I held back and told myself I had to hear his side of the story. He said the only reason he agreed to see me was because of our mutual acquaintance.

    Sarwary’s conditions in jail are a lot more pleasant than those of inmates of the communist times. He’s not in Pul-e-Charkhi but in a temporary cell in police headquarters in the centre of Kabul, where prisoners awaiting trials and sentencing are held. His room mirrored an average Afghan bedroom, with a bed, red mat, a TV, Thermoses of tea and plates of cookies and candies – except there were bars on the window. He wore traditional Afghan garb, loose trousers and a long tunic, and a turquoise ring. His neatly trimmed beard is the same colour as his salt-and- pepper hair. Papers and books were stacked near his bedside. At 66, Sarwary has spent a total of 17 years in prison. His adult life is a cycle of coups and incarcerations in various Soviet-backed regimes, in which he befriended powerful leaders and then became their enemy.

    He greeted me with normal Afghan customs of hospitality, offered tea and began his soliloquy as if he had shared his biography numerous times. Animated at times and subdued at others, he never lost his air of confidence, the absolute conviction that he’s innocent. Sarwary was last captured by the mujaheddin in 1992, and the mujaheddin leader Ahmad Shah Massoud kept him in his private prison until he was handed over to Karzai’s administration.

    Sarwary spent several years in the Soviet Union training to be a pilot and intelligence officer. He became enraptured with communism. “I had never seen that kind of order and organisation. They were civilised and we were backward.”

    When he returned to Afghanistan, he was responsible for 100 planes and 1,500 officers, but that didn’t last long. He teamed up with King Zahir Shah’s cousin Mohammad Daud Khan to overthrow the monarchy in 1973. But while Daud Khan became president, he threw Sarwary in prison for eight months for insubordination. While Daud was pro-Soviet, Sarwary believed he didn’t go far enough in implementing socialism.

    Sarwary came from what he claims was a landowning family in Ghazni province, and he was angry with the injustice to the landless poor. He studied Marx and Lenin and believed in communism, but says Afghans can never truly be communists. “We can’t separate ourselves from nationalism, so none of us were really communists.”

    His role in the 1978 coup was instrumental – he was friends with Nur Mohammad Taraki, the first communist president, and with Hafizullah Amin, a key member of Khalq who later became prime minister and then president. As head of the secret police, Sarwary claimed he simply arrested people – 1,100 – and those who accuse him of torture and murder are lying. His agency used phone-tapping and informants to capture “enemies”. “I didn’t have the power to kill or order killings. All the evidence against me is false.”

    I looked him in the eye and asked him what had happened to those who disappeared. He said Amin, who was assassinated in 1979, was responsible for most of the killings – and the rest of those in power who would know are also dead.

    “Did you know Fazel Ahmed Ahrary?” I asked. He paused for a minute and shook his head. I told Sarwary he was my uncle and had disappeared. Do you know where those who disappeared are buried?

    “I don’t know anything. If I killed anyone, slaughter me,” he answered angrily, motioning a knife cutting his throat. I knew then that I would not get any information I needed from him. Our meeting ended cordially, with him agreeing to be photographed on my mobile phone. Cameras were not allowed inside the prison, but nobody searched me.

    Sarwary’s most faithful ally is Gulabzoy, who was minister of telecommunications when he was chief of Agsa. But while Sarwary anticipates life or death, Gulabzoy makes big decisions in the lower house of the parliament. He visits Sarwary every week and attests that his friend is wrongly accused. “He’s honest, patriotic and gullible – those are his weaknesses,” Gulabzoy said, on the lawn of his two-storey house in Kabul. Most witnesses against Sarwary say Gulabzoy was guilty of the same crimes, but he played his cards better politically.

    After 13 years in prison, Sarwary was given the right to a trial in late 2005, and video tapes from the day of the sentencing in Kabul show a mob in the courtroom anxiously waiting to hear the judge read the death penalty. Sarwary had no defence lawyer and sat there calmly as he was sentenced to death. Representatives from human-rights groups, including the UN, attended part of the trial and said international standards of due process and fairness were ignored.

    There’s no law against war crimes in Afghanistan, and some legal experts believe it would be better to try Sarwary in the Hague, because Afghanistan’s judicial system is not ready for such cases. Three other Afghans have been indicted for war crimes outside the country – one man from the mujaheddin era in Britain, and two from the communist times in Holland.

    Meanwhile, the culture ministry has set up a commission to try to decide what to do with the mass graves. A UN official told me it’s best if families do not get their hopes up that the remains will be identified. According to the ministry of defence, there are no Afghan forensic experts who can do the job and it’s too expensive.

    But for Wali and me, the efforts of the commission are not enough. Wali wants to unite all the victims’ families to build a memorial, similar to the Vietnam wall, commemorating those who disappeared, and some relatives are writing books and documenting their stories in hopes of finding closure. I continue my search – for Hossain Hilali, the former director of the faculty of pharmacy, and for others who might have a clue as to what happened to my uncle. Hilali might be in Munich, but numerous internet searches and calls to Afghans there turned up nothing.

    The answers I found raised even more questions, and the selective memories of those who were there at the time were too subjective to point to any reliable truth. The trail leading to my uncle has gone cold, but no matter in which direction it leads, the ending is death.

    Now I had to share what I knew with those closest to him. My father took the news in his stride when I went back to California to tell him. At 77, his memory is going, but he remembers every detail I told him about my journey and he retells it to all of our guests in an attempt to grasp its reality. I kept delaying the call to Aunt Roufa, my uncle’s wife, and when I did call, I avoided the subject for an hour until finally she asked. With many disclaimers that

    it could be false, I told her that he may have died under torture.

    “I never heard this before. I feel his pain. I think he didn’t have any tolerance for suffering. None of us in the family do,” she said, grappling for an explanation.

    I suggested having a memorial service for him, to give him a peaceful rest, but she said no. “I prefer that he has disappeared and not to know. I don’t want to see a body. I don’t know what I would do if I found out he’s dead for sure.”

    When I hung up the phone, I burst into tears finally, not because my uncle was dead, but because I had opened up old wounds. I knew that at the other end, in her apartment in Honolulu, Aunt Roufa was alone and in pain.

  • With aid of S.F. man’s project, Afghan women risk lives for a song

    By Fariba Nawa
    January 14, 2008
    The San Francisco Chronicle

    At a clandestine music school sponsored in part by a San Francisco resident, male students come and go through the front door while their female counterparts enter through a dark hallway.

    The school, which has no name or sign, is run by a noted pop singer who is well aware that teaching women music – he has 12 female students out of 67 – could mean a death sentence for them or himself. Many Afghan men believe a woman’s voice should not be heard by men, and some conservative clerics believe it is a crime against Islam for women to sing or perform music.

    “If they are going to put their lives in danger,” said musician Nazir Khara, “I’m going to make sure that I do my best to protect them.”

    Although there are female entertainers in Afghanistan, their families often face intense criticism from neighbors and relatives. Some women eventually stop their music careers, while others perform only on radio to avoid being seen or lie to parents when attending music classes.

    Roya, who declined to give her full name, studied guitar with Khara and often sang in public. But she quit after several neighbors threatened to throw acid in her face if she continued. “I went to her neighborhood and tried to convince them that they should not harm her,” Khara said. “I don’t blame her for leaving.”

    Student Farida Tarana, 24, was driven out of the western city of Herat after singing on national television. She is one of the school’s few female students willing to be named and photographed. For the past seven months, she has been taking voice and guitar lessons three times a week.

    Almost seven years after a U.S.-led invasion ousted the fundamentalist Taliban regime that banned music and all but confined women to the home, the Western-backed government of President Hamid Karzai has failed to change many societal attitudes toward women. Numerous schools for girls have been burned down, causing the literacy rate for women to remain among the lowest in the developing world – 12.6 percent, in contrast to 43.1 percent for males. Some parents still force girls as young as 9 to marry older men, and the average life expectancy for women is only 44 years.

    Khara’s school is party funded by the Afghan Music Project, the brainchild of Chris Becherer, 31, of San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood and Adam Gouttierre, 36, of Seattle. Both were studying business at UC Berkeley in 2005 when they developed a “social entrepreneurship” project for Afghanistan as their final master’s of business administration assignment. The idea was simple: record an album of traditional music featuring a female vocalist, and sell it and an accompanying video on the Internet to pay for musical instruction for young Afghans yearning to play their own music.

    But when they arrived in Kabul, renowned musician Ustad Ghulum Hosain told them that finding a female singer would not be easy.

    “Everybody was interested in the project, but no women wanted to be involved with it,” recalled Becherer, who now works in marketing for Apple Inc. “We found that it was still dangerous for females to collaborate with Westerners.”

    With Hosain’s help, the American students found a singer known professionally as Zamzama, who still performs at weddings and private Kabul parties. She agreed to participate on the condition that the CD cover and video not include her real name or show her face. She and Hosain’s band then recorded seven instrumentals and four songs in the local Dari and Pashto languages.

    When Becherer returned to San Francisco, he persuaded the independent Ioda label to distribute the album online. After its launch in 2005, the album hit No. 12 on iTunes’ World Music Chart. “The Afghan Music Project,” which includes a CD and a 20-minute documentary, is available at www.afghanmusicproject.org.

    Becherer says the venture has netted more than $3,000 for Afghan music teachers such as Khara to teach young Afghans – and especially women – how to play their traditional music. Gouttierre, who now works in digital media for Microsoft, said he and Becherer are planning to return to Kabul and create more opportunities for female musicians.

    “We’re trying to convince a Western artist to do a follow-up recording with an Afghan artist for a second album,” Gouttierre said.

    Back in Kabul, Khara is teaching guitar to Tarana, who grew up in Iran and returned to her hometown of Herat after the Taliban were ousted. Two years ago, she was one of a handful of female contestants on “Afghan Star,” the nation’s version of “American Idol.” Khara, who was one of the judges, found her voice captivating and encouraged her to keep singing.

    “My only wish is to continue my music,” Tarana said.

    But performing in public turned out to be a dangerous undertaking.

    After appearing on “Afghan Star,” Tarana received a death threat by telephone. Then, former mujahedeen fighters stopped by her home to implore her to stop singing in public. Even her uncle, a court judge, received a death threat.

    Forced to wear the head-to-toe burqa and frightened for her life, she moved to Kabul, the nation’s most liberal city, to live with a younger sister and work as a financial administrator for a bank. Although Tarana says she feels safer, she is glad that an armed guard paid by the bank is stationed outside her home.

    In the meantime, Tarana and Khara have recorded a song, which the pop singer hopes to perform on television with his star pupil. In recent months, Khara’s songs have hit the top of the charts on Afghan radio and television, with many listeners saying the secrets of his success are duets with unidentified female vocalists.

  • An Afghan village girl blossoms in the city

    She ran from an arranged marriage into a Western household.
    By Fariba Nawa
    September 4, 2007
    The Christian Science Monitor


    To publish an unsigned article or to use pseudonyms is an exception to Monitor policy. The housekeeper profiled in this story is wanted by authorities in her village for running away from a betrothal made when she was 6 months old. For security reasons, the writer is not named and names in the article have been changed.

    KABUL – The only sound that I look forward to hearing in the morning is the jingle of Mojabeen’s fake gold bangles. When I open my eyes from sleep, that’s how I know that she’s downstairs cleaning our dusty house and that as soon as she hears me call, she’ll come upstairs smiling, with my breakfast and her lively conversation.

    She never takes off her dozen bangles or her scarf, which she wraps around her ears to make sure her hair is safely covered. About five feet tall in pink plastic sandals, she’s thin and pale beneath the long, loose dresses she wears, but she’s stronger than she looks.

    Mojabeen is my 21-year-old housekeeper and cook and the person I spend the most time with in Kabul. I work from my home while my husband goes to the office. A friend of mine introduced Mojabeen when I was looking for help in the house. “She needs training,” Sarah told me. The most important thing was whether I could trust her. My last housekeeper stole $1,000 from me.

    I was ready to be stern and aloof with her. But in the past four months, Mojabeen and I have formed a bond and trust that has broken the barriers of class and culture. We’ve learned about each others’ worlds and become friends. She’s an illiterate village girl who’s rapidly urbanizing, and I’m a Western-educated Afghan-American appreciating her resilience and strength. But it would be unfair of me to compare my comfortable life to her troubled one.

    When she was 6 months old, in a remote village in the north of Afghanistan, Mojabeen was betrothed to a deaf and mute man. That man’s sister was promised to Mojabeen’s brother, Ahmed. It was an exchange common in Afghanistan – it avoids the cost of dowries. Mojabeen’s brother married the girl, but Mojabeen’s fiancé went away to work in Iran as a laborer. She dreaded her marriage to the man, who she’d never even talked to.

    “I only saw him once through my burqa on the street when I was walking to my cousin’s house, and my heart fell. He was unattractive, and I wondered if my fate was forever sealed,” she told me as she hung our laundry.

    Mojabeen’s father had passed away and her oldest brother, Tarek, was in charge of family affairs. There had been no ceremony or religious event to bind Mojabeen’s union with the laborer, so in the the fiancé’s absence her brother gave his 17-year-old sister’s hand to another man – Mahmood, who had no idea that she was already engaged.

    Mojabeen and Mahmood, a warm and open-minded farmer, made a life in their village and had a son. She was happy to be with her husband, but she dreaded the laborer’s return.

    After 15 months, the laborer came back and took Mahmood to court to get Mojabeen as his wife. Because he was only engaged to Mojabeen, the man had no case under Afghan law. But Mojabeen and Mahmood say the man’s family bribed the judge to order their marriage and their son illegitimate. Mahmood was thrown in jail, and Mojabeen’s family hid her.

    Mahmood spent 4 months in the local district prison with three murderers. One day, the four prisoners found a small iron rod and dug a hole through the prison wall and escaped. Mahmood picked up his wife and son, who was four months old, and headed to the mountains to hide. For two years, the three of them lived among strangers in villages nestled against hills where people live on wheat and barley farming. “We’re Tajiks, but it was Hazaras and Uzbeks who took us in and provided us shelter,” Mojabeen said.
    Mahmood was often unemployed, but he would find odd jobs to survive. Mojabeen had another son and nearly died in childbirth because there was little medical help in that remote area. It filled Mojabeen with fear that she’d die, leaving her children orphans. Her oldest brother Tarek and Mahmood’s sister had moved to Kabul and they encouraged the couple to join them in the bustling capital where the police from their district did not have the power to capture them.

    • • •

    They settled in with Tarek, his wife, and their two small sons in the servant quarters of my friend Sarah’s house. Each family has a small room; they share a squat toilet and makeshift kitchen.

    Not long after Mojabeen arrived in Kabul, I called Sarah asking if she knew a trustworthy housekeeper. Mojabeen considers our meeting a turn of fortune in her life.

    She works eight-hour days, five days a week, and goes home for lunch to breast-feed her younger son. It’s the first time she’s earned money – $150 a month. Mahmood stays home to take care of the children – unusual for an illiterate Afghan family in which patriarchy calls for men to work outside and women to play the caregivers. But Mojabeen and Mahmood are eager to modernize.

    She observes my life carefully, seeing how I interact with my husband. We often call each other “dear.” One day she told me that she suggested to Mahmood that they also call each other dear instead of the usual “eh,” she said, because”it shows more respect.”

    Mojabeen wears the burqa on her short walk to my house. But one simmering day when I took her shopping, she sheepishly asked if it was all right if she wore just her scarf. I smiled and said it was up to her. I wear a long shirt, jeans, and a sheer scarf in public. She still hasn’t given up the tentlike blue garment completely: She dons it when she walks home, fearing her brother’s disapproval.
    Mojabeen is also learning about food and appliances. For one dinner, I gave her a bag with a head of lettuce and spinach and told her to cook the spinach. She cooked both because she’d never seen lettuce before. Also she didn’t know the difference between the refrigerator and the freezer, so she twice put lettuce in the freezer, not understanding why it froze. When I explained the difference, we both had a good laugh.

    I offered to teach her how to read and write in Dari, and she was thrilled. I got her a literacy-for-adults book, a notebook, and pencils. She put them in a plastic bag, and every day after her chores, she brings the bag, enthusiastic about her next lesson. So far, she has learned the alphabet, her numbers, and how to use a cellphone.

    But things between us aren’t always rosy. She often brings her 3-year-old with her to work, and one morning I noticed that his eyes were red and he was unusually quiet. She told me that Mahmood had beat him with a stick. I pulled up his shirt and saw red marks across his tiny back. I’d also seen Mojabeen slap his face for breaking something. I told her I have no right to tell her how to rear her children, but I do have the right to fire her. Both seem to have stopped abusing their boys.

    Mojabeen has taught me about resilience and patience. Her mental and physical health have improved and it’s her smile that propels me to get up and keep going in Afghanistan, a country on the brink of chaos again.

    I moved back to my homeland from the US after the fall of the Taliban at a time of great hope for peace only to witness growing instability, violence, and dissipating hope. Yet, it’s Afghans like Mojabeen who remind me of why I returned.

    For her, moving to Kabul means giving up her home but gaining a freedom she had never known. Still, she considers herself a simple village girl. “We want to go back to our home in the village and feel safe. I can take what I have learned in Kabul and put it to use in my village,” she says.

    But for now, Mojabeen and Mahmood remain runaways.

  • Expatriate leaves San Jose to give micro-loans to poor Afghan women

    By Fariba Nawa
    August 22, 2007
    The San Francisco Chronicle

    Katrin Fakiri’s office is a constant rush of phone calls, e-mail messages, and people entering and leaving. On a wall, a framed picture of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with Fakiri and several other women hangs crookedly.

    Fakiri, 35, is the director of Parwaz, a flourishing microcredit organization that offers an estimated 9,000 poor women small loans at 2 percent interest. Its total assets of $1.1 million and staff of 70 workers are a far cry from the $50,000 budget and four employees Fakiri started with four years ago.

    In 2003, she gave up security, mobility and independence to move from San Jose to her birthplace, Kabul, and start a nongovernmental organization to help women start their own businesses. Before she left the Bay Area, she was a single woman climbing the corporate ladder in the Silicon Valley. Now she’s married, a mother of a year-old son and head of one of Afghanistan’s 12 flourishing microfinance companies.

    Fakiri is one of several thousand Afghan expatriates who returned to Afghanistan after Sept. 11 and the U.S.-led ouster of the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban government. From the Bay Area, home to the largest Afghan community in the United States with some 60,000 people, these expatriates opened nonprofit organizations, invested in business ventures and found jobs as government advisers.

    Fakiri worked without salary for the first two years and learned to make tough decisions. She sacked seven employees, including a male project manager who had been undermining her efforts. He would agree with her decisions in meetings, then tell other employees to ignore them. She also ordered the arrest of a female employee who had siphoned off thousands of dollars that was supposed to go for loans.

    “This is a country where if you want to a lead an organization, you have to have some dictatorship characteristics,” she said. “These people are survivors, and they survived because they know how to work the system. If someone is perceived as being weak, they’ll take advantage of you.”

    Fakiri lived in Kabul until age 9, when her family fled the Soviet invasion and settled in the United States, first in New York, then San Jose. Of seven brothers, one sister and her parents, she’s the only one who returned. She concedes that she had idyllic images of her childhood until she witnessed the war’s destruction and how different most Afghans were from her. They were not concerned with ideals and nostalgia; they were worried about just getting through the day.

    In the past two years, most expatriates have returned to the United States and elsewhere after the Taliban began a campaign of kidnappings and suicide bombings, delaying many reconstruction efforts. Only a few have remained.

    Homa Clifford, owner of a real estate agency in Fremont, arrived in Kabul in 2004 with her husband, Abdullah, an accountant for a U.S. company hired to reform Afghanistan’s financial system. She said a lack of confidence in local government and deteriorating security sent them packing a year later. However, Clifford says she would return once a “safe and secure environment” has been established.

    Fakiri also points out that life in Kabul as a woman has not been easy. She has stopped smiling at people, especially men, who might perceive it as a sign of promiscuity. She dresses more conservatively, wearing long-sleeved, knee-length skirts with slacks and a head scarf outside the office.

    “I lost the freedom to be myself. I’m friendly, social and interact with men and women, and here I have to watch what I wear, who I talk to. If I go walking, I have to take one of my guards.

    “There are days when I say I can’t do this anymore (until) I see someone who didn’t have enough food to eat running a business,” she said.

    A half hour from Fakiri’s posh office, six Afghan women are sewing, embroidering and making jewelry in a collective business they call Medina. With a $540 loan from Parwaz, they have moved their enterprise to a two-story building with three small rooms, where they also teach disabled children literacy and arts and crafts.

    On a recent morning, three young women sat in front of Chinese-made sewing machines as their instructor, Habiba, showed them how to sew various patterns.

    Nazifa, 20, who is paralyzed from the waist down and uses a wheelchair, says she wants to learn how to sew and read and write so she can eventually support herself. Neither student nor teacher would give their last names.

    “In the beginning, I didn’t think women would be able to open businesses and be able to pay back the loan,” Fakiri said. “But about 98 percent are paying off their loans. If the security is good, I could stay here forever.”

  • New voices, new Afghanistan

    With the fall of the Taliban in 2001, many Afghans believed that, after 23 years of war, their country would be at peace again. Although recent increases in violence have dampened that spirit, there is nonetheless a small population of urban twenty-somethings who are resolutely —albeit not always successfully—working to build an Afghanistan where culture, art and entrepreneurship can flourish.
    These young men and women have worked hard over six years, and it’s their spirit that has paved the way for new television stations, sports clubs, art galleries, music schools and countless businesses to open and thrive, mainly in such urban centers as Kabul and Herat. Indeed, those at the forefront say that, since 2004, there’s been a small cultural renaissance under way in Afghanistan. Here are five people who are making a difference.
    By Fariba Nawa
    July/August 2007
    Saudi Aramco World

    1- Roya Sadat thrives on intensity. She wakes up at four a.m. to discuss her latest film ideas with friends, and she can enjoy a three-hour discussion on the internal contradictions of modernity. A self-trained filmmaker, Sadat, 26, does not crack a smile. She has serious brown eyes. A sense of humor is not one of her traits.

    Her first movie, Ellipsis or, trans-lated literally from Persian, Three Dots (2003), was the subject of debate and discussion at film festivals around the world; inside Afghanistan it won her six of nine awards for filmmakers, including best director and best film. One of Afghanistan’s handful of women filmmakers, she makes films that shed light on women’s rights— a controversial subject.

    Ellipsis is the story of a rural widow who, with her children, fights to survive in a region where the local warlord forces her to smuggle narcotics to Iran. “My goal was to show the voices of the forgotten people, those in the villages who tried to become urban but did not have the means. So they were forced to become armed commanders and thieves,” she says in a telephone interview. Sadat’s style is minimalist, and resembles the genre of independent Iranian films, some of which employ local amateurs as actors, as she does.

    Ellipsis has been shown on television in Afghanistan, and Sadat says it was well received. The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission bought the rights to the film, whose most controversial aspect is that some of the actors are Afghan women. In fact, it took Sadat more than a year to find women—all amateurs—to fill these parts. For shooting, Sadat took them and her film crew to the desert on the border of Iran and Afghanistan. In that remote region, local commanders threatened her. After six days of filming, Sadat and her crew hurried back to Herat, where she finished the film. Japanese investors and Siddiq Barmak, the creator of the award-winning 2003 movie Osama, helped fund the project.

    Born and raised in Herat, Sadat had not traveled outside the country until a few years ago, when her first film was released. She endured the Soviet invasion, the Mujahideen and the Taliban years, reading books at home to keep herself occupied. She recently received her bachelor’s degree in political science and law from Herat University, training which helped her carry out research for Three, Two, One, a documentary about illiterate Afghan women produced by her sister Ilka. She plans to show the documentary to the Afghan parliament in the hope of influencing pending legislation.

    In the last few years, Sadat has traveled to Germany, France, Singapore, India and South Korea, where she studied at the Asian Film Academy and made a short film with other students called The Calling.

    Her next film, she says, will also focus on women, but her biggest challenge has been funding. To raise money for her next feature, she has signed with Tolo TV, Afghanistan’s most-watched station, where she will direct a drama series called Home.

    “I didn’t wait for things to be safer and better because people can appreciate and differentiate between simple and complex ideas, but they’re afraid,” she says. “I worry about the consequences, but I’m still willing to make the sacrifice.”

    2- They arrive in burqas or chadors and, once inside, they change into workout sweats. Most of the women who come to Gold’s Gym in Herat do so with their family’s knowledge and support, but a few of the younger women bring their mothers to exercise with them, and a few say they are afraid to tell their parents, spouses or family elders what they’re up to.

    But Elham Pirooz, a professional trainer and founder of the two-year-old Gold’s Gym (not affiliated with the US-based franchise), wants to see not just young women, but the entire female population of the city working out. So far, she has signed on 50 women—of all ages—as permanent members, for the equivalent of four dollars a month.

    Although another woman previously operated a gym clandestinely in a private home, Pirooz’s gym was the first to open publicly in Herat in 2005. Afghanistan’s bodybuilding champion Khusrow Bashiri helped Pirooz, and the two brought in up-to-date hi-tech equipment from Dubai.

    “In the beginning, women were very excited that they had this opportunity that they had only seen in movies. Some women came for physical therapy and others came to be fit. People are becoming more aware of their health now,” Pirooz says.

    Now, two years later, some of those members have become trainers and are participating in bodybuilding and weight-lifting competitions with some of the 10 other gyms that have opened since. But Pirooz says Gold’s keeps its members because it still boasts the best equipment in town, and it hosts some of the competitions. Prizes are such things as sports outfits or household items.

    Pirooz says she trains members with breathing and weight-lifting exercises as well as aerobics. There is no air-conditioning, but ceiling fans fight the heat in the summer.

    Chatty and friendly, Pirooz is one of six children in a family of athletes. Her sister is a karate champion, and her uncle was a bodybuilder. Pirooz’s mother and father moved to Iran a week after their wedding 22 years ago, and the family returned to Herat from Tehran four years ago after the election of Hamed Karzai as president of Afghanistan. Last year, Pirooz married a man who, like her, is an Afghan raised in Iran. He supports her athletic and business efforts, she says, and wants her to pursue her bigger dream: studying law.

    Life in Tehran was easier, she says, but in Afghanistan she can be part of rebuilding a country.

    “In sports alone you can see how much Herat has grown, and so has the rest of the city. I’m glad to be here,” she says.

    3- It was happening all the time, she says: Crossing a busy intersection in Kabul, men passed Rana Ahmadi, looked at her with a mixture of admiration and disapproval and, after she had passed, whispered mockingly, “Chai Arab! Chai Arab!” (“Arab Tea!”) No matter how many times it happened, Ahmadi could not get used to people’s negative reaction to her appearances in a dozen-odd Afghan television commercials—even though her dress on screen was always conservative.

    She had wanted to be a film actor, but at 22, while attending university, she changed to making television commercials because it seemed less controversial. She became a familiar face in popular commercials for laundry detergent, mobile telephones—and tea. The tea advertisements had the most catchy speaking part.

    Despite her desire to help change attitudes, she says she is not ready to do that at the expense of her security or her family name. Her bronze-skinned, pretty face has, she says, become too familiar.

    Born to an Iranian mother and an Afghan father, she spent her first 17 years in Iran. Mixing the Kabul and Tehran dialects of Persian, she says she fantasized about returning to her father’s homeland while she was growing up, and that it was she who convinced her family of seven to move to Kabul—a decision she now regrets.

    Ahmadi points to the 2005 murder of Shaima Rezayee, a 24-year-old “veejay” on a popular music program, as justification for her departure from show business.

    “My actions are a freedom that women could follow. Until when are they going to sit and wait to be saved?” she says. “But right now society has won, because a girl’s family and security are more important.”

    4- In the 1970’s, Kabul was called “the Paris of Central Asia.” Arsalan Amini, a 26-year-old buyer and manager of four stores at the swanky Roshan City Tower mall, wants his capital to regain that title.

    Sitting cross-legged in one of the stores he manages, Amini wears a pin-striped black suit with a deep blue shirt and a blue handkerchief tucked into the suit pocket. He arches his thick dark eyebrows and runs his fingers through his neatly combed hair.

    Fashion in Kabul today, he explains, is largely “a mishmash” of Indian and western clothes “without any style.” He’s here to change that, he says.

    For his stores, “I buy what I would look good in,” he says with confidence. He is fairly free to choose designs and styles as long as they conform to some of the customers’ expectations. Women, for example, like bright colors—hot pink and neon orange. Men are more subdued, but prefer light yellows and whites. Most Afghans, he explains, get fashion ideas from India’s Bollywood movies.

    This does not sit well with Amini, who has chosen to dictate styles that mostly come from Turkey. Male mannequins in his stores sport silk ties, colorful collared shirts and dark suits with price tags ranging from $50 to hundreds of dollars. The female mannequins show short-sleeved or sleeveless Indian kurtas and wide, sheer matching pants with sequins and glitter. There are both conservative long-sleeved outfits and off-the-shoulder shirts, as well as western clothes—mostly evening gowns with straps or long dress suits for older women.

    “I’m not interested in getting men and women to show more skin,” he says, “but to think about fashion with a little more edge.”

    Encouraging a “fashion sensibility” and a sense of hip style remains a challenge in a country where advertising is not yet common. Amini wants to have more fashion shows, and he’s looking forward to ads on the country’s few television programs, even though persuading women to model modern clothes is still contentious.

    Amini, who spent 10 years in Moscow and Tashkent and speaks six languages, says his customers are mostly Afghan expatriates visiting from their homes in the West, and some wealthy in-country Afghans, often merchants and politicians. Sales in the shops can range from zero to $800 a day. Ordinary Afghans find the Roshan City Tower mall overpriced, and they may come to browse—and then copy the design for their neighborhood tailors to sew.

    In the present deteriorating political situation, however, Amini is concerned. The rise in violence this spring has kept sales down, and a fear of suicide bombers has kept customers away from the shiny mall, forcing business to a post-2001 low. But despite the dangers and uncertainties, Amini is staying, determined to teach people to dress smartly.

    5- Two brothers and three friends, wielding a keyboard, percussion, conga drums and two guitars, are the band called Mawj (Wave), so named to symbolize the “new wave” of Afghan music. Their smooth, heavily instrumental electric pop is a sort of Afghan Depeche Mode, a fusion of electronics and fresh rhythms that departs from older styles, often based on Indian film scores, without rejecting its roots.

    In 2005, Mawj released their first album with 10 songs, and produced music videos for two of them that immediately hit the top of the charts in the country. (Yes, there are pop charts in Afghanistan.) Now, with a second album out—24 songs and five music videos—they are one of the most popular bands in the country. The brains and the leading voices of the band are brothers Ajmal and Aimal Omaid. Ajmal is the clean-cut lead vocalist, and Aimal, 26, is spokesman, percussionist, drummer and overall fusion genius.

    Ironically, the group’s biggest hit came before they formed as a formal band, when they wrote and composed a 2005 song called “Your Heart and Your Soul.” Television and radio programs in Kabul played it on the hour. Aimal says that after the years of the Taliban, during which music was banned, there is a “musical renaissance” sweeping the country. Performers are returning from exile and new artists—like Mawj—are working hard to come up with new sounds.

    “There is so much pressure to be original now. You can’t just recycle songs from bygone artists anymore,” Aimal says.

    By profession Aimal is a graphic designer, and he uses his computer skills to research music mixing on the Internet. He has built a state-of-the-art home studio, where he spends much of his time blending what the band plays in their rehearsals, at weddings and in concerts. Although they began singing their songs in Dari, the Afghan dialect of Persian, they also want to reach listeners of other ethnicities, so they have recently incorporated Uzbek and Pashto into their lyrics and filmed two of their music videos in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

    Aimal says he has been on stage since he was 11, when he sang patriotic songs at his French-speaking school in Kabul. When the family moved to Pakistan in 1997, the brothers took solace in practicing music. A few friends who played instruments gathered, and before they knew it, they had a band. They all moved back to Afghanistan in 2001, and they have stayed together.

    “We want to serve the new generation, who value music, but we also want to produce fast songs they can dance to,” Aimal says. “We have made it this far because of the encouragement of this new generation.”

  • A movie star rises from ruins of war

    Discovered in a refugee camp, feisty Grandma Hamida has gained fame in Afghanistan, but not riches – despite a role in ‘The Kite Runner.’
    By Fariba Nawa
    July 17, 2007
    The Christian Science Monitor

    Barikow, Afghanistan – At 4 feet, 8 inches and 85 pounds, Hamida Alami takes pride in defying the rules of conduct for elderly Afghan women.

    Her most rebellious act this far in life is that she became an Afghan actress, post retirement age. In a country where acting and singing are taboo even for young women, Ms. Alami started her career despite the disapproval of neighbors and relatives. She laughed at the men and women who gossiped behind her back when she put on her skirt suits and wrapped a sheer, silk scarf around her hair before going to work when she lived in Kabul.

    She says she’s between 70 and 80 years old. But as far as Alami’s concerned, she feels as if she’s 21. Sitting cross-legged in her home in a blue velvet dress and silk-embroidered loose-fitting pants, she flashes a toothless grin and says emphatically: “Age is something I fight…. God has given us life to enjoy and appreciate, and that’s what I do.”

    If she could hide the lines on her face and hands, Alami might seem to be 21. She’s got the energy and youthful soul of an adolescent. All the years of war, desperation and poverty Alami has survived haven’t dampened her spirit.

    Her vivaciousness and storytelling skills earned her her first role in the Golden-Globe winning Afghan movie “Osama.” She’s illiterate, but Alami works hard to memorize her lines, which are given to her verbally.

    Afghan filmmaker Siddiq Barmak discovered the widow in a camp for the homeless in Kabul. He searched among the poor to discover acting talent for all the roles in “Osama,” a casting method that Iranian filmmakers also use. That was five years ago. Since then, Alami says she has been in more than 30 TV programs, including films and drama series. She almost always plays a grandmother.

    Her latest foray into acting is her biggest – a small but key role as a neighbor in “The Kite Runner.” The Hollywood movie, which will be released Nov. 2, is based on the bestselling novel by an Afghan-American, Khaled Hosseini, that tells the story of betrayal and salvation. The book has sold 8 million copies worldwide. The film, directed by Marc Forester and made by DreamWorks, was primarily shot in China, and more than a dozen Afghan actors were flown in from Kabul, including Alami.

    But Alami has no idea what the movie is called – let alone what it’s about – and she’s clueless as to how big a box office hit it is expected to be. She received $1,000 for two weeks of work – four to five lines with the main character. She knows that other Afghans plucked from obscurity to act in the movie were not happy with the pay they got, but she isn’t aware that some have launched complaints through the international media.

    While stardom has not brought wealth, it has given Alami fame throughout Afghanistan, where she is known as Bibi Hamida (Grandma Hamida). For this mother of eight and grandmother of two dozen, fame takes the edge off life’s hardships, which include being the sole breadwinner for six of those family members.

    Like most Afghan actors, Alami earns $10 per week for most of her roles in Afghanistan – which is just shy, for example, of the average civil servant’s monthly income of $50, and not enough to pay rent in the city and buy meat.

    Until May, Alami had been living for four years as a squatter on the fourth floor of an abandoned government building in Kabul. Situated across from the former royal palace, the building was damaged by the civil war, with holes in the walls and broken windows and no balconies or indoor plumbing. Alami and her family lived in one room with a small black and white TV, a caged bird, and their bedding folded and stacked in a corner. Nearby outhouses used by the building’s squatters emitted an intolerable stench.

    Alami was never well-off but she wasn’t always this poor. She came from a family of illiterate laborers. She worked as a janitor during the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan. Her husband sold vegetables on a wagon and they lived in her paternal home. Both were liberal and liked to dress up and enjoy walks in the park and go to the movies.

    “My husband was my best friend,” she says. “He wasn’t like these other Afghan men who lock their wives in the house and make them wear burqas.”

    But after he passed away, her life took a turn for the worst. After defeating the Soviet-backed government, the mujahideen began fighting among themselves, reducing Kabul to rubble. Alami could no longer work due to lack of security. Then the Taliban seized the capital and took away women’s freedoms. They threatened to kill anyone who defied them. Alami’s family gave up their home and most of their belongings and joined the 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan.

    In 2001, they returned after the fall of the Taliban and found shelter in a camp near Kabul until they moved to the government building.

    Despite the harsh conditions, Alami’s family liked living in the building because they were close to the city and the children attended school. They also had limited access to power and water.

    But in May, the Afghan government forced all of them to leave and buy a small plot of land for $90 here in Barikow an hour and a half from Kabul. Alami’s family traveled her by truck with nine aluminum chests of belongings here – seven of them were the fashionable grandmother’s. They pitched a tent and built an outhouse on the red soil of the desert surrounded by snow-capped mountains. The wind is strong and constant, the sun scorching. There’s nothing for miles except nomads and their animal herds. There’s no school, no electricity – her TV is just decoration now, so she rounds up her grandchildren to tell them fairy tales after dinner. There’s no water well. The government sends a water tanker daily but it’s not enough for the 320 new families. Alami’s sons are doing odd jobs to make money to build a home before winter.

    As she shows a guest around her new tent that she shares with her three single sons, two grandchildren, and the wife of a son imprisoned in Pakistan, Alami is philosophical, not bitter, about her situation. People who know she’s famous, she says, think she’s well-off. “I don’t need money even though I’m hapless and poor. I need my fame and I’ve got it. I’m satisfied with that,” she says.

    Alami loves to be the center of attention and fame suits her well. She may get glares from the conservatives but she has many young fans who think she’s a brave and unique woman. And no one has threatened her yet.

    Her life of displacement and poverty in Afghanistan is a stark contrast to the glitz and glamor she experienced shooting The Kite Runner” in China.

    “I went from a barn to a greenhouse,” Alami says in her colorful use of the Dari language. “When I was in China, it was like being in a mother’s womb. I was so relaxed. They respected me and were very hospitable there…. I received bouquets of flowers [and] very good food. I even had milk, Coke, and Fanta. I would rest, and three girls would serve me. There were beautiful, beautiful bathrooms, a shower, plenty of water, shampoo, even a blow-dryer and … pretty white towels.”

    But her daughter Farida Ghafouri, who is also her unofficial agent, grouses about why an American moviemaker would pay so little. According to the Screen Actors Guild, the American actors’ union, pay rates for guild members who speak at least one word in a major movie are $737 a day or $2,557 a week, depending on the contract. The Afghan actors who played even the “Kite Runner’s” major roles were paid no higher than $18,000 total.

    A spokesperson for the film offered an e-mailed statement: “The filmmakers specifically chose to work with these actors in order to show the strength, nobility and courage of the Afghan people and give these Afghani actors an international platform to demonstrate their great talents. The actor’s fees were agreed upon in advance of production, and were consistent with the salary levels of actors with similar experience.”

    Alami’s not complaining, even though her acting colleagues and her daughter are.

    Indeed, in their tent here, her daughter takes a cellphone call from someone who wants Alami to play a role in a new Afghan series. Ms. Ghafouri scolds the caller and says that her mother can’t keep working for low wages because she lives far from the city and needs more money to travel.

    Alami chastises her daughter, reminding her she wants this part. The money’s not that important, she whispers.

  • How the West short-changed Afghanistan

    We went to war to restore democracy and prosperity to Afghanistan, and spent billions on building new homes, hospitals and highways. But five years and thousands of lost lives later, everything is crumbling and the ferocious Taliban are back. Where did it all go wrong?

    By Fariba Nawa
    October 29, 2006
    Sunday Times Magazine (UK)

    The supposedly “posh” apartment where I am writing this is in one of dozens of buildings constructed in 2004 near downtown Kabul. It is part of the extensive reconstruction process taking place in Afghanistan in the midst of war. The landlord is a businessman who built the shiny five-storey apartment block with tinted windows as an investment in what then seemed an equally shiny new economy. Across the way are a mosque and a wedding hall, and the call to prayer competes with Afghan pop music. Lately, the roar of fighter jets has added another level to the noise, as security in Kabul declines to its worst state in five years. During the morning rush hour earlier this month, the windows shook from an explosion that injured more than a dozen police several blocks away.

    There are three of us in the flat, including my fiancé and an American friend, and we pay £165 a month in rent, the going price in the city. But few locals could afford such luxury: a civil servant’s salary is £27 a month. And this is no Trump Tower. We’re not sure if our building is earthquake-safe, since no seismic standards are enforced in this construction boom. Afghanistan is to earthquakes as Florida is to hurricanes – we know that when the ground shakes, the walls crack and the doorframes shift.

    Our bathroom drains emit the stench of sewage; the pipes inside the walls leak, and the water seeps into the plaster. The lightest touch sends disintegrated wallboard cascading to the floor. There’s no insulation in the walls, and the gaps in our misshapen door and window frames allow icy winds to blow in. The building’s exterior was never finished with a primer or sealant, so when it rains, the moisture soaks through and beads on the interior walls. Metal beams supporting the ceiling of our living room are rusting, the rust is bleeding through the paint, and the paint is cracking. The list goes on.

    I consider myself lucky. These flawed buildings and services are an inconvenience, but I could leave. Yet the shoddy reconstruction effort in Afghanistan since the Taliban were theoretically ousted has had far greater consequences for Afghans, and now, it seems, for westerners, who have footed the bill for these botched efforts. Amid the detritus of rubble and lost opportunities, the Taliban have returned.

    Four million people in the capital still do not have access to reliable services such as water and electricity, even after £3.9 billion of international aid has been spent on reconstruction since the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, declared peace in 2001. One in four children still dies before the age of five. Of the estimated 31m people in the country, 3.5m still rely on food rations.

    While Kabul has been the beneficiary of much money, the country as a whole has seen little change. Dozens of private clinics have popped up with phoney doctors and fake medicines, partly because the western-backed government was not able to build enough clinics to provide basic health care, according to the Afghan health ministry. Many foreign-funded structures have had severe problems. Roads, hospitals and schools are crumbling away.

    The excitement and hope Afghans had when the US-led coalition entered the country have faded. The mood on the streets is tinged with resentment towards foreign companies, NGOs and western governments, for the vast amounts spent on reconstruction with so little to show. The perception is that these companies and their Afghan counterparts are reaping big profits for bad work. Many Afghan and foreign-aid workers, military and government officials agree that the Taliban have taken advantage of the public distrust and gathered support. And it doesn’t help that aid money pays Afghan soldiers about £37 a month, while the Taliban are able to pay their fighters about £108.

    The Senlis Council, a European think-tank working in Kabul, stated in a report last month: “Afghans are starving to death, and there is evidence that poverty is driving support for the Taliban.” It highlighted the fact that 10,000 Afghans in the south have been displaced by poverty and violence and are living near rivers in unregistered, makeshift camps. The report also blamed the instability on too much military spending and not enough on development. Military operations totalled £44.4 billion since 2002, the report said, compared with £3.9 billion spent on development and reconstruction.

    Afghanistan was sold as a success story. Last year, Tony Blair hailed military and reconstruction efforts: “The military operation is fantastic – the Taliban is no more. Now it’s victory, and the Afghans and their children can go home,” he said. But today, western and Afghan government officials admit the rise in the drug trade and the upsurge in violence – suicide bombings are up 600% on last year – are the results of attempting to rebuild Afghanistan on the cheap and failing. “The Taliban and their supporters are exploiting the discontent among the poor people who waited for their lives to improve, and nothing happened,” said General Abdul Manan Farahi, the director for counterterrorism in the Afghan government.

    President Karzai’s popularity is falling rapidly as the number of suicide bombings and civilian deaths rises. So far this year, 49 suicide bombings have been recorded, according to the Center for Conflict and Peace Studies, another think-tank in Kabul. About 2,000 people, including civilians, military personnel and militants, have died since the start of 2006. Up to 33,000 Nato troops have taken control of the country, but their casualties are increasing, with 115 foreign soldiers dead so far. Afghans and international donors are entitled to ask: where did it all go wrong?

    After the Taliban were thrown out in 2001, thousands of Afghans like myself returned from the West to take part in rebuilding a country that had been bombed into submission. The infrastructure then was nearly nonexistent: there was precious little electricity, running water or health care. The roads had been destroyed by neglect and war. Most men were unemployed. But hope lingered on the horizon. Afghan women came out of their homes, where they had been confined by the oppressive laws of the Taliban. The excitement was contagious among Afghans here and abroad, that finally Afghanistan was getting a chance to live again.

    The mood didn’t last long. From 2002 until the autumn of 2005, Afghans by and large supported the military intervention and the reconstruction effort, because we could see some positive results, especially in the cities. In The Washington Post on October 8, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, conceded the challenge in Afghanistan while listing the achievements, and called for patience. He wrote that there were now 30,000 American-trained soldiers in the Afghan National Army, 600 schools have been built, and 80% of children, compared with 8% in 2001, have access to basic health care: “The size of Afghanistan’s economy has tripled in the past five years and is projected to increase by another 20% next year. Between 2003 and 2004, government revenue increased 70%, to $300m. Coca-Cola recently opened a $25m bottling plant in Kabul, and other large multinational companies are considering opportunities in Afghanistan.” His figures may have been accurate at the time, but the true situation is grimmer. This year, hundreds of schools have been shut down or burnt, the multinational companies are confined to secure areas that are quickly becoming unstable, and the 49% increase in poppy production is the likely reason why the Afghan economy has grown.

    The tide turned when the insurgency continued fighting through the winter in 2005 – battles halt during the snow season – and security rapidly deteriorated. Foreign aid workers and contractors had been a target from the beginning, but Afghans working with them also became victims. The newly surfaced Kabul-to-Kandahar road has become a death trap where the Taliban plant bombs and kidnap.

    Aid agencies have closed down their offices in the south, and girls have been terrorised into staying at home again. In Kabul, women make sure that when they go out, their headscarves stay on their heads. I take care to wear outfits that blend in with the local fashion, and I stay away from target sites, such as foreign restaurants. I would no longer travel without a man.

    On May 29 my fiancé, Naeem, and I returned to Kabul from our home town, Herat, in the west of the country, gleeful after our festive engagement ceremony, to realise that we had arrived on one of the most volatile days in the capital since President Karzai took control. There were no taxis at the airport, where normally it was hard to ward off the yellow cabs. The roads were empty and foreign troops with guns patrolled the streets. Later, on the news, we heard that an American military truck had lost control and killed and injured several civilians. It was the last straw for many Afghans. The number of rioters was small, in the hundreds, but the damage done was irreparable: at least 17 people killed, and dozens of buildings – mostly the homes and offices of foreigners – looted and set ablaze. The rioters chanted: “Death to Karzai, death to America.” Peacekeepers, the US military, along with the Afghan police and army, worked for hours to restore order.

    Naeem and I went out the next day, following the whiff of soot, to talk to Afghans who had witnessed the burnings. Some said they understood why the violence occurred but did not support it. “People are frustrated because they have no jobs and don’t feel safe any more. Their lives have not improved, so they took it out on the foreigners, who are innocent,” said a shopkeeper who did not want to be named.

    Many of the people I interviewed in 2005 had predicted this reaction. Earlier that year, I had embarked on a project for CorpWatch, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to rooting out corporate corruption, to investigate the foreign contractors who were hired by foreign donors to rebuild the country. The six-month venture began in Washington, DC, and led deep into the villages and cities of Afghanistan. I visited clinics, schools and roads recently built or in desperate need of repair, or both.

    An hour from Kabul, in the village of Qalai Qazi, stands a new, bright-yellow health clinic built by the Louis Berger Group, an American engineering consulting company with the largest American-funded contract in Afghanistan, amounting to about $1.1 billion. The clinic was meant to be a sterling example of American engineering and a model for 81 other clinics Berger was charged with building.

    But this “model” clinic was falling apart: the ceiling had rotted away in patches; the plumbing, when it worked, leaked and shuddered; the chimney, made of flimsy metal, threatened to set the roof on fire; the sinks had no running water; and the place smelt of sewage. But the need for health care is so urgent, the clinic was opened anyway. Since 2003, doctors at the Qalai Qazi clinic have treated about 100 patients a day, according to Mohammed Saber, the clinic’s round-the-clock guard.

    I visited it one afternoon last October. It was Ramadan, and the clinic had closed early. When I arrived, the doctors had left. An old woman swept the floors, and they shone. But window-dressing can’t hide the reality that wafts from bathroom drains and leaks from decayed ceilings. Even the staff kitchen had no running water.
    “It’s better than nothing,” Saber said.

    Fred Chace, Berger’s deputy operations manager in Afghanistan, responded to criticism against the company in an e-mail: “Louis Berger, USAid and all the other implementing partners have had to face and overcome numerous challenges since the start of the reconstruction effort. The earlier works were all accelerated to show Afghans some immediate results and evidence that the intent of the programme was honourable and noble. Many people have [worked] and continue to work very hard to achieve the goals that have been established for reconstruction. On a programme of this magnitude there would be problems, even in a developed country. The challenges in Afghanistan make it even more difficult. There will be disagreements and mistakes made by anybody at any given time. However, you overcome those problems and you keep the objectives in mind and move forward.”

    Berger received £357m from the US Agency for International Development (USAid) from 2002 to 2006 to build and rehabilitate infrastructure in Afghanistan, including clinics, schools, roads and dams. The company designed 89 roofs and clinics that needed to be fixed at the cost of millions of pounds. A new school with 12 classrooms costs £49,000 to £54,000, according to the Afghan ministry of education. But Berger’s average was £147,000.

    Despite the mistakes, delays and charges of ineptitude from the Afghan government and development experts, USAid awarded another £748m to Berger in partnership with another American company, Black & Veatch Special Projects Corp, in September, for the next five years, to work on energy, water and transportation infrastructure. By 2009, Kabul has been promised 24-hour electricity.

    The most hailed Berger infrastructure project was the Kabul-to-Kandahar highway, a 482-kilometre stretch of asphalt with 45 bridges and 1,900 culverts and causeways. It took two years to complete, but most of the work was done in six months – and that was no accident. The US military needed a primary road to shuttle troops and supplies, but this highway also had political significance. The Afghan presidential elections were to be held in October 2004, and George W Bush was in a close race for re-election. Both campaigns could use a good press.

    USAid awarded Berger the contract to build the highway in late 2002. In the peak work period, 3,000 Afghan labourers receiving about £3 to £5 a day worked seven days a week in 12-hour shifts to get it done before both presidential elections. In the process, Afghan engineers say the quality of material used was compromised. Cracks formed in the road during its first winter. Berger filled them in: it was under warranty to fix problems for a year; then it falls on the Afghan government to maintain roads, something it does not have the budget to achieve effectively.

    Another road in the north that USAid funded and Berger supervised is known as the Shiberghan highway. Finished last winter, it was supposed to be one of the best roads in the country, according to its American and Turkish contractors. But the locals complain that it already has potholes from the massive fuel trucks that rumble down it daily. Farmers are furious because the road blocks their natural drainage system, causing a flood hazard. Cyclists gripe that there are no hard shoulders for the dozens of them who regularly travel on the highway.

    During Karzai’s election campaign in 2004, he promised the people in this area a highway 10 metres wide, laid with asphalt. What they got was a road eight metres wide with a cheaper, less durable surface. The main discontent with the new road, from interviews with the farmers, was about water: not getting enough or getting too much. The road is built close to mud homes that have been here for decades. The old dirt road was low, and allowed runoff in the wet season to drain away.

    The new road is built atop a raised berm, blocking drainage. If a heavy storm strikes, the villagers fear the mud homes they built with their hands will collapse.
    One thousand local residents signed a petition demanding what they were promised by the politicians and took it to the provincial governor, who had no power to enforce change. “Based on the agreements made, donors can take advice and suggestions from the Afghan government, but they don’t have to listen to it,” said one contractor. The contractors built drainage canals, but the mud homes were in trouble. So the residents tried their own solution.

    On a sunny Friday morning last October, three villagers dug a ditch right through the new road bed in an attempt to create a drainage canal before the rainy season. They were arrested for damaging public property. Habib, the tribal head of the village, defended the ditch. “Seventy families live in this village and we’re happy about this road, but we do not want our homes to fall because of it. We need a drain for the water,” he said. He looked at me as if I could help him. Could I make these big businessmen understand that they had a right to a home, he whispered in Persian. I had no answer except to write down what he said and smile.

    Berger and Limak, the Turkish construction company it hired to build the road, tried to meet some of the demands but explained that their hands were tied by their £8m budget, most of which disappeared in setting up a work camp site, supervisor salaries and the subcontractors. No long-term money was budgeted for maintenance, without which the contractors admit that the road will deteriorate in five years.

    It’s easy to find defects in construction projects, but even if a structure is erected flawlessly, the simple necessities that westerners take for granted inside buildings are lacking. Few of the ministries have regular power, water and sewage sanitation. If residents have the money, they can afford a generator and dig a well, but there is no water-treatment plant in the country. The underground aquifers in Kabul are drying up because too many people rely on well-water. Sewage wells are already contaminating water wells. There is no government resource to store rainwater or to collect river water. As for power, neighbouring countries sell electricity to some bordering cities, but the capital relies on dams. In the spring and summer, the snow melts on the mountains, feeding water to the dams and giving people more hours of electricity.

    On many nights in winter 2004, I escaped my dark, cold home to stay with friends in one of the BearingPoint company houses in the high-class neighbourhood of Wazir Akbar Khan. BearingPoint, an American company assigned by the US government to revamp the Afghan financial system, rented eight houses, paying up to £4,300 a month in rent for the house used by the highest-ranking company official in the country. The area had become a fortress for international consultants, diplomats and the American military. Nearly all the streets were blocked from normal traffic for safety reasons, and inside these homes, aid money had paid for all the luxuries of a western life, including 24-hour electricity provided by truck-sized generators, a cook to prepare three meals a day, and access to satellite television and the internet.

    USAid is the largest donor to reconstruction in Afghanistan. It has spent £1.9 billion from 2002 to 2005 on various sectors, including democracy and governance, infrastructure, agriculture and alternative work for those in poppy-producing regions.

    It’s hard to prove how much of the money donated in the past five years was wasted, mismanaged, misused and, in some cases, stolen. But the former Afghan interior minister Ali Jalali said in a recent press interview that he estimated only 30% of that money was actually spent on aid projects in the country. So what happened to the rest? Bribery is rife. Foreign consultants absorb enormous funding: advisers each cost an average of £275,000 a year to hire and accommodate, according to an Afghan government report, a seemingly outlandish amount. But contractors say they have to pay a premium to attract qualified employees into a dangerous war zone.

    The failure to spend the money wisely is partly down to a flawed system that fails to co-ordinate the Afghan government with the donors, a lack of leadership, and the widespread local corruption and violence that hinder the reconstruction effort. International and national aid agencies – including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and USAid – that distribute aid money to developing countries have, in effect, a system that is efficient in funnelling money back to the donor countries through corporate contractors. And as political pressure increased in Afghanistan to demonstrate the effects of reconstruction quickly, contractors were under pressure to do more work faster; they cut corners and leaned on their subcontractors and underqualified local labourers. When this resulted in fiascos, the blame ricocheted around.

    My Afghan family in Herat decided to stay at home during the October frenzy of Eid festival shopping – their favourite time of year – because they feared suicide bombings. One relative was killed in a blast near the local mosque after Friday prayers in September. Some of my family say the coalition and the government made too many mistakes and it’s too late for Afghanistan.

    When President Karzai pleaded for more money at donor conferences, donor countries didn’t oblige, perhaps because Afghanistan was supposed to be on its way to recovery. Educated Afghans ask why they received so little aid money compared with other conflict zones such as Bosnia, Rwanda and East Timor. According
    to IMF statistics, aid money equalled £36 per year for each Afghan and £134 a year for each Bosnian. Afghan officials say they need £14.8 billion up to 2010 to get the country on its feet, but the latest donor conference in early 2006 in London awarded only £5.8 billion.

    More aid money is crucial to peace but it will not be enough to stop the violence, according to Barnett Rubin, an American expert on Afghanistan who has been an adviser to Karzai’s government. Rubin, who heads the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, argues the need for “the elimination of the Taliban leadership’s safe haven in Pakistan; measures… empowering elders to maintain security in their areas; and more aid and reconstruction, so people actually benefit from the reduction in insurgent violence. The glass is much less than half full and much more than half empty, but… it’s standing on quite a rickety table, and the whole thing could be knocked over. We’re at a potential tipping point, because the expectations of people… have changed dramatically: they see the Taliban as having the initiative and being on the way to victory”.

    Afghans have pleaded to allocate aid money as they see fit. And donor countries continue to object, claiming that the Afghan government is too corrupt to be trusted. No doubt, corruption is a problem in Afghanistan, where business generally involves bribes. But Afghan ministers say the no-bid, open-ended contracts the US and the international community award their own contractors is little more than a dressed-up form of bribery and corruption. And, according to USAid, the increased focus on Afghanistan does not necessarily mean more money.

    I keep coming back, only to be exasperated by the lies, the cover-ups, the greed. When many of my relatives in the West frowned on my optimism five years ago, I called them bitter and cynical. Now I wonder if they were right – but only for a few moments. I’m going to stay as long as I can. I’m going to turn on the generator when the lights go off, breathe the polluted air, ride on those rickety roads and keep writing the history of my homeland, believing that some day Afghanistan will get lucky.

    British involvement in Afghanistan

    Britain makes the second biggest contribution to Afghanistan after the US, both militarily and in foreign aid. Since 2001, the Department for International Development (Dfid) has spent about £390m on reconstruction and development. It has promised a further £330m over the next three years. Most of the money goes directly to the Afghan government ‘to build effective state institutions that will last’, says Dfid. But poor workmanship and the Taliban are undermining the reconstruction, as British and Nato forces are drawn into combat with the insurgents.

    There are currently 5,600 defence-service personnel in Afghanistan and, although British commanders have said they need more troops and equipment, according to the MoD that number ‘should stay roughly the same for the foreseeable future’. So far there have been 40 British deaths, but the rate is increasing — 19 British soldiers were killed in one week last month.

    In January, Tony Blair announced the deployment of 4,500 British troops to Helmand province in the south so schools, hospitals, power plants and roads could be built. But this month the government was forced to withdraw its senior development adviser, as the area had become too dangerous.

    British forces have also struggled to quell opium production — Afghanistan produces 92% of the world’s opium poppies. The national opium crop has increased by 49%, while in British-patrolled Helmand province the crop has trebled. However, Dfid’s money has bolstered some laudable programmes, such as the National Rural Access Programme, which will provide employment for about 190,000 people in building public works. It also contributes £45m per annum to develop alternative livelihoods to opium production, and £20m to the government’s Microfinance Investment Support Facility, which gives legal and other financial services to the poor. Also, about 6m children have returned to school, and immunisation has saved the lives of around 35,000 children.

  • Women used to traffic drugs

    By Safia Melad and Fariba Nawa
    December 22, 2004
    Pajhwok Afghan News

    Kabul– Sakina, Zainab and Latifa were coming to their birthplace Afghanistan for the first time after 20 years from Pakistan. They were expecting a sweet homecoming with relatives; instead they got thrown into a women’s prison in Kabul.

    Four months ago, the women, who are related to each other, boarded a station wagon headed to Afghanistan. But they say they did not have the fare for the ride so a stranger, a man standing in the bus station, offered to pay their way if they carried a yellow plastic bag full of “stuff.” They were told another man would pick up the bag when they got to Kandahar, the women’s destination. He also offered them about 1600 Afghanis (US$ 35).

    Half way through the ride inside Afghanistan in Maidan Shahr, police stopped the station wagon and searched the passengers. They found opium in the plastic bag. The women screamed and cried that they had no knowledge of the contents but police sent them for interrogation and then off to jail where they are awaiting their trial.

    “Opium is like poison, I can’t believe that anyone would knowingly do this,” Zainab told Pajhwok Afghan News.

    Police say the women are guilty of narcotics trafficking.

    These three women are among thousands of women across the country voluntarily or forcibly trafficking narcotics without much incentive. They may get a cut as a poor farmer will but the drug lords benefit from their risk.

    Police say it’s easier for women to traffic narcotics because smugglers and drug lords believe women are less likely to be searched. In some cases, women pretend to be pregnant with kilos of opium and heroin skillfully tied around their belly.

    But the Afghan government’s push this year to fight against narcotics is giving no mercy to the women and the number of women charged with involvement in the drug trade is increasing, police say.

    “These women traffickers are mostly from the south and the drug mafia wants to use them because they think we’ll take it easy on them in searches. We used to but not anymore,” said General Abdul Fatah, chief intelligence prosecutor in Kabul.

    The three women coming from Pakistan say they were naïve and the drug lords exploited them. The three sat in a rather comfortably heated room on their beds in the women’s prison lamenting their fate. Latifa’s two sons, ages 2 and 5, were traveling with them. She sent the older one back to Pakistan to be with his father but kept the two-year-old boy with her in jail. The boy climbed in his mother’s lap and held her.

    Latifia, 35, is Sakina’s daughter-in-law and Zainab, also 35, is her cousin. Fifty-year-old Sakina and Zainab are both widows responsible for providing for their families in Peshawar. Sakina is a maid in people’s homes and Zainab is a street vendor. But for now, they read the Quran and pray all day with each other as they wait to hear from their relatives and their lawyer. Zainab said her brother, who lives in Jalalabad, refuses to visit her because he’s ashamed that his sister has landed in prison.

    The women said not only do they have to deal with imprisonment but with the disgrace hurled on women who are taken to jail, whether they are innocent or guilty. These women thought the same way until they got here.

    “When we first came here, we thought the jail was full of bad people. But now we see that a lot of regular people are here,” Zainab said.

    One of those “regular” people is Zadrana, a nomad farmer struck by the country’s 25-year tragedy of war, drought and poverty.

    Zadrana has six more months to serve from her yearlong sentence after she and her son were convicted for planting and trafficking two kilos of opium. With raisin wrinkled brown-skin and coal-rimmed eyes, Zardana only has one leg for walking. The other is disabled from an illness she does not know. She crawls or holds onto the wall as she walks. Zardana is a widow with two sons and a five-year-old daughter who suffers from a blindness that hurts. The daughter, who’s living with Zardana in jail, sat next to her mother holding her eyes and whimpering. Zardana said the little girl inexplicably stopped seeing well one day. She sees shadows and cries from pain.

    Zadrana owned a couple of pieces of land in Kunduz province. She decided to plant opium last year and sells the harvest so she could have enough money to operate on her daughter’s eyes. She scraped off the juice of the poppy bulbs, prepared it into gummy opium and stuffed it in a plastic bag. Then she and one of her sons set off in a public bus heading south. Their destination was Pakistan through the Kandahar border. But half way through her trip in Chawk-e Arghandi, the police searched and found the opium.

    She confessed to smuggling the drugs but now she wants to ask for the next six months of her sentence to be forgiven.

    “I won’t accept another six months in here. I don’t deserve it and I won’t do this again. It was out of desperation,” Zadrana said.

  • Life in a City

    Being careful in Kabul
    By Fariba Nawa
    September 2004
    Scholastic

    (view article with photos at scholastic.com)

    Aysha and Ahad are kids living in the middle-class apartment complexes in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. They have almost every toy and technology that American children have. But unlike most American children, they’re scared to leave their apartment.

    “I never go outside because it’s too dangerous. The mosque loudspeakers announce how many boys and girls are kidnapped every day,” says 8-year-old Aysha.

    Afghan children in cities, especially in Kabul, are told to beware of kidnappers, careless drivers, and flying bullets. Violence has increased lately because of the first democratic elections scheduled for October 9. People unhappy with the election process are throwing rockets, planting bombs, and threatening anyone who dares to come out and enjoy life.

    Kabul police say that child kidnapping is less common than people think. But many parents are afraid to let their children climb trees, fly kites, or go swimming.

    Let’s Stay In

    Aysha and Ahad find ways to have fun inside. Aysha plays with her dolls and dances to Afghan pop music. She plays games on her sister’s cell phone and teases Ahad. When it’s her turn to watch TV, she watches Scooby Doo and Tom and Jerry cartoons. Her favorite game on the computer is solitaire. Aysha and Ahad often fight over the laptop computer and the TV. Ahad, 13, plays video games like the King of Fighters. But he also goes outside and buys groceries for his mother.

    The two share their home with their parents, four other siblings, and an American woman, Patricia, who is like their second mother. They don’t have couches and tables. They prefer to sit on red, cushioned mats, and lean against fluffy pillows. They eat on a plastic tablecloth when it’s mealtime and then wipe it off and fold it up when the food is eaten. Their living room is covered in red Afghan carpets and they have a medium-screen TV with a DVD and VCR inside an entertainment set.

    The family left this apartment for several years during the civil war in Afghanistan and lived in Pakistan, where Aysha was born. Ahad and Aysha both speak four languages: Persian, Pashto (one of the two main Afghan languages), Urdu (the Pakistani language), and English, which they learned in Pakistani schools.

    The family returned to their homeland four years ago when the new government took power. The brother and sister say they had more freedom in Pakistan, but Afghanistan is home. On Fridays, a Muslim holiday when Afghans do not work, Aysha and Ahad go to picnics, restaurants, and relatives’ homes with their family.

    “It’s my homeland here. There is a better education system in Pakistan and it was safer, but we were strangers there,” said Ahad. “I think my family’s happier here and I want to stay here.”