This seems quite an apt undersong to the latest news


David Bircumshaw

Leicester, England

A Chide's Alphabet
www.chidesplay.8m.com

Painting Without Numbers
www.paintstuff.20m.com/default.htm
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/default.htm
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2001 18:39:21 +0400
> From: Salwa Ghaly <[log in to unmask]>
> To: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: FW: an aid worker's story from Afghanistan
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Thomas Palakeel
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: 10/5/01 6:27 PM
> Subject: an aid worker's story from Afghanistan
>
> > A Last Road Trip Through Premodern, Postmodern Afghanistan
> >
> > September 30, 2001
> >
> > By JOHN SIFTON
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > I got my last haircut in Kabul, but Sept. 11 found me
> > standing on John Street in lower Manhattan with about 20
> > volunteer rescue workers, amid masses of scorched paper and
> > debris, watching fires burn near where the World Trade
> > Center used to be. A recently returned humanitarian aid
> > worker, I had rushed downtown when the towers collapsed.
> > Brushing dust and ash out of my hair -- still short from my
> > haircut -- I felt the low-level shock that came often in
> > Afghanistan, the kind of shock I felt when I saw dead
> > bodies, starving children, Taliban enemies hung from
> > lampposts by cable. I marveled at the fact that I was
> > feeling this familiar emotion in the financial district of
> > Manhattan, an unusual place to be in shock. For a moment I
> > felt that I had somehow not escaped Afghanistan, that I had
> > brought its disaster home with me to New York.
> >
> > I have spent most of the past year working in Afghanistan
> > and Pakistan for one of the international nongovernmental
> > organizations that implement humanitarian aid programs for
> > people suffering or fleeing from Afghanistan's multiple
> > crises: civil war, persecution by the Taliban and by
> > anti-Taliban military forces, economic stagnation, severe
> > drought and food and water shortages. We were the welfare
> > state for a failed state.
> >
> > Of course, everything has changed now. Relief workers from
> > international groups and the United Nations have been
> > evacuated from Afghanistan in response to an expected
> > military strike by the United States. Humanitarian
> > operations have been severely curtailed, and an increasing
> > number of refugees are pouring out of Afghanistan into Iran
> > and Pakistan. ''The country was on a lifeline,'' one of my
> > colleagues said, ''and we just cut the line.''
> >
> > Like many countries suffering from political instability,
> > Afghanistan is a complicated and weird place. In some
> > areas, there are few traces of modern life. Goods are
> > carried by donkey or camel, and oxen plow the ground. Old
> > men with long beards sit beneath trees, fingering prayer
> > beads, their skin brown and wrinkled. Many rural people
> > live as their ancestors probably did 400 years ago: iron
> > pots over the fire, clothes they made themselves and babies
> > delivered by candlelight.
> >
> > In other parts of the country, life is more complicated.
> > Taliban troops speed around Kabul in their clean new Toyota
> > pickup trucks, tricked-out, hip-hop ghetto rigs. On the
> > sides they have painted pseudo-American phrases: ''City
> > Boy,'' ''Fast Crew,'' ''King of Road.'' Inside, young
> > solemn-looking Taliban men sit in their black holy dress,
> > sporting Ray-Bans.
> >
> > The juxtapositions can make your mind reel. Donkey carts
> > carrying computer equipment. Hungry children digging
> > through garbage piles using shovels from a Mickey and
> > Minnie Mouse sand-castle set.
> >
> > The number of people displaced from their homes is
> > enormous. Populations of the desperate roam around, begging
> > for money and scraps of food. People eat wild plants,
> > garbage, insects and old animal parts discarded by
> > butchers. In one camp, an old man showed me a bowl filled
> > with rotten cow bowels, grass poking out in places. ''This
> > is what we eat, sir!'' he said, wiping away tears with his
> > fist.
> >
> > I often had a strange feeling in Afghanistan, a sort of
> > temporal vertigo. It was impossible for me to get a proper
> > sense of time. Like many former cold-war battlefields,
> > Afghanistan is partly frozen in time; most of its urban
> > buildings and infrastructure were completed in the 1960's
> > and 1970's during the height of Soviet and American
> > spending on foreign aid to the developing world. The
> > telephone in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Kabul is
> > one of those heavy models from the 1960's; in a pinch, you
> > could probably knock someone out with the handset. There is
> > an old telex machine in one of the offices, sitting dusty
> > in the corner, making you think it's 1976. Then you see the
> > American and Soviet military remnants from the 1980's:
> > broken old Soviet tanks painted and lined up in town
> > squares, a mural on a wall in eastern Kabul showing a holy
> > warrior with a Stinger antiaircraft launcher on his
> > shoulder. And still there are antique doors on some
> > buildings with designs from the 13th century. History
> > presents itself in a disorderly montage, like one of those
> > heuristic displays in natural-history museums -- dinosaurs,
> > the bronze age, the renaissance, space travel -- rearranged
> > at random: pre-cold-war, post-cold-war, cold war, Buddhist
> > antiquities, Kalashnikovs. The timelessness of this jumbled
> > history made me feel like an old museum curator:
> > time-transcendent, fascinated and lonely. This is perhaps
> > why I felt so crazy at times.
> >
> >
> >
> > Taliban troops and police are always easy to spot. They
> > have black flowing robelike clothes, long hair and big
> > silky black turbans with long tails running almost to the
> > ankles. (These accouterments are meant to identify them as
> > direct descendants of Muhammad.) They are often tall and
> > imposing, even impressive. ''The Taliban troops are like
> > gangsters,'' a colleague told me when I first arrived.
> > ''Tough guys.'' But there is often a particular dandyism in
> > them; many wear black eyeliner (part of the
> > descendant-of-Muhammad costume), and their hair is long and
> > curly. I once saw one buying Prell shampoo at the bazaar.
> > They carry themselves like supermodels.
> >
> > The reputation for religious conservatism in the Taliban
> > obviously doesn't come from their foppish troops. It comes
> > instead from the leadership in the southern city of
> > Kandahar, who founded the Taliban in the early 1990's. They
> > are considered mullahs now, but 10 years ago they were
> > essentially no more than a collection of seminary teachers
> > from the rural south. These ''original Taliban'' are the
> > ones who present the decrees barring women from work,
> > making men wear long beards and prohibiting me from
> > entering the country with ''pork products or lobsters'' (as
> > one recent decree dictated). These are the people who
> > proudly call themselves ''the Mosquitoes of Islam,''
> > proclaiming, ''Islamic faith is a bright light: we seek to
> > be so close to it that we catch fire.''
> >
> > In urban Afghanistan, crime was rare (one of the
> > seldom-mentioned upsides to Taliban authority), and
> > expatriates were treated with a good deal of respect by
> > government officials and the military. ''He who believes in
> > Allah and the hereafter shall perform good service for his
> > guests,'' reads a sign in one small government office in
> > the north. This is a telling poster. It might seem strange,
> > but aid workers were considered guests of Afghanistan, and
> > the title bestowed a special status on us. Even if we were
> > seen as an enemy of sorts (perhaps by a particularly grumpy
> > mullah), we were guests -- distrusted and carefully
> > examined, but still welcomed.
> >
> > In our humanitarian work, my colleagues and I interacted
> > with neither the black-robed troops nor the mullahs from
> > Kandahar. We dealt mostly with the ''new Taliban'' -- the
> > civil servants who in recent years have appeared from
> > between the cracks to run the country for the predominantly
> > illiterate and uneducated ''original Taliban.'' These
> > people form the real bureaucracy of Afghanistan. Though
> > they now sport the same flowing black turbans and long hair
> > as the troops, many were ordinary municipal leaders a few
> > years ago, local politicians. For the most part, they are
> > opportunists who saw the direction the wind was blowing
> > when the Taliban took power and adjusted accordingly; they
> > grew out their beards and put on black robes and became
> > Talibs.
> >
> > Of course, these new leaders' commitment to the moral
> > righteousness of the Talib movement is questionable. Many
> > seem fascinated by Americans and the West, eager to learn
> > more English, more American phrases and more about America.
> > (One afternoon, a Talib in Kabul kept me in his office for
> > an hour to go over some English grammar rules and ask about
> > New York and the ''Hollywood movie company.'') Still, the
> > new Taliban follow the orders of the Taliban leadership.
> > The decrees are enforced.
> >
> >
> >
> > The summer wind up in Mazar-i-Sharif in the north is just
> > absurd -- you feel as if you are on another planet. The
> > temperature is usually well over 100 degrees and the wind
> > blows about 40 to 50 miles an hour almost every day,
> > raising huge clouds of dust that hang hundreds of feet over
> > the desert. You feel as if you're standing in front of a
> > space heater in a dusty attic at the height of summer. Your
> > nostrils fill with dust and dry up; your eyes turn to red
> > slits. You have to wrap a turban around your head and nose
> > and drink a great deal of water. It is a war against
> > desiccation.
> >
> > On a particularly windy and hot day in June, some
> > colleagues and I took an almost insane trip from
> > Mazar-i-Sharif west into the scorching Iranian Plateau, to
> > a province called Jozjan, to gather some information about
> > the drought crisis areas there.
> >
> > We started out at 5 in the morning to avoid some of the
> > heat and drove for hours through the desert -- or what I
> > thought was desert. I learned later that it was, in normal
> > years, productive agricultural land. The heat and dust were
> > intense. The car rocked in the wind, and sometimes
> > visibility was reduced to only a few car lengths. To pass
> > the time, the young Afghan staff members told me about
> > their time in the jihad when they bombed Soviet
> > installations from the mountains. I recited hip-hop verses
> > at the request of one of the young Afghans, who wanted to
> > know ''about the African people with black skin in
> > America'' who ''sing, but without music, like shouting.''
> > We drank huge amounts of water.
> >
> > We arrived in a small village called Aqchah, a dusty and
> > extremely windy trading town. We stumbled out of the car,
> > clothes soaked with sweat and filthy from the dust, and
> > walked into the local Taliban office to ''check in.'' (One
> > must indulge in this courtesy in order to avoid problems
> > later.) Then we sat for an hour with the entire village
> > leadership -- 15 or so men with long beards who argued
> > among themselves about what sorts of aid projects might
> > keep more people from leaving town for the city. (We had
> > this sort of meeting all the time.)
> >
> > We drank a lot of tea. The men spoke in Persian, and my
> > interpreter just filled me in on essentials. In the next
> > room, through the doorway, a man with a large knife stood
> > cutting fat from a sheep carcass hanging from the ceiling.
> > Every so often, the man would come halfway into the doorway
> > in his blood-stained apron, knife in hand, join the
> > conversation briefly, make a point and then go back to his
> > butchering in the next room. The others listened to him
> > with respect, but I never found out why. Our meeting
> > finished when the tea ran out.
> >
> > We drove through another desert -- a real desert -- to
> > arrive in the capital of Jozjan, Shiberghan. The trip took
> > about three hours. We arrived dusty, wind-blasted and
> > spacey. We staggered into the local Taliban office -- a
> > bombed-out building without windows -- to check in. The
> > local liaison official for international relief workers in
> > Shiberghan was about 22 years old. We were invited into his
> > office, a room facing the courtyard with no furniture, just
> > a rug on the floor and a phone. After the regular
> > introductions, the young official explained that he would
> > need to ''ensure my safety'' by supplying me with guarded
> > accommodations. I insisted that this wouldn't be necessary.
> > I told the official that I did not fear for my safety. I
> > even flattered him and said that I was sure that his city
> > was exceedingly safe. Still, after 15 minutes, he stood up,
> > put on his black turban and left to go secure my lodging.
> >
> > We had to wait for more than two hours. We got bored. I
> > examined a curious calendar on the wall that displayed a
> > map of Afghanistan surrounded by planes, tanks and ships
> > all labeled ''U.S. ARMY'' and all pointing missiles toward
> > the center of Afghanistan. Various Taliban functionaries
> > came and went -- new Talibs mostly. Finally, the official
> > returned to inform me that I would be staying at a hotel
> > reserved ''for foreign dignitaries'' (this is how my
> > interpreter translated it) called Dostum's Castle. It was
> > obvious that this was an honor, so I made an effort to
> > thank him profusely, despite the fact that I did not want
> > to go. I insisted, however, that the Afghan staff accompany
> > me. He obliged me at least on this point. Off we went.
> >
> > Dostum's Castle. What can I say? It was chintzy
> > Soviet-style public architecture combined with low-rent
> > Miami design: long frosted-glass windows and a faux marble
> > facade. There were peacocks on the front lawn -- peacocks
> > -- and a swimming pool filled with algae-plagued water.
> >
> > Inside, it was like ''The Shining.'' We walked down long
> > wide corridors with dark red carpeting; each of the
> > hotel-room doors had a padlock on it. We were the only
> > guests. The air-conditioner in my room sounded like a
> > Harrier jet, and there were bullet holes in the furniture.
> >
> > The bathroom in our room didn't work, so we had to go down
> > two floors to use another one. On the landing of the stairs
> > two floors down, there was a large landscape painting,
> > about 16 feet by 12 feet, of a pond, some flowers, a forest
> > and a few animals. The heads of the three animals had been
> > cut out of the painting to comply with Taliban aesthetic
> > restrictions: the creation of images of living beings is
> > forbidden under the Taliban's kooky interpretation of
> > Islamic law. This left a decapitated deer standing by a
> > pond and a headless beaver sitting on a tree stump.
> >
> > I considered the piece as I stood on the landing. A
> > terrible painting in the style of Bob Ross, done entirely
> > with two shades of green and one shade of brown and then
> > vandalized by Taliban police trying to ensure its innocence
> > before God without destroying it altogether. In its own
> > way, I thought, it is a post-postmodern masterpiece. But
> > surely I could add still more to this artwork. I could buy
> > it from the Taliban, sell it for a fortune in New York and
> > give the money to the Afghan opposition. Yes. Participatory
> > political art. It just might be crazy enough to work. How
> > much would a rich New York liberal with a sense of irony
> > pay for this, this bad art, vandalized by the Mosquitoes of
> > Islam and then sold to raise money against them? A new
> > school: censorship as an art form unto itself. Politics as
> > art. Art-dealing as art. I could be rich.
> >
> > I was still chuckling to myself when one of the Afghan
> > engineers came down the stairs. ''What are you laughing
> > about?'' he asked. ''I don't know,'' I answered.
> >
> >
> >
> > the next day was a nightmare: human suffering on a shocking
> > scale. Displaced persons without enough food to eat were
> > drinking water taken from muddy ponds -- mud really.
> > ''They're drinking mud,'' I said into my tape recorder.
> > ''They're drinking mud.'' I remember one particular
> > experience especially. We were in a windy camp for
> > displaced persons, and a man was showing us the graves of
> > his three children, who had died of disease on three
> > consecutive days: Thursday, Friday and Saturday. It was
> > Monday, and he had buried his last child the day before.
> > After he described all this, we stood around the graves in
> > the strangely loud silence of the wind, hot as an oven, and
> > the man absent-mindedly adjusted a rock atop one child's
> > grave.
> >
> > It was a very emotional moment, yet I didn't really feel
> > sad. I was just fascinated by the realness of it all. You
> > look out an office window, and you see a displaced family
> > living in a bombed-out school, sleeping on the balcony and
> > cooking some birds they caught, doves. This is their life.
> > They can't change the channel.
> >
> > There are no channels, in fact. We are ''off the grid,''
> > not linked up with the world's information sources or any
> > of its culture. There are no telephones outside the cities.
> > There is no television reception. We have no access to
> > ''entertainment.'' There are no theaters, films, galleries
> > or circuses. The Taliban has even banned music. All this is
> > in contrast with the Western world, with its many
> > reality-altering and distance-distorting mechanisms:
> > television, cellphones, the Internet. Again, there seems to
> > be a time warp. Sometimes it feels as if we have been
> > brought back not just to a time before modern entertainment
> > but to a time before art -- a time in which reality was
> > just more real, a time without images and ideas and
> > representations, only actual events.
> >
> > And yet moments here often seem cinematic to me. I
> > constantly see things as scenes. Here we are walking in
> > Kabul, near some women in their concealing blue burqas;
> > goats are running by and an ancient Soviet tank lies gutted
> > by the side of the road. Here we see the schoolchildren
> > running by in their little Taliban uniforms, black turbans
> > hanging to their knees, yelling to me in robot English:
> > ''Hello! Hello! How are you?'' And here we are at the U.S.
> > government club in Peshawar, over the border in Pakistan,
> > sitting by the pool with some Belgian journalist, drinking
> > Grand Marnier and orange juice and talking about German
> > novels. I feel outside myself seeing these scenes play out:
> > absurdities that seem so normal while they're happening.
> >
> > There is a propensity among some aid workers (usually
> > younger ones) to work endless hours during a crisis. You
> > cannot take a break, it is argued, when children are
> > hungry. You cannot sleep, have a beer or lie in your bed.
> > You have to act. And so you work endlessly. And then,
> > inevitably, you crack: you go nuts, start acting righteous
> > and weird, and your colleagues come to despise you.
> > Ultimately, your organization evacuates you on
> > psychological grounds -- a procedure churlishly referred to
> > as a ''psycho-vac.'' You end up back home: unemployed,
> > asocial, crazy, useless and pathetic.
> >
> > I remember a story that a friend told me about an aid
> > worker she worked with in Albania. During the Kosovo
> > crisis, they were working together in a huge new refugee
> > settlement across the border with inadequate sanitation
> > facilities.
> >
> > ''We had to get 5,000 latrines built, like immediately. But
> > I'll tell you, he was gone, man -- his brain was fried by
> > trauma. He had been at Goma'' -- in the Congo -- dead
> > bodies and hacked-off limbs in a pile, and they had to
> > clean it up. I guess he was scarred. Anyway, he got like a
> > pound of pot from some Albanian mafia playboy in Tirana. He
> > would drink huge amounts of that terrible instant coffee,
> > Nestle's -- I think they put speed in that stuff. He was
> > high all the time. He didn't talk to anyone. He just drank
> > that crank coffee and smoked pot. He worked like a madman.
> > But we did it, man. We built those 5,000 latrines. They
> > psycho-vac'd him a little later though. He lost it.''
> >
> >
> >
> > Just a few weeks ago, on an unusually cool summer evening
> > in southeast Afghanistan, I was sitting with some
> > colleagues at an outdoor restaurant above a small pond
> > beneath the beautiful mountain ranges southeast of Kabul.
> > We were enjoying a rare night of relaxation away from the
> > madness of our work. We sat on carpets, drinking tea,
> > waiting for food and enjoying the evening sky.
> >
> > The pond below was unnatural -- the result of a small
> > hydroelectric dam built by Soviet contractors decades
> > before -- but it was pretty enough, and we were enjoying
> > the scene. We had come to have some fried fish, a rare dish
> > in this landlocked country.
> >
> > We watched as a young boy climbed down to the pond to
> > retrieve our dinner, some fish previously caught but still
> > alive, swimming in a burlap bag laid in the water. In
> > Afghanistan, dried to the bone by three years of drought
> > and enduring a decreasing food supply, the sight of both
> > fish and water was strange.
> >
> > Some Taliban troops appeared from the nearby road. ''We are
> > here for fish!'' they announced in Pashtu. (My interpreter
> > told me this later.) They sat beside us. My colleagues
> > stiffened.
> >
> > ''Is he a Muslim?'' one of the Talibs asked, indicating me.
> > (He appeared, incidentally, to be very stoned.) My
> > interpreter answered in the negative. ''Christian?'' the
> > Talib asked.
> >
> > My interpreter turned to me. ''Are you a Christian?'' he
> > asked.
> >
> > ''Basically,'' I answered.
> >
> > My interpreter translated this, somehow.
> >
> > Questions began
> > to fly: ''Is he an American?'' the Talib asked. ''Where is
> > America? How close is America to Saudi Arabia? Are there
> > Muslims in America?''
> >
> > My interpreter turned to me again. ''These are very
> > uneducated peasant people from the south.'' I nodded.
> >
> > ''Is this a problem?'' I asked. ''Should we leave?''
> >
> >
> > ''No. They are bemused by you.''
> >
> > The Talibs ordered some fish. Although we had ordered our
> > dinners first, the owner gave the Talibs our fish and
> > started to cook some more for us. The Talibs ate with
> > gusto, spitting bones onto the floor, fish catching in
> > their beards. When they finished, they rose and went to the
> > next room for prayers.
> >
> > Our fish arrived. We began to eat, but soon the Talibs
> > returned and sat down with us. ''Which province are you
> > from in America?'' one of them asked. I told them I was
> > from New York. ''This is a place with many black people,
> > from Africa, is this right? Very dangerous.'' I tried to
> > explain that this was a misperception.
> >
> > One Talib began to help himself to our fish, taking it from
> > our basket as though he hadn't just eaten. ''The black
> > people are very dangerous,'' he said. ''I hear that they
> > are very tall. How tall are they?''
> >
> > I tried my best. There is only so much that can be
> > translated from one language to another, from one culture
> > to another.
> >
> > After a while, the Talibs rose to leave. Amazingly, the one
> > who had stolen from our bowl of fish wiped his hands on my
> > turban, lying untied on the ground next to me. Then he
> > started to leave, but turned back, and a smile came across
> > his face.
> >
> > ''God bless America,'' he said in English, inexplicably.
> >
> >
> > John Sifton is a human rights attorney and humanitarian aid
> > worker. The views expressed here are personal reflections
> > and do not represent the organization for which he worked.
> > For security reasons, it is not named here.
> >
> > http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/30/magazine/
> > 0AFGHAN.html?ex=1003207913&ei=1&en=8cc979e1e9eca719
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
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