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NYTimes.com Article: An Archive of Images Details Afghanistan's Pre-Taliban Void



This article from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by johnschr@wellsfargo.com.


In lieu of Peter's RAIN, thought you all may be interested...

johnschr@wellsfargo.com


An Archive of Images Details Afghanistan's Pre-Taliban Void

October 2, 2001

By SARAH BOXER




WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Sept. 26 - Picture this: A river in
Afghanistan, late fall 1987. A group of young men are
fishing. They prepare their bait - something that looks
like a marshmallow on a stick - and toss it into the river.
Boom! Fish float to the surface, some dead, some alive. The
men laugh and splash around in the water harvesting their
catch. The cameraman shouts at them not to get his camera
wet.

This image - by turns playful and violent, backward and
modern - is part of an archive of 700 hours of videotape
and 12,000 photographs taken by Afghans to document the war
between the mujahedeen (which literally means the people of
the jihad or holy struggle) and the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan from 1987 to 1995. The very last images are of
the Taliban taking Kabul. In retrospect it seems to record
how Afghanistan fell apart, leaving an open field for
terrorists.

This summer, when no one knew how eerily significant the
archive would soon become, it was carried from the Afghan
Media Resource Center in Peshawar, Pakistan, to this neat
and sleepy Berkshire town. David B. Edwards, a professor of
anthropology at Williams College here and the author of
"Children of History: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad"
(forthcoming this spring from the University of California
Press), and his friend Shahmahmood Miakhel, a former Voice
of America journalist who now earns a living as a cabdriver
in Washington, brought it to Williams College hoping to
save it from the heat and dust of Peshawar and to digitize
it for posterity.

Along with the pictures came three Afghans - a video
cameraman, a photographer and a computer specialist - who
set about describing and documenting the pictures. One of
the men was scheduled to fly back to Peshawar on Sept. 11.
He was detained in Washington by the F.B.I. and then
released, Mr. Edwards said. [He has since returned to
Peshawar.]

The photographs and videotapes are extraordinary in their
ordinariness. Although the archive includes some "bang-bang
footage," Mr. Edwards said, mostly there are hours upon
hours of ordinary life in a war zone: fishing, schooling,
game playing, planting, herding, buying and selling and
praying. Still, "if you want to understand the breakdown of
the nation-state in Afghanistan," he said, if you want to
understand how the Taliban took hold and the terrorists
seeped in, this archive is "very relevant in an immediate
way."

Beginning in 1986 the Afghan Media Resource Center,
directed by Haji Sayd Daud, sent out scores of newly
trained Afghan photojournalists to follow various rebel
groups as they fought the Soviets in the mountains and
deserts. "It shows a side of the war that no other archive
does," Mr. Edwards said. "It is from an Afghan
perspective."

That the cameramen were near amateurs makes it all the more
immediate and intimate. As Greg Whitmore, a photographer
who is directing the digitization of the archive, said, the
scenes filmed by these Afghans are distinct from those of
most American and European photojournalists. "They unfold
slowly and cinematically," he said, "with great patience
and attention to detail."

Even the dramatic sequences feel as if they are happening
in real time. You see film, shot covertly from inside a
taxicab, of Soviet soldiers chatting only two or three feet
away, Mr. Edwards said. You see one of the mujahedeen
getting shot in the cheek. "Much of it is like wildlife
photography," he said. "You have to be patient. You wait
for something to happen."

And if you are patient, you will see "how Afghanistan fell
apart," Mr. Edwards said. From 1984 to 1986 a huge influx
of Arab volunteers came to fight against the Soviets. That
is when Osama bin Laden came. And that is when some of
those who would become involved in the 1993 bombing of the
World Trade Center came. The Arab rebels changed the look
of the resistance and ultimately the look of Afghanistan.

Now militants from some 60 nations and regions are in
Afghanistan, and they would never have taken root without
the collapse of civil society there, Mr. Edwards said.

In the videotapes, classrooms, military training camps,
even graveyards look makeshift. One bit of video shows two
mujahedeen sitting in a desert graveyard for martyrs. They
are describing the deaths of the martyrs buried beneath
them. The gravestones look like sand castles. Some are
decorated according to an old central Asian custom, with
rams' horns on top. Other have tattered flags on poles. A
stiff wind briefly fills the flags. The sand castle graves
seem ready to blow away.

The archive from the Afghan Media Resource Center captures
a moment of transition, the moment just before the Taliban
seized power. (Taliban rule is not captured on film because
cameras were largely banned.) And at that moment
Afghanistan seemed to be moving backward in history. The
villages were still functioning. But volunteers in the war
against the Soviet Union were being indoctrinated in boot
camps. Boys, raised without fathers, were sent to religious
schools, or madrassas, taken away from daily village life
and away from the influence of women.

One piece of videotape captures lessons in a madrassa. A
little boy has just been startled by the smacking of a
wooden cane against the book he is reading. Wearing a white
hat that says "God is great," just like all his
schoolmates, he stands singing. Men with guns are watching.
The boy does not look straight ahead but rather to his
side, wide-eyed, at a slightly older boy standing next to
him, and he moves his lips to match his elder's.

Another piece of videotape shows the beginning of a
military campaign. The commander calls everyone to order
with a bullhorn. The troops seem to range in age from 15 to
70. There are artillery shells at their feet. The teenagers
look petrified. The commander invokes the Koran. The troops
shout back passages from it: "God is great!" Donkeys and
camels are loaded with machine guns. The men stabilize a
missile launcher, a BM-1, by pounding it into the ground
with a big rock and then fire at a distant Soviet base.
They hit part of it and then shout: "Another! Another!
They're all going too far to the right!"

A game of buzkashi, which used to be played on the steppes
of central Asia, is also captured on videotape. Dozens of
horsemen gallop around, show off and try to get possession
of a headless calf. The man who carries the calf around a
flagpole and drops it into a circle drawn on the ground is
the winner. All the players are mujahedeen. It is their day
off from fighting. They are having a pickup game. And there
is betting going on. The horses belong to wealthy
landowners, and the riders are paid to play.

Where are the women? Out of the 700 hours of videotape,
there may be 30 minutes that show any women or girls, Mr.
Edwards says. This is partly because the Muslim cameramen
respect the modesty of Muslim women and partly because the
women are inside their homes.

One video segment shows a few school scenes, indicating how
entwined reading and writing are with religious
instruction. A boy at the chalkboard is doing his ABC's.
The child spells baba, grandfather, Mr. Edwards explains,
translating from Dari, the Afghan dialect of Persian. Then
the boy puts it in a sentence: "Grandfather goes to the
mosque." There's a call and response: "Who created you?"
"God did!" "Who created heaven?" "God did!" The camera
focuses briefly on a boy huddled in the corner. A fly
lights on his face. Nearby an older child yawns. An
ordinary day at school. Another lesson is taking place
outdoors. The children rock back and forth memorizing a
text. A teacher goes over the pollution laws, explaining
when to wash. He tests the students: "If there's a lot of
blood, do you need to perform an ablution again?"

The archive, Mr. Edwards said, captures a moment when the
civic rules that bind people were falling apart. And what
replaced them were religious instruction and bands of all-
male societies centered on charismatic leaders. After the
Soviets withdrew in Afghanistan, "there was no longer any
functioning central government," Mr. Edwards said. "The
power began to radiate from little groups as it had in the
19th century," when Afghanistan was squeezed between the
Russian and British empires and when local princes battled
one another for power. But this time the local chiefs would
be armed with AK-47's and rocket-propelled grenade
launchers rather than flintlock rifles and lances.

Here the 19th century meets the 20th, and the mixture, as
presented in this archive, appears both threatening and
benign. One bit of videotape makes the point. There is a
close-up of an inner tube that has been crisscrossed with
twine. A man seats himself in the tube and uses what look
like two wooden spatulas to paddle across the river. It's a
primitive vessel and a wide and muddy river. But as the
video camera follows him out, his destination comes into
focus: a huge natural-gas refinery in the Soviet Union. The
man reaches the far shore. And there the video ends.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/02/arts/design/02ARTS.html?ex=1003043367&ei=1&en=a6955a4b64beef58



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