Traditional dance at Hamid Karzai’s rally during the 2004 presidential election
A new period in Afghanistan’s history has opened up with the return of the Taliban to power and the hasty departure of US forces.
I reported from Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, during the 2004 and 2009 presidential elections and the 2005 legislative election.
Here are photos of some of the country’s long-suffering people taken during my assignements (my camera was stolen in 2001 during an unpleasant roadside incident, so none from then, sadly). Unfortunately, I don’t have easy access to my notes of the time and a link to a slideshow on RFI’s website in English appears to be broken, so I no longer have people’s names and am writing captions from memory. So here goes:
For a small fee this boy burns incense (span) in a can and waves it around your head to chase away evil spirits. His father is dead, leaving his mother to look after several children, the fate of many women after decades of war. His income, collected on the streets and in the parks of Kabul, is essential to feed the whole family.
His friends play table football in Kabul’s central parkThe daughters of better-off families on their way to school, following the end of Taliban rule when education for girls was bannedEvery morning labourers gather at key points of the city in the hope of being hired for the day. Many of them are Hazaras, a minority group who are mainly Shia Muslim and have often suffered discrimination or persecution, notably during the Taliban’s rule
Some of them stay until late in the day …
… in the hope that some employer may need an extra handThis man runs taxi-buses and employs boys to tout for business. He seemed quite proud of providing an income for their familiesA stallholder at the bus stationA cassette vendor. Before 2001 the Taliban banned music, so he sold tapes of religious speechesA timber merchant in the mainly Pashtun area of the cityAn Uzbek tradesman makes Astrakhan hats of the kind favoured by Hamid KarzaiBakers in KabulThe uncooked bread is placed in an underground oven, which is sprayed with water to prevent overheating … then brought out with the help of iron rods… and sold to an eager public. One series of the Danish TV showThe Killing took its heroine to Afghanistan, where she found the remains of a murder victim in a walk-in baker’s oven. So far as I know no such ovens exist in the country (please send a comment to correct me if I’m wrong)A vendor at Kabul’s bird market. Quails are popularButchers at a street market, hygiene not a top priorityThis restaurant-owner was once a professinal wrestler. Photos of his former triumphs decorate the walls of the establishmentA kebab sellerThe temple that served Kabul’s small Sikh communityAn election worker, handicapped like so many people who may have lost limbs in fighting, bombardment or to landminesElection workers are trained in 2005Women arrive at a polling station in 2009A pottery in KabulThe clay being workedPashtun villagers, camping in Kabul where they have come seeking workResidents of the camp wash in a spring nearbySelling light bulbs on a Kabul market, with proof that they workA photographer with a box camera in the Shah Shaheen neighbourhood of KabulThe caretaker of the British cemetery, where many foreigners, including participants in the 19th-century British forays into Afghanistan, are buried. He told me the leaders he most admired were Daoud Khan, who abolished the monarchy and was ousted by the Communists, and Najibullah, the Communist who was driven out by the Western-backed mojaheddin and murdered by the TalibanRecreation in the Bagh-e-Babur gardens, first laid out under Moghul emperor Babur, destroyed during the last century’s wars and rebuilt sincePolice leave the scene of a Taliban bank raid with the body of one of the assailants in the back of the vehicle in 2009
Photos of Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, Panjshir Valley and elsewhere to follow in a later post
Philippe had the virus. He was exposed to it because he does an indispensable job, even if that job is poorly paid and commands little respect.
Philippe is a dustman, leaving home during the night and returning in the early afternoon, all for a fraction of the salary that many less essential workers pocket. While the white-collar workers who live in our courtyard work from home, while the man in an apparently inessential branch of the building trade appears to be laid off, Philippe kept going to work. And so he caught the virus.
He’s a friendly man with a southern French accent – he came to the Paris area from the south-west. He lives in a ground-floor flat more or less opposite our house.
Philippe often opens the window – bare-chested and brown between the months of April and September – to chat with the neighbours. He hadn’t done that for a few days, so when he appeared at the window yesterday afternoon I asked if he had been ill.
He had, for about 10 days, he said. The experience had not been pleasant, he Added, but he’s recovering now.
This is not the first time his job has exposed him to illness. He once caught mange off a mattress, apparently.
Inequality is evident not just in exposure to the virus but also in our experience of confinement.
Philippe is stuck in his poky, dark flat. My mum and I are able to sit out in front of our house and three lucky neighbours actually have gardens. And then there are the inhabitants of the 16e arrondissement of Paris who headed to their holiday homes before lockdown was announced.
The town council asked Raphaël, the man who phones every day to check on Mum’s health, to go out and see how well the lockdown was being observed in the area he lives in, Bois l’Abbé.
Despite its pretty name, Bois l’Abbé is a working-class area with a lot of social housing, much of it tower blocks.
A lot of people had fled their less-than-luxury apartments to enjoy the sunshine, Raphaël reported. “People can’t take it any more,” he said.
I lived in a 10th-floor council flat in Coventry in the 1980s and I can testify that it can drive you a bit nuts even when you’re not locked in to avoid an epidemic. Not everyone seems to feel the same way, but I found the lack of street-level social interaction – the sort of interchange you don’t even notice – isolating and depressing.
That’s what the inhabitants of Bois l’Abbé are trying to escape, even if they are perhaps unwise to do so at the moment.
“Those who live in tower blocks and small flats will find the lockdown a lot tougher,” as Emily Maitlis said on the BBC yesterday. “Those who work in manual jobs will be unable to work from home.”
And, as Raphaël says, the government has to take that into account when deciding the conditions for extending lockdown and how to wind it down when the time comes.
The government is putting more police on the roads out of town this weekend to stop city-dwellers who haven’t got the message trolling off on an Easter break.
There is hope we will soon reach a plateau, France’s top health official, Jérôme Salomon, says. “But it’s a very high plateau”.
More than 12,000 deaths from the virus have now been recorded. The deaths in care homes that were not accounted for yesterday have been added to today’s total.
But for the first time more people were discharged from intensive care than were admitted, slightly easing the pressure on the overstretched health service.
There were 41% more deaths in the week 30 March-5 April than usual, although not all those deaths were due to the virus.
France’s official Covid-19 death toll now stands at 12,210. 30,767 people have been hospitalised, up 392 in 24 hours, but the number in intensive care is down 82 to 7,066. There are 86,334 officially recorded cases but that is clearly an underestimate due to the lack of testing. 23,206 people have been discharged from hospital, up 1,952.
Jakarta is one of the world’s most heavily populated cities, its kampongs swelled by migrants from the overcrowded Javanese countryside and from the rest of the Indonesian archipelago. The city took a hit in 1997 and its people had to find ways to survive … not all of them pleasant or, for that matter, legal. I wrote this when I visited in 1999.
Jakarta, not in 1990. Public domain
A lot of Jakarta’s buildings are having a bad hair day. Their sexy steel-and-glass bodies soar up to a mess of girders and concrete pillars. Others haven’t even got the glass and cladding. As in the rest of south-east Asia, building stopped when the crisis hit.
Jakarta is hot and humid. Millions of lorries, buses, cars, motorbikes, mopeds, tuk-tuks fart into the atmosphere and what doesn’t go straight into your lungs rises to hang in a greyish pall above the city, for consumption at a later date.
For all the business boulevards, Jakarta’s people ensure that it remains an Asian city at street level: street-stalls crowd virtually all available pavement space, selling fried rice, boiled rice, fried noodles, boiled noodles, fried chicken, chicken soup, meatball soup, fried catfish, fried tofu, smoked tofu, fried bananas, fried tapioca, sate, tripes in sauce, cow’s stomach in sauce, cow’s skin, won ton, durian, papaya, pineapple, coca-cola, tea, coffee, fanta, a strange luminous green liquid served with another brown liquid and white noodles that look like worms… and more, if you dare to try.
The crisis means an increase in the number of beggars and street-hawkers. Some literally grovel in the gutter as traffic rushes past them; being as wretched as possible is their professional qualification. Boys play guitars at the crossroads. Others appoint themselves unoffical traffic-police at the many points where motorists make U-turns, occasionally picking up a tip for their pains. A sign that they are aware of the years that they’re knocking off their lives is the fact that some wear bandanas across their mouths in an ineffectual attempt to keep out the fumes from a thousand exhausts.
A city official says that the number of street-children has swollen from 12,636 in August 1998 to 68,688 in June 1999. Parents who’ve been laid off from building sites and factories apparently send their children out on the streeets to beg.
Meanwhile, we foreigners lock the taxi doors and tell each other the story of the woman who was stabbed in the leg by a man who jumped in her cab demanding money.
Some people find Jakarta peaceful at night. I find it sinister. Perhaps it’s just the bad street-lighting and the looming trees. Drive around town after dark and you whisk by the skeleton of unbuilt or burnt buildings, a crossroads peopled by about a hundred hookers, turned to caricature by make-up and headlights, gangs of men or boys loitering, people who sleep under overhead roads and railways, and the flames of the last of the street-vendors frying the last of the street-food.
