-
4. Land without Images: Kandahar
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
4 Land without Images Kandahar With the Russians gone, the mujahedeen armies soon began jockeying for power over what remained. Promptly abandoned by the world community, Afghanistan was left to descend into the anarchy of civil war. Fundamentalism metastasized into a plethora of ethnic armies, now intent on using their salvaged Kalashnikovs in the service of racial hatred. What had once been a tribal federation of Pashtuns, Panjshiris, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Nuristanis, and many more soon disintegrated into a spiraling whirlpool of factions and The Abstraction of the Desert: Nafas (Nelofer Pazira) en route to Kandahar. i-x_1-198_Grah.indd 59 1/25/10 2:27:19 PM 60 the burqa films counterfactions, supported by various world powers eager to take their turn at playing the New Great Game. The cost of the Russian resistance was almost incalculable. The country itself plunged into a dark age, with a million dead and countless others scattered across the world as refugees, five million of them living in Pakistan and Iran. By 1990, with 44 percent of Afghanistan’s population dislocated, Afghans had become the largest refugee population on earth.1 Six years later, those who remained had little spirit left for fighting. When a group known as the Taliban, a term that means “students of religion,” came to power, many Afghans—especially Pashtuns—enthusiastically supported them in the hope they would end the fighting. According to legend, the Taliban’s initial success involved rescuing children kidnapped and sexually abused by warlords and their soldiers. Riding in on Datsun pickup trucks and equipped and indoctrinated by Pakistan, the Taliban rapidly defeated the numerous factions of former mujahedeen. After almost twenty years of fighting, it was something of a relief to drive on a road without getting shot at. And yet many Afghans felt that the Taliban were essentially another invading army of foreigners, in this case ethnic Pashtuns who had been born and raised in Pakistan (albeit mostly in refugee camps), indoctrinated there in Wahhabist madrassas, and then unleashed on their ancestral country. Once in power, however, the Taliban proved to be a match for the depravity of their fellow fundamentalists. Continued famine, disease, and staggering unemployment along with their campaigns against women, ethnic minorities (notably the Hazaras and Tajiks), and the Afghan cultural heritage took Afghanistan from bad to worse.2 At the beginning of 1997, less than a year after the Taliban took power, the country had become a Grand Guignol stage set—a desolate spectacle of bullet-ridden ruins and human misery. The Taliban fought bitterly in Mazar-e Sharif and Herat, causing thousands of deaths on both sides. People were bombed, buried alive, raped, and forced into marriages with mullahs. Thousands of children died of exposure to cold. Polio raged in the refugee camps.3 Despite these horrors, the world had more or less forgotten about Afghanistan . Some feminist groups campaigned against Afghanistan’s “gender apartheid,” which had forced women from work and made the chadari, the traditional Afghan covering for women, compulsory. President Bill Clinton, a supporter of the Taliban (having invited a delegation of them to America to seal a pipeline deal), ignored their concerns, bombing the country only once to distract Americans from Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress. A few years later, the Taliban detonated some bombs themselves at the Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan’s most precious archeological site. i-x_1-198_Grah.indd 60 1/25/10 2:27:19 PM [3.236.171.68] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:36 GMT) Kandahar 61 Yet while more international outrage was expressed over the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas than the human death toll, concerned organizations and individuals did continue to champion the rights of Afghans and draw attention to their suffering. One of them was the Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. “The Buddhas of Bamiyan were not destroyed,” he wrote. “They collapsed out of shame.” To rub the world’s neglect of Afghanistan in its face, Makhmalbaf began work in 2000 on what would be his sixteenth full-length feature film and greatest international success, Kandahar (also known as Journey to Kandahar). By the time it was hitting screens worldwide, Afghanistan was “enduring freedom” from yet another invading force: the United States of America. Winning not only a prize at the Cannes Film Festival but also UNESCO’s Fellini Award in 2001, Kandahar went from being considered a “baffling and ponderous” work pre–September 11, to being named by Time as the best film of...