What Wars Leave Behind: The Faceless and the Forgotten

Introduction

Introduction I slipped, fell, and started sliding off the rock ledge. I reached for a sapling , roots, anything, waving my arms until finally I seized the prosthetic leg of the man behind me as I passed him. He clung to the arm of a man ahead of him, and together they pulled me up. Shaken, I sat beside him on the ledge fronting the entrance to his cave. “You don’t look too good, but your leg is strong,” an old man said to the man who helped me. The three of us laughed. The year was 2002. July. I was filing a story from the Afghan city of Bamiyan, about a ten-hour drive north of Kabul and known best for the Buddha statues that had been carved into the cliffs in the sixth century. They were destroyed in March 2001 after the Taliban government declared they were idols and therefore sacrilegious. Those cliffs then housed about 200 mostly ethnic Hazara families. Desperation drove them there. It was windy. It was boiling hot in the summer, frigid in the winter. It was hard to reach. It was easy to slip on the loose gravel and narrow footpaths. A man’s prosthetic leg had just saved me from tumbling down a mountain. I was alive, sitting outside a remote cave with destitute war survivors and dying for an ice-cold glass of water. Instead I got what I came for: a story. The man with the prosthetic leg told me that in 1994 he had stood here and watched the Taliban battle their way into Bamiyan. He saw men and women killed by machine guns and mortar fire. He left and walked to Kabul. He stepped on a mine and lost his leg. He had only recently returned. Before, he said, he had a home. Now he had a cave. 1 2 Introduction The Hazara are the dominant ethnic group in Bamiyan and date to Genghis Khan’s warriors. In the late 1990s reports of Taliban fighters’ massacring Hazara men, women, and children in northern and central Afghanistan were common. The Taliban ransacked and destroyed homes. After the Taliban were routed by the American-led international military coalition that invaded Afghanistan a little more than a month after the World Trade Center fell, Hazara families returned to villages that had been reduced to rubble. So they resorted to the caves, an uneven patchwork of openings across wind-chiseled rock. The caves interconnect like a beehive above the ruined city. When I arrived in Kabul in November 2001 on my first overseas assignment, I knew little about Bamiyan and the slaughter of the Hazara and even less about Afghanistan. I knew social work because that’s what I did until I was forty, when I decided to break into journalism. At the time, 1997, I was more than a little worried that, to follow a new calling, that of the wandering scribe, I had just thrown away a successful fourteen-year career helping homeless people. Four years later I got my first glimpse of the consequences of war. Kabul’s downtown was a giant rock pile of bomb-blasted buildings destroyed during decades of wars. Men with turbans and thick beards wandered the streets in frayed sandals. Donkeys pulled carts. Women drifted by in billowing body-length veils. Boys pushed wheelbarrows filled with grinning goat heads. Older boys shouldered Kalashnikovs. The broken streets teemed with commotion and dust and the shouts of vendors and the supplications of beggars. Makeshift camps without water or plumbing overflowed with refugees. I returned to the States three months later and felt lost. I couldn’t stop thinking about Afghanistan and the vacant stares I had absorbed from people who had lost everything. So I put them out of my mind by returning to Kabul again and again to be among them. No longer were they memories trapped inside my head but real people I lived with and who told me their stories. I also became acquainted with photographers from Europe, Asia, and South America. They pitched editors story ideas they had for Pakistan, the Middle East, and Africa. We hooked up, and I began writing about the poor and forgotten families I encountered along the way. Introduction 3 The people I have met and continue to meet in my travels across the globe move me, and I am angry that their suffering so easily falls beneath the radar of news coverage. I write about them...