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Reviewed by:
  • Afghanistan Unveiled, and: Afghanistan, The Lost Truth
  • Deepa Kumar (bio)
Afghanistan Unveiled, a film by Brigitte Brault and the Aina Women Filming Group, 2003. Distributed by Women Make Movies, $295 VHS.
Afghanistan, The Lost Truth, a film by Yassamin Maleknasr, 2003. Distributed by Women Make Movies, $295 VHS.

Afghan women suffered tremendously under Taliban rule. Yet, until they proved to be politically useful to the U.S. elite, their problems were largely ignored by the mainstream media. In the days leading up to the U.S. war on Afghanistan, the first Bush administration argued that the war was going to liberate the women of that country. The media then suddenly discovered Afghan women and the coverage of their hardships increased exponentially. Uncritically accepting the administration's justification for war, the media now portrayed burqa-clad Afghan women as victims who needed U.S. protection (Stabile and Kumar 2005/in press). Both documentaries reviewed here challenge this construction in different ways.

Afghanistan Unveiledis a powerful testament to the misery that women continue to endure under "liberated" Afghanistan. It is shot from the perspective of fourteen young Afghan women who trained as video journalists at the Aina Afghan Media and Culture Center in Kabul from July 2002 to August 2003. Taking advantage of the modest freedoms open to women in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban, such as the ability to travel unveiled without an escort, they visit various regions of Afghanistan in order to learn and document the plight of women. Their journey and the stories told by women from Bamian to Herat is the subject of this documentary. Their mission as journalists is to give voice to these women. As one woman who received death threats, and threats that her breasts would be cut off if she didn't agree to marry the local warlord, put it, "I want to raise my voice to the world so that people understand that women do not have equal rights yet here in Afghanistan and that unrestrained gunmen can force people to do anything they like."

The journey begins in Bamian, the city the world heard of when the statues of the Buddha were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. What has received significantly less coverage is the plight of the Hazara people after their homes were destroyed and their men mercilessly slaughtered by the Taliban. Hundreds of widowed women and orphaned children were left to fend for themselves and had to make their home in the caves where the Buddha statues once stood. Zainab, the matriarch who now cares for the [End Page 195]children, tells of the incredible hardships they have to endure barely eking out a living while the world has forgotten about them. She demands that the government of Hamid Karzai provide them with looms so that they may earn a living and become self-sufficient. The courage of the Hazara and their hope for a better future in the face of such extreme depravation is remarkable.

In Herat, dominated by the warlord Ismail Khan, little has changed for women. At first the journalists have a great deal of difficulty trying to find women willing to talk with them. Many are afraid to give an interview fearing reprisal from the warlords who continue to treat them like property and force them to wear the veil. Finally, one young woman agrees to speak with them. She explains how her extreme poverty is the product of the U.S. war. A stray cluster bomb landed near their house during the war, killing her husband and many members of her extended family. She argues that bin Laden was not in their area and questions the United States's massive military bombardment of remote locations. The narrator explains that for this woman "the priority is not to unveil her chaddaur (veil) which hides her worn clothes, but to find money to feed her family." In the 2005 U.S. budget, aid to Afghanistan was cut from its already low levels.

In Badakshan, women tell similar stories of being traumatized by warlords. For the women journalists, these stories are both shocking and revealing as they shed light on how little...

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