Afghani Gives Six Year Old Daughter as Payment for Debt

As far as I can tell, the child's father has taken the money that poured in to pay the debt, and is still "selling" his daughter.  Prove me wrong.  Please.

From The New York Times
Painful Payment for Afghan Debt: A Daughter, 6

By ALISSA J. RUBIN
Published: March 31, 2013

Editors' Note Appended

KABUL, Afghanistan — As the shadows lengthened around her family’s hut here in one of Kabul’s sprawling refugee camps, a slight 6-year-old girl ran in to where her father huddled with a group of elders near a rusty wood stove. Her father, Taj Mohammad, looked away, his face glum.       

 

“She does not know what is going to happen,” he said softly.

      

If, as seems likely, Mr. Mohammad cannot repay his debt to a fellow camp resident a year from now, his daughter Naghma, a smiling, slender child with a tiny gold stud in her nose, will be forced to leave her family’s home forever to be married to the lender’s 17-year-old son.

      

The arrangement effectively values her life at $2,500. That is the amount Mr. Mohammad borrowed over the course of a year to pay for hospital treatment for his wife and medical care for some of his nine children — including Janan, 3, who later froze to death in bitter winter weather because the family could not afford enough firewood to stay warm. [So, Mr. Prick, you're still in the Camp and you're still impregnating your wife, thereby endangering not only her life, but the lives of your surviving children, just to prove You.Are.A.Macho.Man.  And not a word uttered against this kind of barbarian attitude from the Republicans here in the USA.  You.Are.Absolutely.Disgusting.  All.Of.YOU.]

      

“They said, ‘Pay back our money,’ and I didn’t have any money, so I had to give my girl,” Mr. Mohammad said. “I was thankful to them at the time, so it was my decision, but the elders also demanded that I do this.”

      

The story of how Mr. Mohammad, a refugee from the fighting in Helmand Province who in better days made a living as a singer and a musician, came to trade his daughter is in part a saga of terrible choices faced by some of the poorest Afghan families. But it is also a story of the way the war has eroded the social bonds and community safety nets that underpinned hundreds of thousands of rural Afghans’ lives.

      

Women and girls have been among the chief victims — not least because the Afghan government makes little attempt in the camps to enforce laws protecting women and children, said advocates for the camp residents.

      

Aid groups have been able to provide a few programs for women and children in the ever-growing camps, including schooling that for many girls here is a first. But those programs are being cut as international aid has dwindled here ahead of the Western military withdrawal. And the Afghan government has not offered much support, in part because most officials hope the refugees will leave Kabul and return home.

      

Most of the refugees in this camp are from rural southern Afghanistan, and they remain bound by the tribal codes and elder councils, known as jirgas, that resolved disputes in their home villages.

Few, however, still have the support of a broader network of kinsmen to fall back on in hard times as they would have at home. Out of context, the already rigid Pashtun codes have become something even harsher.

      

“This kind of thing never happened at home in Helmand,” said Mr. Mohammad’s mother as she sat in the back of the smoky room. Watching her granddaughter, as she laughed and smiled with her teacher, Najibullah, who also acts as a camp social worker and was visiting the family, she added, “I never remember a girl being given away to pay for a loan.”

      

From the point of view of those who participated in the jirga, the resolution was a good one, said Tawous Khan, an elder who led it and is one of the two main camp representatives. “You see, Taj Mohammad had to give his daughter. There was no other way,” he said. “And, it solved the problem.”

      

Some Afghan women’s advocates who heard about the little girl’s plight from news media reports were outraged and said they had asked the Interior Ministry to intervene, since child marriage is a violation of Afghan law and it is also unlawful to sell a woman. But nothing happened, said Wazhma Frogh, the executive director of the Research Institute for Women, Peace and Security.

      

“There has to be some sort of intervention,” Ms. Frogh said, “otherwise others will think this behavior is all right and it will increase.”

      

The Camps

 

The dark, cramped room where Mr. Mohammad lives with his wife and his eight children is typical of the shelters in the Charahi Qambar camp, which houses 900 refugee families from war-torn areas, mostly in southern Afghanistan.

      

The camp is the largest in the capital area, but just one of 52 such “informal settlements” in the province, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

      

Abjectly poor, the people in the camps came with little more than a handful of household belongings. Seeking safety and aid, they instead found themselves unwelcome in a city already overcrowded with returning refugees from Pakistan and Iran.

      

For years Charahi Qambar did not even have wells for water because the government was reluctant to let aid groups dig them, said Mohammad Yousef, an engineer and the director of Aschiana, an Afghan aid group that works in nine camps around the country as well as with street children.

 

The refugees’ skills as farmers and small village workmen were of little use here since they had neither land nor houses. Penniless, they gravitated to others from the same area, and the camps grew up.

 

Mr. Mohammad, like most men in the camps, looks for work almost every morning as an unskilled laborer, which pays about $6 a day — not even enough to buy the staples that his family subsists on: green tea, bread and, when they can afford them, potatoes. Meat and sugar are the rarest of luxuries.

Many days, no one hires the camp men at all, put off by their tattered clothes, blanketlike wraps and full beards. “People know where we are from and think we are Taliban,” Mr. Mohammad said.

After four years in the camp, he is thinking now of going back to Helmand as a migrant laborer for the opium poppy harvest so that he can earn enough to feed his family and save a little for next winter’s firewood.

      

“It is too cold, and we wish we had more to eat,” said Rahmatullah, one of 18 deputy camp representatives and one of the few who spoke against the jirga’s decision to have Mr. Mohammad give his daughter to pay off the debt.

      

Rahmatullah, who uses just one name, did note a positive difference in camp life, however, adding, “We do have one thing here — we have education.”

      

Education was unheard-of for most camp residents at home in Helmand, and Rahmatullah, like many camp residents, said that at first he was suspicious of it. Shortly after arriving in the camp four years ago, he was shocked to see young girls walking on the street.

      

He was even more amazed when another camp resident explained that the girls were going to school.

“I did not know that girls could go to school, because in my village only a very few girls were taught anything and it was always at home,” he said. “I thought, ‘Maybe these are the daughters of a general,’ because where I come from women do not leave their homes, not even to bring water.”

“I talked to my wife, and we allowed our girls to go to the camp school, and now they are in the regular Kabul school,” he said.

      

His daughters were lucky. The schools in the camp were run by Aschiana, which gives a healthful lunch to every child enrolled — 800 in the Charahi Qambar camp alone. They try to bring the children up to a level where they can keep up in the regular Kabul schools.

      

However, that program has just ended because the European Union, amid financial woes, is not renewing its programs for social protection. Instead, it is focusing its aid spending on the Afghan government’s priorities, ratified at last year’s international aid meeting in Tokyo, which do not include child protection, Alfred Grannas, the European Union’s chargé d’affaires in Afghanistan, said in an e-mail.

      

The World of Women

 

Like most dwellings in the camp, Mr. Mohammad’s hut has a tarpaulin roof, lightly reinforced with wood, an unheated entry room, and an inner room with a stove. A small, grimy window lets in a faint patch of light, and piled around the room’s edges are the family’s few possessions: blankets, old clothes, a few battered pots and pans, and 10 bird cages for the quails he trains to sing in hopes of selling them for extra money.

      

For his wife, a beautiful young woman who sat huddled in the shadows, a black veil drawn across her face as her husband discussed their daughter’s fate, there is little to look forward to day to day. Back in their village in Helmand, even poor families have walled compounds and sometimes land where a woman can go outdoors.

      

In the camps, though, the huts are crammed together, with narrow mud pathways barely more than foot wide between them.

      

“There’s no privacy in the camps, and for women it is like they are in a prison,” said Mr. Yousef, the Aschiana director. “They are constantly under emotional stress.”

      

Like many Afghan women, Mr. Mohammad’s wife, Guldasta, let her husband speak for her — at first. He explained that she was too upset about what was happening to her daughter to talk about the situation.

      

But then in a quiet moment, she turned, lifting her veil to reveal part of her face and said clearly: “I am not happy with this decision; it was not what I wanted for her.”

      

“I would have been happy to let her grow up with us,” she said.

 

The family’s case is a kind of dark distortion of the Afghan tradition of the groom’s family paying a “bride price” to the family of the wife-to-be. The practice is common particularly in Pashtun areas, but it exists among other ethnic groups as well and can involve thousands of dollars. In this case, the boy who is receiving Naghma as a wife, instead of paying for her, will get her in exchange for the debt’s forgiveness.  [Calling a 17-year old male a "boy" is an oymoron.]

 

Because Naghma, whose name means melody, was not chosen by the groom, she will most likely be treated more like a family servant than a spouse — and at worst as a captive slave. Her presence may help the groom attract a more desirable second wife because the family, although poor, will have someone working for it, insulating the chosen wife from some of the hardest tasks.

       

Anthropologists say this kind of use of women as property intensified after the fall of the Taliban, said Deniz Kandiyoti, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

      

The most recent anthropological studies of the phenomenon were of indebted drug traffickers who sold their daughters or sisters to settle debts, she said. These are essentially distress sales. And unlike the norm for marriage exchanges before the past three decades of war, the women in some cases have become salable property — stripped of the traditional forms of status and respect, she said.

      

Regrets

 

Almost from the moment he agreed to the deal, Mr. Mohammad began to regret it and think about all that could go wrong. “If, God forbid, they mistreat my daughter, then I would have to kill someone in their family,” he said as he stood at the edge of the camp in a muddy lot in the cold winter dusk.

      

“You know she is very little, we call her ‘Peshaka,’ ” he said, using the Pashto word for kitten. “She is a very lovely girl. Everybody in our family loves her, and even if she fights with her older brothers, we don’t say anything, we give her all possible happiness.”

      

He added: “I believe that when she goes to that house, she will die soon. She will not receive all the love she receives from us, and I am afraid she will lose her life. A 6-year-old girl doesn’t know about having a mother-in-law, a father-in-law, or having a husband or being a wife,” he said.

      

Adding to their fears, the mother of the boy that Naghma will marry came to Mr. Mohammad’s home to ask his wife to stop sending the girl to school, he said.

      

“You know, my daughter loves going to school, and she wants to study more and more. But the boy she is marrying, he sent his mother yesterday to tell my wife, ‘Look, this is dishonoring us to have my son’s future wife go to school,’ ” he said.

      

“I cannot tell them what to do,” he added, looking down at his boots. “This is their wife, their property.”

 

Editors' Note: April 2, 2013
A front-page article on Monday described the painful decision of an Afghan man, Taj Mohammad, to give his 6-year-old daughter in marriage to pay off his debt to another man. After the article was published, Mr. Mohammad called The New York Times on Monday and said the debt had been paid nearly a month ago, by an anonymous donor. In an interview on Friday, when asked if there had been any developments in the case — which The Times first learned about several months ago — Mr. Mohammad did not mention the payment. Asked on Monday why he had not said anything about it, he gave no direct answer. An article updating the case can be found on Page A6.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 1, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Painful Payment for Afghan Debt: A Daughter, 6.

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Here is the follow-up article.  So, does this mean since it was posted on April 1, 2013 that it's a fucking joke? I don't think so - but, how utterly rotten ironic.

 

Afghan Who Agreed to Trade His Daughter to End a Debt Says It Was Paid

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

Published: April 1, 2013

KABUL, Afghanistan — After the publication of an article in The New York Times on Monday about an Afghan man who had agreed to give his 6-year-old daughter in marriage to pay off his debt to another man, the father called The Times and said the debt had been paid nearly a month ago by an anonymous donor.

 

The father, Taj Mohammad, who had fled the fighting in Helmand Province four years ago with his family and has been living in a refugee camp in Kabul, had borrowed $2,500 to pay for medical care for his wife and children, as well as for firewood. When the man he had borrowed from demanded his money back, Mr. Mohammad was unable to come up with the sum, he said.

      

After a traditional jirga, or extrajudicial proceeding, involving elders in the refugee camp, he agreed that if he could not pay the money back in a year, he would give his daughter in marriage to the lender’s son. The case came to the attention of The Times this winter because Mr. Mohammed’s 3-year-old son had frozen to death.

      

After hearing about the daughter’s case through earlier news reports, a donor offered to pay the debt, but stressed that the donation’s origin should remain private. Kimberley Motley, an American lawyer through whom the donor worked, said the transaction had taken place in early March. But Mr. Mohammad, for reasons that remained unclear and despite numerous conversations with reporters since then, did not tell The Times about it until after Monday’s article.

      

As recently as in a telephone interview on Friday, when he was asked about any developments in the case, he did not mention the donation. Asked on Monday why he had not said anything about it, he gave no direct answer.

      

Potentially complicating matters was that the payment was made through a jirga, Afghanistan’s unofficial justice system, which, while abided by in some cases, does not have the force of a formal proceeding in the courts. And it could be superseded by another jirga.

      

Ms. Motley, in an unusual step, chose to organize a jirga to undo the marriage commitment and repay the debt because the system is more expeditious and less intimidating than the courts to the impoverished displaced residents in the camps, she said. She acted as the jirga’s chairwoman, although the councils are almost always convened and presided over by local elders.

      

She said she had been concerned that the money might not be used to buy back the girl, given the extreme poverty in the camps, so she was present when Mr. Mohammad gave the money to the lender. She had each side sign the document; those who could not read or write, like Mr. Mohammad, signed with thumbprints.

      

Ms. Motley said she had taken every step she could think of to try to ensure that the deal holds — including having a mullah present as well as elders from the camp and witnesses for each side.

“This is as good as it gets,” she said.

      

She said she had not publicized the jirga or the payment in deference to the donor’s desire for discretion.

      

Still, some human rights experts, as well as Afghan law professors, questioned whether the two families would respect the jirga’s decision.

      

“Is this sustainable? I cannot guarantee it,” said Ahmad Gul Wasiq, a law professor at Nangarhar University, who specializes in family disputes. “There’s no guarantee that two years from now the lender won’t show up with a bunch of armed men and take the girl. Since the foundation of the agreement is unofficial, then everything is unofficial.”

      

Mr. Mohammad’s original commitment of his daughter, and its sanction by a jirga in the refugee camp, was illegal under Afghanistan’s Elimination of Violence Against Women law, according to the United Nations human rights division in Kabul. However, the law is enforced only if the victim or her relatives file a complaint, which leaves open the possibility of such informal practices

 

The United Nations director of human rights for Afghanistan, Georgette Gagnon, said both the initial use of the girl to pay a debt and the decision to turn to a jirga to undo it “showed the weakness in both the informal and official justice system when it comes to the protection of women and girls.”

      

The refugee camps in Kabul are rife with families in tough circumstances, and the Afghan government does little to address them — in part because some officials would rather have the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have fled fighting return home. Though it is illegal under national law, child marriage is not uncommon in the camps, and there are a number of cases of it among displaced families, according to the aid group Aschiana. The group works in several refugee camps, including the Charahi Qambar camp, where Mr. Mohammad’s family lives.

      

Several aid groups deal with women’s and children’s issues in Afghanistan. In addition to Aschiana, they include Women for Afghan Women, which runs a network of shelters.       

A version of this article appeared in print on April 2, 2013, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Afghan Who Agreed to Trade His Daughter to End a Debt Says It Was Paid.

Afghanistan School Girls Poisoned

Sadly, once the last of the U.S. military presence is "officially" removed from Afghanistan, you know, and I know, and we all know, what will happen to any Afghani girl who dares to go to school, and to any Afghani female who wants to teach, or nurse in a hospital, or work as a secretary, or be a clerk in a grocery store, or try out for an Olympic running team, or play badmitton or chess, or learn how to read and write...

Official: 122 girls, 3 teachers poisoned at Afghan school

From Nick Paton Walsh, CNN

updated 5:23 PM EDT, Wed May 23, 2012

 

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- More than 120 girls and three teachers were admitted to an Afghanistan hospital Wednesday after being poisoned in their classes with a type of spray, a Takhar provincial official said. The incident occurred in the provincial capital of Talokhan, in the Bibi Hajera girls school, said Dr. Hafizullah Safi, director of public health for the northern Afghanistan province. Forty of the 122 girls were still hospitalized, he said, with symptoms including dizziness, vomiting, headaches and loss of consciousness.

Blood samples have been sent to Kabul in an effort to determine the substance used, he said. "A number of girls from 15 to 18 were brought from a school to hospital today," said hospital director Dr. Habibullah Rostaqi.

"Generally they are not in a critical condition. We are looking after them, but let's see what happens later. We understand so far from the situation ... they are more traumatized."

"The Afghan people know that the terrorists and the Taliban are doing these things to threaten girls and stop them going to school," said Khalilullah Aseer, spokesman for Takhar police. "That's something we and the people believe. Now we are implementing democracy in Afghanistan and we want girls to be educated, but the government's enemies don't want this."

There have been several instances of girls being poisoned in schools in recent years. In April, also in Takhar province, more than 170 women and girls were hospitalized after drinking apparently poisoned well water at a school. Local health officials blamed the acts on extremists opposed to women's education.

While nearly all the incidents involve girls, earlier this month nearly 400 boys at a school in Khost province fell ill after drinking water from a well that a health official said may have been poisoned.

The Taliban is struggling with the country's government over Afghan schools. It recently demanded the closure of schools in two eastern provinces. In Ghazni province, the school closure was in retaliation for the government's ban on motorbikes often used by insurgents. Locals in Wardak province said the Taliban has been a little more lenient and has allowed schools to open late after making changes to the curriculum.

The battle indicates broader fears about Afghanistan's future amid the drawdown of U.S. troops in the country. NATO leaders on Monday signed off on U.S. President Barack Obama's exit strategy from Afghanistan, which calls for an end to combat operations next year and the withdrawal of the U.S.-led international military force by the end of 2014.

During the Taliban's rule from 1996 to 2001, many Afghan girls were not allowed to attend school. The schools began reopening after the regime was toppled by the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. However, observers say abuse of women remains common in the post-Taliban era and is often accepted in conservative and traditional families, where women are barred from school and sometimes [! only sometimes?] subjected to domestic violence.

Afghan Education Minister Dr. Farooq Wardak told the Education World Forum in London in January 2011 that the Taliban had abandoned its opposition to education for girls, but the group has never confirmed that.

Acid Attack Victims May Become Targets Again

Pakistan acid women fear backlash over Oscar film

By Jennie Matthew | AFP – Wed, May 23, 2012

 

Survivors of acid attacks whose plight became the focus of an Oscar-winning documentary now fear ostracism and reprisals if the film is broadcast in Pakistan.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy made history earlier this year when she won Pakistan's first Oscar, feted across the country for exposing the horrors endured by women whose faces are obliterated in devastating acid attacks.

Her 40-minute film focuses on Zakia and Rukhsana as they fight to rebuild their lives after being attacked by their husbands, and British Pakistani plastic surgeon Mohammad Jawad who tries to help repair their shattered looks.

When "Saving Face" scooped a coveted gold statuette in the documentary category in Hollywood in February, campaigners were initially jubilant.

The Acid Survivors Foundation Pakistan (ASF) had cooperated on the film but some survivors now fear a backlash in a deeply conservative society -- and are taking legal action against the producers.

"We had no idea it would be a hit and win an Oscar. It's completely wrong. We never allowed them to show this film in Pakistan," said Naila Farhat, 22, who features fleetingly in the documentary.

She was 13 when the man she refused to marry threw acid in her face as she walked home from Independence Day celebrations. She lost an eye and her attacker was jailed for 12 years.  After a long, painful recovery, she is training as a nurse.

"This is disrespect to my family, to my relatives and they'll make an issue of it. You know what it's like in Pakistan. They gossip all the time if they see a woman in a film," said Farhat, taut skin where her left eye dissolved.

"We may be in more danger and we're scared that, God forbid, we could face the same type of incident again. We do not want to show our faces to the world."

Lawyer Naveed Muzaffar Khan, whom ASF hired to represent the victims, said legal notices were sent to Obaid-Chinoy and fellow producer Daniel Junge on Friday. The survivors, he said, "have not consented for it to be publicly released in Pakistan", adding that such agreement was required for all the women who featured in the film, no matter how fleetingly. Khan said the producers had seven days to agree not to release the film publicly in the country, or he would go to court to seek a formal injunction.

"They (survivors) were absolutely clear in their mind in not allowing any public screening as that would jeopardise their life in Pakistan and make it difficult for them to continue to live in their villages," he told AFP.

But Obaid-Chinoy insisted the women signed legal documents allowing the film to be shown anywhere in the world, including Pakistan. She told AFP that Rukhsana had been edited out of the version to be shown in the country out of respect for her concerns, adding she was "unclear about the allegations" and would respond to the legal complaints "when a court orders us".

Rukhsana was not reachable for comment.

Many of the women are routinely threatened by their husbands or relatives and it is a television broadcast that they particularly fear.

"The accessibility is so wide scale, the chances are their lives are going to be threatened," said the lawyer, Khan.

The producers promised that profits from screenings in Pakistan would go to Zakia and Rukhsana, but the row also hints at deeper differences between film-makers trying to tell a story and charity workers on the ground. Some medical personnel, for example, believe it was wrong to focus on an expatriate doctor at the expense of countless local surgeons who have treated dozens of victims. Others believe the film was too sensational and question whether it really will make a difference to the survivors struggling to live in Pakistan, where there are scores of such attacks each year.

Gold and Gems Found at Mes Aynak Excavation, Afghanistan

Great, just great.  Exact location of the dig was given in the news article.  You can expect hordes of illegal diggers to descend upon the location and start digging willy-nilly amidst priceless archaeological relics.  Damn!  As if that isn't bad enough, the Chinese have a concession from the Afghanistani government to mine the location for copper, and they're just waiting to get in there and start blowing things to smithereens.  The Chinese don't even care for their own culture, let alone any other country's culture.  Goodbye to undiscovered finds forever and ever.

Story at the scotsman.com
Afghanistan’s ancient jewels finally see the light of day           
By Jerome Starkey in Mes Aynak
Published on Saturday 19 November 2011 05:56

THE gold still glistened after a more than 1,000 years underground; the gemstones glinted at their first touch of sunlight, undimmed by a millennium in the dirt.

“It’s a necklace,” said a Polish archaeologist breathless with excitement. “They’ve found a gold necklace!”

As the fine grey sand of Afghanistan’s sun-bleached mountains was gently sieved away, there was treasure in the pan: tiny golden orbs adorned with even smaller gold beads, tulip-shaped pendants no bigger than a fingernail, red gemstones and swirling gold bowls, like acorn lids.

Next to them were two spoons and a brooch made of copper, green from corrosion, and two copper hairpins embellished with gold.

Excavations at Mes Aynak have already unearthed three Buddhist monasteries and an ancient copper mine replete with statues, coins, reliefs and murals – which is more than enough to secure its place as one of the most significant archaeological digs in a generation.

Yet last week’s discovery was the first time since archaeologists started work in 2009 that anyone has found jewellery in the mountains, 35km south of Kabul, and with at least three more monasteries still to be explored, Afghan officials hope the discoveries will elevate Mes Aynak into the archaeological pantheon, alongside Tillya Tepe, home of the Bactrian hoard.

The archaeological remains in Logar province date from the 1st to the 7th centuries; first settled by the Khushan dynasty and eventually abandoned by the Hephtalites, with the advent of Islam to Afghanistan.

“The gold, the wall paintings, the statues all suggest that the inhabitants of the site were quite wealthy,” said Hans Curvers, leading archeologist on site. “Not a surprise when you live in the place were the Khushan empire mines, its main financial resources.”

But the treasure is both a blessing and a burden for the Afghan government, which is desperate to start exploiting its minerals as a source of income.

The archaeological sites sit directly on top of a world class copper deposit which a Chinese state mining company paid $3 billion (£1.9bn) to acquire, in 2008. It was Afghanistan’s largest foreign investment, and allegedly came with a $30m bribe to the then minister of mines.

The Afghan government hopes to earn up to $350m a year in royalties – equivalent to 20 per cent of Kabul’s tax revenue – once the mine is operational, but recently agreed a 12-month delay, to give the archaeologists more time.

“The artefacts are right on top of the copper,” said Nasir Ahmad Durrani, deputy minister of mines. “Unless we remove them we can’t get to the mine.”

The government has also spent $6.5m clearing Soviet-era landmines from the site. “The landmines and artefacts amounted to a force majeure,” Mr Durrani added. “The original timelines didn’t take into account the realities on the ground … but we believe that by 2014 we will be able to start commercial production.”

Western officials are less sure. The Chinese have improved the road to the mine and built a camp to house their workers but they are yet to start work on the railway or the power station, stipulated in their contract, which they will need to purify the copper and then export it.

Mes Ayak, one of the monasteries being excavated. Look to the right in the distance and you can see the blue
rectangles that constitute the Chinese encampment for it occupational force.

“They are playing the long game,” said a senior European official. “They have got their resource and they know that price of copper is not going down.”

Omar Sultan, the deputy minister of culture, said he was confident the archaeologists would excavate the areas in immediate danger before the Chinese “start blowing it up”.  “We are not going to let anybody destroy our culture and I haven’t seen any intention to go and do that from the Chinese or anybody else,” he said.

He hopes to relocate the monasteries, block by block, in a purpose-built museum nearby. “This was a crossroads of civilisations,” he said. “We have a cultural heritage that doesn’t just belong to Afghanistan. It belongs to all of humanity.” [Yeah, right.  I'd like to smoke some of what he's smoking, because you know for a fact that not a single stone of any of these monasteries will ever be moved to a "museum" site unless the United Nations or UNESCO steps in.  The Afghanis will claim they don't have the money or the manpower to undertake such a project -- the $3 billion the Chinese paid (cheap bastards!) is long gone into private bank accounts in Switzerland, the Bahamas and Bahrain).  Bye bye priceless ancient cultural relics.]

Can This Woman Make A Difference?

From The Scotsman.com

Meet the woman who could hold the key to peace in Afghanistan

Published Date: 06 August 2011
By Jerome Starkey
in Kabul

Homa Sultani

BLINDFOLDED and bundled into an stranger's car, Afghanistan's most unlikely peace negotiator was driven across Helmand for more than two hours, under the cover of darkness, for a clandestine meeting with the Taleban's supreme leader.

In a mud-brick farmhouse, in an unknown village, Homa Sultani said she spent 45 minutes talking with Mullah Mohammad Omar, in the dead of night.

Then, in front of the self-styled Emir and a dozen of his top lieutenants, she unwrapped her headscarf and threw it on the floor between them.
"I threw my shawl on the floor and said, 'As a woman, as a mother, I beseech you to end the war and make peace,'" she said.

According to Ms Sultani, Mullah Omar agreed. Now she claims to be the only person invested with authority to strike a peace deal.

That alleged encounter was more than a year ago, and when she called a press conference last month to announce her home-baked peace plan, colleagues denounced her as mad, local journalists ridiculed her story and President Hamid Karzai's office said they had many "doubts".

Yet it is a mark of how little is known about the current "talks about talks", allegedly ongoing in Qatar, Norway and Germany between warring sides, that there were almost as many diplomats taking notes at her press conference as journalists.

"I am not mad. I am not lying," she insisted when I visited her home in Kabul, last week. "If there is any proof, then I am ready to be hanged. But if the president doesn't want peace, then he should be hanged. If Nato doesn't want peace, General John Allen (the commander] should be hanged."

A former women's rights officer who worked at Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), Ms Sultani does not appear of unsound mind.

She hopped between Dari and English during our hour-long meeting, and said a senior official from the United Nations and a British political officer had visited her home to find out more about her proposals.

But there is little to prove the veracity of her extraordinary story. A letter, which she claims is from Mullah Omar, was inexplicably written in Dari, instead of the Taleban's native Pashtu.

It lacked the grandiose and often colourful letter heading often associated with Taleban stationery. Ms Sultani is a woman, and is also from Afghanistan's Hazara minority, who were persecuted by the overwhelmingly Pashtun Taleban.

She had originally claimed that Mullah Omar, the one-eyed Taleban leader, had been staying in her home. "When I said Mullah Omar was living in my home, it doesn't mean he is living here," she said by way of clarification. "It means my access to him is as easy as to my family. It means the house where he is living is like my family house."

Afghan officials and western diplomats are overwhelmingly sceptical.

Nader Naderi, an AIHRC commissioner, said Ms Sultani left the organisation in 2009 because her work wasn't up to standard and then entered politics. "She can't present any precise proof that (the meetings took place]," he said. "I don't know why she is making these claims. It looks strange to me."

Mullah Omar, usually thought to reside in Quetta in Pakistan, is in fact within 150 miles of Kabul, Ms Sultani insisted, where she visited him again as recently as last month. He's ready to announce a peace process as soon as President Karzai guarantees he won't be bombed, killed or whisked off to Guantanamo by the Americans.

Towards the end of our meeting, Ms Sultani walked into the adjacent room where Haji Abdul Basir was dozing.

A fellow MP, she said Mr Basir was present at both her meetings with Mullah Omar.

"Everyone knows everyone in Afghanistan," he said, explaining how he had made contact with the insurgents' high command.

"If the international community doesn't take this opportunity they will be trapped in this country and never escape." It is that lingering fear, perhaps, which has stopped diplomats ruling out the story completely.

The Catamites of Afghanistan

I didn't "know" - actually - although I suspected such practices still exist, particularly in certain areas of the world - but still, to read about something that is a perverted practice and condemned as such thousands of years ago, I was not shocked to see it alive and actively growing today.  Saddened, but not shocked.  What is happening to this world?

7 September 2010 Last updated at 19:42 ET
The sexually abused dancing boys of Afghanistan
By Rustam Qobil
BBC World Service

Image from article.

It's after midnight. I'm at a wedding party in a remote village in northern Afghanistan.  There is no sign of the bride or groom, or any women, only men. Some of them are armed, some of them are taking drugs.

Almost everyone's attention is focused on a 15-year-old boy. He's dancing for the crowd in a long and shiny woman's dress, his face covered by a red scarf. He is wearing fake breasts and bells around his ankles. Someone offers him some US dollars and he grabs them with his teeth.

This is an ancient tradition. People call it bachabaze which literally means "playing with boys".

The most disturbing thing is what happens after the parties. Often the boys are taken to hotels and sexually abused.

The men behind the practice are often wealthy and powerful. Some of them keep several bachas (boys) and use them as status symbols - a display of their riches. The boys, who can be as young as 12, are usually orphans or from very poor families.

Omid's story

I spent months trying to find a bacha who was willing to talk about his experience.  Omid (not his real name) is 15 years old. His father died in the fields, when he stepped on a landmine. As the eldest son, it's his job to look after his mother - who begs on the streets - and two younger brothers.

"I started dancing at wedding parties when I was 10, when my father died," says Omid. "We were hungry, I had no choice. Sometimes we go to bed on empty stomachs. When I dance at parties I earn about $2 or some pilau rice."

I ask him what happens when people take him to hotels. He bows his head and pauses for a long time before answering.

Omid says he is paid about $2 for the night. Sometimes he is gang raped.

I ask him why he doesn't go to the police for help.

"They are powerful and rich men. The police can't do anything against them."

Omid's mother is in her early 30s, but her hair is white and her face creased. She looks at least 50. She tells me she only has half a kilo of rice and a few onions for dinner. They've run out of cooking oil.

She knows that her son dances at parties but she is more concerned about what they will eat tomorrow. The fact that her son is vulnerable to abuse is far from her mind.

In denial

There have been very few attempts by the authorities to clamp down on the bachabaze tradition. Muhammad Ibrahim, deputy Police Chief of Jowzjan province, denies that the practice continues.

"We haven't had any cases of bachabaze in the last four-to-five years. It doesn't exist here any more," he says.  "If we find any man practising it we'll punish them."

According to Abdulkhabir Uchqun, an MP from northern Afghanistan, the tradition is not just alive, but steadily growing.

"Unfortunately it is the on the increase in almost every region of Afghanistan. I asked local authorities to act to stop this practice but they don't do anything," he says.  "Our officials are too ashamed to admit that it even exists."

Afghanistan is a country where Islamic values are cherished so I asked a Grand Mullah at the Shrine of Ali in Mazar-e Sharif - the holiest place in Afghanistan - for his views on bachabaze.

"Bachabaze is in no way acceptable in Islam. Actually, it's child abuse. [but honor killing young females isn't?] It's happening because our justice system doesn't work.

"This country has been lawless for many years and responsible bodies and people can't protect children," he explains.

Dancing boys are picked out at a young age by men who cruise the streets looking for effeminate boys among the poor and vulnerable. They offer them money and food.

The Independent Human Rights Commission in Kabul is one of the few organisations that has attempted to address the bachabaze practice. The group's head, Musa Mahmudi, says while it is common in many parts of Afghanistan there have been no studies to determine how many children are abused across the country.

He takes me to the street in front of his office to show me just how difficult it is to protect children here.

The streets of Afghanistan are full of working children. They polish shoes, they beg, they gather plastic bottles to resell. They will take on any job which will earn them some money, he says.

Dancing bells

Every Afghan I spoke to knew about bachabaze. Many tried to convince me that it exists only in remote areas.

But I went to a party late at night in the old quarter of Kabul, less than a mile from the government's headquarters. It was there that I met Zabi (again not his real name), a 40-year-old man who is proud to have three dancing boys.

"My youngest bacha is 15 and the oldest is 18. It wasn't easy to find them. But if you want it badly - you will find them," he says.

Zabi says he has a good job and he gives them money.

"We have a circle of close friends who also have bachas. Sometimes we gather together and put women's clothes and dancing bells on our bachas and they dance for us for two-to-three hours. That's all."

He says he has never slept with his boys, though he admits he hugs and kisses them.

I tell him that many people think this practice is wrong.

"Some people like dog fighting, some practice cockfighting. Everyone has their hobby, for me, it's bachabaze," he says.

When we leave the party at two in the morning a teenage boy is still dancing and offering drugs to the men around him.

Zabi is not especially wealthy or powerful, yet he has three bachas. There are many people who support this tradition across Afghanistan and many of them are very influential.

The Afghan government is unable and some say unwilling to tackle the problem. They are facing a growing insurgent movement. How long international troops will stay in the country is uncertain. The justice system is weak, poverty is widespread, and there are thousands of children on the streets trying to make a living.

So bachabaze will continue.

Afghan Women Fear Loss of Modest Gains

From The New York Times
A reminder that we really haven't come a long way, baby...

By ALISSA J. RUBIN
Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan
Published: July 30, 2010

MAHMUD-E RAQI, Afghanistan — Women’s precarious rights in Afghanistan have begun seeping away. Girls’ schools are closing; working women are threatened; advocates are attacked; and terrified families are increasingly confining their daughters to home.For women, instability, as much as the Taliban themselves, is the enemy. Women are casualties of the fighting, not only in the already conservative and embattled Pashtun south and east, but also in districts in the north and center of the country where other armed groups have sprung up.

As Afghan and Western governments explore reconciliation with the Taliban, women fear that the peace they long for may come at the price of rights that have improved since the Taliban government was overthrown in 2001.

“Women do not want war, but none of them want the Taliban of 1996 again; no one wants to be imprisoned in the yards of their houses,” said Rahima Zarifi, the Women’s Ministry representative from the northern Baghlan Province.

Interviews around the country with at least two dozen female members of Parliament, government officials, activists, teachers and young girls suggest a nuanced reality — fighting constricts women’s freedoms nearly as much as a Taliban government, and conservative traditions already limit women’s rights in many places.

Women, however, express a range of fears about a Taliban return, from political to domestic — that they will be shut out of negotiations about any deals with the insurgents and that the Taliban’s return would drive up bride prices, making it more profitable for a family to force girls into marriage earlier.

For many women, the prospect of a resurgence of the Taliban or other conservative groups is stark. “It will ruin our life,” said Shougoufa, 40, as she sorted through sequins and gold sparkles at the bazaar in the city of Pul-i-Khumri in Afghanistan’s north. “I am a tailor and I need to come to the bazaar to buy these things,” she said. “But if the Taliban come, I will not be able to come. Already we are hearing some girls cannot go to their work anymore.”

In teachers’ tea-break rooms, beauty shop training sessions, bazaars and the privacy of their homes, young women worry that their parents will marry them off early, so they will not be forced to marry Taliban.

In the Pashtun-dominated district of Taghob, east of Kabul, girls’ schools have been closed and any teaching is done at home, the provincial education director said.

That does not trouble some local officials.

“Look, our main priority is to feed our people, to provide rest and to protect their lives,” said Haji Farid, a local member of Parliament. “Why are people focusing on education and sending girls to school? Boys walk three, four, five kilometers to their school. How can a girl walk two, three, four kilometers? During a war you cannot send a girl beyond her door. No one can guarantee her honor. So it is hard to send your daughter to school.”

In Kandahar, Helmand and Zabul, all unstable southern provinces, there are girls’ schools open in the provincial capitals, but in outlying districts there are few, if any. In Zabul Province, there are just six schools for girls, four in the capital and two outside, but few families send their girls to school because of the fighting, said Muhammad Alam, the acting head of the provincial education department. (Photo: A student speaks during a class at the Jamal Agha Girls School in Kapisa Province.  By Adam Ferguson for The New York Times.)

In Baghlan Province, in northern Afghanistan, the situation for women has steadily worsened over the past year. Ms. Zarifi, the Women’s Ministry representative, has endured assassination attempts and demonstrations against her work. Three months ago, a female member of the provincial council was paralyzed in an attack, and a woman was stabbed to death in the daytime in the middle of the provincial capital earlier in July.

By contrast, most of Kapisa Province, which lies northeast of Kabul, is peaceful. There is a mediation program in the capital to help women and girls when they face domestic violence. In the predominantly ethnically Tajik north there are large, lively schools for girls, where families even allow those who are married to complete high school.

Women’s advocates are concerned that they are increasingly being shut out of political decisions. At an international conference in Kabul on July 20, which was meant to showcase the country’s plans for the future, President Hamid Karzai said nothing about how women’s rights might be protected in negotiations.  The very first meeting on negotiations, held by Mr. Karzai on July 22 with former leaders who had fought the Taliban, did not include a single woman, despite government pledges.

Part 2

Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul

Damn! We missed it by about 7 weeks. The Met is hosting this fantabulous exhibit starting June 23, 2009 through September 20, 2009. I received the Summer 2009 Exhibitions and Programs calendar in the mail today and on the cover is this gorgeous carved ivory representation of a female riding a "fantastic creature." Personally, I think it is a simorgh -- or the inspiration for the meat-eating "gryphon" that Harry Potter flew! It's sort of a dragon, horse, bird. Unfortunately, my scanner is on the fritz - damn! It would break now! And a quick search didn't locate the photo, which is copyrighted anyway. Double double damn. Well, I'll figure out a way, but probably not tonight. Stay tuned...

In Poverty and Strife, Women Test Limits

From The New York Times By CARLOTTA GALL Published: October 5, 2008 BAMIAN, Afghanistan — Far away from the Taliban insurgency, in this most peaceful corner of Afghanistan, a quiet revolution is gaining pace. Women are driving cars — a rarity in Afghanistan — working in public offices and police stations, and sitting on local councils. There is even a female governor, the first and only one in Afghanistan. In many ways this province, Bamian, is unique. A half-dozen years of relative peace in this part of the country since the fall of the Taliban and a lessening of lawlessness and disorder have allowed women to push the boundaries here. Most of the people in Bamian are ethnic Hazaras, Shiite Muslims who are in any case more open than most Afghans to the idea of women working outside the home. But the changes in women’s lives here are also an enormous step for Afghanistan as a whole. And they may point the way to broader possibilities for women, eventually, if peace can be secured in this very conservative Muslim society, which has been dominated by militia commanders and warlords during the last 30 years of war. In a country with low rankings on many indicators of social progress, women and girls are the most disadvantaged. More than 80 percent of Afghan women are illiterate. Women’s life expectancy is only 45 years, lower than that of men, mostly because of the very high rates of death during pregnancy. Forced marriage and under-age marriage are common for girls, and only 13 percent of girls complete primary school, compared with 32 percent of boys. The cult of war left women particularly vulnerable. For years now they have been the victims of abduction and rape. Hundreds of thousands were left war widows, mired in desperate poverty. Particularly in the last years of Taliban rule, even widows, who had no one to provide for them, were not allowed to work or leave the home unaccompanied by a male relative. Fear of armed militiamen left women afraid even to walk in front of the police station in the town of Bamian, recalled Nahida Rezai, 25, the first woman to join the police force here. “And I came right into the police station,” she said, admitting to some fears. At the beginning, she had some problems. “I received some threats by telephone,” she said. “But now I am working as a police officer, I think nothing can deter me.” Nekbakht, 20, joined the police force, too, and now helps her father, a casual laborer, support the family. They live in a single room tucked into the cliff face of Bamian valley, where homeless refugees have found shelter in caves inhabited centuries ago by Buddhist pilgrims. "It was very difficult to find a job,” she said. “We had economic problems, and with the high prices life was difficult. Finally, I decided if I could not find another job, I should go into the police.” After joining nine months ago, she likes the job so much she says she is encouraging other women to join, too. Indeed, growing economic hardship has helped drive some women to join the work force or to take other bold steps as they try to help their families cope with a severe drought, rising food prices and unemployment. That was the case for Zeinab Husseini, 19. Her father, with seven daughters and no sons, says he had little choice when he needed a second driver to help at home. “I like driving,” she said, seated at the wheel of her family’s minibus. “I was interested from childhood to learn to drive and to buy a car. I was the first woman in Bamian to drive.” But over all, it is the return to relative peace here that has allowed for women’s progress, said the governor, Habiba Sarabi, a doctor and educator who ran underground literacy classes during the Taliban regime. “If the general situation improves, it can improve the situation for women,” she said. She pushed to have policewomen so they could handle women’s cases, and there are now 14 women on the force, she said. Some of the changes in Bamian have been echoed in more conservative parts of Afghanistan. But even the success stories sometimes end up showing the continuing dangers for women who take jobs to improve their lot. In Kandahar Province, one of the most noted female police officials in the country, Capt. Malalai Kakar, was gunned down on her way to work on Sept. 28. In Bamian Province, Mrs. Sarabi, 52, has been the driving force behind women’s progress in public life. Her appointment by President Hamid Karzai three years ago as governor of Bamian was a bold move when jihadi leaders were still so powerful in the towns and countryside. Some opponents are still agitating for her removal, Mrs. Sarabi said. “It is not only because they are against women,” she said, “but they do not want to lose power, so they make trouble for the governor.” The people of Bamian say they accepted a woman as governor in the hope that an English-speaking, development-oriented technocrat like Mrs. Sarabi would deliver jobs and prosperity. In fact, the success of women’s Community Development Councils here has caught the attention of the World Bank, which has been a major donor to the programs and is looking to develop them further. Around the country there are 17,000 such councils, which choose local development projects and could be expanded to work on district and regional levels, said the bank’s president, Robert B. Zoellick, who visited Bamian this year. “They are very effective,” he said of the councils in a recent interview. “People feel they have an influence in the future.” The quiet work being done by women on the councils and in other jobs has helped turn things around for many in Bamian. Najiba, 48, is a woman in Yakowlang District who lost her husband in the notorious massacre by Taliban forces there in the winter of 2000-1. The Taliban fighters came on horseback, forcing the villagers and townspeople to flee in the night, leaving everything behind. Their shops and homes were set on fire while they sought refuge in the mountains. After the American intervention in Afghanistan and the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, they returned home to nothing, not even a roof over their heads. “I just had one skirt, and I was always patching it,” Najiba said. As the government began development programs in the provinces, Najiba was elected head of a newly formed women’s development council, representing her village and the neighboring village. Its job was to plan how to spend a government development grant. The men’s council decided the area needed a road, and flood barriers to save the farming land near the river. The women’s council wanted instead to buy livestock for each family, traditionally the women’s domain in Afghan households, to improve the food supply for families. The men won that debate. “We did not get the farming project,” Najiba said. “We are still suggesting it was valuable; we are trying to work on our projects so we don’t have to depend on the men.” The women got their way with the next project: solar panels to provide light to groups of four houses. That project has opened up all sorts of ideas, for computers, televisions and educational and election programs, she said. Women have participated in literacy and tailoring training programs, too. Najiba laughed as she explained: “We have changed our way of life. Now I have lots of skirts.” She added, “It all comes down to the council.” Now, women are taking courses run by nongovernmental organizations, getting educated and learning ways to improve their family incomes. Most important, the women have won over the men, she said. “Their minds have changed,” Najiba said. “They want to share decisions, not too far, but they want to give us some share.”

More on the Exhibit of the Bactrian Hoard

From pbs.org/newshour
Originally aired July 2, 2008

Antiquities Exhibit Illuminates Ancient Afghan Trading
A new ancient Afghan art exhibition displays the country's rich and diverse culture. At the National Gallery of Art, the NewsHour visits the relics that have survived the tumult of recent history in Afghanistan.

JEFFREY BROWN: June 2004, Kabul. The bank vault in Afghanistan's presidential palace is opened, and a metal safe brought out. Lacking keys, a worker takes a circular saw to open up a box that could hold priceless antiquities long thought to be lost.

Archaeologist and National Geographic fellow Frederik Hiebert was there.

FREDRIK HIEBERT, National Geographic fellow: I was worried. A circular saw had a lot of heat. If there was gold in there, was it going to affect the gold? What if there was nothing in there? What if somebody had already gotten in there, stolen the gold, and there was a little note saying, "Ha, we got here first?"

JEFFREY BROWN: In fact, thousands of pieces of gold from the so-called "Bactrian hoard" were there and safe.

CURATOR: You can see actually there's a piece of jewelry...

JEFFREY BROWN: And some can now be seen here, at Washington's National Gallery of Art, part of an exhibition organized with the National Geographic Society called "Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul." It will travel around the U.S. through September 2009.

The 228 objects were excavated from four archaeological sites and together reveal a little-known land that stood at the center of ancient trade routes, while developing its own unique cultural blend.

FREDRIK HIEBERT: I think this is the most astonishing part of the exhibition. You look at these treasures from Afghanistan, from a country that you know only from the news as a land of terror, as a land of chaos.

And you look at these pieces, they're gorgeous. They're beautiful. They're so familiar. You see iconography from Greece, from Rome, from China, from India. You say, "Wow, these things came from Afghanistan."

JEFFREY BROWN: The oldest objects, from 2200 B.C., come from a Bronze Age site called Tepe Fullol. Little is known about the people who made these, but the images show they were in contact with ancient India and Mesopotamia.

FREDRIK HIEBERT: On these gold bulls, you see iconography that's distinctive of the neighbors. But the gold itself was local, so we know now that Afghanistan had a role in international trade already 4,000 years ago.

JEFFREY BROWN: Objects from the second site show northern Afghanistan -- then called Bactria -- when it was a colony of Greece. The city of Ai Khanum was founded around 300 B.C. by followers of Alexander the Great. Most of these pieces were excavated in the 1960s and '70s by French archaeologists.

A highlight is a ceremonial plaque in silver and gold, with Cybele, the Greek goddess of nature, riding in a chariot with the winged goddess, Nike.

Afghanistan as a mosaic
JEFFREY BROWN: The largest galleries in the exhibition bring the visitor into Afghanistan's role as a crossroads of the famous Silk Road, trade routes that ran from Rome and the Mediterranean to China and India. These ivory reliefs were used to decorate furniture including, as this video animation shows, a throne.

These objects were excavated in 1937 from a long-buried warehouse in the ancient city of Begram. Amazingly, most were found intact.

FREDRIK HIEBERT: This is really unusual in archeology. If we took a -- take a look at this fragile glass. That's 2,000 years old. You can see the pieces are intact. They're whole. Look at this glass.

JEFFREY BROWN: You mean, these were found -- these were found like this?

FREDRIK HIEBERT: These were found like this. These fish are typical of the Roman world. There are fish drinking glasses like this from other parts of the Mediterranean world.

JEFFREY BROWN: So this is a Mediterranean fish that washes up in Afghanistan?

FREDRIK HIEBERT: Of all places, in Afghanistan.

SAID JAWAD, Ambassador, Afghanistan: That's what Afghanistan is about actually. It is truly a mosaic of different cultures, countries, civilizations, languages, but yet it has kept a Bactrian or Afghan characteristics.

JEFFREY BROWN: And this exhibition, says Said Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador to the U.S., is a way of showing that identity to the world.

SAID JAWAD: For a lot of people, Afghanistan starts with the Soviet invasion or some of the recent violence. This is not the case. This country has been around for 5,000 years.

Objects survived modern Afghanistan
JEFFREY BROWN: But it is the recent history that makes this exhibition all the more striking, for as remarkable as the ancient history of these objects may be, their survival in modern times can seem miraculous.

Remember the Bactrian hoard? These thousands of pieces of gold were found in six graves at a site called Tillia Tepe, on and around the bodies of wealthy nomads.

But the year was 1979, just as the Soviets were invading Afghanistan, and archeologist Victor Sarianidi didn't even have time to finish the excavations.

Fredrik Hiebert, who would later work with Sarianidi, picks up the story.

FREDRIK HIEBERT: He actually had to go sort of incognito. He took his golden treasures, more than 50 pounds of gold, and he put it in paper bags and got on a bus.

JEFFREY BROWN: Paper bags?

FREDRIK HIEBERT: Paper bags, got on a bus, and went incognito back to the capital city. He quickly inventoried these objects. It was astonishing.

More than 20,000 pieces of gold were inventoried and then quickly hidden away in the National Museum of Afghanistan, not to be studied, not to be displayed. This was kind of an unusual moment for an archaeologist to find his greatest find and have to hide it away.

JEFFREY BROWN: In fact, hiding the treasures saved them, while so much else was lost. In the early '90s, the National Museum in Kabul was looted and shelled amid civil war.

FREDRIK HIEBERT: The National Museum lost its roof, lost its windows. When I first saw it in 2003, there was not a single artifact.

Restored museum to receive the art
JEFFREY BROWN: Next, the Taliban systematically destroyed works of art, including the famous giant sculptures of Buddha at Bamyan in 2001. Everything, including the Bactrian hoard, was at risk.

SAID JAWAD: The criminals and the looters wanted to have in their hands for financial gain. The Taliban wanted to destroy these items because of their wrong ideological or religious conviction.

JEFFREY BROWN: And it was, in the end, a handful of workers at the museum who apparently saved what they could, in the vault in the presidential palace, in homes, and elsewhere, and kept it secret, even as the world assumed the worst.

SAID JAWAD: Any one of these gentlemen could have actually packed one or a few pieces of these artifacts and lived very comfortably somewhere in Europe. They didn't.

JEFFREY BROWN: Indeed, this is now the great hope, that these, and so many other objects that have been looted and taken from the country, will be part of a restored National Museum in Kabul.

For now, even as Americans can study these treasures, the continuing political uncertainty in Afghanistan makes it impossible to predict when Afghans, young and old, will get their chance.

The "Key Holders," Heroes of Afghanistan

Another compelling article about the current "Hidden Treasures of Afghanistan" exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The article contains photos of some of the treasures - check them out! 2,000-year-old treasures tell wild story NEELY TUCKER; The Washington Post Published: May 25th, 2008 01:00 AM An exhibit in Washington, D.C., reveals gold, intrigue and jewelry once buried in Afghanistan. The finds have survived looters and wars. WASHINGTON – You can go see Indiana Jones and the temple of whatever if you like, but it’s probably not going to be as good as the Bactrian Gold and the Secret of Tillya Tepe. The former is at any multiplex. The latter is at only the National Gallery of Art. It’s one of those ripping good yarns of yesteryear, the kind you used to see on cliffhanger serials before the main feature. This one is set in a dusty corner of Afghanistan. It’s about ancient art, looters, gravediggers, the Russians, the French, the Taliban, an invasion or three, civil war, the Silk Road, the Dragon Master and 22,607 pieces of gold and ivory and lapis and turquoise. There’s a surprising role played by pink Chinese toilet paper and six mysterious safes in a sealed underground vault at the presidential compound. OK, so the plot gets a little crowded. That tends to happen when your story is true and covers more than 2,000 years. The show is “Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures From the National Museum, Kabul,” and it is a remarkable display from a remote outpost in the world of antiquity: a dusty land of foreign traders, violent nomads, dangerous women and the unmistakable glint of gold. It has a great subplot of archaeologists winning one against the black market. It plays until Sept. 7. Like any good archaeological thriller, this one features valuable antiquities and modern twists, set into world-shaping international politics. After being covered by dirt and mud for nearly 2,000 years, most of the artifacts in this show were discovered in digs made during the 1930s or the 1970s. Then, once found, they were lost again, as the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the rise of the Taliban in 1996 raised successive clouds of dust over their whereabouts. Most archaeologists feared they had been lost forever to the black market or destroyed by the Taliban. Then, three years after the Sept. 11 attacks and the subsequent defeat of the Taliban, the sealed cases and footlockers were opened in vaults in the Arg, the Afghan presidential compound in Kabul. Nobody was sure what was in them – the keys had been lost – until they were broken open with a hammer, crowbar and finally a power saw. “This power saw starts going – bbbrrrzzzzttt!!! – and the sparks are flying, and at first I thought we were going to open them to find a couple of potatoes in a sack with a note saying, ‘We got here first! Your friends, the Taliban,’” says Frederik T. Hiebert, the show’s curator, who was representing the National Geographic Society when the safes were hacked open. “Or I thought the sparks would set something on fire, and it would burn up all these great artifacts inside.” Hiebert’s worries were well founded. It turned out much of the ivory and gold and glasswares had been packed in pink Chinese toilet paper. Which did not catch fire, and instead had preserved tens of thousands of items the wider world has not seen since the time of Christ. Here was the fabled Bactrian gold, named for the region in Afghanistan where it was found, in the graves discovered at a place called Tillya Tepe (“hill of gold”): Bracelets. Necklaces. A golden belt. A woman’s crown, thin hammered orbs of gold, designed to be pulled apart into five pieces and stored flat. Pendants depicting the Dragon Master of lore, a nomadic man holding a dragon’s foreleg in each hand. Here, in another case, ivory carvings from the ancient warehouses found in archaeological digs in the city of Begram. A woman astride a mythical leogryph. A fish-shaped flask, made of glass, stunningly blue. A bronze statue of the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis-Heracles. More than 23,000 objects in all. “This is probably our best picture of how the Silk Road actually worked,” Hiebert is saying, giving a walk-through of the exhibit. He gets enthusiastic, pointing to a series of decorative plaques. They are flat and rectangular and carved of ivory. They depict women in various poses, sitting, standing, reclining. All these were part of an elaborate chair or throne, the rest of which is missing. On the adjacent wall, a flat-screen monitor shows a rotating three-dimensional re-creation of how all the pieces would have been placed together on the throne. “This is the first time in 2,000 years anyone has seen that throne,” Hiebert says. The Silk Road of which you’ll hear much in this exhibit was not actually a single thoroughfare, but a series of trails, pathways and trading routes that ran from Rome, Greece and Egypt, and stretched all the way to China, with connections to Siberia, India and Persia. Those roads pretty much all ran through northern Afghanistan. “Nowhere in antiquity have so many different objects from so many different cultures – Chinese mirrors, Roman coins, daggers from Serbia – been found together in situ,” Viktor Ivanovich Sarianidi, the Russian archaeologist who made the historic find at Tillya Tepe in 1979, wrote in National Geographic in 1990. As recounted in that article, he was the leader of a joint Soviet-Afghan project that had been digging among ancient ruins in the region, off and on, for nine years. In 1978 he spotted a bit of painted potsherd on a nearby hillock. They dug beneath it. They uncovered a confusing site, as layers of villages from about 300 B.C. were lying atop the ruins of a massive edifice of walls and turrets more than 1,000 years older. That edifice had been built and collapsed and rebuilt, and apparently sat unused for more than 600 years. And amid these ancient ruins, they made a remarkable discovery: Tombs, from perhaps the 1st century A.D. It was a historic find, but civil war and the Soviet invasion were closing in. Sarianidi got the artifacts from the first six graves to Kabul before war broke out. He left in February 1979. In the intervening years, the national museum was bombed. Tons of Afghan artifacts turned up in Europe, traded on the black market. The Taliban, which did not allow graven images, destroyed more than 2,500 pieces of artwork in the museum. Archaeologists figured Sarianidi’s historic find had been sold off, melted down or destroyed. The find was thrilling in its day, but again, war intervened: World War II ended the dig. The artifacts were shipped to the national museum in Kabul and duly lost. It turns out they were in the footlockers in that vault in the Afghan presidential compound, the same place the goods from Tillya Tepe were taken. A small society of “tahilwidars,” or keyholders, had kept them safe, never saying a word about the treasure. Omara Khan Masoudi, the director of the national museum, was one. After the country was stabilized, they informed Karzai, and the world found them again. “To me, this exhibit isn’t just about archaeology, it’s about keeping culture alive, about real heroism in hiding and saving these artifacts,” Hiebert says. ********************************************************************************** The tahilwidars are heroes.

Silent Survivors of Afghanistan’s 4,000 Tumultuous Years

Prior post.

From The New York Times
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: May 23, 2008

WASHINGTON — Art objects inspire many reactions, perhaps most crucially acts of preservation or destruction. From 1979 to late 2001, destruction had the upper hand in Afghanistan. The Soviet-Afghan war, the ensuing civil war and finally the pernicious rule of the Taliban inflicted incalculable losses on active archaeological sites and ancient monuments and artworks.

In March 2001 the world watched helplessly as the Taliban blew up the two giant Buddhas carved from existing rock that had faced each other across the Bamiyan Valley for 1,500 years. The progressive destruction of the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul was less blatant but equally tragic. Its collection of 100,000 artworks and artifacts — one of the finest in Asia — spanned several millenniums of Afghanistan’s rich, multicultural history.

The museum suffered looting, bombing, fire; the Taliban ordered destruction of all depictions of the human figure. By the time they were driven from power in November 2001, the Kabul museum had lost two-thirds of its collection. (Since then the museum has been safe, although looting continues outside Kabul.)

But isolated acts of preservation and some lucky circumstances also prevailed. In 1988 a small group of the Kabul museum’s staff hid crates packed with about 600 of its most precious artworks in the vault of the presidential palace. No one was sure how these crates had fared until 2004, when they were retrieved with their contents intact.

Around 200 of these works are in “Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures From the National Museum, Kabul,” at the National Gallery of Art here. At once revelatory and heart-rending, this show, making a four-city American tour, has much to tell about Afghanistan, past and present.

The objects in the exhibition date from 2200 B.C. to around the second century A.D., that is, from the Bronze Age to the height of the Kushan Empire, which reached nearly across Asia and deep into the Indian subcontinent. Included are Indian ivories, Roman-Egyptian glass vessels, Greek and Greco-Bactrian bronzes and carved stone, as well as a trove known as the golden hoard of Bactria, an ancient empire in northern Afghanistan.

The combination offers a picture of Afghan cosmopolitanism, which was fed by the trade routes of the Silk Road, and the ethnic diversity resulting from invasions and peaceful migrations alike. Structured to focus on four important excavation sites, this show is the latest phase in a close working relationship between the National Geographic Society and the Kabul museum. It has been organized by the society in collaboration with the National Gallery and overseen by Fredrik Hiebert, a National Geographic Society fellow.

It begins and ends with gold objects separated by more than two millenniums. The first group consists of three rare Bronze Age gold bowls, one intact and fragments of two others. They were found in 1972 at a single site, Tepe Fullol, in northeastern Afghanistan, but their very different styles reflect influences from across Asia. The designs on the intact bowl are abstract, a square divided by an X; each quadrant contains a stepped square found on artifacts from Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. One bowl fragment is strictly local, with motifs of a wild boar, trees and mountains. The other fragment features a majestic bearded bull, an image common to Mesopotamia, 1,200 miles to the west.

Subsequent displays contain objects from the Greco-Bactrian city of Ai Khanum, founded in 300 B.C. by a follower of Alexander the Great and excavated by French archaeologists from 1964 to 1978. (Destined for Kabul’s Institute of Archaeology, which was completely destroyed, these finds survived, unnoticed, in crates that never got farther than the Ministry of Information and Culture in Kabul.) This gallery contains two leafy Corinthian capitals; lidded, partitioned bowls (for unguents and perfumes); and a full-length statue of a man named Stratos who grasps the folds of his robe in one hand, a gesture that might have influenced centuries of statues of Buddhist sculptures.

The showstopper in this section is a large ceremonial plaque in silver and gold from the third century B.C. that might have been part of Alexander’s entourage (image at beginning of article). It represents Cybele, the Greek goddess of nature, riding in a chariot driven by the winged goddess Nike, seen in profile. Their high, lion-drawn chariot seems Syrian, but the naturalism of the figures is largely Greek. This naturalism is at its best in the priest who walks behind the chariot, carrying a large parasol. He leans back with his head tilted up — making sure the deities are properly shaded — in a pose that has the alert springiness of a circus juggler. Also marvelous: the gold rocks and incised flowers underfoot.

Rest of article.

The Key-Holders: Guarding Priceless Cultural Treasures with Their Lives

From The Chicago Tribune: To guard Afghan treasure, silence golden By Bay Fang Washington Bureau 11:48 PM CDT, May 13, 2008 WASHINGTON—For years they kept the secret. A dozen men, the "key-holders" of a fabulous treasure, told no one about the gold they'd buried deep in a palace vault, hidden from the ravages of war, looting and a regime bent on destroying Afghanistan's cultural heritage. Now, some 20 years later, that collection thought lost forever is being exhibited for the world to see. Opening in the U.S. with a show in Washington on May 25, it spans the beginning of the Silk Road trade through a country most Americans associate with violence and destruction. "The story of the hidden treasures is like the story of Afghanistan," noted Said Tayeb Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador to the U.S. "It is about precious culture and traditions covered by the ashes of war and neglect. You don't know what remains under the ashes, and when you see the glitter of gold, you almost can't believe it." The exhibition is filled with artifacts of almost unbelievable artistry—collapsible gold crowns that belonged to nomad princesses, a chubby Aphrodite figurine with wings and a forehead mark in the Indian tradition, a golden tree hung with pearls for fruit. Accompanying the collection as it travels to Washington, San Francisco, Houston and New York are some of the key-holders, the men who protected the collection from the violence of mujahedeen and Taliban. "In Afghanistan there's a different curatorial system—these men are bonded by law to their collections, and they bear personal responsibility for them," said Fredrik Hiebert, curator of the U.S. exhibition. Sitting beside him on a couch in the National Gallery of Art, looking somewhat ill at ease, Abdullah Hakim Zada, one of the key-holders, said that when he and his comrades packed away the treasures, they could not have foreseen that there would be a civil war followed by the reign of the Taliban. "At times during the years, we worried that we hadn't put the right materials in the boxes for them to be stored so long," he said. Throughout his career as an Asian archeologist, Hiebert said everyone in the field thought the famous Afghan collection lived on only in legend. Rumors abounded: that it had been taken to Moscow after the Soviet invasion, that it had been looted or stolen, that the gold had been melted down. Afghanistan's National Museum had been shelled and set on fire, and its storerooms looted. The so-called Bactrian Hoard, one of the greatest archeological finds of the 20th Century, is the heart of the trove, discovered accidentally in 1978 by Russian archeologist Viktor Sarianidi, Hiebert's mentor. Six 2,000-year-old nomadic tombs, from an area in northern Afghanistan that was once an important crossroads on the Silk Road, contained more than 20,000 beautifully crafted pieces. Before Sarianidi could study the items, the Soviets invaded, and he rushed the pieces to Kabul, where they went to the National Museum. That was the last he saw of them. Unbeknownst to him, 10 years later, as the communist government weakened and rockets rained on the city, a group of museum workers packed the most important artifacts into boxes, sealed them with their signatures and brought them to the presidential palace, where they were stored in a vault. "Only 13 to 20 people knew about the treasures, and as fighting between the different groups got worse we decided not to tell anyone about them," said Omara Khan Masoudi, now director of the National Museum in Kabul. It was not until 2003 that a new government under President Hamid Karzai entered the palace and discovered — in a massive Austrian-made vault, alongside the government's gold bullion — piles of sealed boxes. Hiebert heard about these and traveled to Kabul that October with his colleague Thomas Barfield, now chairman of the anthropology department at Boston University. They met with then-Minister of Finance Ashraf Ghani. "The question then was, did it really exist?" said Barfield. The archeologists remained skeptical – until, two hours before their plane was supposed to leave, Ghani took them to the palace basement. " 'Well, boys,' [Ghani] said, 'I can't show you the gold, but I can show you the silver.' And he opened his hand and showed us this two-headed ancient Greek coin, almost as big as his palm, that we had also thought were completely gone. That was when we thought, if this stuff exists, there's no reason to doubt the Bactrian gold was there too." Ghani told Hiebert that if he agreed to do a scientific inventory on the items, they would open the boxes thought to contain the gold. A group of ministers and scholars, including Sarianidi, gathered around to open the sealed boxes with a power saw, sparks flying. "We literally didn't know what we would find," Ghani said in a telephone interview. "When we saw that it was actually what we hoped, it was the feeling of regaining a part of your being, of connecting our generation to those who lived thousands of years before us and for millennia to come." Still, further squabbles erupted before the collection left the country for the exhibit. Some feared letting it out at all. Others thought Afghanistan should negotiate for more money. "I pushed the idea that no matter where it goes, it should be touring for the next 10 years," said Tim Moore, cultural attache at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. In the end, this is the story of the hidden treasure, and the fact that it survived. "It was our job," key-holder Masoudi said. "Even if we just saved one piece or 100 pieces, we cannot be too proud, because it is just our job. Archeological pieces belong not to one person, but to the world." **************************************************************************************** See The History Blog for further information on the Bactrian hoard's visit to the U.S. Info page on the exhibit from the National Gallery of Art.