Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium

by Tim Bonyhady

  The Battle for Afghanistan was a CBS documentary in 1987 narrated from the United States by Dan Rather, whose 1980 program had spurred the Texan Democrat, Charlie Wilson, to support the mujahideen. The 1987 documentary was recognised immediately to rival ‘a fictional war movie for drama’. Soon the question was how much of it was fictional. CBS admitted ‘the unintentional use of a misidentified aircraft’—a Pakistani jet fighter on a training mission being passed off as a Soviet aircraft bombing Afghan villages. Footage of the mujahideen blowing up electricity pylons outside Kabul was impugned because the cameraman had been there twelve days after the event. A scene showing a mujahideen attack on a Soviet armoured column, shot from the bottom of a hill with the rebels charging towards the camera, was identified as another performance resembling ‘Apaches attacking a wagon train’.

  The Qur’an prescribes punishments for a small group of crimes, including the amputation of hands or feet of thieves and the stoning of adulterers. Most governments of Islamic countries have not enforced these punishments because of their severity. Sharia law also, on one view, ‘does not require, and perhaps even discourages, punishment as spectacle’. But some members of the mujahideen made a spectacle of how they imposed punishments. In 1985 Associated Press obtained a photograph from a village held by mujahideen forces of the public flogging of two men for homosexuality. After the northern town of Taloqan fell to Massoud’s men in 1988, British cameraman Rory Peck filmed seven thieves ‘being paraded through town with small items, radios and a bag, hanging round their necks’, before each had a hand amputated.

  Fighting between the mujahideen killed and injured many villagers. The communists killed and wounded many more when they bombed and shelled villages. But photographs and footage of the victims were few. The devastation of the village of Kushk-e Serwan near Herat in August 1987 by Soviet bombing was an exception. A member of the Afghan Media Research Center was there when bodies were still being pulled from destroyed buildings. So was Polish journalist Radek Sikorski. Both photographed the corpses of small children—almost intact, laid close together on blankets—who had suffocated when their homes were bombed. Both recorded a cellar, just excavated. Inside was a veiled woman, her hands reaching out, as if to touch her two boys seated next to her. All, too, had suffocated.

  Sayyid Ahmad Gailani’s National Islamic Front published the Media Research Center’s photographs in a sixteen-page booklet with English text. Sebghatullah Mojadiddi’s National Liberation Front put one of the photographs on the cover of its monthly magazine, identifying the deaths as ‘an act of Soviet massacre’. But these publications had scant impact internationally because they had little distribution. Sikorski had London’s Observer waiting. Its choice was Sikorski’s photograph of the veiled woman and two boys. After it appeared in September 1987, it won first prize at the World Press Photo Contest. While Sikorski wondered whether his photography was disrespectful to the dead, he concluded it was the best means of making their lives ‘significant to the outside world’.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Most Beautiful Girl

  One in three Afghans—more than 5 million—fled in the 1980s. The West gave sanctuary to only a tiny number. In 1985, for example, the United States took 1692 Afghan refugees, Australia sixty-five, West Germany thirty-seven and the United Kingdom ten. Almost all the other refugees stayed in Iran and Pakistan, where no attempt was made to stop Afghans crossing the borders and no limits were placed on their numbers. Those who fled east were fortunate that Iran held them only briefly in camps, then let them settle where they chose. But they generally had no access to Iran’s welfare system and were largely ignored by the international community because of Iran’s isolation after its revolution. Those who fled to Pakistan received much more attention.

  The leaders of the main mujahideen groups lived comfortably in well-guarded villas in Peshawar. Other refugees crammed into flats or camped ‘in ragged tents and makeshift lean-tos in vacant lots and rubbish dumps’. Most could find no other home than camps situated on wasteland. The water was often polluted, and sanitation was poor. New arrivals had to wait nine months before being entitled to medical assistance, food, bedding and tents. One in three children died before turning five, the second-highest infant mortality rate in the world. Partly because they were surrounded by strangers, but partly also because of the Islamisation campaign of Pakistan’s president Zia ul-Haq, many refugees practised purdah much more strictly than they had in Afghanistan. Instead of working in the fields, rural women were largely confined to their dwellings with little to do, and had to wear chadaris when they went out. For women and girls from Kabul, the change was even more traumatic.

  Many intellectuals and activists were assassinated. Sayed Bauhuddin Majrooh was the director of an Afghan Information Center renowned for being politically independent because it was not linked to any of the main mujahideen groups, though it received CIA funding. Majrooh was executed after conducting a survey that found that seventy-two per cent of refugees preferred the former king, Zahir Shah, to the mujahideen leaders. Faiz Ahmad—the Maoist husband of Meena Keshwar Kamal, founder of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, who herself was murdered in Quetta—was also killed. Each time, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was identified as responsible, but Pakistan did nothing.

  Tajwar Kakar, a school principal in Kunduz and then Kabul, became the most interviewed refugee woman after fleeing to Peshawar because she was willing to talk about her resistance work and experience of jail and deride the communists’ claim that they were ‘bringing freedom to the women of Afghanistan’. Yet Kakar was also in jeopardy in Peshawar because of her commitment to female education, her refusal to wear the chadari and her support for Zahir Shah. When she responded to the limited educational opportunities for refugee girls by starting two high schools with international funding, Kakar began receiving letters and phonecalls threatening to bomb the schools and kill her, despite some protection provided by Jamiat. Following a ‘last warning’ in 1989, she fled to Australia.

  The Pakistani government used the Nasir Bagh camp on the outskirts of Peshawar as a showpiece. It received most attention when national leaders such as Jimmy Carter, Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl visited. It also attracted crew from Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo III, one of two Hollywood films made in the late 1980s about the war. While shot in Israel, Thailand and Arizona, Stallone’s assistants bought many of the movie’s costumes and props in Nasir Bagh, including turbans, shirts, pants, boots, sandals and rugs. Sadiq Tawfiq, the one Afghan to act in the film, explained: ‘The refugees do not have a good understanding of movies. They think movies are drinking and girls. We do not want to clash the cultures. So I tell them, we are buying clothes for a cultural exhibition to help Afghanese people, which is the reality, is it not?’

  Nasir Bagh was also a prime destination for western photographers who generally depicted the barrenness, poverty and vast cemeteries of refugee camps, the crippled, blind and aged. Since most of the photographers were male and had little or no access ro refugee women, they usually showed men. If they depicted women and children, the magazines and newspapers that published their work often identified the widows and orphans. A photograph by Steve McCurry, which Newsweek put on its cover in 1983, showed a white-bearded, turbaned melancholic man at the entrance to a rudimentary tent with a small child in his lap, both looking away from the camera.

  McCurry broke this mould in 1984 when he received his first assignment from National Geographic—to photograph Afghan refugees in Pakistan. When he visited Nasir Bagh, where the school for girls had five teachers for 350 pupils, its mud roof had collapsed after heavy rain. Months later, a large plastic tent was the only classroom. In June 1985, National Geographic chose for its cover a photograph by McCurry of one of the students, a green-eyed girl in a torn red headscarf looking straight into the camera. The accompanying text was: ‘Haunted eyes tell of an Afghan girl’s fears.’

  McCurry would later claim that the girl wou
ld not show her full face or look at his lens until her teacher told her how important it was that the world saw what refugees looked like. McCurry would also say he did not learn the girl’s name because he did not have an interpreter. But that can hardly have been the case given he required permission from the girl’s teacher to photograph her and travelled with a fixer. More likely, McCurry thought the girl’s name of no interest since refugees were usually anonymous in the work of western photographers, and National Geographic generally did not identify the subjects of its images. Its only elaboration in June 1985 was: ‘Haunting eyes and a tattered garment tell the plight of a girl who fled her native Afghanistan for a refugee camp in Pakistan.’

  Apart from the holes in her shawl, she looked much like a model on the cover of Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar. A Canadian reader responded: ‘On your June cover is the most compellingly beautiful young girl I have ever seen!’ An American reader declared the image ‘magic’, the ‘most remarkable photograph’ he had seen in National Geographic. As many readers asked about the girl, National Geographic explained: ‘She lived in the section for widows and orphans in the Nasir Bagh refugee camp.’ It also claimed that ‘Photographer Steve McCurry knows only that she was about thirteen years old’, which was improbable when National Geographic’s original article reported that girls in the camp had to wear chadaris once they turned twelve.

  By 1987, when this photograph reappeared on the cover of American Photographer, McCurry claimed to have received ‘two hundred letters from people offering to help her’. McCurry later maintained that ‘people around the world…were inspired by the photograph to volunteer in refugee camps or do aid work in Afghanistan’. But McCurry also acknowledged that the photograph’s ‘positive contribution’ was simply that ‘several people’ became volunteers. This more limited impact was in keeping with the photograph, which suggested a girl in need because of her torn headscarf but did not convey she was in a camp. While National Geographic would claim the girl’s ‘stare drilled into our collective subconscious and stopped a heedless Western world dead in its tracks’, international interest in Afghanistan was scant.

  This photograph became the focus of even more attention in 1994, when National Geographic chose it as the cover and the frontispiece of a book of its photographs—implicitly identifying it as the magazine’s pre-eminent image. National Geographic also included the photograph in its accompanying exhibition that toured for years and put it on the exhibition poster. Most reviewers were laudatory, identifying the photograph as a ‘powerfully expressive’ image that ‘never pales or grows ordinary’ and is ‘so universal in its humanity that we see it in our dreams’. But Rosemary Ranck of the New York Times was unconvinced by National Geographic’s claim that the girl’s eyes ‘speak volumes about war and fear’. She suggested that McCurry and his ‘intrusive telephoto lens’ had been responsible for the girl’s fright.

  The photograph became iconic. National Geographic used it on everything from direct-mail advertising to TV commercials. As American writer Janet Malcolm observed: ‘Even a photograph of no special distinction will take on aura if it is reproduced again and again.’ In 1999 McCurry put it on the cover of his book Portraits. In 2001 it returned to National Geographic’s cover for a special issue of the magazine’s ‘100 Best Pictures’. According to National Geographic, it was ‘the most recognised photograph in its history’. McCurry declared it ‘the most recognisable photograph in the world today’. The response to it was ‘overwhelming’, he said. People ‘wanted to send [the girl] money, they wanted to adopt her, they wanted to…marry her.’

  By then, McCurry had discovered something of the girl’s background, though his accounts kept changing. ‘She and her family had spent two weeks walking through the mountains to escape the Russians, and several of them had died as a result,’ he told London’s

  Sunday Times in 1999. ‘Her village had been bombed and her relatives had been killed,’ he told National Public Radio in 2001. But McCurry still did not know her name, despite having ‘looked far and wide’, ‘maybe ten times’. In 2001, National Geographic republished her photograph captioned as a place, not a person: ‘Border Camp, Pakistan’.

  National Geographic and McCurry only discovered her identity in 2002 when, with Pakistan about to close Nasir Bagh, they initiated a search led by Rahimullah Yusufzai, one of Pakistan’s most prominent journalists. Because National Geographic offered a substantial reward, the search gripped Peshawar. Inevitably, there were false claimants. Then a man declared that McCurry’s subject was in southern Afghanistan and went to fetch her, returning with a woman, her husband and two children. Seventeen years since McCurry spent a few minutes with her, he identified Sharbat Gula as his subject, which iris scanning and facial recognition tools confirmed.

  The result was another cover story for National Geographic, and a documentary, Search for the Afghan Girl, for its Explorer series. They reported that Gula had fled her village in Nangarhar after Soviet bombing killed her parents. Travelling with her grandmother, her three sisters and brother, she reached Pakistan after a week-long journey across snow-covered mountains. She married while in Nasir Bagh and had one daughter in about 1989. In the mid 1990s, she returned to her village where she had three more daughters, one of whom died in infancy. Because her husband could not get work in Afghanistan, he lived in Peshawar. While she spent part of each winter there, she returned each summer to her village because its climate was better for her asthma.

  National Geographic’s new cover, titled ‘Found’, showed Gula in a chadari with its grill down, holding McCurry’s photograph from 1984. For other photographs, Gula lifted her grill, with her husband’s permission. She also expressed something of what it had been like to be photographed by McCurry as a girl. ‘She remembers her anger’, the National Geographic story began. ‘The man was a stranger,’ she said, confirming that her much-discussed fear in 1984 was of McCurry.

  National Geographic and McCurry announced that, as well as paying for Gula to make the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, they were ‘making sure’ Gula would be ‘okay’ and were working ‘with her family to see how they might somehow benefit financially or otherwise from the global success of her image’. National Geographic and McCurry did not reveal that their assistance, which enabled Gula to buy a house in Peshawar, was in return for exclusivity, making National Geographic ‘the sole publisher of her pictures and story’ for ten years.

  Gula returned to public view in 2016, having become one of thousands of Afghans in Pakistan to secure a national identity card illegally. She did so in an attempt to stay in Pakistan as its government intensified efforts to expel Afghan refugees. When Gula was arrested in Peshawar, she was seen for the first time internationally other than through the lens of McCurry’s camera. Her arrest photograph, which was widely published, showed her, with the grill of her chadari raised, seemingly disorientated. After being refused bail, she spent several days in jail before pleading guilty to six charges in Pakistan’s Anti-Corruption Court, which fined her $1000 and ordered her deportation.

  It soon emerged that, when National Geographic and McCurry undertook to look after Gula in 2002, her husband’s health was rapidly deteriorating, increasing her vulnerability and need. After the couple had two more children, her husband died of hepatitis C, as did her eldest daughter, and Gula also became ill. Fearing eviction from Pakistan because of her illegal status, she sold her house in Peshawar at a reduced price. She blamed her celebrity for her exposure as the holder of an unlawful identity card. ‘The photo created more problems than benefits. It made me famous but also led to my imprisonment,’ she declared. Nevertheless, having spent most of her life in Pakistan, she considered it her ‘homeland’ and wanted to remain there, while dismissing Afghanistan as just her ‘birthplace’.

  McCurry funded her legal representation and proclaimed her arrest ‘an egregious violation of her human rights’. He cast the circulation of her arrest photograph as an attempt ‘to humiliate and debase
her’ and ‘to instill fear into other refugees—and to turn the minds of others against the migrant population’. As international pressure grew, the Pakistani government moved Gula to a hospital, then announced it would review her deportation on ‘humanitarian grounds’. The Afghan government sought to shame Pakistan by undertaking that, if Gula went to Afghanistan, she would be able to ‘live with dignity and with security’ in her village in Nangarhar.

  When Gula accepted this offer, the Afghan government flew her to Kabul where she was welcomed by billboards carrying McCurry’s photographs. For the first time in her adult life, she was required to go unveiled before dozens of strangers, including cameramen and photographers at a reception in the chandeliered Presidential Palace. Because Nangarhar remained a war zone, the government could not make good its offer of a new home there for Gula. Yet when most returnees lived in slums, Gula got to live in a furnished apartment in Kabul and was promised ‘comprehensive support’. When it emerged several months later that the government had simply leased the flat and stopped paying the rent, another flurry of media reports forced the government to buy a house in her name. But as her 1984 photograph continued to be reproduced on book covers, touted as ‘the most iconic picture of all time’, McCurry and National Geographic remained the great beneficiaries.