by Tim Bonyhady
With the Taliban gone in December 2001, Asefi made a public spectacle of the removal of the overpainting, giving him a prominence enjoyed by no Afghan artist since Ghausuddin in the 1980s. ‘Throughout history artists have fought for their art. So as an artist myself, I tried my best and did what I could to save Afghanistan’s art,’ Asefi explained to reporters before taking a big sponge to a painting in the gallery. A journalist with the London Independent was amazed as Asefi washed away his watercolour overlay and a man herding three donkeys along a mountain path began to appear in one painting, followed by four cows next to a stream, and then a man on horseback. The Toronto Star observed: ‘It was his own art work he destroyed—as Asefi brought the figures back to life with the precision of a surgeon.’
As Asefi repeated his ‘magic trick’ over the next few months, he declared that he washed the pictures ‘in public so that people could see that their culture and history had survived’. Sometimes he took up his sponge for politicians and diplomats, sometimes for television and print journalists who typically presented each performance as if it were unprecedented. Eventually, when National Geographic wanted to film him but there were no pictures to restore, Asefi overpainted a picture, then immediately wiped off this paint. As his reputation grew, Voice of America credited him with having ‘single-handedly saved all that remains of the National Gallery’s collection’. In 2012, when the five-yearly Documenta exhibition in Kassel focused for the first time on Afghanistan, prompted by Alighiero Boetti’s Mappe, it departed from its usual preoccupation with the avant-garde and included one of Asefi’s ‘pleasantly derivative’ paintings because of his reputation for ‘cultural resistance’.
Mark Landler of the New York Times was unusual in questioning what Asefi had done. At the start of 2002 he reported that Asefi often marred the original brushwork in removing his overpainting and, far from trying to save the work of other artists, had only protected pictures that he had painted. The many reports presenting Asefi as the sole saviour of works in the gallery also came into question when curator Miragha Hashemi claimed responsibility. Hashemi maintained that, after the Taliban destroyed four hundred paintings, he hit on ‘the idea to disguise the remaining works, painting over the oil pieces with watercolour images of nature—mountains, lakes and trees that did not offend the Taliban’s sensitivities’. In almost identical terms to those used by Asefi, he told westerners what they wanted to hear. ‘I had a small opportunity and I used it. I was not afraid. Whether they caught us or not, I had to do this,’ Hashemi declared. ‘You must understand, a painting is like a child to an artist, so he must care for it like a son. Some of these paintings are more than a hundred years old. If they were lost, there would be nothing left of those who had died.’
According to the gallery’s website: ‘When the Taliban were nearing victory in the takeover of the city, the Director of the National Gallery realised that many of the paintings would be destroyed because they showed human or animal figures…He therefore called together a group of artists who painted over the animals and people with landscape scenes in around thirty of the paintings. Other works were hidden. Consequently, of the 820 paintings in this care at the time, only fifty per cent were destroyed.’ If this account is correct, Asefi may have defied the Taliban only in relation to pictures in the Foreign Ministry, or perhaps not at all.
Many other Afghans breached the Taliban’s prohibition on images of living creatures. In 1999 the South China Post reported that two hundred photographic studios in Kabul remained open. Because of the low price of identity photographs, the studios had to be doing ‘something more’. While some photographers operated photocopiers, which the Taliban allowed, others sold cameras and film to their fellow Afghans, then developed the film even when it depicted people. They also took portraits of ordinary Afghans, sometimes in family groups, often for weddings. In Kandahar and Kabul if not other cities, they satisfied the Taliban’s appetite for portraits. While some of these photographs may have been a product of hypocrisy, as members of the Taliban commissioned for themselves what they denied to others, many were probably a mark of dissent from prohibitions imposed by their leaders.
Several of the Taliban’s photographers worked with colour film. Others used black-and-white, then hand-coloured the images to ‘beautify’ the sitters, often creating blue or green backgrounds with orange or red halos around the heads. Just as members of the mujahideen had been photographed in the late 1980s with mirrors in hand, combing their hair and putting on kohl or sumra—a kind of graphite commonly used as eyeliner—members of the Taliban appeared in some portraits with kohl-rimmed eyes. Some held hands, a customary expression of friendship. Others held walkie-talkies or more often guns, sometimes real but usually plastic. A vase of flowers was the standard prop. The painted backdrops included a mural of a Swiss chalet, echoing Afghanistan’s promotion in the 1930s as the ‘Switzerland of Asia’.
Khalid Hadi, who took the only early portrait of Mullah Omar after he lost his right eye, was among a small group of photographers employed by the Taliban. He not only photographed hospitals, highways and gardens for Taliban magazines, but also became a frontline photographer, witnessing the Taliban’s failed assault on Mazar-e Sharif in 1997 and their conquest of it in 1998. When an Indian Airlines flight from Kathmandu to Delhi was hijacked in 1999 and eventually landed in Kandahar, Hadi photographed the plane. But as the Taliban often failed to pay their employees, Hadi received no salary for months. The religious police also smashed his equipment, despite his official status and his identity card to prove it. In 2000 he fled to the United States with a cache of photographs including his portrait of Mullah Omar.
Yet the Taliban also wanted the world to see certain aspects of their rule even if that involved images of people. In March 1995, the Taliban invited foreign journalists to the southern city of Lashkargar to record the amputation of the right hands and left feet of three thieves. An Associated Press photograph, published widely in Pakistan, showed one of the amputees using his remaining hand to hold up his severed hand and leg, both wrapped in white bandages. In February 1996, the Taliban invited Reuters and Associated Press to a double execution in the eastern city of Khost, resulting in photographs of the men about to be shot, then dead on the ground. When the New York Times carried one on its front page—a prominence never accorded photographs of mujahideen executions in the 1980s—the paper identified Afghanistan as entering ‘a brutal new age’ due to the Taliban’s ‘harsh interpetation’ of the Qur’an. That March, Peter Jouvenal filmed another execution in Kandahar—a blindfolded man sitting by a tree waiting, the executioner being handed a Kalashnikov and then firing at close range.
Foreign photographers and film crews generally had little difficulty securing visas. They applied at the Afghan embassy in Islamabad, paid a small fee and were allowed entry on condition that they ‘follow the Taliban interpretation of Sharia law, not photograph human subjects, not talk to women, and not interview Afghans in their homes’. At the border at Torkham, they found a new English-language sign: ‘The Sacrifice People Heartily Welcome You with Pleases.’ In Kabul, they had to hire drivers and interpreters who served as minders. They had to stay at the Intercontinental, which the Taliban gradually repaired for foreign visitors. By 2001, it boasted one of Kabul’s few internet cafes, several rooms with satellite television and was sometimes largely full. One journalist considered it good value at $65 a night; another thought it a slum.
American Robert Nickelsberg was one of many western photographers who sought to escape the Taliban’s proscriptions by offering bribes to their minders. When Nickelsberg’s minder refused, he sometimes pre-focused his camera, put it under his arm, covered it with a shawl and hit the shutter while being driven, though the resulting photographs were usually unusable. Nickelsberg also found that, if he tried to photograph on the street, passers-by sometimes voiced their support for the Taliban’s rules. ‘It’s prohibited. How dare you!’ they might yell. Another American photographer, Ed Grazda, experienced
similar vigilance. A young man who saw Grazda’s equipment said, ‘Camera, don’t.’
The few female photographers who visited typically did so with male journalists. One was British photographer Harriet Logan, who had worked in Sudan, Somalia, Angola and Mozambique. When the Sunday Times magazine offered her its first feature on Afghan women since Eve Arnold’s ‘Seven Veils of Islam’ in 1970, Logan had no idea what to expect. ‘I didn’t even realise that photography was illegal,’ she later admitted. On arriving with journalist Stephen Gray for a six-day stint in Kabul in late 1997, she invoked the common pretence of wanting to document ‘war damage’. The particular form, which she did not disclose, was damage to women.
While Taliban minders accompanied Gray each day, Logan enjoyed unusual freedom because the Taliban let her find her own female escort, provided by a western aid group, who took her to meet Afghan women in their homes. Most of her images published by the Sunday Times early in 1998 were of these women, including one applying lipstick. ‘A small way of us objecting to the Taliban,’ the woman told Logan. But the Times thought an image of the veiled had more impact, and would better fit its title, ‘The War on Women’. Its cover shot—taken ‘through a bullet hole in a now-derelict cinema’—showed two chadari-clad women on a street of ruins.
The French edition of Elle went further when it produced a special issue about Afghanistan in April 2001, just before Latifa, Homa and Diba reached Paris. The cover image was of a woman in a chadari with a child. Inside were eighteen pages on ‘The Martyrdom of Afghan Women’ including a double-page spread titled ‘The Tragic Regression in the Status of Women’, which depended on a pictorial contrast between old and new, inverting that of the 1960s, where the chadari was old and western dress was new. Elle’s old image was Laurence Brun’s 1972 photograph of the three young miniskirted women walking confidently in the Shahr-e Naw. Its image for 2001—taken, in fact, by Harriet Logan in 1997—showed two women in chadaris at particular risk not from the Taliban but landmines. The wall behind the women was emblazoned in Dari and English: ‘Stop Crimes against Human Kind. Ban Land Mines.’
Some of the Taliban wanted to allow more images. Early in 1997 an official maintained that the Taliban were ‘not against modern inventions such as television’ and would resume broadcasting films and programs ‘not violative of Islamic principles’. In case television restarted, the Taliban left Kabul’s studios intact for future use. They also did little to enforce their ban on satellite dishes, so some Kabulis continued to watch foreign television channels, facilitated by the Taliban’s restoration of electricity. Many more watched videos smuggled in from Pakistan. But illicit viewers could still be in jeopardy. According to Latifa, the Taliban’s religious police battered to death a boy they caught watching a video in 1997. In 1998, after giving owners a fortnight to ‘remove’ their sets, prompting many to hide them, the Taliban made a show of a rare attempt at systematic enforcement, throwing televisions from high buildings to smash on the streets below. But there were more sets than Taliban officials could locate. They were also unable to stop traffickers bringing in more videos from Pakistan.
The limits of their attempt to control images of the living were also manifest in the work of Zaheeruddin Abdullah, a Pakistani journalist with Associated Press who reported on the suppression of televisions on a visit to Kabul in 1998. In one photograph, taken within the relative privacy of a shop, Abdullah showed a vendor with two of the televisions he had for sale. In another, he recorded satellite dishes that the Taliban had seized and put on public show above a police station, a group of children and a woman in a chadari passing by, and a policeman looking at Abdullah—and doing nothing to stop his photography.
Indian movies remained most popular, fuelling a vogue for Bollywood hairstyles and an appetite for Bollywood songs. But James Cameron’s Titanic, a hit in late 2000, generated a welter of unauthorised product including Titanic cosmetics, clothes, rice, vegetables, thongs, mammoth wedding cakes and high-heeled shoes. ‘Leonardo’ haircuts with a long fringe, prone to flop over the forehead, named after the Titanic’s star, Leonardo di Caprio, also came into fashion, flouting Taliban proscriptions. A contemporary joke had a mullah warn his congregation: ‘I know you are listening to music, you’re hiring video players, you’re watching films. You should be careful. You’re all going to be damned and drowned just like the people in the Titanic film!’
The Taliban would not let Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf work in Afghanistan, so he shot Kandahar just across the border in Iran. The cast was all amateur, as with most of Makhmalbaf’s films; to a significant extent the actors played themselves. They included Nelofar Pazira who had fled with her family via Peshawar to Canada where she became a journalist. When Makhmalbaf learned how Pazira had tried to return to Afghanistan in search of a suicidical friend, he cast her as an Afghan-Canadian journalist attempting to rescue her sister from Kandahar.
Pazira recognised that the chadari offered Afghan women ‘a sense of immunity, however false, in a land…in need of peace and security’. Makhmalbaf found, when he tried to recruit refugee women as extras, payment in cash did not interest them. Some would have participated in return for a chadari—part of the longstanding appetite for them among rural women—but, because he regarded chadaris as a key instrument of the subjugation of Afghan women, Makhmalbaf would not provide them. When Kandahar premiered at Cannes in May 2001, Makhmalbaf railed at the world’s lack of concern for ‘the 10 million women prisoners under the chadari’.
Some critics found Kandahar ‘hauntingly poetic’ and ‘full of bizarre but highly effective imagery’. They were particularly struck by a scene in which a Red Cross helicopter flies over a refugee camp, drops artificial legs by parachute, and an army of one-legged landmine victims race on their crutches to collect the prosthetics. These critics lauded Kandahar as ‘a model of social engagement’ that ‘made a passionate plea for the plight of Afghanistan’s victims’. Other critics found Kandahar heavy handed, likening Pazira’s narration to ‘a semi-poetic lecture on women’s rights abuses in Afghanistan’ and dismissing her dialogue as ‘flat and barely credible’. Unlike several of Makhmalbaf ’s films, Kandahar failed to become part of the international art-house circuit. It screened only occasionally at film festivals. When first shown in North America in early September 2001 at a Toronto festival, it was inanely renamed The Sun behind the Moon because Kandahar meant nothing to most Canadians.
CHAPTER 25
Protectors and Breakers of Idols
Archaeological sites were more vulnerable than ever when the Taliban began taking control of Afghanistan. Warlords looted sites using tractors and bulldozers. Sometimes they fought over the finds. Sometimes they laid landmines to keep out their rivals. In 1997 and then again in 1999, the Taliban proscribed all digging and prohibited the export of archaeological material. When a vast site was discovered at Kharwar south of Kabul, the Taliban laid even more mines to protect it. The Taliban also appointed a warden to guard a big reclining female Buddha outside Ghazni and seized hundreds of objects being smuggled out of Afghanistan.
Robert Kluijver, a curator who worked from 1998 on a program funded by the Dutch government to survey and preserve archaeological sites, lauded this part of the Taliban’s rule as ‘a welcome respite after years of nightmare’ for ‘lovers of Afghan cultural heritage’. But this respite was never more than partial. In 1998 Mullah Omar authorised digging in the central province of Ghor as long as a quarter of the finds went to the Taliban. Where the Taliban maintained their prohibitions, Kluijver found ‘illegal excavations in full swing, sometimes quite openly’ in 2000. When he visited dealers in Peshawar in early 2001, they had masses of Afghan material.
The Taliban’s attempt to conquer Bamiyan put its giant Buddhas in jeopardy. After the Hazaras, who controlled Bamiyan in 1996, placed an anti-aircraft gun on the peak above the bigger Buddha, a Taliban bomb fell ten metres from it. Hazara fighters also turned the ceremonial cave under the Buddha’s feet i
nto an arms depot, but emptied it at the request of SPACH, the Society for the Protection of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage. A Hazara spokesman identified the Buddhas as ‘sacred’ to his fellows, endowing the Hazara with ‘cultural significance which make us distinct from amongst the nations of the world’. Local residents viewed the Buddhas as ancestral figures.
‘These statues are not Islamic and we should destroy them,’ a Taliban commander declared in 1997. The Taliban’s Supreme Court disagreed, because there was ‘no worship’ of the Buddhas. ‘We preserve all sorts of historical relics, from all eras, as long as there is no contradiction between Islam and what we have inherited from the past,’ the court pronounced. But when they took Bamiyan in 1998, Taliban fighters blew off the head of the smaller Buddha, punched a hole in its groin and damaged its left sleeve. They also placed tyres on the chin of the bigger Buddha and burned them, blackening the Buddha’s head. Then they began fixing explosives but were prevented from detonating them by Mullah Omar who declared in 1999 that the Buddhas deserved ‘serious respect’ and would be protected.
The Buddhas’ potential as a drawcard for international visitors influenced this decision. Eager to restart tourism, the Taliban made it easier for westerners to obtain visas. Although Afghanistan continued to be judged the ‘ultimate blackspot for travellers’, a few backpackers journeyed by bus across the Khyber Pass through Kandahar to Kabul and Bamiyan where they were barred from photographing but allowed access to the Buddhas for a small fee. ‘I feel perfectly safe. It’s fantastic,’ a Swiss traveller declared.
The Taliban also recognised the tourist potential of the National Museum. It was a shell in 1996, its roof punctured by rockets, display cabinets broken, and galleries littered with rubble, weapons and filth left by the mujahideen. Deputy Culture Minister Hotak, whom SPACH found ‘cordial and pragmatic’, was pivotal to its partial restoration. After receiving small grants from UNESCO and the Dutch government, Hotak announced in July 1998 that the museum would reopen with some Buddhist sculptures on show and allowed museum staff and SPACH to continue their inventory of what survived. In August 2000, as part of the annual independence celebrations, the museum briefly opened with photographers from international news agencies and a Taliban film crew present. After speeches, ribbon-cutting and the reading of an academic paper, twenty-four objects were displayed including Buddhist pieces, which the museum’s Taliban president accepted as ‘part of our history’ and hence deserving of exhibition. ‘Everything which happens in the country becomes part of the country and the government is obliged to preserve it,’ he declared.
