by Sally Cooper
Sally Cooper grew up in Australia. After a career as a journalist and producer with ABC Radio in Sydney, she travelled to Africa, working on radio projects in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. In 2004 she joined the United Nations, training local journalists across Afghanistan.
A Burqa and a Hard Place
Three Years in the New Afghanistan
SALLY COOPER
First published 2008 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney
Copyright © Sally Cooper 2008
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Cooper, Sally, 1964–
A burqa and a hard place / Sally Cooper.
Sydney : Pan Macmillan Australia, 2008.
9781405038591 (pbk.)
Cooper, Sally, 1964–
Journalists–Australia–Biography.
Women journalists–Australia–Biography.
Women social workers–Afghanistan–Biography.
Humanitarian assistance–Afghanistan.
Afghanistan–Social life and customs.
070.4332092
Typeset in 12/15 pt Baskerville Classico by Post Pre-press Group
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
These electronic editions published in 2008 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
A Burqa and a Hard Place
Sally Cooper
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For Ismail, Mahmood, Faheem and Mirwais
Author’s Note
This book is a personal account of my time in Afghanistan from 2003 until 2006. It is as I remembered it and the opinions expressed are entirely my own. Names and some minor details of characters and organisations have been changed to protect their privacy. UN security terminology has also been changed in the interests of its ongoing operations in Afghanistan. There have been some slight adjustments in chronology for the purpose of the narrative.
Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author's Note
Introduction
1. In a Valley Far, Far Away …
2. Welcome to the Karwan Sara
3. Chicken Street
4. The Office
5. What Not to Wear
6. Fridays with Mohammed
7. Adventures with Jean-Luc
8. America, God Shed His Grace on Thee
9. Uniform November 43
10. Spring Cleaning
11. Star Reporter
12. A Change in Season
13. The Beauty Salon
14. Return to Bamyan
15. Bank it Like Bilal
16. The Kingdom of Ismail Khan
17. Reality Bites
18. Democracy 101
19. Autumn
20. Pale Rider
21. Fortress UN
22. Thinking Outside The Bubble
23. The Turkey Seller of Kabul
24. Moving to Mohammed
25. Going to the Dogs
26. Eid-e-Qurban
27. The Long Cold Winter
28. We Come in Pizza
29. Let the Games Begin
30. The Matriarch
31. Age Shall Not Weary Him
32. Ordinary Afghans
33. Bless this Burqa
34. It Ain’t What You Do, It’s the Way that You Do It
35. Farewell Karwan Sara
36. The Chez Ana
37. Life During Wartime – or Similar
38. Messing with Mercenaries
39. Maimana
40. Democracy or Bust
41. The Earth Moves
42. Free to a Good Home
43. And Man Shall Live Forever More
44. Seven Days of Solitude
45. Leaps and Bounds?
46. A Glass Half Full
47. Captive on the Carousel of Time
Do what you believe in, believe in what you do.
Introduction
‘Afghanistan? Why would you want to go there?’
It was usually a shriek rather than a question, accompanied by a look of horror and incredulity. More often than not, it came from friends whose idea of travel went no further than a beach or a shopping mall or, preferably, both.
My answer was always the same. Quite simply, taking a job in Afghanistan got me off the sofa. Sometimes, when I look back on those three years, I wonder if the whole adventure, or at least the beginning of it, was set in motion by my friend Hamish. It wasn’t, of course, but I had arrived at his farm at Rongai, in Kenya’s Rift Valley, in 2002, planning to stay for a weekend. Twelve months later, with the exception of a few minor excursions, I had pretty much colonised the sofa on his large verandah, and spent my days walking his dogs, drinking his gin and generally having what my Kenyan friends would call a ‘jolly good time’.
I had left Sydney for Africa in May 2000, tired of the daily slog at 2BL, the ABC’s radio station where I worked as a producer. There was no life-changing, road-to-Damascus moment, but one morning, halfway through a fairly uneventful shift, I leaned back in my seat in the studio control room and looked out the window. Beyond the thick, soundproof glass, the city of Sydney sparkled in its brilliant early autumn glory. I was on the cusp of my thirty-fifth birthday and I had what all my friends agreed was a ‘great job’ – but it wasn’t enough. Beyond the window was a life that seemed to be passing me by. Time waits for no man and, quite possibly, even fewer women. Six weeks later, I packed my bag and literally headed west.
My motivation in choosing Africa was a vague combination of wanting to do ‘something else’, do it overseas and make it ‘worthwhile’. Thirteen years in a Catholic school had instilled in me the importance of ‘giving back’ – although giving what had always been something of a mystery.
Through a combination of good fortune and even better timing, I ended up working on a number of radio projects in Uganda and, later, in Kenya. Africa is radio heaven. Its low literacy rates, lack of reliable electricity and longstanding tradition of passing information on by spoken word means radio is not only th
e most useful medium, it’s also the most valued. Africans love their radios and up-country evenings will invariably see village elders ‘walking’ their transistors while they take a sunset stroll. For a lifelong radio listener and career radio journalist, Africa was the final frontier. Unlike in the West, with its addiction to news-by-picture, here radio was king.
I’d initially viewed my stint on Hamish’s sofa as a short break from the daily grind of an African radio project but, twelve months later, it wasn’t doing much to pay the bills. More importantly, it wasn’t really satisfying my wanderlust. I’d like to be able to say that my choices thus far had been motivated by good intentions and grand plans, but in fact my life to that point had been ruled largely by a sports shoe slogan. ‘Just Do It’ had always seemed infinitely better than wondering what would happen if I didn’t.
I had, by now, probably enjoyed a little too much of the Kenyan good life to call myself an ‘aid worker’; the time had come to seek new horizons.
My journey to the Ghan, as I came to refer to it, began, as big things often do, with something small. In my case it was a short advertisement in one of the newsletters that periodically appeared in my email inbox. An American non-government organisation was looking for a short-term mentor for its trainee journalists at a group of radio stations it was establishing in Afghanistan.
Like most Westerners, I didn’t know much about Afghanistan. I knew vaguely where it was – in a sea of other ‘stans’ somewhere west of India, south of Russia and maybe near Iran. While 9/11 had raised Afghanistan’s profile in the eyes of the world, making it the epicentre of George W. Bush’s War on Terror, I hadn’t paid much attention to what had happened after the bombing stopped.
When I look back on that June of 2003, I realise how heady those days really were. I was sitting on Hamish’s verandah one Sunday morning when my phone rang.
‘Hello. It’s Mark East from Internews in Kabul. Are you still interested in coming over?’
‘Well … yes. What did you have in mind?’ I was more struck by the clarity of the Kenyan phone line than the fact that someone was calling me from Kabul.
‘We need someone as soon as possible. Er … can you come next week?’
At this point, most sane people would probably have baulked, perhaps even wondered if the call was a hoax. But as my life consisted of the sum total of the things I could fit into my backpack and, more importantly, as my bank account was teetering on the brink of oblivion, I didn’t see the harm in jumping on a plane and heading to Kabul. ‘Okay … How do I get there?’
‘There’s a UN flight that leaves from Dubai. I’ll email you the details. Oh – and do you mind wearing a headscarf?’
A few days earlier, in the absence of a decent hairdresser, Hamish had given me what was quite possibly the most awful haircut of my life. Banishment to the Ghan and a headscarf seemed like a very good idea.
In 2003, my preconceptions of what Afghanistan and Afghans should look like were based on television footage and magazine pictures showing a swarthy bearded man dressed in a shalwar kameez, the knee-length robe and loose-fitting trousers worn by just about every Afghan male, young and old. With a turban wrapped around his head and an AK-47 in his hand, he stood on a rocky outcrop amid an expanse of dusty, parched desert.
My first encounter with Afghanistan occurred at Dubai Airport. There was no gun, no dust and no desert, just a vast, heavily perfumed shopping mall full of scantily clad foreigners buying up duty-free cameras and laptops, whisky and sunglasses, cosmetics and Toblerone … people – like me – for whom the War on Terror was nothing more than an inconvenient frisk at a foreign airport.
My flight from Nairobi had arrived at the sprawling neon-lit building from where travellers go on to London, Paris and Sydney. To me, and thousands of other passengers, that appeared to be the extent of Dubai Airport, but the UN flight to Kabul left from ‘Terminal 2’. After wandering among the frenzied shoppers with no transfer desk in sight, I finally spotted a nondescript darkened doorway sandwiched between the lights of the duty-free stores. The sign above said ‘Transfer to Terminal 2’. The opaque sliding doors opened with a whoosh and I stepped into a brightly lit, cavernous room. In the far corner stood another throng of passengers, but these weren’t Europeans wielding Toblerone giftpacks. These passengers were the turbaned, bearded, swarthy men straight out of the pages of National Geographic. Each was dressed in a shalwar kameez but instead of brandishing AK-47s they were waving tickets at a bewildered Filipino desk clerk.
As I was soon to discover, one should never judge an Afghan by his cover. I edged my way forward. In the midst of the throng, arguing in a language I had never heard, one of the turbans turned towards me. His eyes were a vivid, piercing emerald I had never seen before, his beard added years to an unfathomable age. For a brief moment, our eyes locked and he smiled, not a broad grin but a shy acknowledgment of my presence. Like me, he was just trying to get to Kabul.
A few hours later, I found myself strapped into the window seat of the United Nations’ charter flight, heading out over the Persian Gulf. My turbaned fellow travellers had left on an earlier flight, an ancient Boeing 727 belonging to Ariana, the national airline of Afghanistan. As the UN plane banked and we headed north-east, I looked out the window at the endless miles of seemingly uninhabitable rocky desert below. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just taken the smallest of steps that would forever change the person that I was.
1
In a Valley Far, Far Away …
In the summer of 2003, the Ghan was a place of extraordinary hope and optimism. Afghans were looking for a new beginning, and the world was there to help. Security was good, the Taliban was believed to be long gone. Women were allowed out of their homes, and many had gone so far as to shed their burqas, though few had dispensed with their headscarves. Children were returning to school, even if ‘school’ was little more than a large grey canvas tent with a UNICEF logo stamped on the side.
When aid agencies first returned to the Ghan at the end of 2001, the country was pretty much at Year Zero. Twenty-three years of war had forced hundreds of thousands of Afghans to flee to all corners of the globe. Anyone with money or education or both had long gone; few had returned. Those who had remained were, like their dusty, barren country, shell-shocked in ways few Westerners could ever really understand. Professions were almost non-existent. Afghanistan had barely trained a doctor, an engineer, a teacher or a journalist for more than twenty years.
USAID, the donor arm of the US government, was funding the establishment of a string of radio stations. Radio was just as popular in the Ghan as it was in Africa but the handful of stations scattered about the country had more often than not served as the voice of the Taliban or the resident local warlord. The goal was to bring more radio and, with it, more information to more people. It was with this funding that Internews, the non-government organisation that had brought me to the Ghan, was building a planned fourteen stations across the country.
Most were being built in provincial centres and were to be staffed and run by the local community. I was to spend three months helping to train Afghanistan’s first generation of post-Taliban journalists in the rudiments of radio production, everything from how to hold a microphone to how to edit a program. In the absence of any workable media, at least in the Western sense, the term ‘journalist’ was something of a misnomer. Afghanistan’s first wave of post-Taliban ‘journalists’ were therefore the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker: ordinary people, mostly men, with ordinary jobs in what were, in Afghan terms, ordinary communities. They were to be the vanguard of Afghanistan’s new media.
In August 2003, three colleagues and I set off one morning for Bamyan in the country’s central highlands. I had spent the previous month and a half working in Kabul at Radio Nida (nida meaning ‘echo’), the first Internews station to go on air. None of the Nida trainees had worked in radio before and in the space of six short, crazy weeks we managed to get the stat
ion on air. The process had been both exhilarating and exhausting and I was looking forward to some respite in the provinces.
Bamyan is in the heart of what is known as Hazarajat, the lands of the Hazara people. My colleagues were all male: the driver, an Afghan engineer and Mark East, the head of the project and the man charged with the fostering the Ghan’s media renaissance. The drive, along the most decrepit of potholed roads, usually took eight hours, but after the necessary food stops and the requisite car breakdown, the town was in darkness when we rolled along its main street more than ten hours later.
We stayed the night at a small inn perched atop a hill on the edge of town. The building had no front door, was missing glass in most of its windows and, as far as I could tell, no-one had quite gotten around to building any bathrooms. I used the ‘staff bathroom’, a windowless shed with a bucket of water and a hole in the ground, at the end of a rocky path at the rear of the main building. The owner believed that hordes of post-war tourists were coming, though it seemed he wasn’t quite prepared for them yet.
The following morning, with ablutions out of the way, I walked out the main entrance of the inn and down the steps. Laid out in front of me was one of the most awe-inspiring views of my life: a vast green valley just beginning to come alive in the filtered light of the early morning sun. Tall trees followed the course of a small river as it wound its way through a patchwork of green fields. Dotted in between were the mud walled compounds of its farmers. Below me to my right was the town itself, little more than the main street snaking its way east until it met the river and a bridge to the world beyond. As breathtakingly beautiful as the valley below me were the surrounding hills. Vast streaks of sandy brown rock stretching in layers, each further and higher than the one in front, for as far as the eye could see, the brown becoming lighter as the hills became higher until they vanished into the distance.
