25/08/2006
stampa
invia
Lashkargah, July 12th 2006. This morning, a little before dawn, the Taliban attacked the British base, just
as a demonstration: a few Kalashnikov rounds. Toward five AM, in the hospital
run by Emergency, Sardar died. He was brought in yesterday with his body torn
to pieces, with his wife and small son: they will live as amputees, but Sardar
has joined the other four people travelling in the same car, who died instantly
when it was struck by a missile.
“The British are better than the Americans, less arrogant and overbearing”, begins
an old man in the group. “But we don’t want them here either”, another retorts
immediately. And as if a valve had opened, the voices multiply and everyone speaks
at once: “They say they are here to bring security: bombings, attacks, dead and
wounded, is that security?”. An big man with a dark beard, who seems to have enough
authority to make the others fall silent, says, “You see the conditions we live
in?”, waving his arms to show everything around him, “the foreigners who want
to help us are welcome but there is no need to carry weapons to build roads, schools,
hospitals. We do not want armed foreigners. They say this is to keep the Taliban
from returning. We care nothing for the Taliban, we lived in misery when they
were here, just as we do now but it was safer, and they were Muslims like us and
they respected us, they respected our religion and our customs. It is the foreign
troops that keep the war in Afghanistan from ending.”
stampainvia
A renowned cartoonist travels in Afghanistan, where war seems never-ending
Written for PeaceReporter by
Vauro
Vauro
Lashkargah, July 12th 2006. This morning, a little before dawn, the Taliban attacked the British base, just
as a demonstration: a few Kalashnikov rounds. Toward five AM, in the hospital
run by Emergency, Sardar died. He was brought in yesterday with his body torn
to pieces, with his wife and small son: they will live as amputees, but Sardar
has joined the other four people travelling in the same car, who died instantly
when it was struck by a missile. The sky over Lashkargah today is a dirty opaque white, the city seems hazy in
the thick dust raised by the wind, the durhia, as they call it here. To reach
the bazaar area we pass the residence of the governor named by Karzai, or rather,
the bars and cement blocks that enclose and surround the entire area. “The few
times he goes out of the house,” says the driver with us, “troops block off the
neighboring streets too.” The governor of Lashkargah is little more than a prisoner.
A labyrinth of low mud dwellings, the ones that open onto the unpaved main road
have half-torn sheeting in front of the entrance holes, held up by tilting poles,
hanging here and there like the fly-coated pieces of meat and the other poor wares
shown in the shops.
Poverty robs this bazaar of any exotic charm. What is left is a seething group
of human figures, dark turbans, elderly men with their eyes darkened by kajal,
young men with black beards and long robes, crowds of children, shy and evasive
women in bourkas, brightly colored motor rickshaws like those seen in Pakistan,
overloaded donkeys and carts. Moneychangers and shoemakers who work with old tires
squat behind small benches. A lively scene that seems strangely quiet, as if the
dust, along with the colors, had dulled the sounds as well. The children approach
us first, but in a moment there is a small crowd of elderly people and youths
surrounding us. There is no enmity in their eyes, but curiosity and a perplexed
look: the only Westerners they have seen for a long time have been armed and closed
inside armed vehicles. We will see the same perplexed look, soon after, in the
eyes of the British soldiers looking at us from behind their machine-guns on an
armoured convoy that slowly moves across the main road.
“The British are better than the Americans, less arrogant and overbearing”, begins
an old man in the group. “But we don’t want them here either”, another retorts
immediately. And as if a valve had opened, the voices multiply and everyone speaks
at once: “They say they are here to bring security: bombings, attacks, dead and
wounded, is that security?”. An big man with a dark beard, who seems to have enough
authority to make the others fall silent, says, “You see the conditions we live
in?”, waving his arms to show everything around him, “the foreigners who want
to help us are welcome but there is no need to carry weapons to build roads, schools,
hospitals. We do not want armed foreigners. They say this is to keep the Taliban
from returning. We care nothing for the Taliban, we lived in misery when they
were here, just as we do now but it was safer, and they were Muslims like us and
they respected us, they respected our religion and our customs. It is the foreign
troops that keep the war in Afghanistan from ending.”Beyond the bridge on the Helmand river that runs through the city there is a
British military point: cement blocks, armoured vehicles and machine guns. A line
of bashed-up cars, rickshaws and small trucks has formed, also because a donkey
harnessed to a cart has stopped in the middle of the road and refuses to move,
in spite of the blows that his owner, a turbaned old man, gives him to try and
get him out of the way. Right behind the checkpoint, in a clearing, lie the rusty,
torn carcasses of old Soviet tanks. It almost seems as if history is trying to
send a warning signal, but the young British soldier with his blue eyes and red
hair showing under his helmet certainly isn’t paying attention.
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