Imagine an orchard where everything is covered in green grass. In the orchard there are several dozen fruit trees: apple, pomegranate, plum and apricot trees. There is a small stream flowing nearby in which you can find crabs and fish. You are sitting on the porch of your house; on the table there is a plate full of fruits: grapes, figs, plums, apricots and mulberry. From inside the house comes the smell of fresh bread and meal cooking. The sun is setting down and children can be heard laughing and playing at the stream.
Mit Afghanistan - Livet i den forbudte zone (“My Afghanistan – Life in the forbidden zone”
in Danish) is a documentary made by Nagieb Khaja. He went back to Afghanistan,
his home country, and handed mobile phones with cameras to several people. Over
the next months, these people would record their daily life, and at the end of
it the movie is made from their clips. We get to see how people in Afghanistan
live, inside the zone where is dangerous for outsiders to enter because there
is open conflict, Taliban country or risk of being kidnapped.
I will remember several characters from this movie, like the one who has
a lot of younger brothers and sisters, and how scared they are every time they
hear bombings and shootings nearby. He goes to school but the classroom looks
nothing like we expect. There is a man who is working at a hospital and he is
also a refugee, forced to leave his home because people are fighting in his
city, and he’s driving a 70 years old car. There is a farmer who’s also a widower,
and he is filming when somebody died in an accident or a bombing, as if he is
trying to convey us his fear that death might come upon his family also.
But I want to talk about three issues that have come into my mind from
watching this documentary: conflict, warfare technology and responsibility.
After the movie there was a debate and people from all over Denmark
could ask questions. One of the questions was: “Was there ever peace in Afghanistan?”
I have heard this rhetorical question before elsewhere, maybe it was about
Afghanistan or maybe about Palestine, but it is a loaded question nevertheless.
First, Afghan government did not order Afghan military to invade another
country, and historically the present territory of that country has been
invaded more times than that society has been an invading force. Secondly, the
Western governments’ politics towards Afghanistan have been of aggression, from
the United Kingdom to Soviet Russia and USA. The British Empire and the United
States has been and are, respectively, two of the most war-mongering and
rapacious for resources countries in the world. And because the rest of Europe
gravitates and benefits from English and American influence and because of our
history also, I don’t think it is ethical for European people to quickly judge
other people and see if they are capable of keeping peace or not. It’s like
nuclear powers denouncing nuclear arms-race, and unfortunately people who
believe that Afghanistan is a place where there has never been peace are
echoing an imperialist core belief in which the imperial power is needed to
maintain peace among warring lesser kingdoms. This has happened before with the
Roman Empire and is happening today again, when invasion forces are called peace corps.
But the most important thing is that whether there is war in a region is
irrelevant in a lot of aspects. It might be important for international
politics and economics, for history or tourism, but ultimately war is declared
by people in power but fought and felt by those who do not rule. Just because
there is war in a region doesn’t mean that the population from that region
wants the war (let alone provoke it), deserves it or got used to it. Human
nature is simple and complex at the same time, loving and grudge-bearing,
peaceful and warlike, and it really depends on perspective and purpose. You can
say about Afghans that are savage fanatics in constant conflict, or that they
are people who are constantly searching for peace. A certain region (in this
case, Afghanistan) can be torn apart by war for many generations, but this
doesn’t mean that war has been normalised there, that there can never be peace
there and that there is nothing we can do to end the war and bring peace again.
As I said earlier, wars are provoked by people with power who want more
power, and it is carried by the rest of the society. When we think about war we
usually picture small or large groups of male soldiers trying to kill each other.
This was the case for most of our history, men’s duty was to defend their
territory and deflect the attack perpetrated by other men, and the last 5.000
years have been the history of the arms race, of ever increasing military
technology, of groups of people trying to invent more sophisticated weaponry
with which to overthrow their enemies.
The truth is that the more (military) technology improves, the more it
affects non-combatant people and the lesser the chance of survival or equitable
fight. For most of our history we fought with sticks, stones, bows, spears and
bare hands. They made up to a very personal, man-to-man fight which was not
always ended in killing the opponent, and also the low level of military
specialization ensured that more non-combatant people like women or elders had
greater chances of survival in times of conflict. Weapons were quite easy to
manufacture, and learning to use them was not a very complicated matter. The
present times warfare technology is very complex and it is very hard for an
individual to survive an attack with tanks, fighter jets, sniper rifle or
weapons of mass destruction. These weapons are also commanded from high up the
social hierarchy, and this, together with the complexity and lethality of modern
weapons creates in the psyche of ordinary people a sense of powerlessness and
hopelessness in the face of social change. Modern military gives the feeling
that we are too small and weak to be able to react successfully in times of
war, and hence the philosophies proclaiming the subordination of man to destiny
and history, and the apathy and abandonment into consumerism and whatever is
mainstream that is so specific to the present society.
Military specialization – the simpler it is the more chances we have to
meet an opponent of equal power. I don’t think it is possible to return to
fighting with sticks and stones again, but we must think about the future we
step in, nonetheless. And the future is not looking good: drones and other
remote-controlled robots, super-soldiers whose capabilities will be enhanced by
smart drugs (and will also have their empathy numbed), 1984-like surveillance and God knows what else. We like to think
about people in white lab coats as very intelligent scientists who work every
day to build a better world, but maybe we’d better look at how much our
lives are actually better because of techno-fixes. The age of
inventions and garage-inventors is over, and has been over since Los Alamos. Science is made
nowadays by highly specialized teams of scientists and their research only
works with good funding and good marketing, and because of that they are highly
susceptible to corporate and political influence, and their interests are not
always the same with people’s hopes and expectations.
The garden that I have described in the beginning used to belong to one
of the people filmed in Mit Afghanistan.
He had to flee from his hometown somewhere else and he is a refugee now. He
recorded how his garden looked like before, and by the end of the movie we get
to see how it is now: no more fences and grass, the trees are cut, there is no
stream anymore, everything has been levelled down and bulldozed by the army.
I didn’t destroy that man’s garden. Ultimately I can say that I am not
responsible for his suffering. However, his life has been invaded by armies
from USA, which is the so-called flagship of Western civilization, and from my
country and the country I live in now. This makes me and everybody else from
Europe responsible for what is happening in Afghanistan, and because of the
global economy, everyone else in the world is indirectly involved and
responsible. I didn’t call for the war, and so is the majority of people from
Europe. We live however in a political system called “democracy” in which we
are taught that people rule a system through elected officials, and we, the
people, are choosing the acts of political actions, wars included. This means
that the people of Europe should be able to choose whether European armies can
stay in Afghanistan or not. It is time to say no to occupation and yes to
withdrawal. And if our voice is not heard, it is perhaps time to face the truth
that we cannot decide what governments do, and the idea that we live in a
democracy where the voice of the people is respected and feared is false, that
our political system is a myth and the more we choose to live by this myth the
worse it’ll get. Once we accept that, we may become responsible for our lives
again, and we may also become aware of the lives of people from other countries
which “our” governments and “our” corporations destroy every day.
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