31 August 2011 Last updated at 05:58 GMT
A car bomb has exploded in the south-western Pakistani city of Quetta, killing at least five people.
The bomb exploded in a parking lot as hundreds of people were leaving a mosque after Eid prayers, a senior police official said.
Police said the car with the bomb was parked at the site by an unidentified man. Nearly a dozen people are injured.
Pakistan is celebrating the festival of Eid which comes at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.
News source,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-14727621
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Monday, August 29, 2011
Bonds of hope and hardship
Ben Doherty and Kate Geraghty
August 20, 2011
Fearful ... Mohammad Akbar Sohrabi, fourth from left, with members of his extended family in their rented home where he remains largely in hiding. Photo: Kate Geraghty
A decade after their disastrous voyage, the Tampa asylum seekers sent back to Afghanistan are still on the run. Story by Ben Doherty. Photos by Kate Geraghty.
Sarwar had been home a week when they came for him. After more than two years away from Afghanistan - on leaky boats and in refugee camps, seeking a new country to call home - he returned to his village in Ghazni province.
"He was at his home for one week when some men, some Taliban, came on motorbikes. They took him from his house and they killed him. They dragged him outside and choked him to death with barbed wire.
"His wife and children saw him killed. They fled. I don't know where they are now," Mohammad Akbar Sohrabi says.
Sohrabi carries a photo of Sarwar. It's mixed up among the meagre possessions he has from his time overseas, alongside a flimsy passport with an incorrect birth date and a Nauru stamp in it.
The shopkeeper and the metalworker were firm friends at Topside, the Australian-run refugee camp on Nauru. The photograph shows them in happy times, seated, making preparations for one of the occasional parties the detainees held. Then, they believed they would be resettled in Australia.
Eventually though, pressured to return to Afghanistan, they flew home together, "but we faced the same problems, the same people, waiting for us".
It was Sohrabi who warned his friend not to go home, that his village wasn't safe. "But he went, and he died. He was innocent, he was a very decent man. God willing," Sohrabi says, "I am still alive."
But he remains in hiding.
Over the course of the seemingly endless warring of his Afghan lifetime, Sohrabi has lost three family members to insurgent attacks. He lives in fear he will be next.
He rarely leaves his home, except to work, and worries for his children who run serious risks simply by walking to school every day.
IN THE eyes of the Taliban, the sins of Rauf* are legion.
He is Hazara, an ethnicity regarded as un-Afghan, barely human, by the Pashtun militants. He is a Christian, an abomination in Islamic fundamentalist eyes, and a left-wing political activist. But his greatest crime, perhaps, was teaching girls to read.
Rauf can no longer live in Afghanistan and is in hiding in a South Asian country. His family cannot contact him and the friends who once sheltered him have told him it is no longer safe for him to stay.
Sitting in a secure room in a foreign city far from his homeland, Rauf remains wary; he faces the door as we speak and asks that the curtains be closed.
He describes an isolation that has enveloped his entire existence: "I see only one friend. Always, always I am very lonely."
After being returned to Afghanistan from Nauru in 2003, he moved back to his village in the Jaghori Valley in the central province of Ghazni.
The schools there had been ruined, the buildings robbed of books and stationery, the teachers chased out of town.
Rauf had taught English to other asylum seekers in detention on Nauru so, using what little money his family could gather, and funds from international donors, he set up literacy centres in some of the poorest communities in Afghanistan.
In one village in Uruzgan, where not a single woman or girl could read, he started teaching girls in a tent-cum-school. "On the third day, the Taliban attacked," he says, his voice faltering.
"It was just becoming dark, they had come there by motorbikes … [and] everything they took, the stationery, the books, they burned the tents. They destroyed everything."
Other schools survived longer. From one centre in Qarabagh, 34 women were able to graduate a basic literacy course.
But last year, he was kidnapped, bundled into a car, blindfolded and beaten for five days before he was released, threatened that unless he paid off his captors they would come back and kill him.
Since then, he has been on the run, moving between houses, between cities and countries.
"I cannot return. They will come for me again, and they can do anything. No one can stop [them]. They will kill me."
A decade after his first attempt to reach Australia failed, Rauf is trying again. Now recognised by the UNHCR as a refugee, he is in the process of applying for a protection visa, having been denied one last year.
"I want to go legally. To Australia I hope, but anywhere, and I hope soon, because I cannot live like this."
SARWAR and Rauf were just two of the 433 asylum seekers, mostly ethnic Hazara from Afghanistan, who boarded the undersized and ill-prepared Palapa in Jakarta on August 23, 2001.
Barely 24 hours later, the engine failed and the stricken boat began to take on water before those on board were picked up by the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa and carried to Australian waters. So began a dramatic chain of events that would eventually see 179 of the asylum seekers sent back to Afghanistan. (See story, page 6.)
A decade on from the Tampa, the Herald has spent six months tracking Tampa returnees who had been sent back to Afghanistan from Nauru.
The group, bound together by two years in detention on the remote and isolated island of Nauru, has become a splintered diaspora.
Few keep in contact. Few can. Rumours of what has happened to others sweep across the scattered group through chance meetings and common contacts.
Many Tampa returnees have simply disappeared: walked to work one day and never come back. Others have fled again, to Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, on to Europe or back to Australia. Some - it has been reported as many as 20 - have been killed by the Taliban in their homes and villages. And some have died trying to escape again.
There is no archetype of a Tampa returnee's story. But common threads run through many. Financial hardship, near ruin, is one.
While some Tampa asylum seekers were poor, seeking economic opportunity as well as safety, many on board were people of means. Several whom the Herald met were business owners in the days before the Taliban.
They sold everything they owned - businesses, stock, homes and cars - to finance their shot at getting to Australia. And despite Afghanistan's shaky wartime economy, some have since managed to rebuild lives of relative prosperity. But most now eke out an existence on Afghanistan's crowded margins.
Mohammad Zahir Rasouli sold his farmland, his house and his partnership in a car to finance his trip to Australia. Still it wasn't enough for the people smugglers, so he borrowed heavily. A decade later, he is mired in debt.
"After all these years, I haven't paid them back. They are friends, so they never ask, but I am still in debt and I can't pay it back," Rasouli says.
He now works as a shop assistant in a grocery store, trying to feed his own family - his wife and three sons - as well as two nephews, the children of his brother who was killed by the Taliban.
"I work here as a shop assistant and I can only earn [enough to] take care of the food. What I earn, that much we eat."
Separation from family is another recurring theme.
Shir Ahmad Ahmadi's eldest child was kidnapped when the family's political enemies came to his house looking for him. He paid a large bribe to have his 19-year-old son released and then told him to flee. He does not expect ever to see him again.
"I said to him: 'you must run now … don't come back, because you know what happens to people here'."
Mohammad Naim Akbari's wife and seven children live in his home village in Jaghori.
He sends them money when he can, from wherever he is, occasionally as close as a couple of hundred kilometres.
"I have seen my family only twice in the last five years. They are in my home, but I cannot go to my village, it is not safe for me there. The Taliban will kill me.
"I personally think I have been in hell, not on earth, but I was forced to. What can I do?"
Finally, the element that appears common to almost all the Tampa returnees' stories - wherever the past decade has taken them - is the fear they are not yet safe.
They have lost family members, seen fellow asylum seekers killed. They have been kidnapped, beaten and robbed, been frozen out of jobs and reduced to begging. They have faced death threats and had their homes razed.
The salient story of Mohammad Hussain Mirzaee, told time and again to the Herald across south and central Asia, seems to haunt many of the returnees.
In 2008, Mirzaee, a Tampa returnee and a former anti-Taliban fighter, was caught by insurgents and dragged to his home village. There, in front of 35 members of his family, he was beaten and thrown down a well.
His tormentors threw a hand grenade down after him, decapitating him.
Naim Akbari was his friend.
"We all worry, because who is next? This is the ending story of all of us."
*Not his real name.
Source Article,
http://www.smh.com.au/national/bonds-of-hope-and-hardship-20110819-1j2ct.html
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Interview with Phil Grabsky, Director of The Boy Mir: Ten Years in Afghanistan
Author: Rickflix — Published: Aug 27, 2011 at 9:51 pm
I recently had the opportunity to interview Phil Grabsky, director of The Boy Mir: Ten Years in Afghanistan, a new feature-length documentary that offers an unusually intimate portrait of a young boy growing up in the remote reaches of Afghanistan over the last decade. From eight to about eighteen, we watch Mir's life unfold with his family, as they struggle to survive, distant but impacted by the battle's for Afghanistan's future. This is actually Grabsky's second feature film about Mir. The award-winning "The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan" (2004), followed Mir and his family during a single year as they struggled to survive in the aftermath of Taliban rule, living in the shadow of what had been the tallest sculptures in the world - the Buddhas of Bamiyan - which the Taliban had destroyed to international outrage in 2001.
A large part of the appeal of both films is Mir himself - an intelligent, charismatic boy facing daily hardships that force him to often interrupt his schooling to work in the fields to help sustain his family. As he grows into a teenager, his hopes dreams, humor - and even his material wishes (a bike, a motorcycle, a cell phone) will seem familiar to kids and adults the world over.
Grabsky, based in Brighton, U.K., remembers the very event that triggered both Mir films. On July 2nd, 2002, a U.S. aircraft accidentally fired on an Afghan wedding, perhaps reacting to perceving celebratory gunfire as a threat. The attack killed and wounded dozens - and haunted Grabsky, "I thought to myself, alright, step back from that. Imagine your own wedding day, my wedding day, out of the blue sky - they don't even see this plane - out of the blue sky, one minute everyone's dancing and happy, and the next minute people are literally in bits."
"I thought, who are the Afghans? They can't all be terrorists, they can't all be mute women behind burkhas. And I was just interested, and I thought I'lll just go and find out myself."
Though well traveled, Grabsky had never been to Afghanistan and didn't speak the language - yet he wanted to tell a personal story. A filmmaker with over twenty-five years of experience, he began with a guiding principle.
"I think as a filmmaker," he explains, "there comes a point when you do everything you can to get into a position where you're engineering yourself to be lucky."
In an unfamiliar - and sometimes dangerous place like Afghanistan, his first task was to find a local fixer, "but they're more than that - they're journalists, they're security advisors - your Afghan right hand man. That's absolutely key, and that was an important entrée into society. He was the one that talked to everybody. He was the one who put my questions in a way that they would understand and respond to. He organized my food, my security and my transport."
Grabsky's greatest responsibility, then - and something he feels many documentary filmmakers often "get wrong" - was to show respect. "You are not a big deal. You mustn't think that because you have the camera and you're from England, you're from the West - somehow these are "little people" and they should be grateful that you turned up. " Grabsky's subjects had been through war - they had lost relatives, and seen others tortured. They lived traumatized lives. He found that most adults by that time were exhausted and depressed - but their children - like most children - still had hope.
Still, the challenge of creating an honest film required establishing a level of trust with his subjects - and a recognition of Grabsky's own impact on his surroundings. "I think that the minute you pull out a camera you are intervening, and actually it's much more realistic to think to yourself, 'How do I manage the intervention?'"
As a camera at a demonstration might encourage some to say or do something they wouldn't do otherwise, Grabsky was acutely aware of his own intervention in Mir's life. Much of his time with the family wasn't spent filming, but talking with Mir, his family and others - building trust and getting to know his subjects - off camera.
It helped that Grabsky's crew was small - generally only himself and his Afghan colleague - and a small, unimposing camera (beginning with Sony's legendary PD-150), a couple of radio microphones, and an on-board directional microphone. There were times when his colleague, who also developed a high level of trust with the family, would shoot in situations where Grabsky's presence wasn't possible or preferable. As a result, The Boy Mir includes rare insights into the relationship between MIr's parents and Afghan family dynamics, and fascinating glimpses into common misconceptions of the western world.
Perhaps Phil Grabksy's most important consideration was Mir himself. Intervening in an adult's life was one thing - intervening in a child's life was an even greater consideration.
Early in the project, at the close of his second trip to Afghanistan, Grabsky asked Mir if there was anything he would like to have. Mir responded, "A cuddly toy." Only then did Grabsky realize that MIr had never had a cuddly toy. During the rule of the Taliban, human and animal representations of any kind - even children's toys - were banned. Returning home to England, Grabsky shared the story with his young daughter, who had a menagerie of cuddly toys. She chose one in particular - an Applalachian brown bear (an artifact of another Grabsky film about Dolly Parton's "Dollywood" theme park). When Grabsky returned to Afghanistan, he brought the cuddly toy to Mir, and "he was overjoyed when I gave it to him, to the extent that I had to say, you know what, you've got to hide that," to preserve the perceived authenticity of the film, "but he couldn't, because he loved it so much."
The greatest appeal of The Boy Mir is the director's clear respect for his subject - and it's a respect that extends far beyond the on-camera portrait and gifts of toys and clothes. It continues to this day.
After conferring with colleagues and Afghan aid experts, Grabsky decided to provide modest compensation for the family throughout the filming. While there are some documentarians might consider the practice unethical - and might consider it disruptive, Grabsky believed that "ultimately, it was the right thing to do."
He decided to provide compensation equal to three months wages, but carefully avoided a level of compensation that could encourage dependency. He also showed respect to those in Mir's village - providing funding to fix the roof of Mir's school, for example - but making it clear it was at the request of the family - and not his own decision.
Grabsky also created a trust fund for Mir, contributing to it through the years as he children's own account. As an adult, Mir will soon have access to some of the funds - which could allow him to rise out of the abject poverty of his youth to further his education if he wishes, or even go into business for himself (For more information on Mir's fund and the film, check out theboymir.com).
Though the culture and situation may be alien to most westerners, coming of age and family themes are universal. Audiences connect with Mir, perhaps, because they see themselves.
The Boy Mir: Ten Years in Afghanistan, though, is about a real person - his fate now forever altered by a filmmaker who told his story - and respected his life.
Source,
http://blogcritics.org/video/article/interview-with-phil-grabsky-director-of/page-3/
Female leader shows her courage
DR HABIBA SARABI: "My thanks to the government and the people of New Zealand for sending their sons and daughters to Bamiyan."
In an exclusive interview from Bamiyan, Afghanistan, Fairfax National Affairs editor Vernon Small talks to the province's female governor Dr Habiba Sarabi.
Habiba Sarabi is possibly the bravest person in war-torn Afghanistan.
As the leader of Bamiyan province, and as a personal appointment of President Hamid Karzai, the governor is an obvious target for the Taliban.
Bamiyan was one of the first provinces where security was handed over to local control, with transition from the New Zealand-led Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) formally taking place in July.
That would be enough to put the governor in the insurgents' crosshairs, without taking into account Sarabi's role as a leader of the Shia minority Hazaran community, the bitter enemies of the Sunni Taliban.
The insurgents have lately switched their focus to high-profile targets such as the British Council office in Kabul, where Kiwi SAS corporal Doug Grant was killed this month.
Two weeks ago, 22 were killed and 34 injured in a suicide bomb attack on the governor's offices in the nearby province of Parwan, though the governor escaped.
On top of all that, Sarabi is the first and only woman to be appointed governor of a province in Afghanistan.
During their rule the Taliban indulged in a form of "gender apartheid", banning education for girls beyond the age of eight and preventing many women from working.
Sarabi, now 55, fled with her children to Peshawar in Pakistan to avoid the Taliban repression, but returned in secret to visit her husband, who stayed on in Kabul.
Now, sitting in her office in Bamiyan with an armed police guard outside, she is philosophical about the risks she is taking.
"If the man or male governor can be a target, I also can be a target, and more than a man because I am the only woman and so it can be a good reason for the Taliban to target me. And of course it can be a credit for them. So, we believe [in] God and God save us."
In the relative peace of Bamiyan, where even the appearance of a Pashtun Sunni contractor is reported by locals to the police as a possible Taliban, there is little risk.
"Whenever I am in Bamiyan I feel secure, but after Bamiyan, no," Sarabi says, her voice tailing off.
The road to Kabul to the east is dangerous and the province is feeling increasingly under siege from more violent neighbouring provinces.
Even in the north east of Bamiyan, where the New Zealand Defence Force has stepped up its presence with two patrols of light armoured vehicles (LAVs), the security situation is fragile. Insurgents infiltrating across the border from neighbouring Baghlan province are blamed for roadside bomb attacks on the Kiwi forces, including the one that killed Lieutenant Tim O'Donnell last year.
Sarabi is looking forward to 2014, when the Kiwi forces are due to leave, and believes that with more modern equipment and heavy weapons – and some extra training – the local forces will cope.
She is also pressing for a quick reaction force for the province and for an army contingent to be posted to the north-east when the Kiwis pull out of the "problematic area" around the Do Abe village. At the moment there is no Afghan army presence in the province.
But she does not see an end to Kiwi involvement when the troops pull out.
"We cannot say it can be at the end. It depends on the whole situation in 2014. They can work more with our police, train them and be back-up as a supporter."
In the meantime, she believes the transition process is going well, and wants to convey her personal thanks directly to New Zealand for its assistance, including aid worth $10 million a year.
"My thanks to the government and the people of New Zealand for sending their sons and daughters to Bamiyan. I fully appreciate it and I want to thank all New Zealanders for that great support."
She credits the Kiwis' success to their cultural tolerance and multi-ethnic background. New Zealand's development assistance includes $7m this year to seal the airport runway, to help attract tourists, tractors for mainly subsistence farmers and a new generator to light the bazaar. At the moment storekeepers fire up individual generators when shoppers arrive.
PRT director Richard Prendergast says there are opportunities for New Zealand to ramp up its assistance and Bamiyan is ready for full transition in the wake of the July ceremony attended by prominent and charismatic politician Dr Ashraf Ghani.
"Ninety percent of the province is now secure, the Afghan national police are undertaking a lot of patrols themselves, there is real potential for improvements in governance and development."
Sarabi is also keen for help with agricultural and livestock production. "We need some expertise to guide the farmers; how they can work better and get more products, not only for agriculture but for animal husbandry."
In the meantime she is using her position as a prominent female to promote women's rights in the male-dominated society. In Bamiyan, 44% of the 130,000 school pupils are female. There was one female police officer in 2005 when she arrived, now there are 20. She also gave her personal protection to the first woman to open a store in the bazaar.
The scale of her achievement comes into focus later at a dinner to celebrate the promotion to general of the province's police chief – a recognition of the peaceful transition to local control. Among a who's who of Bamiyan society, including police, military leaders, judges and religious leaders, she is at the head of the table ... the only woman in the room.
- Sunday Star Times
Friday, August 26, 2011
For Shia Hazaras, it’s Funeral After Funeral
By Zofeen Ebrahim
Another funeral procession of a Hazara killed in an attack.
Credit:Altaf Hussain Safdari/IPS.
KARACHI, Aug 26, 2011 (IPS) - Rukhsana Ahmed finds comfort visiting her husband Ahmed Ali Najfi’s grave. "I feel at peace there," says the 60-year-old widow, mother of four and member of the Shia Hazara community.
What disturbs her moments of peace is the increasing number of fresh graves of the Hazaras in Quetta, capital of Balochistan province, where some 550,000 members of the minority community are concentrated.
"It was September of 2009. My husband was going to his factory when he was ambushed by five armed, masked men who sprayed him with bullets and then fled," recalled the widow, speaking with IPS over phone from Quetta.
The killers of 63-year-old Najfi were apprehended. They belonged to the banned Sunni militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). "The killer admitted publicly that he killed my husband because he was a Shia," said Rukhsana. "He even flashed a victory sign!"
Shias of all ethnicities account for about 20 percent of Pakistan’s 160 million, Sunni-majority population.
The LeJ, which has strong ties with the Al-Qaeda and Tehrik e-Taliban Pakistan, is a sworn enemy of the Shia sect and considers its members to be apostates.
The LeJ has a declared agenda of ridding Pakistan of all Shias who include the 966,000 Hazaras, descendents of Mongols who were part of Genghis Khan’s armies.
Eliminating Pakistan’s Hazaras follows a pattern in which they were persecuted in neighbouring Afghanistan under Taliban rule from 1995 until 2001, when they were ousted by invading U.S. and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) forces.
The Hazaras of Pakistan fled Afghanistan some 120 years ago when they faced an earlier round of persecution from the dominant Sunni Pashtun tribes. In Pakistan, they were well received and rose to hold important positions in the government.
Today, however, the Hazaras are being persecuted in Pakistan because of their ethnicity and their history of conflict with Sunnis.
"The same game played over a century ago to force Hazaras out of Afghanistan is being replayed. Religion is used as a tool to persecute them," says Irfan Ali of the Human Rights Commission on Social Justice and Peace in Quetta.
"We are easily distinguished because of our (Mongol) features and physical attributes," says Abdul Khaliq, a prominent Hazara politician and leader of the Hazara Democratic Party (HDP).
Hazaras also speak Persian, rather than Balochi, Pashto or Urdu, Pakistan’s national language.
Anti-Shia violence reached a high in July. On Jul. 10, two people were killed and 11 injured when armed men ambushed a bus carrying Shia pilgrims to Iran. On Jul. 30, 18 Shias, including a woman, were shot dead in Quetta. Eleven of the victims were Hazaras.
Earlier, on Jun. 16, Syed Abrar Hussain Shah, a Hazara boxer who represented Pakistan in the 1984 and 1988 Olympics, was shot dead in Quetta.
"We are attending one funeral after another and there is no stopping it," said Khaliq, whose predecessor as HDP chief, Hussain Ali Yusufi, was assassinated by the LeJ in 2008.
Over the years, says Rukhsana, the provincial general secretary of the women’s wing of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party, the cream of the community has been systematically eliminated. In the last 10 years, some 500 Hazaras have been killed in Balochistan and over 1,500 have suffered injuries.
"If you look at the list of those killed, you will find it includes doctors, engineers, teachers, students, politicians and even ordinary shopkeepers and vendors. Not a single person had any political affiliation," said Khaliq.
Three months ago, on May 18, Mohammad Ali, 45, a vegetable vendor, was going to the market in a pickup along with 12 others when masked gunmen opened fire on the van, killing seven. "My father was among the dead," said Asadullah, a cobbler and the eldest of Ali’s seven children.
Today an unlettered Asadullah, who earns a mere Pakistani rupees 200 (2.30 dollars) a day, feeds 11 mouths in his family.
"We are a liberal, open-minded and educated community, compared to the Baloch and Pashtuns," said Rukhsana. According to Amjad Hussain, a correspondent with Dawn News, a private television channel, young Hazaras do not see any future in Pakistan and are steadily migrating.
"Till a few years back, many were fleeing to Australia, via Indonesia. Of late, though, the interior ministry has directed the Indonesian embassy to stop issuing visas to Hazaras," he said.
Hussain believes that pro-Taliban lobbies (including Pakistan’s intelligence agencies that backed the Taliban initially) are penalising the Hazaras for colluding with the Northern Alliance and the U.S. army in Afghanistan.
It is also possible that members of the defeated Taliban who found refuge in Balochistan province, after fleeing Afghanistan, may be taking their revenge on the community.
The Shia and Hazara killings, and growing insecurity among Pakistan’s biggest minority sect, have failed to draw the attention of the state or media.
"Hazara killings do not make headlines because Balochistan is sandwiched between the big story of Baloch nationalism and the alleged Taliban presence in Balochistan," says Malik Siraj Akbar, a young Baloch journalist.
Akbar added: "Although the HDP has always stood behind Baloch and Pashtun nationalists during hard times, they have never condemned the persecution of Hazaras."
At the same time, said Akbar, the Islamic political party, the Jamiat Ulema Islam (JUI), an important partner in the coalition ruling Balochistan, has never condemned the killings of Hazaras or Shias.
Khaliq said his party has tried but failed to get Islamabad to act against the ethnic cleansing.
"All they come up with are hollow words of regret after each death. They can stop the killings instantly, if they want to do it. We cannot accept their words of comfort anymore," he said. (END)
Article Source,
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=104900
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