Sunday, December 11, 2011
(AFP) Death toll from Afghan holy day bombs reaches 80
KABUL — Afghanistan said Sunday the death toll from bombings targeting the Shiite Muslim holy day of Ashura, which raised fears the nation could face an eruption of sectarian violence, has climbed to 80....Continue Reading......
Sesame Street: Can it save Afghanistan?
Sesame Street brings its message of tolerance and hope to a war-torn nation.
KABUL, Afghanistan — The team that was crowded into a slightly down-at-heel office in central Kabul could not look more ordinary. There was Zubaid, a young man in a sweater with a knitted cap pulled low over his head, Ali, in a suit, tall with cropped hair; Ferishta, in a typical long black coat-dress and blue headscarf. They and the others in the room were a bit shy, smiling politely.
But put them in a sound studio and they are transformed: this is the uniquely talented crew that is now bringing the characters of Sesame Street to life for thousands, perhaps millions, of Afghan children.
Supported by a grant from the US Embassy in Kabul, the Kaboora production house has worked for the past 10 months to make Shahpar and Kachkool — Big Bird and Grover, to most — household names in Afghanistan.
The show premiered just one week ago, and has attracted a lot of attention in a country starved for some good news for a change.
According one Kabul parent, whose 3-year-old is a finicky eater, Sesame Street has already proved a boon.
“Once he saw the characters, our little Hamsa sat right down and ate his cereal,” laughed Inayat.
Others were similarly impressed.
“My 5-year-old nephew was stuck to the television until the end of the show,” said Fazel Oria, a Kabul resident. “I did not feel it was a foreign show at all.”
The style might take some getting used to, though.
“I did not think it was attractive,” said Huzzein Hazara, a Kabul resident who watched the show with his daughters. “While it was on my daughters were asking me to find Tom and Jerry.”
Tania Farzana, the Afghan-American executive producer of the show, is hoping that Sesame Street will do more than make children behave. She has set herself the mission of bringing a new vision to a generation that has known nothing but war.
More from GlobalPost: Spa Kabul: In search of respite in a war zone
“I was the luckiest child in the world,” said Farzana, who was born in Kabul in the 1970s, before leaving for the United States at the age of nine. “There was so much comfort and warmth, a sense of security. Children now cannot even imagine a Kabul like that.”
Coming back after close to 30 years was a shock.
“The first three months broke my heart,” she confessed. “Nothing was the way I remembered it.”
Farzana recalls a Kabul where her mother rode a bike to university, where women were free to do what they liked.
“My mother never even wore one of these,” she said, flicking at the white headscarf that covered her dark hair.
Through Sesame Street, Farzana wants to give children back a sense of wonder.
“I am hoping we can give them the right to use their imaginations,” she said. “This instills empathy, the ability to identify with others.”
This, in turn, could help to reduce some of the religious, ethnic, and regional divides that exist among Afghans.
The project is an ambitious one. While much of the footage is archival stock straight from New York, giving the Sesame Street Muppets their own Afghan identity has been a challenge.
“We interviewed over 600 applicants for 15 characters,” Farzana said. “The voices had to be dead-on. I wanted them to be perfect.”
It is not just a matter of translating the original dialogue into Dari or Pashto, she added. The language has to be pitched just right for the age group — three to seven — and, in addition, has to have the same number of syllables as the English text, so that the famous Sesame Street mouth flaps will match the new words.
“Our actors have become co-creators in making the dialogues work,” she said.
In addition to the familiar character pieces, though, Farzana is making 26 original films about Afghan life and society, to insert into the half-hour show.
These will cover topics as diverse as the first day of school and kite flying.
The first day of school will feature a little Hazara girl. The choice was not accidental.
“Many people call Hazaras, who are mainly Shia, ‘infidels,’” she said. “We wanted to show that this little girl’s mother blessed her with the Quran as she left the house, just as millions of mothers do every day. We want a Pashtun child in the south, a Tajik or Uzbek child in the north, to watch the film and say ‘that girl is just like me.’”
Farzana’s message is particularly important in the wake of a horrific attack on Shiites in Kabul on Dec. 6, as they marked their holy day of Ashura. More than50 people were killed, and many feared a new round of ethnic or sectarian violence in the country.
Sesame Street, or Bagch-e-Simsim, as it is called here, wants to put those fears to rest.
But as Afghan culture rubs up against Sesame Street rules, sparks begin to fly.
“We had some amazing footage of children flying kites on rooftops,” Farzana said. “This happens all over Afghanistan. But Sesame Street said we could not use it because it was against their safety rules.”
Sesame Street sets great store by teaching children how to protect themselves, and did not want young Afghans encouraged to take up such a dangerous activity.
The compromise: Farzana’s team added a graphic fence to the film.
More problematic is the season’s final show, in which Farzana wants to show a father taking his 6-year-old daughter to Friday prayer. But Sesame Street in New York, with its resolutely secular message, balked.
“I told them this is not about religion,” she said. “It is about community. In Afghanistan, social life revolves around the mosque; you go there to meet old friends and make new ones; you go to feel that you are never alone.”
She got a tentative go-ahead from New York, but then ran into trouble on the Afghan side.
“So many people did not want me to show a father taking his daughter to the mosque. ‘She’s a girl!’ they said. But I answered, ‘she’s a child!’”
The issue is still not resolved, but Farzana, a woman of prodigious energy and enthusiasm, vows that the segment will be shown.
“I will have a film on Friday prayer,” she said firmly.
In the meantime, she is content with the progress she is making. Her team, she points out, has forged strong bonds, overcoming all the obstacles that Afghanistan’s post-war society puts in their way.
“Look at these two,” she said, gesturing at Zubaid and Ali. “One is Pashtun, one is Kizlbash. One speaks Pashto, the other Dari. One is from the north, the other from the south. There is so much that divides them, but they are the best of friends. Yesterday they went horseback riding together.”
Asked if Bagch-e-Simsim had helped them to get past their surface differences, Zubaid answered with a wry smile.
“Yes,” he said. “When we were out there riding, it was Zubaid, Ali, Big Bird and Grover, all together.”
Kabul-based journalist Abdul Qayum Suroush contributed to this report.
Global Post
KABUL, Afghanistan — The team that was crowded into a slightly down-at-heel office in central Kabul could not look more ordinary. There was Zubaid, a young man in a sweater with a knitted cap pulled low over his head, Ali, in a suit, tall with cropped hair; Ferishta, in a typical long black coat-dress and blue headscarf. They and the others in the room were a bit shy, smiling politely.
But put them in a sound studio and they are transformed: this is the uniquely talented crew that is now bringing the characters of Sesame Street to life for thousands, perhaps millions, of Afghan children.
Supported by a grant from the US Embassy in Kabul, the Kaboora production house has worked for the past 10 months to make Shahpar and Kachkool — Big Bird and Grover, to most — household names in Afghanistan.
The show premiered just one week ago, and has attracted a lot of attention in a country starved for some good news for a change.
According one Kabul parent, whose 3-year-old is a finicky eater, Sesame Street has already proved a boon.
“Once he saw the characters, our little Hamsa sat right down and ate his cereal,” laughed Inayat.
Others were similarly impressed.
“My 5-year-old nephew was stuck to the television until the end of the show,” said Fazel Oria, a Kabul resident. “I did not feel it was a foreign show at all.”
The style might take some getting used to, though.
“I did not think it was attractive,” said Huzzein Hazara, a Kabul resident who watched the show with his daughters. “While it was on my daughters were asking me to find Tom and Jerry.”
Tania Farzana, the Afghan-American executive producer of the show, is hoping that Sesame Street will do more than make children behave. She has set herself the mission of bringing a new vision to a generation that has known nothing but war.
More from GlobalPost: Spa Kabul: In search of respite in a war zone
“I was the luckiest child in the world,” said Farzana, who was born in Kabul in the 1970s, before leaving for the United States at the age of nine. “There was so much comfort and warmth, a sense of security. Children now cannot even imagine a Kabul like that.”
Coming back after close to 30 years was a shock.
“The first three months broke my heart,” she confessed. “Nothing was the way I remembered it.”
Farzana recalls a Kabul where her mother rode a bike to university, where women were free to do what they liked.
“My mother never even wore one of these,” she said, flicking at the white headscarf that covered her dark hair.
Through Sesame Street, Farzana wants to give children back a sense of wonder.
“I am hoping we can give them the right to use their imaginations,” she said. “This instills empathy, the ability to identify with others.”
This, in turn, could help to reduce some of the religious, ethnic, and regional divides that exist among Afghans.
The project is an ambitious one. While much of the footage is archival stock straight from New York, giving the Sesame Street Muppets their own Afghan identity has been a challenge.
“We interviewed over 600 applicants for 15 characters,” Farzana said. “The voices had to be dead-on. I wanted them to be perfect.”
It is not just a matter of translating the original dialogue into Dari or Pashto, she added. The language has to be pitched just right for the age group — three to seven — and, in addition, has to have the same number of syllables as the English text, so that the famous Sesame Street mouth flaps will match the new words.
“Our actors have become co-creators in making the dialogues work,” she said.
In addition to the familiar character pieces, though, Farzana is making 26 original films about Afghan life and society, to insert into the half-hour show.
These will cover topics as diverse as the first day of school and kite flying.
The first day of school will feature a little Hazara girl. The choice was not accidental.
“Many people call Hazaras, who are mainly Shia, ‘infidels,’” she said. “We wanted to show that this little girl’s mother blessed her with the Quran as she left the house, just as millions of mothers do every day. We want a Pashtun child in the south, a Tajik or Uzbek child in the north, to watch the film and say ‘that girl is just like me.’”
Farzana’s message is particularly important in the wake of a horrific attack on Shiites in Kabul on Dec. 6, as they marked their holy day of Ashura. More than50 people were killed, and many feared a new round of ethnic or sectarian violence in the country.
Sesame Street, or Bagch-e-Simsim, as it is called here, wants to put those fears to rest.
But as Afghan culture rubs up against Sesame Street rules, sparks begin to fly.
“We had some amazing footage of children flying kites on rooftops,” Farzana said. “This happens all over Afghanistan. But Sesame Street said we could not use it because it was against their safety rules.”
Sesame Street sets great store by teaching children how to protect themselves, and did not want young Afghans encouraged to take up such a dangerous activity.
The compromise: Farzana’s team added a graphic fence to the film.
More problematic is the season’s final show, in which Farzana wants to show a father taking his 6-year-old daughter to Friday prayer. But Sesame Street in New York, with its resolutely secular message, balked.
“I told them this is not about religion,” she said. “It is about community. In Afghanistan, social life revolves around the mosque; you go there to meet old friends and make new ones; you go to feel that you are never alone.”
She got a tentative go-ahead from New York, but then ran into trouble on the Afghan side.
“So many people did not want me to show a father taking his daughter to the mosque. ‘She’s a girl!’ they said. But I answered, ‘she’s a child!’”
The issue is still not resolved, but Farzana, a woman of prodigious energy and enthusiasm, vows that the segment will be shown.
“I will have a film on Friday prayer,” she said firmly.
In the meantime, she is content with the progress she is making. Her team, she points out, has forged strong bonds, overcoming all the obstacles that Afghanistan’s post-war society puts in their way.
“Look at these two,” she said, gesturing at Zubaid and Ali. “One is Pashtun, one is Kizlbash. One speaks Pashto, the other Dari. One is from the north, the other from the south. There is so much that divides them, but they are the best of friends. Yesterday they went horseback riding together.”
Asked if Bagch-e-Simsim had helped them to get past their surface differences, Zubaid answered with a wry smile.
“Yes,” he said. “When we were out there riding, it was Zubaid, Ali, Big Bird and Grover, all together.”
Kabul-based journalist Abdul Qayum Suroush contributed to this report.
Global Post
Saturday, December 10, 2011
(BBC) New Afghan group claims shrine attack part of campaign
Tuesday's bombing of a Kabul shrine was part of a campaign to target Shia Muslims in Afghanistan, a man claiming to lead a new Afghan group says.
The man, who gave his name as Ali Sher-e-Khuda, told the BBC his group was inspired by Pakistan's Sunni militant Lashkar-e-Jhangvi organisation.
He said the group had not officially sanctioned the Kabul attack, but did not deny his men carried it out.
It has raised fears of a wave of new sectarian violence in Afghanistan.
Afghan officials say the attack was the work of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, but they have cast doubt there is a new Afghan group active in the country with formal links to it.
The killing of at least 71 Shia worshippers earlier this week was the first significant sectarian attack in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban.
Despite suffering years of violence, the country has not seen the attacks between Sunni and Shia Muslims that have been common in Pakistan and Iraq.
'Fighting discrimination'
Ali Sher-e-Khuda spoke to the BBC's Shoaib Hasan at a secret location in the Pakistani border province of Balochistan.
He said his group - which he called Lashkar-e-Jhangvi Afghanistan - is relatively new and operated on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghan border.
He said the organisation was made up of Afghans who are targeting Afghanistan's Shia minority.
I know all about Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. I am totally unaware of any Afghan affiliate. I personally doubt very much that there is such a thing”
Ryan Crocker
US ambassador to Afghanistan
"I was born in Nimroz and am of Afghan Pashtun origin," he said.
"[I] set up the organisation with other like-minded young men from Afghanistan. Most of them hail from the provinces around Bamiyan - especially Wardak and Ghazni provinces," he said.
Mr Sher-e-Khuda said Tuesday's bombing was about fighting discrimination by "Afghanistan's ruling Shia elite".
When challenged on the tactic of murdering dozens of innocent worshippers, the militant leader argued it was the only way to counter what he described as "criminal behaviour" by Shias - such as displaying Shia banners in Sunni areas.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai and others believe the attack was mounted by one the established militant groups based inside Pakistan.
"Our information and sources show that the Kabul attack was carried out by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi," Afghan intelligence agency spokesman Lutfullah Mashal said.
Our correspondent says Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is one of Pakistan's deadliest militant groups. As well as being blamed for the killing of thousands of Shias, it has also been linked to a string of high-profile attacks, including the 2002 murder of US reporter Daniel Pearl.
Afghan caution
Mr Mashal said that as far as the National Directorate of Security was concerned, there was no such group as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi Afghanistan.
He said the claim was a tactic by Pakistan's Lashkar-e-Jhangvi to create sectarian tensions as the shrine attack had failed in its goal "to create a rift between Sunnis and Shias" in Afghanistan.
The US ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, said it was not clear who carried out the attack.
"I served in Pakistan for three years, I know all about Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. I am totally unaware of any Afghan affiliate," he said. "I personally doubt very much that there is such a thing."
BBC
Danger in spread of sectarian conflict
The conflicts in Afghanistan and Syria have taken a turn for the worse, with developments that are likely to go far beyond those countries.
Today new Defence Secretary Philip Hammond delivers his first major speech - about how Britain intends to prepare its forces for security at home and abroad. Already there is talk of moving on from success in Libya to other hot spots....Continue Reading.......
Today new Defence Secretary Philip Hammond delivers his first major speech - about how Britain intends to prepare its forces for security at home and abroad. Already there is talk of moving on from success in Libya to other hot spots....Continue Reading.......
U.S. ambassador: Kabul attack won’t spawn sectarian violence in Afghanistan
KABUL — The U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan said Saturday that the United States has virtually no information about the motive or culprit behind a rare suicide bombing that killed scores of Shiite worshipers earlier in the week, but he asserted that it was unlikely to spawn sectarian violence.
Ambassador Ryan Crocker said he was skeptical of reports that a hard-line Pakistani militant group that has claimed it carried out Tuesday’s attack has a nascent Afghan offshoot. The prospect has worried Afghans, who fear it could change the dynamics of the Afghan war by exacerbating ethnic and sectarian tensions....Continue Reading...
Ambassador Ryan Crocker said he was skeptical of reports that a hard-line Pakistani militant group that has claimed it carried out Tuesday’s attack has a nascent Afghan offshoot. The prospect has worried Afghans, who fear it could change the dynamics of the Afghan war by exacerbating ethnic and sectarian tensions....Continue Reading...
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