|
|
*Book Excerpt from: White With Foam > December 13, 2001
Peshawar, Pakistan to the Afghan border refugee camps in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Tribal Belt
We drove northwest on the border (along the CNN red line on the TV map), and I made a few rural road shots along the way. Common camp street scenes of trucks driving past us overloaded with dozens of people (mostly men) standing and hanging off every conceivable space and every hand or foot hold --- the tires of the trucks about to rub their sunken undercarriages.
After awhile we crossed back over the border a short distance to a refugee school housed in buildings along a canal that brings Peshawar water from the Kabul River in the Afghan mountains. Just as we were driving up and parking at the school across the street from the canal, I looked through the windshield and coming straight at me was a Taliban loyalist from Afghanistan hauling a sack of belongings over his shoulder. I was astounded, --- --- --- but what did I expect being at that place, at this time? So I seized the moment, and working with the street elements at hand in the two seconds I had to respond, I composed a shot that would (if he continued walking toward me) squeeze him between a windshield wiper and a windshield sticker. To express my idea about how such a person must feel at this point in his desperate war; squeezed and under incredible pressure and strain. And when he walked into the composition, I captured that important historical streetphoto.
“Isn’t that a Taliban,” I asked everyone in the car as soon as I’d fired off the shot and as he passed by me about a foot from my car door, already knowing it was by the shape, color, and tie of his turban and by his general fierce and hyper-focused demeanor. And all three exclaimed “yes!” at once --- they too amazed and curious to see this man who we’ve all been hearing so much about the past week on our TV news reports. The Taliban fleeing away from Afghanistan --- defeated. The Taliban everyone was looking for, to capture or kill or re-educate. For going overboard with his conservative and suppressive extremist fervor and for shielding Osama bin Laden from his deserved September 11 justice.
I got out of the car, and I watched him trudge down the road toward Peshawar. Me standing there on the border street shaking my head at the wonderment of having gotten to a place like this at a time like this. To have watched and to have photographed a momentary encounter like that, another of the intrinsic dream shots I imagined could happen right in front of me while conceiving the possibilities of this streetphoto project in Kansas.
We entered the school (the Eagle Eye High School for Displaced Afghan Youth) and Shahid surprised me by asking me if I’d consider giving a short speech to the whole school (250 students plus two dozen faculty) and I asked, “About what?” And Shahid suggested that since the whole school was currently studying human rights, and that since I was an American, might I speak about that?
“Of course,” I blurted right out with a grin, always game for incredible last minute, once-in-a-lifetime challenges.
I didn’t want to say anything that might offend (or get me stoned to death) because I was told that I would be the first American that any of the nearly 275 men and boys had ever met in person. That responsibility alone was almost as enormous as was the responsibility not to offend as I gave my off-the-cuff address to nearly 275 people whose country was currently having the shit bombed out of it by my country. And then, at that moment, I inconveniently chose to recall that article I’d just read in the local newspaper last night about the British journalist from the Independent who’d been maimed and nearly stoned to death by Afghani refugees just a few days ago when his car broke down on the road between Quetta and Chaman.
I was a little bit intimidated as I climbed the stairwell to the roof, the only place large enough to hold a school assembly. But not so intimidated that I wasn’t bemused by a poster I noticed that was hung on the wall at the stairwell landing titled; “The 17 Steps to Human Rights.” The poster listed the 17 steps in order, and number one on the list was “religion.” Well --- I’m sorry --- but I’ve just seen too many horrible examples over the years across the world of religion being politicized (particularly in the context of this god-awful religious terror war) and used as a human rights wedge instead of a first step toward human rights. Christianity used as a motivation for battle (God is with us). And this bloody jihad-gone-amuck used as justification for evil.
I didn’t want to be stoned to death, but I just couldn’t let that one slide by. But instead of challenging religion (as that would make me no friends in this place at this time) I focused on what I thought was the first step toward building human rights.
A solid education.
A surprise Human Rights Speech by an American Global Street Artist
at an Afghanistan Refugee Camp High School (at the time of and in the vicinity of the battle of Tora Bora)
...
and interrupted by the roar of the war...
Human rights are the same all over the world. That’s why they call them human rights, not Afghani, Pakistani, or American rights. It’s human rights.
“Human rights are the rights that lead us to happiness and protect our happiness, and I believe that maintaining happiness is the equivalent of attaining genius.
“For me, happiness means to have the lifelong opportunity and freedom to travel and wander wherever I want to around the world. Pakistan was the 49th country I’d ever wandered to and photographed in my life, and now Afghanistan is the 50th.
“Being here to meet you at this moment makes me happy.
“And I believe that human rights and the happiness that subscribing and adhering to a code of human rights provides --- begins with education.
“Education is hard and ignorance is easy.
“Education leads in the end to an adherence of human rights which leads us to the genius of maintaining happiness. In short, education leads us to peace, security, and contentment which leads us to happiness --- while ignorance leads us to insecurity, poverty, and war -- which leads us to hopelessness and unhappiness -- -- --
-- -- -- then, seemingly on cue -- -- -- two American fighter jets ripped the sky (probably brought on by a satellite photo of so many men gathered in one place so close to the Tora Bora White Mountains), one of them doing a three-quarter barrel roll and a wing-wag directly over our heads -- -- -- which diverted my attention from my speech to the assembly. Although the sound of the roaring war jets shook the walls of the school and shut my speech down for about eight to ten seconds, when I looked back down to continue my talk, not one of the audience seemed to even notice the war above them that had stopped me in mid speech. As if it were normal -- -- or by now too typical to wonder about for them any more.
I continued:
Education is hard. But it leads us toward peace, which plants a seed to grow us toward the genius of happiness.
Ignorance is easy. But it leads us to war and unhappiness.
“Even now we can hear the roar of the warplanes overhead, and we can see the white streaks of their exhaust, and we can look straight up over our heads and watch all these war machines I helped pay for by paying my taxes heading to or returning from dropping bombs and missiles on your homeland, Afghanistan.
“Well, I’m here today to try to inspire you to become educated men and to make a lifetime commitment to preferring education over ignorance and peace over war. And I’m here to challenge you not to just educate yourselves, but to educate all those around you as well --- even the girls.”
(A smattering of giggles and a murmuring arose from the audience, and I continued...)
“Education is difficult.
“Ignorance is easy.
“And I challenge each of you to choose the difficult path of a lifetime of education. Because if you do decide to become an educated man, educated enough to become a happy genius -- and perhaps even wealthy enough -- you might one day chose to exercise your human right to travel as freely around the world as I do. And then you might even choose to travel to the United States of America to visit me and to stay with me in my house there in Kansas.
“And if you ever do end up knocking on my front door, then perhaps by that time my government and your government may have worked together well enough so that together we’ll be able to build a lasting peace. A peace so strong and stable all over the world that together we’ll be able to disable the warplanes of all nations forever because they’ll no longer be needed to assure human rights.
‘So you’re all invited over to my house in America, and if you travel there to see me, then maybe you and I can find those war jets that just flew over us and that bomber you can still hear rumbling right now,” (I pointed toward the sky with my index finger,) “and together we can chain them all down to their runways forever.
“Education is hard.
“Ignorance is easy.
“Choose the difficult but intelligent path toward education over the easy but counterproductive road to ignorance, and together we will distance ourselves from the unhappiness of war and poverty and embrace the values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness --- thereby achieving security, and along with security, the global human contentment of liberty and personal satisfaction.”
I
Think They Will Bomb All of Afghanistan to Bits
After the speech (which was translated into both Uzbeki and Pashtun dialects by two advanced students who knew English, and which was met by thunderous applause from the audience, embarrassing me) I was treated like a liberator rather than the observer I thought I was. And afterward, each of the nearly 275 men and young men insisted on standing on line to shake my hand. I even saw a few of the more enthusiastic students sneak back into line to shake my hand again, so I probably shook more than 300 hands altogether in the ten minutes following the speech.
It had been among the most astounding hours of my astounding life.
Later, on my way down the stairs and out the door, I noticed three faculty and about 25 students crowded around that “17 Steps to Human Rights” poster, examining it in light of what I’d just told them about education --- which it turned out was number two on their list.
Back out on the street at the car while we were leaving, I asked one young man (the one who’d acted as my Pashtun translator for the speech) what he thought about all the war jets overhead and what was happening up the road at Tora Bora and he answered with a grimace, “I think they will bomb all of Afghanistan to bits.”
On the way back out of the refugee camps I re-donned and tweaked my disguise for the authorities, and we went through the checkpoint (I just mostly starred ahead and occasionally nodded during question time from the uptight well-armed Pakistani Army soldiers), and afterward the four of us giggled for having put one over on the government.
It truly is easier to apologize than it is to ask permission, I quipped. And I had to figure that working around bureaucracy is pretty much the same in every culture (an international sport) because after I made that quip it took the three of them close to a minute to stop laughing. While I bitterly sat there recalling my Monday in Islamabad when I spent six hours asking permission. Almost a whole day getting my freaking permission slip stamped in my passport that I never even had to use once today hop scotching back and forth across the border. “However, perhaps I’d need it tomorrow,” I reasoned to myself, “if I get that chance to make that run over the Khyber Pass and up the Grand Trunk Road toward Jalalabad...”
As we were driving back into Peshawar from the camps I flipped through a copy of a Displaced Afghan Youth School Magazine I’d picked up at the school after the speech (put out by Shahid and his wife and called Babloo Bably), and on the title page it was written:
“No country can afford to not adopt, connect, and adjust to globalization.
“Can we afford being left behind?
“NOT AT ALL!
“So now we all must abide by the international laws and codes of human rights!”
|
|
