WORLD
Afghanistan: A Nascent Free Press Seizes the Moment (Carefully)
The rebirth of the Afghan media began, ironically, with a bomb packed into a news camera by two apparent al Qaeda operatives posing as journalists. On September 9, the bomb, quite possibly a precursor to the events of September 11, killed Ahmed Shah Massoud, the lion of Panjshir, who had fought against the Taliban militia since the mid-1990s.
The explosion, in the Northern Alliance stronghold of the Panjshir Valley, also badly injured Fahim Dashty, a distant relative of Massoud and the warlord’s designated propaganda filmmaker. His hands, arms, and legs badly burned and bloodied, Dashty was airlifted to Tajikistan and later flown to Paris for treatment.
From his hospital bed, he hooked up with a group of idealistic French yuppies who took it upon themselves to help Dashty and other Afghans relaunch Kabul Weekly, once a mouthpiece for Massoud and his mujahedeen faction, as an independent nonpartisan weekly. And despite coming of age in the lap of a warlord in a country torn apart by ideological and territorial strife, Dashty, the skinny, chain-smoking editor-in-chief of the weekly, decided to become a real journalist.
“The stuff I did in the past was definitely propaganda,” says Dashty. “In the past there was a necessity for propaganda. No one knew what the Taliban were doing to the people of Afghanistan. But now, without a doubt, I’ve learned the value of freedom of the press in Afghanistan.” And he’s not alone.
Dashty’s country now is a devastated land with a shaky government that desperately needs channels of communication to close wide geographic, cultural, and political divides. And if the unstable transitional government cobbled together in the recent Loya Jirga, the grand assembly of the elders held in mid-June, makes an independent, accessible press all the more pertinent, it also makes it more possible. Afghanistan’s media — particularly in and around Kabul — have flowered since the overthrow of the Taliban, flowered, in fact, as at no time in Afghanistan’s history. More than 100 new publications have launched, including about ten publications for women. The nation’s quickly hammered-out press law is filled with vagaries and loopholes, and Afghan journalists have gleefully taken advantage. “This is it,” says Dashty, pounding his fist on the table in his offices. “Right now is the only real period of freedom of press in Afghanistan.”
Of course, building anything in one of the poorest countries in the world is no easy task. Per capita income here is less than $500 a year. The phones don’t work between cities. Mobile and satellite phones have arrived, but they cost far more than most local media outlets can afford. Radio Solh (Peace), two hours north of the capital, has its Kabul correspondent file by handing his dispatches to a taxi driver. Fewer than one in three Afghans can read.
An even more complicated challenge is finding independent journalists in an environment where political positions are forged in spilled blood and the rhetoric of martyrdom. Massoud, who for all of his faults and blessings was a warlord who killed other Afghans, continues to haunt. His picture appears in the studio of Radio Solh, the only non-government radio station in the country, up in the Shomali Plain city of Jabolasaraj. It hangs in the offices of Kabul Weekly. A massive portrait of Massoud hangs at the new offices of Mihan, a biannual cultural magazine that recently moved its offices from exile in Iran back to a smart neighborhood in Kabul. “We want to be independent of Ahmed Shah Massoud,” says Ebrahim Kawesh, political editor of Radio Solh. But “it’s going to take a while.”
Massoud’s complicated legacy also has a positive side. Afghan journalists wave his photo as their American counterparts wave the First Amendment, and projects to which he had some connection — such as Radio Solh and the Kabul Weekly — enjoy something akin to immunity from official and semi-official attempts at intimidation and censorship.
Then there are the warlords. Hamid Karzai may be a committed democrat who lived in the United States and understands the value of a free press, but the former mujahedeen commandants who control all but the area around Kabul do not. They all have the blood of innocents on their hands, and don’t take kindly to independent journalists who might try to dredge up past misdeeds or flesh out current exploits.
Afghanistan’s nascent press is prodded on by foreign NGOs like Aina, a nonprofit group, funded partly by UNESCO with the goal of helping media flourish. Some of its employees — mostly French business school graduates — are refugees from the Internet bubble, and it’s probably no coincidence that Aina operates much like a dot-com incubator: would-be publishers submit proposals to the organization, which might grant them a little cash, a little space to work, and a lot of moral support.
In Aina’s ramshackle smoke-filled complex, in front of the foreign ministry compound, are the offices of Kabul Weekly and Malalai, a women’s magazine supported by the French Marie Claire. A recent issue included an interview with the “only parachutist woman in Afghanistan” and an article titled “Women’s Rights Trampled,” grazing the touchy subject of men’s fears about women’s liberation. Another women’s magazine, Roz, is supported by the French Elle.
In the same complex is the office of Zanbil-e-Gham, a biting, satirical monthly that was the brainchild of Osman Akram, a jolly middle-aged former engineer who was fearless enough to publish fifteen underground editions of his scathing, illustrated ’zine during the Taliban years.
Akram and others are in a mad rush to expand the boundaries of the permissible before a clampdown begins. They don’t take today’s relative press freedoms for granted. Maybe more than any other people in the world, Afghans know the clock can go backwards, and many have followed events in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where an independent press was brutally crushed by the clerical government in the late 1990s.
The sprint to expand freedom began just hours after the first reports that the Taliban had fled Kabul in November. Back then, a group of broadcasters and Northern Alliance mujahedeen roused Jamila Mujahed from her sleep and asked Afghanistan’s best-known female newscaster if she’d be willing to be the first female voice on Kabul’s airwaves since the Taliban’s five-year reign of terror began. She didn’t hesitate. In her slippers, chaos and gunslingers still ruling the streets, she was hurried to the studios. All the transmitters had been destroyed in the U.S. bombing campaign, so the broadcasters dragged an old ten-kilowatt transmitter out of the basement of the government-owned radio station. It couldn’t reach beyond a few miles outside Kabul, so Mujahed’s first words were as much for the history books as the few who could hear her: “Dear fellow citizens of Kabul, the Taliban have fled Kabul.”
Still, Mujahed, who is the editor-in-chief of Malalai as well
as a television newscaster, says she remains just as terrified
of some of the former warlords now running Afghanistan as she
was of the Taliban. “Many of the current leaders of Afghanistan
raped and killed women in the name of Islam,” she says.
Indeed, just after female voices began broadcasting over Radio Solh last October, one of the warlords denounced it as immoral, threatening to take matters into his own hands. After asking the women to get off the air for a couple days, Mohammad Fahim, Massoud’s successor, got the women back to work. But Rasoul Sayef, the warlord who started the crisis, remains a powerful member of Afghanistan’s judiciary.
Save for Radio Solh, all the broadcast outlets in Afghanistan are government-owned. (There is a dearth of proposals to create new outlets, despite the problem of illiteracy.) And almost all the major players in broadcast have ties to one political group or another.
One player who remains unconnected to the past wars is Barry Salaam, the responsible and mature twenty-three-year-old managing editor of Good Morning Afghanistan, an independently produced one-hour morning news show on government-owned Radio Afghanistan, which is broadcast in Dari and Pashto, the two main languages of the country. His fluency in both languages allows Salaam to edit scripts in either, in a country where the blood feud between the two ethno-linguistic groupings remains volatile.
The head of his family despite being the youngest of eight children, Salaam spent almost all of the Taliban years in Kabul, studying journalism and making the mundane daily newsletter of the International Committee of the Red Cross he edited the hottest read coming out of Afghanistan.
He is careful. Journalism in Afghanistan, even during this period of relative freedom, requires a steady hand. And a nervous control freak like Salaam may be the perfect person at the helm. “When you have editorial independence in a situation like this, you’re not supposed to do anything to undermine the peace process,” he says, his face so young you almost expect to see braces each time he opens his mouth. “You don’t have to use all of your freedom at once. We have to go gradually. We have to make people get used to us and the way we do the news. We’re very careful with our freedom.”
In a sense, his Good Morning Afghanistan is quite an ordinary news broadcast: current events, weather, traffic, and sports. And a touch of Salaam’s journalistic irreverence. “We had the minister of construction on the show, and grilled him about when they’re going to fix the potholes in the road,” he says in perfect English. “Two weeks later we had a reporter in the streets describing the work crews fixing the holes on the roads.
“I love that story."
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