Helping Afghanistan with 'my voice and my face': 'we must never stop reminding the world about what is happening'.

"So you've been in Afghanistan? One doesn't hear much about it nowadays. How are things going there?" Often, when I return from some war-torn country--Angola, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Chechnya, Burundi--I am asked questions like these, but to answer satisfactorily is never easy. This in reality is not a problem, because the last thing the questioner wants is an analysis of the situation in distant countries, in whose conflicts and their consequences the media is no longer taking much interest. The degree of world attention is governed by the frequency with which the media keep us informed, and the more that is said the greater the interest, a chain effect that, alas, operates also in reverse.

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For example, Afghanistan--enclosed by inaccessible mountain ranges and geographically unidentifiable to most people--has been front-page news on and off for the last twenty years. We have all read about the Soviet invasion, the Mujahideen resistance, the Taliban, the destruction of the giant Buddhas and Osama bin Laden, but the information has been interlarded with long intervals of silence. In the immediate aftermath of 11 September. Afghanistan became once more "the place to be". A considerable army of media representatives, stationed in Pakistan to the south and Tajikistan to the north, was urgently trying to get to Kabul, at all costs. But on 1 May 2004, when I reached Kabul after a comfortable and tranquil flight from Dubai (United Arab Emirates) on board a United Nations plane, few members of the international press were still there. They had all moved on to the latest hot spots. There is, however, no lack of people. The city is in fact heaving with bigger than ever crowds. I had been warned that Kabul had changed beyond recognition, but I never expected a difference as great as this. Sitting in a tailback of cars, moving or rather inching forward chaotically, I watched people on dusty roads dodging between battered cars and muddy potholes. Their faces with proud sunburnt features were the same as ever, as were their grey, threadbare clothes--nearly all were men, hardly any women, a few blue burqas. No guns were visible, but there were plenty of new shops with windows displaying the same tourist paraphernalia found in Pakistani souks.

In May 2001, Kabul had 700,000 inhabitants; now, they tell me, there are more than 3.5 million, not counting the humanitarian operatives and soldiers of the peacekeeping forces, whose jeeps try to make headway between the clapped-out, noisy yellow taxis. Kabul is no longer under siege as it was the first time I arrived in March 1996. After waiting for a week at Peshawar, Pakistan, I had managed to get a seat on a small aircraft belonging to the Red Cross, but the prolonged daily bombing raids made it too dangerous to land in the city. We had to go to Bagram in the north, which was not an airport but a military airfield like so many others seen in wartime: a pockmarked control tower overlooking a bare-earth runway; two or three green Hercules parked beside it; the burnt-out shells of a few helicopters and planes; and the hope of a providential jeep to carry us on the three-hour journey to the city.

This was, however, a less fraught landing than the one I experienced a few months later--this time on the first plane to reach the city when it was no longer besieged, on 30 September 1996. The Taliban had taken Kabul three days before, which meant they were occupying three quarters of the country. Squatting besides the runway and nursing their Kalashnikovs, they glowered fiercely at us from under tattered black turbans as we emerged from the small jet. However, this worried us less than the sheet of white paper, a normal A4, pasted on one of the bullet-riddled walls of the airport, bearing the rudimentary sketch of a plane above the warning, "UN aircraft, don't fire on it".

During those days, Kabul was crawling with reporters from all over the world, and victory had made the Taliban euphoric to the point where they allowed themselves to be photographed driving their pickups along the desert roads. You could sense the feeling of relief among the people, the hope of change after so many years of deprivation and fratricidal warfare. There was change, but not for the better, because the effects of deprivation, armed conflicts and natural disaster such as the long drought were daily exacerbated by an oppressive government issuing senseless edicts.

In the West, there was a preoccupation with burqas and the treatment of women by the Taliban but, in fact, few people knew what was really going on. In September 2000, after many days of waiting in Pakistan and an endless car journey across the Khyber Pass, jolting over potholes as deep as craters on a road by now reduced to rubble, I managed to return to Kabul. But as far as I could see, not only the city but the whole of Afghanistan, apart from the Panjshir Valley to the north, was categorically and strictly off-limits to reporters and photographers. We travelled around the country for a month, but the Taliban refused to allow Riccardo Venturi, the photographer who was with me, to take a single picture. Until the very last day, when invited by the Governor to a meeting in Herat, the permit we had applied for so many times was finally granted; and yes, we could take photographs as long as the subjects were neither human nor animal!

The "humans", however, were there at the gates of that legendary city, once a paradise of poets and flower-filled gardens and now reduced to a state of collapse by the failure of the crops in the surrounding land. A throng of desperate people gathered in the shade of a few scraggy pine trees in a bare field opposite the Governor's residence; they were farm workers fleeing the fields, arriving at a rate of 500 to 1,000 a day. "We've been walking for weeks", one man said, raising imploring hands. "We've lost everything; our only food in the past days has been the skins of dead animals." The sight of these people was the welcome awaiting refugees returning from Iran ("voluntary", it was said euphemistically) after nearly a decade in exile. The expressions of horrified dismay, when they were disgorged into the Herat transit camp from the dusty lorries in which they had travelled crammed together like animals, were unforgettable. I was there then as a "Messenger of Peace".

"But what do you people do when you go off on these missions?", I am also often asked. First of all, I have to make it clear that instead of "you people", the "missions" more often than not involve only one traveller: me. And as to what "we do", it would be extremely difficult to describe in a few words the different situations and contexts. Occasional visitors, some very famous indeed and others little known, arrive full of good intentions but with empty hands. However well we have done our homework, the reality is always worse than we could possibly have imagined. It is impossible to witness the pain and suffering in the refugee camps, hospitals and villages razed to the ground, in the imploring expression in the eyes and the wasted bodies of children without being moved by an almost unbearable sense of impotence.

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"We'll tell the world", we say in the heat of the moment. "We'll shout it from the rooftops as soon as we return home. The world must know about the suffering of these people. We must help them--and soon." But once we have left the country, our voices are weak, and the tragedies unfolding on this planet are so many, as the world listens to us with indifference. At most (more embarrassingly still), it praises our "goodness of heart" in going to such places. Meanwhile, a whole army of anonymous workers in the field--operatives from the UN humanitarian agencies and non-governmental organizations--carry on its aid work and engage in an unequal daily battle to contain the tide of human catastrophe.

An Italian friend who has dedicated himself tirelessly to the rehabilitation of handicapped people in Afghanistan for over fourteen years told me: "I no longer ask what I can do for the world. I get on with my humble work and take each day as it comes." The number of handicapped there is enormous. The mines and unexploded ordnance left behind by more than twenty years of warfare litter the whole country. The Afghans call them "everlasting sentinels" and maintain "there is one of them for every one of us; sooner or later, we meet the one with our name on it". The statistics are shocking: each month 200 men, women and children--more than six a day--are either killed or seriously injured by these weapons. It may only be the result of a second's carelessness or sheer bad luck, but the consequences are endless. Even those who are lucky enough to receive immediate medical assistance are condemned to a painful future. Prostheses need to be constantly adjusted and replaced, rehabilitation is painful, to work a difficult task. Amputation for a young woman means losing all hope of marriage and children. In a country as poor as Afghanistan, a wife in generally good health is a necessity. There are even cases of young wives who on becoming amputees have been repudiated by their husbands.

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Mines are also responsible for hunger, because contaminated fields can no longer be cultivated, and over 65 per cent of livestock, vital to a rural economy, has been killed. For example, how many Kuchis--a peaceful nomadic people whose wandering feet never bring them anywhere near the main roads--have bled to death or died from gangrene resulting from a mine injury? How many refugees or evacuees are unable to return to their homes until they have been cleared of ordnance?

Accompanied by Dan Kelly, head of the UN Mine Action Centre in Afghanistan, I went to observe a mine-clearance operation in the Shomali Plains, the plateau north of Kabul that runs towards the Hindu Kush and the entrance to the Panjshir Valley. All that remains in this area, once so fertile that it was regarded as the breadbasket of Afghanistan, are barren fields and the skeletons of houses in ruined villages. Years of warfare, the terrible drought of 1999 and the fate of being at the epicentre of the definitive battle between the army of the Northern Alliance and the Taliban caused more than 2,000 desperate people to flee. Now that peace seems to have been restored, the Shomalis, after nearly three years camped in the squalor of the ex-Soviet compound in Kabul, have set out on the return journey to their homes. But the enemy is still hiding in the fields where they would venture at their peril, and in the ruins where the invisible but deadly booby traps could still be lurking.

Deminers are indeed in action. They kneel forward, advancing metre by metre, examining every clod, and battling with the unseen enemy so that one day the people to whom this land belongs can start rebuilding their lives. The team is camped in a field by a village where the houses appear to be almost all intact but no sign of life is visible. By contrast, a little further away is a cluster of tattered tents crowded with men and women who, according to Dan, were "camping here while waiting for their houses to be declared safe". The deminers work in silence, and the men in silence watch day after day from their vantage point beside the tents. The words of an expert in mine clearance come to mind: "When I go to bed at night and think of the few square metres we cleared during the day, and the fact that at least no one's life will be put in danger again ... well, I feel that my day has not been wasted."

Dan Kelly seldom enjoys a good night's sleep. I ask him if he dreams of exploding mines, and he smiles and says nothing, but I suspect that that is the case. The work he is responsible for is immense and discouraging. Afghanistan has over 750 square kilometres of suspected mined lands and an estimated additional 450 sq. km. with unexploded ordnance, making it the most contaminated country in the world. He calls his team of workers "my men", who together with those in the mine-clearing agencies partnering with the United Nations are, to my mind, the true bricklayers of the so-called "peace-building" initiative.

At the end of a visit, we who are designated Messengers of Peace or Goodwill Ambassadors leave with our hands still empty and our hearts aching. But perhaps it is not quite in vain. Shocked by the first appalling pictures of the famine in Somalia in the summer of 1992, I asked my great friend Audrey Hepburn what could I do, and she answered: "I've asked myself the same question so many times, but realized that I was no longer young enough nor did I have the professional skills to help in the field. So I thought that as I was still a little known, maybe my voice and my face could be of service", she added with her innate modesty. "Each one of us has something to give. If you can write, then write. The most important thing is to raise awareness. We must never stop reminding the world about what is happening." Audrey is no longer with us; she died four months after her visit to Somalia, but her example, as someone said at her funeral, will be an inspiration to anyone wishing to devote themselves to humanitarian aid. Besides her courage, faith and great humanity, she also bequeathed to me those words that lift my spirits when I feel close to despair.

The moment of my departure from Kabul has arrived, though, unfortunately, two days earlier than scheduled. Leaving Afghanistan, a country in which I am a foreigner yet where without any logical reason I almost feel more at home than in my native land, always saddens me. I feel that I have seen, understood and done little.

Dan Kelly and his team, who have been with us throughout our journey, see us off at the airport. They all say: "Come back soon. The need here is so great, and the world, despite all the promises, is forgetting about us." This is both an invitation and an obligation. I will return to Afghanistan.

Anna Cataldi was appointed United Nations Messenger of Peace in 1998. She is an author, journalist and human rights activist, involved for more than a decade in human rights activities in war-affected countries and is a committed advocate on behalf of children affected by war.

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