As the Afghan people face further suffering and the big powers and international agencies debate how to deal with the new Taliban government, I am posting photos from my reporting assignements in the country in the first decade of the century, the captions are based on memory but I have done my best to avoid inaccuracy. I visited Mazar-e-Sharif in and interviewed Atta Muhammed Noor, a Tajik former warlord who had become governor of Balkh province and has now fled the country.
I reported from Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in , during the and presidential elections and the legislative election. So here goes:. For a small fee this boy burns incense span in a can and waves it around your head to chase away evil spirits. His father is dead, leaving his mother to look after several children, the fate of many women after decades of war. His income, collected on the streets and in the parks of Kabul, is essential to feed the whole family.
Thousands of far-right fanatics, many of them armed, gather in front of the seat of government, whipped-up by fake news and racist propaganda, convinced that the political elite is mired in corruption. They battle with the police, who open fire. At least 15 demonstrators and one police officer are killed and about 2, people are injured. One important far-right leader marches his troops away from the battle and the rest are forced to retreat.
Over the preceding weeks, there had been a series of right-wing demonstrations against corruption, fuelled by anti-Semitism and other forms of xenophobia, as well as another French right-wing hobby-horse, anti-freemasonry.
This all culminated in the 6 February demonstrations, during which thousands of far-right street-fighters assembled in various parts of Paris, a large number of them in front of the National Assembly. Many were carrying projectiles, fireworks or fire-arms, as well as ball-bearings to throw under the hooves police horses or poles with razor blades attached to cut their tendons. Unlike the US authorities, the French government pulled out the police in force. Then as now, nobody would accuse French cops of being woolly-minded liberals but, having already suffered the attentions of the right-wing militias on previous protests, they opened fire in response to explosions that may or may not have been shots, with the results noted above.
