Afghanistan: The Forgotten War & Britain’s Legacy

A day conference to support peace and justice for Afghans 

11th October 2014, Friends House 10am-4pm

Hosted and facilitated by Maya and Farzana

SPEAKERS

Andy Garrity – The Toxic Ramifications of War Project

On the 30^th of September 2104 the Afghan Government signed a bilateral security agreement with ISAF and the Status of Forces Agreement with NATO, which dictate the role of ISAF in Afghanistan beyond 2014.

The Toxic Remnants of War Project was launched to consider and quantify the detrimental impact of military activities and materials on the environment and human health. As part of this process, the project is also reviewing gaps in existing state obligations for reducing the humanitarian and environmental harm from military-origin toxics, and examining parallel systems of protection based on environmental and human rights law and peacetime regulatory frameworks.

Andy Garrity will describe the environmental footprints of ISAF and NATO including what they are leaving behind through the closure of bases and firing ranges, as well as the waste disposal practises that pose a serious threat to civilian health.

Chris Cole- Drone Wars UK

Chris Cole is a tireless investigative campaigner, he will be outlining the case against drones from his research into the use of British military drones in Afghanistan and the environment of official secrecy and obfuscation. Over the past couple of months we have witnessed drone strikes in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Palestine, Yemen, Egypt and Iraq – and its likely that Syria and Libya may soon join that list. Whether such strikes are being undertaken under the umbrella of a UN resolution or carefully-crafted secret memos, it’s becoming clearer that drones are indeed making it easier for our political leaders to opt to use lethal force rather than diplomatic or political solutions.

Afghanistan has been the testing ground for Britain’s growing drone arsenal bought from US and Israel. We will hear about the co-operation between these countries and the global significance of the use of drones by focusing on Afghanistan, the “drone capital” of the world.

Frank Ledwidge author of Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan War

Frank is a barrister and former British military officer, his book sent tidal waves as he pieces together the colossal human and financial cost of the war in Afghanistan for Afghans and British, and weighs up what it was all for. His devastating indictment of the utter, unanswerable folly of Britain’s military intervention in southern Afghanistan includes calculations such as: by 2020 the Afghan war will have cost British tax payers £40bn – enough to run 1,000 primary schools for 40 years or to recruit 1,000 nurses and pay for their entire careers.

Like many in Afghanistan, he wonders how successful we will be have been in leaving behind a better country than the one we entered in 2001.

With regard to the cost in lives, more British soldiers have died in Afghanistan than in any other counter-insurgency campaign overseas since the Boer war. Moreover there are hundreds of thousands of unnamed Afghan civilians caught up in the conflict. As Ledwidge points out, Britain makes no serious effort to count, let alone identify, the thousands of Pashtun people killed, maimed or displaced by the fighting.

Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan War has been described as “a masterpiece in miniature” by New Statesman.

Women from the Afghan Peace Volunteers in Kabul

The conference has been inspired by the Afghan Peace Volunteers who have a clear and independent analysis of what Afghans need and want for their country. Since forming in 2012 Voices for Creative Non-Violence UK has focused it work on supporting the Afghan Peace Volunteers grassroots activists who are based in Kabul. Our peace delegations involve staying with and learning from the group and their friends in the community. With the APV we have produced articles to reflecting the lives and perspectives of ordinary Afghans. This Skype connection will enable us to hear the inspiring women Afghan peace activists who have chosen to reject the status quo of violence and look for alternative solutions for their war torn country.

There will be an opportunity to address questions to the women who will speak about the impacts of war and what is needed for Afghan women to secure better rights.

Focused Sessions 

Building Afghan Peace

A workshop facilitated by Afghan community organiser Sabir Zazai who works with asylum seekers in Coventry. It is likely that Dari will be the main language spoken as the workshop will talk live with men and women in from the Afghan Peace Volunteers. They will make a case for the importance and value of international Afghan solidarity.

Sabir will also speak about his experiences and insights as an Afghan community organiser in the UK, the problems Afghans face here, the recent fallout following the Afghan elections and how we can work as a united movement to support the non-violence campaign in Afghanistan. The session will provide a foundation for future campaigning and perhaps start a coalition of activists wanting to work  on what can be done in the future.

Perspectives of Kabul Street Children

Photojournalist Guy Smallman will talk about the Street Angels Project which he worked on with Azim Fakri, a Kabul based artist who has long viewed the children working on the streets on his home city with a heavy heart. Doing menial and often dangerous work, the children are robbed of their childhoods and dignity by crushing poverty. Guy and Azim are working together to raise awareness about the plight of the children, not by telling their stories for them, but by empowering them to tell us themselves. Guy will talk about the pilot project they ran in Spring when they worked with five street children to teach them the basics of photography and issue them with disposable cameras. The result is an exhibition showing the underbelly of Kabul through the eyes of its street children. Their photography shines a light on the people living on the margins as well as showing off their own skill and ability to learn. The project has proved that street children possess just as much talent and potential as any other child regardless of their circumstances.

The Challenges for Afghan Women

When Britain backed war with Afghanistan in 2001 we heard from our politicians that the international community would not turn its back on the plight of Afghan women. Thirteen long and bloody years later we will hear from Afghan women about their lives today and the challenges they face. The workshop will include testimonies from Farzana and Yagana, two Afghan women who have recently made their way to the UK after fleeing for their lives from Afghanistan.

Participants will see the premier showing of “Afghanistan: A Difficult Birth”, a short documentary by Janey Moffatt who made the film while visiting Kabul last year on a VCNV delegation.  Her unique footage records the difficulties Afghan women face from childbirth, to equality.

Joining the Dots – Drones, Gaza and the War on Terror

With investigative journalist and campaigner Ewa Jasiewicz and VCNVUK’s Maya Evans, both of whom visited Kabul and the APV earlier this year.

Ewa and Maya aim to make the connections between all the factors which are making these wars possible, linking the common causes and drivers, and attempt to join the dots to link peace campaigners together in a combined effort.

They will explore how the arms industry is enriched by lucrative government contracts which is fuelling the wars on terror; how Britain’s drone arsenal was purchased from the Americans, how Britain uses Israeli drone technology and tests it on Afghanistan and how British drones will likely be used against Iraq and across the wider Middle East.

Ewa Jasiewicz spent 9 nine months in Iraq during 2003 and has visited Gaza and the West Bank several times. Both Ewa and Maya are very active in the anti-arms campaigners. In August this year they participated in a rooftop occupation the of UAV Engines Ltd which shut down the Israeli owned factory in the Midlands for 2 days.

WHAT NEXT?

At last year’s conference we launched the campaign action Fly Kites Not Drones, inspired from the testimonies of Afghan children who are too frightened to participate in kite flying because of the fear of drones which also favour the conditions of clear blue skies. The Fly Kites Not Drones actions at Afghan New Year on the 21st March this year saw international participation from the US to Australia, Kabul to Cerdigion and across the UK with over 30 peace groups getting together to make and fly kites in solidarity with Afghan peace makers. The concept is now being made into an education resource pack to be used in British schools.

We encourage everyone to Fly Kites Not Drones again in 2015 and make it an even more widespread event as we reclaim our skies for fun and not war.

This conference will also help form campaigning ideas and strategies for the future.

2015 is the year to unite with Afghanistan and reclaim the power.

Register now: vcnvuk@gmail.com

FOOD

Friends House has a marvellous cafe with soup, sandwiches, hot drinks and snacks available. There is also the yummy possibilities of Drummond Street (near Euston Train station) which has loads of Indian cafes and tasty snack shops.

Afghanistan 2014 – The Forgotten War: Britain’s Legacy

A day conference to support peace and justice for Afghans

Saturday, 11^th October, 2014 10:00am to 4:30pm 

 Friends House, 173 Euston Road,

London NW1 2BJ

The NATO/US war with Afghanistan is currently in its 13th year and no closer to bringing peace and justice for Afghans.

The war has however provided Britain with a testing ground for its growing armed drone fleet which will now likely be redeployed to the Middle East or Africa. It laid the foundations for the global war on terror and the justification to invade many other countries.

As the ‘global war on terror’, as it is characterised by Western powers, rolls on and expands to more and more countries we will not forget the people of Afghanistan and how the long war there has shaped global politics today.

The conference will foreground Afghans living in Kabul, and the UK, and their experiences of the present and expectations for the future as international forces withdraw from the country at the end of 2014 and the election of a unifying government for Afghanistan is mired in confusion and uncertainty. .

Women from the Afghan Peace Volunteers will speak with us from Kabul by live video link, and Sabir Zazai and Farzana will lead a workshop about the problems Afghans face in the UK and how they are overcoming them.

Key note speakers include Frank Ledwidge, author of Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan War and Chris Cole, Director of Drone Wars UK.

Frank Ledwidge, a barrister and former British military officer, pieces together the colossal human and financial cost of the war in Afghanistan for Afghans and British, and weighs up what it was all for. While Chris Cole, a tireless investigative campaigner, outlines the case against drones from his research into the use of British military drones in Afghanistan in an environment of official secrecy and obfuscation.

In smaller groups participants can join focused sessions – Joining the dots – Drones, Gaza and the War on Terror with investigative journalist and campaigner Ewa Jasiewicz and VCNVUK’s Maya Evans.

Journalist and photographer Guy Smallman, who has extensive experience working in Afghanistan, showcases his collaboration with street children in Kabul – displaying their photography from education projects with cameras. The story the children tell of their world through the lenses of cameras is extraordinary is premiering in London this Autumn.

Film maker Janey Moffat with Yagana will show her film Afghanistan: a difficult birth. Janey travelled to Kabul with VCNVUK in 2013 and recorded the challenges Afghan women face from childbirth to equality.

Please join Voices for Creative Non Violence UK and friends for their second annual conference.

To register, and for more information about the conference contact vcnvuk@gmail.com

Internal refugees, motherhood, and illegal land grabs in Afghanistan

by Maya Evans with Hakim

A few days ago we visited a refugee camp, in the Perwan Dodo area of Kabul. The camp is relatively small compared to camps we’ve visited previously, with around forty families occupying an area about the size of a football pitch. Most of the families were from Pawan Province which is to the north of Kabul. They had become internal refugees after fleeing from their homes due to the fighting or lack of jobs.

It had been raining the night before and the road in front of the camp was flooded. There was a man in knee length wellies wading up to his shins in the water sucking it up with a large tube coming from a truck. We ducked under a curtain of ragged sheets which acted as a makeshift wall between the camp and the busy road. The little lanes which weaved around the camp leading to the various huts were a mud fest. As soon as we stepped into the camp our shoes became encrusted with mud.

Janey had wanted to interview a mother in a refugee camp as part of her short film project about the life of mums in Afghanistan. We were introduced to Paiky, a 42 year old mother of six. Her home was a hut made from mud with a small porch area which seemed to be used for cooking and then a larger area where the family of eight lived. Our Afghan camerawoman Alka set up her equipment while Paiky arranged herself under a large green patterned blanket. We had yet to hear her story but it was already obvious that she was in a lot of pain.

Janey and I sat next to her while some of her children peeked from behind a curtain which led into the darkened main area of the hut. The interview initially started with some of the men present but after a few minutes Paiky requested that they leave. Once the men left the porch Paiky opened her heart and poured forth about her life and physical ailments. She had given birth to four of her six children alone. Her last birth was also unassisted and due to lack of medical care she is still in constant pain six years later. She says the discomfort is so extreme that she can’t wear trousers or any garment on the bottom half of her body. She lifted her blanket and dress to show me her swollen stomach with some extremely sore looking veins running across it. Janey later said she wasn’t in a position to see her stomach but my expression had said it all.

At the end of the interview I joked with three of Paiky’s children, my limited Dari allowed me to describe them as “dost” friends, and in reply they laughed and called me “holla”, aunty. When I looked into the soft eyes of Rafiq who was about eleven, his smile was so warm and sincere that I immediately felt a deep connection with him. Paiky explained that he was the main bread winner of the family. Every day he went out into the street and washed cars for a living, and my heart went further out to this eleven year old man.

Outside our male companions were talking to the elders of the camp. They were learning more about the political economics of the situation. Apparently, the site was previously occupied by another group of internally displaced people (IDPs) who have now been housed in a building development overlooking the present camp. The site is now part of the land grab racket which is currently gripping Afghanistan and is described by Barmak Pazhwak, at the US Institute of Peace,  as “the next big conflict” for the country, while the Afghan Land Authority have assessed that 197,266 hectors of public land has been grabbed.

In 2008 Oxfam published a report which described land issues as now being the main cause of dispute within Afghanistan. The problem lies with the recent falsifying of land ownership documents. Previously there was no legal documentation proving the ownership of land in Afghanistan and land just belonged to families and was passed down between generations. The land theft has given rise to what is locally described as a “land mafia” who are suspected to be a mixture of rich corrupt property developers, drug dealers and war lords – many of whom are currently within the Afghan Government. Kabul is now gripped by this land theft racket.

In the case of this camp’s site, the previous refugees had negotiated a deal with the owner of the land, a rich property developer who is said also to have land in Canada and Dubai. Furthermore it is alleged that the developer had struck a deal with a warlord who negotiated housing for the refugees in return for their loyalty as fighters. The buying of refugees’ loyalty is now becoming common place. Many refugees who last year were considered among the poorest in the country are now relatively well off and living in new housing.

Property prices boomed in Kabul up to a year ago with rocketing rents fuelled by the large number of internationals living in Kabul who are earning big money. Recently rents have stalled and are predicted to level out, but are still at massively inflated prices by local standards. Everyday we hear about the problems for ordinary people in Afghanistan – a country with the highest number of drug addicts in the world; the highest infant mortality, mental health problems, domestic violence and internally displaced people – the list goes on and on. Land theft is just another problem to add.

Read more: http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/afghanistan-the-cost-of-war.pdf

http://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/land-grabs-in-afghanistan-1-nangrahar-the-disputed-o-rangeland

http://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/a-new-round-of-anti-sherzai-protests-in-nangarhar

First days in Kabul

UK delegate Beth Tichbourne shares her first impressions of Afghanistan with us…
“I didn’t know what to expect in Afghanistan. I knew there’d be men with guns about, and that there would be a lot of visible poverty, addiction and the other marks of a long war on people and the landscape. But I couldn’t imagine what it would be like landing in Kabul, getting a taxi from the airport to the compound and meeting our hosts, the Afghan Peace Volunteers.

Our new friends from APV

What I definitely wasn’t expecting was to feel so at home. We landed to a scene like nothing I’ve ever been part of before, a strange mixture of a heavy military presence and the more traditional aspects of Afghanistan. We walked out of the airport past men in various uniforms and crowds of ordinary Afghan people wrapped up in scarves against the thick snow. We had barely stepped into the carpark when were met by Ebi, a friend of Maya’s from her previous trip and by Gulan, who has joined the APV more recently. They were so welcoming and friendly that despite its strangeness Kabul felt immediately like the right place to be, even before we had got in the taxi I felt unexpectedly at ease. They took us in two taxis back to the compound where the APV are based.

APV making tea

We spent the first sleep-deprived day acclimatising and making friends. There are all the funny little things that make a place seem foreign. They have carrot jam and gigantic fluorescent light bulbs. The room that we’re staying in, which is also the meeting room, is beautiful, there’s a stove to one side that heats the room and provides water for the constant cups of tea, a red carpet and gold cushions and curtains. For lessons and meetings everyone sits around the edge of the room on the cushions, and at night the four of us from England turn the cushions into mattresses and stay snug despite the snow outside. I think the other rooms are less luxurious and we’re getting some guest treatment in having this as our sleeping space.

The compound feels like a safe space for a diverse range of people to come and to explore difficult and dangerous issues. There are the volunteers themselves, who are boys and young men from different ethnicities and backgrounds doing deep reflective work alongside the practical projects and campaigning that they run from here. There are women who come to sew quilts and are considering how to set up a business in a way that won’t put them in danger from strangers or their own families. Some of the daughters of the women come to English lessons first thing in the morning along with the volunteers and other students, most of whom are in their young teens. And there are international visitors like us, who come to learn from the APV and to visit Afghan people to hear their stories of everyday life in Afghanistan.

We’ve only been here a couple of days but we’ve already visited a refugee camp, a women’s business meeting and a woman who lost two children in a suicide attack. The boys and men of the APV that we’ve been making friends with have their own experiences of bereavement and hardship. It’s startling and horrible to be in a meeting and to suddenly hear about the toll the war has taken on someone who you’ve just been sharing bad jokes and a plate of food with. And it’s never just one tragedy. Ebi, the boy who greeted us at the airport with the friendliest grin I’ve ever seen, who is studying journalism and wants to one day travel to Africa, Mexico and Egypt to witness and support other people’s struggles around the world, told us today in the meeting with the mother who had lost her children that he had lost a cousin in the same attack. Later he told us that when he was six he’d seen his older brother killed in front of his house.

The people we’ve been out to visit are exhausted. They have immediate needs and a profound tiredness and lack of hope. Every group has said the same thing in slightly different words. They don’t know where to start telling you their troubles, there are too many to recount. Against this background the goodness and the energy of Ebi and the other volunteers is hard to comprehend. They do such hard work with such commitment and love. In the evenings they talk for hours, addressing the root causes of the prejudices that have left some of them bereaved in the potentially volatile setting of a mixed ethnic group. They also address problems that thay have a more indirect experience of, like how to live their values of recognising the fellow humanity of women in a society where genders are segregated in many ways and women very disadvantaged. In the daytime they do outreach and projects that empower the poorest and least visible members of their community. They don’t shy away from living with contradiction or addressing controversy. I am learning a lot about Afghanistan, about the realities of war and poverty, but I hope I’ll also be able to absorb something of the sincerity, passion and friendliness of the community here and find ways to apply it back in England. Two weeks already feels far too short a time to be here.”