"There Is Great Hunger for Peace in Afghanistan"
You wanted to form your own picture of Afghanistan shortly after the end of the 25-year war. Did you have a particular affinity to the country?
Roger Willemsen: For a long time, Afghanistan was the land of my dreams, ever since a friend of mine came back from there. He'd been there for a year. He had gone completely native and was totally sensitive to a culture that was so porous that different forms of Islam, Buddhist and Christian thinking fused with the German hippies.
I really wanted to go to a country with that kind of charisma. I read a lot about the country and travel writing from there, smoked green and black Afghan, and the place seemed hallucinatory to me. I also met one of my closest friends, Nadia Karim, an Afghan woman in exile, and came into contact with other exiled Afghans.
And just like everyone has mythical places they'd like to visit, I had recognised Afghanistan as my mythical land and took the first opportunity I got to go there.
Do you see any deficits in the aid programmes? What would be possible but isn't being done?
Willemsen: First of all, the concentration on Kabul is fatal, because when 2400 aid organisations are based in one city, they push up the prices and the rents. That means less living space for the Afghans and for the exiled Afghans who have to come back to Kabul.
Secondly, the concentration of aid projects in a city like Kabul is also fatal, because the greatest need is in the countryside, far away from Kabul. But you often don't see aid projects out there.
And then it's extremely difficult to distribute the money around Afghanistan so that it's really altruistic aid and doesn't become a new form of exploitation or opens up new markets, which help the Turks, the Chinese, the Americans of course, the Pakistanis, but not the Afghans.
It's horrific to see how goods from Pakistan come into Afghanistan, coming from a completely different culture. That goes all the way up to architecture, but also plastic guns that simulate laser rays, with which the children of Afghanistan are supposed to deal with their trauma. So much happens in Afghanistan that can be put down to outside influence and is fatal for country that I don't know where to start.
A little boy in Afghanistan called you the first tourist, because you told him you were just there for pleasure. Did you come across many people with humour or did you encounter more resignation?
Willemsen: I hardly encountered resignation, because the people's vitality was so great, despite all the breaks and all the trauma – and that's a luxury expression from western psychology. There was such great hunger for peace that I met people who were deeply disappointed by the democracy we're imposing on them and which gathers forces that have caused suffering for Afghanistan in the past and puts them together in a parliament.
But despite that I have to say that many people want peace – a taxi driver who steers his car into peace, a builder who wants to join in the reconstruction, a teacher who had to train secretly and stared into this peace so sad and broken and said: "What would happen if we could stand in a class where 40 girls sit and are taught …"
I was much more caught up in the spirit of this hope, even if that hope is not flowering but wilting before it even had a chance to blossom. But at least one has the feeling: everything in Afghanistan is now ready to go to peace.
A recent survey asked: what is the prerequisite for peace? 35 percent of all Afghans answered: disarmament. Two percent said: outside aid. That means that our share in what happens in Afghanistan should be very reserved at the moment, very careful and ought to take place with precise observation of the Afghan culture. Of course not military and of course not economic in the sense of opening up new markets.
So you're not in favour of Germany sending Tornado reconnaissance planes to Afghanistan?
Willemsen: I was very strongly against the Tornados. I wrote to several members of the German parliament, I protested in public. It's simply stupid to say it's an act of humanity that has nothing to do with military operations. A Tornado is a piece of military equipment; the reconnaissance they're going to be doing is not something that won't be used for military purposes; they are locating combat targets.
At the moment Germany takes part in something like this, Germany becomes an occupier, and at the moment it's a occupier, it becomes a target of military operations by the Taliban and marauding gangs, and loses goodwill. The goodwill that Germans experience in Afghanistan is firstly a precious and rare thing, and secondly an endangered thing, because I also met people who said to me: "Get out! What do you want here?"
These are young men who start to riot the minute you say you're German. On the other hand people said to me: "Put a German flag on your car, then nothing will happen to you." And now American soldiers are putting German flags on their cars, which is a war crime.
Interview: Homeira Heidary
© Qantara.de 2007
Translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire
Roger Willemsen: An Afghan Journey. Haus Publishing, London, February 2007, £20
Qantara.de
Roger Willemsen's "Guantanamo Speaking"
Back to the Dark Ages
In his book "Guantanamo Speaking", Roger Willemsen lets former inmates in the American prison camp have their say – creating a comprehensive document of an era stained by the perfidy of humiliation and torture. By Martin Gerner
Reconnaissance Flights against the "Neo-Taliban"
A Step in the Wrong Direction
The provision of Tornado reconnaissance planes by the Bundeswehr is a meagre contribution to the major Nato offensive. But this is in any case the wrong way to achieve a comprehensive political stabilization for Afghanistan, Citha D. Maaß believes
Maliha Zulfacar, Afghanistan's Ambassador to Germany
"People in Afghanistan Need More Tangible Changes"
Maliha Zulfacar is one of two female Afghan ambassadors. In this interview with Martin Gerner, she talks about her unusual career, as well as about NATO's military strategy, and the reconstruction process in Afghanistan