![]() ![]() The only word he would utter was ‘Nothing … nothing,’” Momin Gul said. “We all wanted to go and see what had happened to the house and its inhabitants, but our parents wouldn’t let us. After this, they opened fire indiscriminately, killing more than 300 villagers in a single day.”Ī rocket hit Momin Gul’s uncle’s house. At the time, Momin Gul was a farmer in his early thirties, living with his extended family and he recalls: “A mujahed was hiding in the village. ![]() Shortly after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a village called Rozay Qala was blitzed out of existence. The sole reason for kites, Afghans will tell you, is to fight them, and a single kite aloft is nothing but an unspoken challenge to a neighbor: Bring it on! (It still remains largely off-limits to girls and women.) And with the American release Friday of the film “The Kite Runner,” based on the best-selling novel of the same name, a much wider audience will be introduced to Afghan kite culture.įollowing a kite’s string to its source will most likely lead to an Afghan boy standing on top of his roof or in an empty lot, playing the line in deep concentration.īut this is not the stuff of idle afternoons or, as in American culture, carefree picnics in the park. To a new arrival in this chaotic city of three million, they are unexpected and wonderfully incongruous.īanned during the Taliban regime, kite flying is once again the main recreational escape for Afghan boys and some men. They reveal themselves, like dragonflies, at the most unexpected moments: through the window of a grim government office, beyond the smoke curling from the debris left by a suicide bomb, above the demoralizing gridlock of traffic and poverty. KABUL - The kites appear suddenly, whimsical flashes of color that kick above this beige landscape of relentless dust and desperation. “We want the story written by the victims themselves,” said Hadi Marifat, director of the Afghanistan Center for Memory and Dialogue, where the exhibition, which opened in February, is housed.Ĭountless Afghan families have been shattered by violence, but the civilian dead are often forgotten and forsaken by everyone but their closest relatives, even as combatants - warlords, commanders, fighters - are lionized as martyrs in billboards and posters. They are the possessions of the dead, lovingly preserved by family members of Afghans killed during the past 40 years of conflict.Īn exhibition of these everyday items - from scarves and robes to teacups and poems - seeks to memorialize a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of civilians who have died violently since 1979 in Afghanistan, a country that rarely pauses to remember its victims.Įach so-called memory box includes a narrative composed by loved ones about the life lost, making each tragedy personal. ![]() The prosaic belongings, collected in handmade wooden containers, are displayed in the frigid basement of a house in Kabul. These are some of the remnants of lives lost to violence. A Concise Chinese English Dictionary for Lovers.Internal Migration and Internally Displaced Peoples. ![]()
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