Children pay the heaviest price for Afghanistan’s drugs trade – according to a powerful account by journalist Najibullah Quraishi and producer Jamie Doran in their documentary Opium Brides.
Opening to a packed screening at the Frontline Club on Friday 7 March, the film exposed the failure of the Afghan government and its international allies’ attempts to eradicate opium poppy cultivation in the region.
The documentary gave an intimate account of the stark choices made by ordinary farmers who are forced to hand over their children, especially young girls, to drug traffickers closely linked to Taliban when they fail to pay off their debts.
Farmers borrow money from drug traffickers to cultivate poppies in the hope of making repayment with the proceeds of their harvest. But, in line with the government’s aim to curb opium production, the crops are often destroyed, leaving the farmers indebted to the traffickers.
Internationally acclaimed director and producer Doran said:
“The traffickers will kill anyone who threatens their business. . . . One of the worst things for us is that we couldn’t show you . . . what happens to the farmers who say no. . . . We watched them beheaded in the most horrendous ways possible because they wouldn’t give up their daughters.”
The film claimed that 200,000 farmers and their families across Afghanistan produce 90% of the world’s opium, which in turn generates $200 billion annually for Afghanistan but very little trickles down to the poor farming communities.
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In an answer to a question from the audience on any realistic plans to find alternatives to narcotic problems, award-winning Afghani reporter Quraishi expressed his dismay at what he saw as the British and US governments’ failure to show commitment to tackling the drug issue in Afghanistan:
“Five or six years ago we went to Afghanistan and spoke to around 300 farmers and talked to some of the big warlords and traffickers. . . . The farmers said if the government gave us $1,000 per year we’ll stop growing poppies . . .”
Doran who was also part of the negotiations at the time added that he approached the British and US governments with this agreement but the issue was sidelined and the opportunity was missed:
“We went to the Foreign Office and said you can cut off (poppy growing areas) from north of Kabul right down to Herat if you agree to give farmers $1,000 a year . . . and the person in charge of the drugs eradication in Afghanistan didn’t want to know. . . . I think it was going to cost around $6 million in total to cut off Badakhshan, Nangarhar and Helmand . . . you are talking about cutting off 30% of the country’s poppy growth and they didn’t want to know. . . . I contacted the Sate Department in United State and they didn’t want to know . . .”
Explaining giving subsidies to farmers to grow alternative crops, Doran said there is very little real monetary incentive for them to grow wheat or maize:
“If they grow maize or wheat they are going to starve. . . . The countryside in Afghanistan is in a mess . . . despite all the million and trillions of dollars. . . . Eighty-five percent of the people living in countryside are in a bad way . . . we are leaving a mess behind.”
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A member of the audience who carried out field research on Afghanistan’s drug trade felt that the speakers had not given a fair account of the issue of subsidising farmers and claimed that it is only in pockets of Afghanistan that poppy is grown, and wheat and other diversified options can bring in a reasonable income.
Doran and Quraishi disagreed and said that it is in the rural areas where the Taliban have widespread influence and which is in the grip of poppy cultivation and rampant corruption. Doran said:
“If they had invested in the countryside things would have been different . . . for the farmers their biggest struggle is to give them security and food to their families.”
The documentary, produced by Clover Films, has been broadcast in over 30 countries, but despite this the main media outlets in UK have shown little interest. One voice in the audience reflected this, saying:
]]>“I served in Kabul . . . and my view is that everything is focused in Helmand. . . . There is no media interest in the rest of Afghanistan – it’s incredibly narrow and very disappointing.”
The acclaimed book chronicles the work of the Frontline news agency, founded by journalists Rory Peck, Peter Jouvenal, Vaughan Smith and Nicholas Della Casa.
First published in 2005, the latest edition features a foreword from BBC world affairs editor John Simpson, who writes that the book is “the history of a moment in television news, which was brief enough, yet so bright it will stay in the minds of everyone who experienced it, like staring into a torch-beam on a dark night.”
Frontline Television’s reporters were motivated to document the true horrors of war and courageously went where other news organisations feared to tread. Risking everything to show the truth, they travelled the world’s most dangerous places in a quest to live life to the full, a quest some paid for with their lives. (Two of FTV’s founders, Peck and Della Casa, are now dead: killed in action.)
Between them, this colourful collection of adventurers and ex-army officers captured some of the key images at the end of the Cold War, and the fractured, fissile world which emerged.
The way they lived and died was an anachronism; they were eccentrics who might have been happier fighting wars in the British Empire a century before. Instead, they brought back pictures from the worst war zones the late twentieth century had to offer. And it suited them.
For the men of Frontline, how things were done was as important as what was done. All four of the founders, and those they recruited, shared the same panache, wit, and disdain for authority, planning the next trip to the Hindu Kush in the bar of the Ritz.
Their story reads like a latter-day Rudyard Kipling adventure. But while their lives may have been lived as if they were still playing the Great Game, they also cared passionately about their work and the truth it conveyed.
Part Bang Bang Club, part Flashman, Frontline is the gripping story of lives lived to the full in some of the worst places on earth.
The book can be purchased by visiting this link.
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Praise for Frontline:
“Loyn does a terrific job. His methodical, journalistic approach is perfect for grounding out a yarn that nobody would dare make up” Time Out – Book of the Week
“A gripping story, splashed with devil-may-care colour and scarcely credible tales of derring-do” The Guardian
“Girls, booze, physical hardship and flying bullets … Loyn keeps his narrative rattling along nicely” Daily Mail
“Barnstorming non-fiction. Every page is full of the kind of chutzpah, grit and valour that makes your own nine-to-five seem gut-wrenchingly futile.” Arena
“Hugely entertaining … the nearest thing to a Victorian adventure romp of empire against a background of fine marijuana, ‘Hotel California’, and the wheep and chirrup of satellite technology” Literary review
]]>Reporter is a film about the work of New York Times foreign correspondent Nicholas Kristof. The film, produced by Ben Affleck, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival last week,
“As journalism of all kinds becomes more desperate to make money, then there is a tendency to focus more on celebrity,” Kristof said in a telephone interview from his home in the New York City area. “I just don’t know what’s going to happen to journalism, what our business model is going to be. I tend to think that one way or another, news and information will still have value.” link
You can catch a short interview with Affleck and Kristof with the LA Times above. The (somewhat dramatic and breathlessly wordy) trailer for the documentary is below. Anyone seen it in full? Any good? By the way if you haven’t seen the trailer to the Frontline Club’s own journalist documentary film, head over to Blood Trail now.
]]>Michael J. Kavanagh, from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, reports from a refugee camp in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo with footage from cameraman Taylor Krauss. Earlier today we blogged how the two got caught up with the secret police in the DRC. You can read the full story on the World Focus website,
]]>Note: In the weeks since this story was filmed, the camp has been attacked and Pascal was forced to flee a third time. The camp is now deserted except for a small rebel force and Worldfocus reporters have not been able to locate Pascal and his family. link
De Pear said: “He sent back via DHL five or six tapes which were extraordinary – it was the descent into absolute chaos of Mogadishu following the Ethiopian invasion and the Islamic insurgency against the invasion… We are reliant on people like Dulla because you can’t go to Somalia as a western broadcaster. He is the only person who has told that story from a TV perspective in the last two years.” link
Earlier this month Duguf won the Rory Peck Award for News. You can see the award winning report on the Channel 4 website. The Press Gazette has a full list of winners.
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John D. McHugh’s latest multimedia report for the Guardian finds him in Logar province with the US-Afghan mission in search of the Taliban. A US army captain, with a price on his red head, gives his views on the challenges they face. John also has an audio slideshow up on The Guardian,
]]>The Seray combat outpost is a base in Afghanistan’s Chowkay district, 10 miles from the border with Pakistan, manned by US army and Afghan national army soldiers. A small team of US marine tactical trainers is embedded to help the Afghans. Seray, high in the mountains, is attacked by Taliban fighters almost daily. While the photographs in this slideshow were taken over the course of a week, the audio is taken from a single five-hour attack on October 9 link
The shortlist for the Rory Peck Awards 2008 is now out. Among the contenders in the “Features”category is Frontline Club Founder Vaughan Smith for the blog he wrote from Afghanistan in 2007. You can see the edited footage he put together for BBC Newsnight in the video above. Good luck Vaughan. Here is a list of all the nominees,
THE IMPACT AWARD, sponsored by Sony UK Ltd
This award honours freelance news footage which raises humanitarian issues and has had an impact internationally or contributed to a change in perception or policy.
“D” and Ginny Stein – Mugabe’s Calling Card
Shot in South Africa and Zimbabwe, May – June 2008. Commissioned and broadcast by SBS TV Dateline
Jung In Taek and Han Yong Ho – Korea: Out of the North
Shot in North Korea, China, Laos, Thailand and South Korea, August 2007 – February 2008. Commissioned by Chosun Ilbo newspaper, South Korea. Broadcast by BBC
Jezza Neumann – Undercover in Tibet
Shot in Tibet, China, Nepal and India, April – August 2007. True Vision Productions for Channel 4. Broadcast by Channel 4
THE RORY PECK AWARD FOR NEWS
This award honours freelance coverage of on-the-day news, where the focus is on the immediacy of the story.
Clifford Derrick – Kibera Slum
Shot in Kenya, January 2008. Commissioned and broadcast by Al Jazeera English
Abdullahi Farah Duguf – Two weeks in Mogadishu
Shot in Somalia, September 2007. Commissioned and broadcast by ITN / Channel 4 News
Subina Shrestha – Down the Irrawaddy Delta
Shot in Myanmar, May 2008. Commissioned and broadcast by Al Jazeera English
THE RORY PECK AWARD FOR FEATURES
This Award honours freelance news features: in-depth pieces which look beyond the immediacy of a news story.
Tim Hetherington – The Other War
Shot in Afghanistan, October 2007. Commissioned and broadcast by ABC Nightline
Vaughan Smith – Grenadiers Fighting in Helmand
Shot in Afghanistan, September 2007. Self funded. Broadcast by The Frontline Club Web Log / BBC Newsnight
Rodrigo Vazquez – Inside Hamas
Shot in the Palestinian Authority Gaza, August – October 2007. Stampede Limited for Channel 4 International. Broadcast by Channel 4
Interesting to note that Vaughan’s is the only self-funded entry on the list.
]]>Ben Anderson talks about his BBC reports from Helmand province in Afghanistan with VBS TV. Part 1 is above and here’s more on the series,
“This series is about 24 hours in Helmand, Afghanistan’s most violent province. More..I was with the Queen’s Company, British soldiers who normally guard Buckingham Palace. Their job was to train the Afghan National Army while fighting the Taliban, an almost impossible combination. On the day this was shot, we were ambushed late in the morning, then surrounded in a small house belonging to a terrified Afghan family. The battle to get out of the house lasted eight hours. The two most senior soldiers there – both veterans of Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Northern Ireland – agreed that it was the most intense day they had ever experienced. I spent two months in Afghanistan, and I’m sure that what I saw in Helmand is going on in many other parts of the country. We could be there for decades.”
You can watch parts 2 through to 8 of the discussion on the VBS site.
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John D. McHugh, Frontline Club member and regular in these parts, has his latest short film from Afghanistan up on The Guardian website. He to a member of a the US army Medevac team about the day to day job of helping the wounded and the dying. John says he has a lot more footage from Afghanistan that The Guardian is not using for his diary. He promises to put the rest on his personal blog in the near future,
I have realised that they havenâ€
t been using lots of the stuff Iâ€
John also has a new audio slideshow, alos focussing on Medevacs, up on The Guardian.
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