Over Christmas I joined members of Voices for Creative Nonviolence UK on a peace delegation to Kabul, Afghanistan.
Over Christmas I joined members of Voices for Creative Nonviolence UK on a peace delegation to Kabul, Afghanistan.
We stayed with the women’s community of the Afghan Peace Volunteers, who run a community centre, the Borderfree Centre, home to humanitarian and cultural projects. The centre runs literacy and numeracy classes for street children, and organises local seamstresses to make duvets which are then handed out to IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) and day labourers. The volunteers host many delegations from the US, Australia and the UK. They also join Global Days of Listening in Skype calls with people all over the world.
In Kabul I shared in the daily life of the women’s community, cooking and cleaning, took part in workshops at the Borderfree Centre and went out to see the duvets being distributed to internally displaced families in a refugee camp and to day labourers. During our visit, Mary Dobbing from Voices for Creative Nonviolence and Drone Wars UK delivered an international workshop on the UK use of drones for Afghan journalists and the APV. Drone experts joined us from UK by Skype: Chris Cole from Drone Wars UK, Chris Woods investigative journalist and author, and Jennifer Gibson, an international human rights lawyer with Reprieve.
The purpose of the visit was to show solidarity with the peace activists in a war torn country, at the very time when the ISAF forces were pulling out of Afghanistan after 13 years of war. I also wanted to be able to report back to friends in the UK on the terrible effects of war. This is an extract from my personal blog.
Here in London, free to hop on and off buses, run down the street, yell at the top of my voice, I am mostly afraid of being knocked off my bike by a truck or swallowing a poisonous cleaning product.
But over there in Kabul, as an unwelcome foreigner I could be attacked or I could be kidnapped. I could be hit by a suicide blast in a crowded place.
To go over there with a peace delegation I needed to prepare for what would happen in the event of my death or if I was kidnapped. My deepest fear, was what it would be like for my children. Close friends reacted to my plans in various ways according to their own experience and expectations. I found that some were encouraging and even a little jealous, some questioned me at length, while some others couldn’t bring themselves to mention it at all. The anxiety this last group produced in me, as well as my own pre-travel nerves, might have been enough to put me off altogether.
As well as being a foreigner I was a Christian and therefore at risk of being perceived as a legitimate target by the Taliban. There was no way I could pretend not to be Christian. However silent I remained on the subject of faith, to the Taliban, anyone western was probably Christian.
In the weeks before setting off, near my workplace, a church building, I suddenly noticed the street signs: the Angel, St. Giles Place, St. Martin’s Lane, Newman Street, Charing Cross. In Kabul these fearful addresses would get me into trouble. But this was wandering into the absurd, I told myself. I even started to grow a little defiant, an emotion I quickly batted away.
A few weeks before we were to depart, Afghan news site, Tolonews, regularly reported suicide bombings and attacks in Kabul. A South African and his two children were killed in an attack on an international aid organisation in the same district that we would be visiting. The Taliban had claimed the attack and said the organisation was a “secret Christian missionary group”.
Still, I reasoned with myself, if there had been a shooting or explosion in Hackney, I wouldn’t discourage friends from visiting. We gathered for a pre-trip Skype call, faltering, in trepidation, wondering if it was a bad time to be go. Maybe we should consider postponing. But as we sat down and listed the positives and the negatives and the positives outweighed the negatives, we decided we should still go ahead with our plans.
Once in Kabul, I learned that as the government doesn’t want to scare the population, some attacks are left unreported. Even if they are reported, accounts of the numbers killed are often inaccurate.
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© Henrietta Cullinan is Ekklesia’s administrator. She is also a peace activist and involved with London Catholic Worker. Her blog, from which this is adapted, is here: https://henriettacullinan.wordpress.com/ Twitter: @henrietta_