Veiled hopes

TELLY VISION

When freelance journalist Saira Shah, of Afghan origin, visited Afghanistan for CNN's documentary Beneath the Veil, she went with the desperate hope of finding "gardens and fountains, a bit of Eden" as her father once told her referring to the country.

But what she, her crew and the cameras captured instead was massive human disaster in a country severely crushed under the Taliban regime.

There was no beauty in Afghanistan; instead, there were scenes of a mother grinding animal feed for her seven children, women begging on the streets, hidden camera shots of people being publicly executed in what was once a football stadium, a stinking maternity ward devoid of even basic care, a school where little girls studied secretly, a secret beauty parlour where women painted faces of other ladies.

There's more: scenes of villages where women and old men picked up bodies of their children, some of whose faces had been skinned "" all massacred because they belonged to a different ethnic race from the Taliban.

A woman wailing at her little son's death (he was killed because he didn't understand the Taliban's language when they came to the door), four girls huddled in fear in their own house after their father was captured and their mother shot dead when she objected to a group of Taliban leaders making her home their headquarters.

The documentary captured the tears in the eyes of one of the sisters while she narrated the incident to Shah and revealed that the Taliban stayed for two entire days while their mother's body lay in the house.

Beneath the Veil was the result of millions of such stories capsuled tightly into a 45-minute documentary that showed a society, which, according to Shah, "was a result of shutting out women; half of the country's society altogether".

And while it's easy to cringe at the thought of seeing a documentary with such dismal scenes, Beneath the Veil succeeded, according to Shah, in showing that the very survival of women in this oppressed society was their daily victory against tyranny.

Which is why CNN's Lifting the Veil, presented by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, and shown last week on television, becomes so critical. It looks at the ravaged country after the decline of the Taliban regime when George Bush overthrows it and promises to "give aid to the sisters and mothers of Afghanistan who were victims in their own country".

The aid, as the documentary reveals, is still to reach the battered villages and cities of Afghanistan and many women (including those belonging to educated families) are still sold, raped, murdered and told firmly to stay beneath the veil. There's an interview with Bibi Gul, a 40-year-old woman, who begs on the streets after she lost her husband and her son to an American bomb.

Also shocking are the documentary's scenes of a hospital's ward where a large number of women are admitted with third-degree burns. "I burnt to get rid of this life," mentioned a young girl of 20 who was being tortured in her marriage. And in the maternity ward pregnant women, we are informed, still arrive on ladders on which they are tied.

And while it's difficult to search for answers as to why life hasn't still changed for the society beneath the veil, there's hope, some believe, for the future generations. Lifting the Veil has images of young girls "" sans the burqa "" laughing and giggling and shouting and studying openly, without fear.

"I'd like my daughters and granddaughters to study," says the father of the four girls who had been interviewed in Beneath the Veil, and tracked down once again by Chinoy for the sequel.

It's a country still living in hope.

(abhilashaojha@gmail.com )