BBC Radio 4 Start the Week

June 12, 2008

This week Andrew Marr is joined by Lord Ashdown, General Sir Michael Rose, Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy and Richard Littlejohn.

When Britain and America went into Afghanistan in 2001, they claimed that the liberation of women would be one of their main priorities. Did they deliver? Award-winning Pakistani journalist and documentary filmmaker, SHARMEEN OBAID-CHINOY, finds out what life is like for the women behind the burqa. She argues that the liberation of Afghan women is mostly theoretical, despite the advances in Kabul where there are female journalists and politicians. Tribal customary codes still rule supreme and the position of women is dire and unchanged. Her documentary for Dispatches, Afghanistan Unveiled, is broadcast on Thursday 17 May at 9.00pm on Channel 4.

SHARMEEN OBAID-CHINOY

December 28, 2007

by Benjamin Law

Edited version published: Frankie #21 (Jan/Feb 2008)

We’re told that after 9/11 and the ousting of the Taliban, women in Afghanistan are better off. They’re now in parliament, they can drive, they can divorce, and they’re no longer forced to wear the burqa. But after documentary-maker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy visited the region last year, she told Benjamin Law that for Afghan women, the reality is far more complicated.

Towards the end of 2006, Pakistani film-maker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s documentary Beneath the Veil was broadcast around the world. It had a provocative thesis: that despite Western intervention, and the downfall of the Taliban, Afghani women were still subject to the same social, economic and physical degradation of the old regime. “Yes, women were in parliament,” Sharmeen says, “but they weren’t allowed to speak or make laws. And in the four and a half weeks that I was there, I didn’t see a single woman behind the wheel of a car.”

For the most part, Beneath the Veil was horrific viewing. It showed how decades of civil and international conflict had reduced an estimated two million war widows to begging on the streets in burqas. Girls continued to be forced into marriage—some as young as seven—while infant mortality rates continued to soar because of poor, or non-existent, health services.

However, the most disturbing images in the film were courtesy of Sharmeen’s visits to hospitals, which were packed with seriously burned women. Having been forced into marriages with no possible means of escape, Afghan women were protesting with their most basic of resources: their bodies. All over the country, women were pouring kerosene on themselves and lighting themselves on fire as protest.

“Afghan women are some of the bravest women in the world,” Sharmeen says. “To pour kerosene on yourself, then light yourself? It’s an act of defiance. It is a cry to the rest of the world: ‘I am suffering, and I refuse to die quietly.’” One particular girl Sharmeen interviewed had been sold into marriage five years earlier to fund her father’s addition to opiates. She was severely burned from the waist down after a self-immolation suicide attempt. All this, and she was only 12-years-old.

The first time she entered one of the hospital wards, Sharmeen says she was close to just bursting out in tears. “Every bed had a young woman who was disfigured—badly—and moaning in pain. There wasn’t enough morphine—the irony, being that Afghanistan is the largest opium producer in the world. These women had burns on 50 to 60 percent of their bodies, and no skin grafting because it’s not done in Afghanistan. It’s extremely expensive.”

A young Muslim woman herself, Sharmeen noted a massive disjoint between her personal understanding of Islam, and how the religion manifests in Afghan culture. For her, the problem isn’t with Islam, but how Afghan culture had appropriated it to undermine the entitlements of women. “Afghan culture has been perverted. A lot of people have said it’s the religion, but actually it’s Afghan culture,” she says.

“As a Muslim woman in Pakistan, my parents always told me I was on par with any man, anywhere in the world. Even as a child, I always thought I was equal to a man. In an environment like Afghanistan, men feel superior to women, and treat women as inferior. As a result, women feel that they’re inferior, and that this is all sanctioned by Islam.”

In one sequence of the documentary, Sharmeen talks to a war widow reduced to begging on the streets. When Sharmeen is crouching down, face to face with her, it’s as though viewers are presented with the two extreme opposites of what Muslim women can be in the contemporary world. One is a disempowered, poor, uneducated woman, deprived of resources, support, and personal agency; the other is Sharmeen.

“This is true,” Sharmeen says. “In some ways, it’s testament to the fact you can be ‘the other’. Often in the Western world, there’s a perception that Muslim women have been held back by their religion. But there are many women like me who are practising Muslims, but also lawyers and journalists and artists—and often doing better than most men in the country.

“In Afghanistan, I’ve almost been in screaming matches with men. I know: as a journalist, you’re supposed to step away from your subject. But I need to let them know that I am a practising Muslim, yet I can turn around and tell him he doesn’t make any sense at all. That it’s okay to allow your women to get an education, it is okay to allow your women to work. And in no way would that threaten you as a man.”

Sharmeen didn’t even have to open her mouth for her presence to be felt in Afghanistan. By simply donning a red head covering instead of a full-body burqa, entire groups of men would immediately turn their gaze towards her. “Afghan men are not used to seeing women like me, walking with my face uncovered,” she says. “Especially in a place that’s so grey and brown. All the women look the same under the blue head coverings.”

But why would a foreign journalist purposefully go out of her way to invite hostility from Afghan men? “In my travels in the Muslim world, I’ve found if you look a man in the eye—because Afghan women seldom do—he will look away and continue walking. I’ve found that to be a weapon. You let people know you’re not afraid; they will back off.”

Presumably, that is not something you can do in a burqa. “Well exactly,” Sharmeen says laughing. “That’s why I didn’t wear one. Look: covering the head is sanctioned by Islam. So any woman who chooses to cover her head is doing so because her religion dictates she does so. But that’s it. A woman who covers her face or entire body in a burqa or niqab is not sanctioned by Islam, in any way. It’s a controlling mechanism.”

Right now, Sharmeen is 28-years-old. Had she been born an Afghan, life at this age would obviously have been different, but to what extent? “Life in Afghanistan would mean marriage, and at least four kids,” she says. “Maybe five. Maybe even grandchildren. If you get married when you’re 14, and you have a child, then you’re a grandmother by the age of 28.”

At one stage in Beneath the Veil, Sharmeen asks the 12-year-old forced bride and burns victim what she would have done had she not been forced into marriage. (The girl’s bewildered response: “I was too young to wonder.”) Of course, there is a reverse question implied in that: “What would you do, if you were sold into marriage?”

“What could I do?” Sharmeen asks. “I logically thought about it: ‘Oh, can’t go back to the parents’ house, because the father would kill you. Can’t run to a friend’s house, because of her husband.’ Do you go the police? They’ll come and contact your father or your husband. How do you find a shelter in a city, considering there are only two across Afghanistan? How do you travel alone to get to the shelter? You are essentially, like the poet Nadia Anjuman said: caged, in a corner.”

Nadia Anjuman provided an interesting case study for the documentary. Here was an educated Afghan woman, a published poet and a journalist, but still trapped in the confines of Afghan convention. One extract of Anjuman’s poetry roughly translates to: “I am caged in this corner / full of melancholy and sorrow / my wings are closed and I cannot fly / I am an Afghan woman and I must wail.”

“You hear her poetry, you hear her story, and you say, ‘Wow, who is this woman? I’d like to meet her,’” Sharmeen says. “Then you find out, of course, she was killed.” In the film, Sharmeen talked to Anjuman’s family—who claimed Nadia’s husband was responsible—then fearlessly tracked down Anjuman’s husband for an interview. It makes for riveting but uncomfortable viewing. “I really wanted him to feel Nadia was not forgotten,” Sharmeen says. “That the fact she was murdered was important, and I believe he killed Nadia.”

When Sharmeen first visited Afghanistan in 2002, what struck her most was the people’s optimism. “They’d finally gotten rid of the Taliban, and things were going to get so much better,” she says. In 2007, that look was replaced by a tired look of resignation. “That really got me down,” Sharmeen says. “Because when people don’t have the will to bring about change, something in them dies.”

While there continues to be active fighting in the South, in Afghanistan’s north, some young girls are being educated. However, there’s no infrastructure or local economy to support jobs after finishing school, so they’re still panned off into marriage. Allied troops fight and secure towns, but move on immediately afterwards. “Are they really there to bring about change in Afghanistan, to bring about sustainable development?” Sharmeen asks. “What is the plan to make sure their lives are better, so they can move beyond their circumstances?”

In Sharmeen’s mind, the key is establishing a local, independent economy. “In Afghanistan, every single thing is imported. From milk to eggs to wheat. There’s nothing happening to show there might be prosperity in the coming years. You have to show them a better path. How do you do that? Make sure they have jobs, so they’re not obsessing about the women. You have skill centres where women can go in the morning and learn how to sew, to make bread, and sell that,” she says. “You have to give them something to hold on to.”

Love is a strange notion, Hyerada Times, India

October 15, 2007

Hyderabad Times (Hyderabad, India) October 15th 2007

‘Love is a strange notion’
While 54 per cent women justify domestic violence in a nation-wide survey, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy investigates whether women in Afghanistan have been ‘liberated’ since the invasion by America and its allies
PRIYANKA DASGUPTA Times News Network

With 54 per cent Indian women justifying wife-beating, the scale of exploitation against women and the reasons for accepting them don’t seem to have changed much worldwide. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, the first non-American journalist to be awarded the prestigious Livingston Award, and the youngest recipient of the One World Media broadcast journalist of the year award, had interviewed Afghan men who wanted their wives veiled since they couldn’t control themselves! The maker of 12 documentaries, on subjects as varied as stalled reconstruction and the repression of women in the post-Taliban regime, women’s movement in Saudi Arabia, abortion in the Philippines and aboriginal Canadians in British Columbia, tells Hyderabad Times that she doesn’t let fear run her life. She has plans to do a documentary on the Partition generation of Indo-Pak and a film on Robert Mugabe.
Does being named among the ‘10 to Watch in 2007’ by Toronto Star add to the pressure to perform?
The accolades are a recognition of my work. They point to the fact that it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from. The awards inspire me to reach beyond the ordinary.
Why did you choose this profession?
When 9/11 took place, I was freelancing for newspapers (in the US and Canada) and studying politics. I realised that writing articles about the Muslim world was not enough; my readers in the US could seldom imagine the conditions, environment I was talking about. I turned to documentary film-making as a way to make Americans understand what life is like in the Muslim world. Later, I moved beyond the Muslim world to look at stories in Canada, the Philippines and South Africa.
Is the condition of Afghani widows still as pathetic as has been portrayed in Siddique Barmak’s Osama, where a girl has to be dressed up as a boy by her widowed mother to earn a livelihood?
Afghan women are worse than second-class citizens. The Constitution gives them a few rights — to divorce, to refuse marriage before the age of 16, to work and study. But, Afghan men refuse these rights to women. In 2002, Afghan women were hopeful. By 2007, many are disillusioned by how Afghanistan has fared in the last six years. Afghan women barely have the freedom to walk out of their homes. Finding a partner and falling in love is a strange notion for them. There are a few families who would allow their daughters to have love marriages. Most women who fall in love have to run away to another part of the country.
Hasn’t education changed the mindset of Afghan men?
Education has not changed the Afghan mind towards women. The ability to read and write is one thing, but does that change society?
Your documentary quotes that 9/11 has been very good for Pakistan since it gave a reason to the country to dump the Talibans…
September 11 was a wake-up call for Pakistan — did we want to become like Afghanistan or did we want to walk with our heads high into the 21st century with the rest of the civilised world? I think President Musharraf chose the latter.
Would you have got financial backing and accolades abroad if your documentaries hadn’t highlighted Pakistani extremism?
I’ve worked in over seven countries and have won awards for films I’ve done outside of Pakistan. I know where I stand. Unfortunately, people would like me to be Pakistan’s PR agent; I’m a journalist and I like to highlight the truth which, many find too hard to swallow.
hyderabadtimes@indiatimes.com

Sharmeen on the streets of Lahore

Living in reel time - dawn.com

September 23, 2007

By Madeeha Syed

“Travelling to conflict-riddled countries has made me more of a patriot because it made me realise that we have something that we really need to work to make better. I’ve seen what happens when things fall apart. And believe me, we do not want that to happen to us,” says Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy

A Pakistani documentary-maker based in Karachi, Paris, New York and Canada, Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy has won accolades from all over the world — the most notable being the Livingston Award for journalism and being the only non-American so far to have received it. She is also one of the 25 people picked out to represent 25 years of the Livingston Awards.

Having made documentaries and travelled to places such as South Africa, Manila (Philippines) and Afghanistan, and having made a locally-controversial documentary out of Pakistan titled Reinventing the Taliban, Sharmeen isn’t one to sit back when there is a story at hand or to get intimidated by the material she uncovers. Independent, straightforward and to-the-point with a visibly pragmatic side to her, one of the things that becomes apparent when meeting her in person is that she does not have a different camera personality — she is exactly the way she is in real life, in her mannerisms and way of talking and addressing issues, as she is on camera.

Recently, with the formation of the Citizens’ Archive of Pakistan (CAP) with a view of archiving and communicating Pakistan’s history and heritage, the group went on to organise the Shanaakht Festival held around Pakistans Independence Day. Talks about Partition, photography and art exhibitions and documentaries based on the theme of Partition were shown to the public totally free of cost. In between dealing with the festival’s post-event issues and going on yet another travelling stint abroad, Images managed to garner an interview with the documentary-maker bent on uncovering real-world issues.

Q: Your latest documentary, Lifting the Veil, that went on air recently focuses predominantly on the lives of Afghan women six years after their so-called liberation. How long did it take to make the documentary?

SOC: Lifting the Veil has got three names — it was released by Channel 4 with the name of Afghanistan Unveiled, CNN is releasing it as Lifting the Veil and my name for it is The Promise. The festival version is called the latter. I travelled from Kabul to Herat to Tahar, Talakand… basically from the capital to the west and up towards the north and north-east to villages, towns, cities to see what’s happened to the women there.

I travelled through Afghanistan for five weeks. It was one of the most fascinating journeys that I have ever undertaken. Partly because I didn’t have any language trouble, almost everyone spoke Urdu and because the country is spectacularly beautiful. It’s very sad to see such stark beauty contrasted against such stark poverty and destruction.

Q: Was it safe travelling in Afghanistan for a woman where the effects of Taliban rule and the recent war on terrorism are still predominant?

SOC: I’ve worked in conflict zones for a long time now and safety is a very relative thing. Are you safe in Karachi? You could be shot outside your own home here, your car could be hijacked, you could be robbed. Similarly, you could be robbed in Rio de Janeiro or the slums that I worked in in South Africa.

I think that safety is a very relative term and when I go into dangerous situations I do not think about whether I’m safe. I think about whether the circumstances that I’m in require me to be more cautionary or take precautions.

Q: Going armed with a camera to an individual or a group to talk to them about whatever situation they are in can be very intimidating for them. How do you get people to open up?

SOC: I start a film after I research it for about two months before I actually go in and film it. During that period I make a lot of connections with the people in that country through NGOs, individuals who I would have met during the course of my travels and basically people who connect me to others. Once I’ve built a relationship with them, they then introduce me to ordinary people in that country and when they filter, it becomes easier for those people to trust me.

Also, people are not hesitant to speak to me because of the fact that I’m a woman and I come from a third-world country myself. I’m able to relate to many of their issues because I see it happening in my own country. A lot of people find me easier to talk to than, for example, a western journalist who they can’t relate to on any level.

For example, while working in the slums in South Africa or in the Philippines, I could tell them: ‘Look, I’ve seen this. I’ve seen this poverty, I’ve seen this discrimination, I’ve see this class of society because I’ve grown up in one’. Even though those countries are across the planet or in another hemisphere, I am able to connect with those people and they realise that when they speak to me, it’s not that I am walking through the slums wearing my D&G top or something. I am there in the mud with them doing the things that I should be doing.

Q: You have been accused of representing Pakistan in a negative light in your documentary, Reinventing the Taliban. Why?

SOC: I am very straightforward about what I do. I am not Pakistan’s PR agent. I am a journalist. And just because I am one of the few journalists who work for international television and have access to stories in Pakistan does not mean that I do not uncover those stories. Some people may think that I am not a patriot, but I believe that you’re a patriot if you actually point out the faults in your country so that these can be rectified. A lot of people feel that because I have exposure, because I am well-known per say in the international community, that I should only present stories that are favorable to Pakistan.

Quite honestly, I present a very balanced view. In Reinventing the Taliban, I showed the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) area of Pakistan which was becoming increasingly radical at the time. I did the film in 2003 when the radical elements were not there but I predicted that in the next three years, Pakistan will face a civil war, where you will have Islamists battling the moderates. And what is happening today? What is Lal Masjid all about? If you watch Reinventing the Taliban you will think that I made it now. But I made it when the tribal belt of Pakistan was not as volatile as it is right now. The areas that I travelled to and the kind of people that I met in 2002-2003, I could never do now because it is extremely difficult to do so.

And of course that’s going to be a problem in this country and now everyone talks about it — its common drawing room conversation. In 2002-03 it wasn’t. And that’s why people didn’t like it and I think in some way I was a visionary. At least I was able to put forward the fact that I saw what was happening to my own country and it pained me to see it. I wanted other people to wake up and see that just because they live in your comfortable homes, in a large city, and no one is threatening the schools of their daughters and no one is threatening their wives.

Let’s face it. How many people are socially and politically active in this society? If you live in Karachi, the tribal belt seems so far away and so unknown to many of us. It’s not like we frequent that area or that we even know about it. How many of us have been to that part of Pakistan to know what’s happening over there? There is detachment because people don’t really care.

Q: As a journalist, you’re taught that your job is to observe and not become a part of the observed. After having travelled and covered issues in conflict zones extensively, is it difficult for you not to get involved?

SOC: I’ve had a couple of circumstances where I’ve been very involved with people’s lives. I did a film in 2005 about a young man who stopped a suicide bomber, his name was Ghufraan Haider. He stopped a suicide bomber in Karachi at the mosque near the former KFC outlet in Karachis Gulshan-i-Iqbal area. He was very hurt and he comes from a very poor family. He sustained a lot of injuries, when he partially recovered, he was a key witness against the suicide bombers and based on his testimony, they (the bombers) got the death penalty. He was threatened openly in court and our government could not protect him. He fled overnight to a country in the Middle East and I helped him get asylum in Canada. So in that sense, I became increasingly involved in that case.

I did so because here was a young man who did something good, who should have been set as an example and instead, we ignored him. I was the only journalist to do a story on him for international television. I asked people in the military then: ‘This is a man, you should put him on a pedestal, you should tell other people that this is an example of what a Pakistani patriot is’. Instead, he now lives in Canada. It’s a loss for Pakistan to have lost someone like him.

Again, when I did a film in the earthquake zone, I became emotionally involved in the case of a woman who lost her husband and two children and who became a widow. She was getting propositioned by men and she had to leave for Karachi with 2 or 3 small children in tow. She’s struggling to make ends meet and I’ve been helping her get jobs.

Sometimes, you can’t distance yourself from these people just because you spend so much time with them, I’ve spent 4-6 weeks with such people and they become a part of who I am then. It becomes difficult for me to draw that line. And it’s not only in Pakistan. Sometimes being a human being comes before anything else.

Q: What has been the most difficult documentary you have made so far?

SOC: The most difficult documentary that I have ever made was in East Timor. It was a small island, remote and difficult to gain access to. There was gang violence going on and a lot of times you had to look over your shoulder. The culture was very alien to me, it was a different society. But it was a beautiful country and had stunning beaches. Coming back to the gang violence, it was very difficult for me to penetrate the gangs.

Q: Some would say you’re looking for trouble… that you have a death wish?

SOC: People have been known to say that about me. There is a tremendous feeling when you’re able to meet and understand situations. You see first-hand what all the fighting is about.

The one thing that I’ve learnt after being to all these places is that we’re not so bad in Pakistan. I mean, we have problems but we have a country. We’re not fighting to get a country. And if anything, travelling to conflict-riddled countries has made me more of a patriot because it made me realise that we have something that we really need to work to make better. I’ve seen what happens when things fall apart. And believe me, we do not want that to happen to us.

Q: You have received a lot of accolades for your documentaries. What do you say about that?

SOC: Every film I did won something. Every film I did got some recognition. It has helped me know what I’m doing. There’s got to be something right to it and I should continue doing it. It’s a very lonely life doing what I do because you take off for months on end in locations and I’m married with a family. I miss a lot of important occasions… it’s a hard life.

Q: Do you plan to show any documentaries of your here? Why didn’t you show any at the Shanaakht Festival?

SOC: I didn’t show any at Shanaakht because those films were about Partition and history and my films are very contemporary politics. I do try and show something at the KaraFilm Festival every year because that’s my only avenue through which I can reach out to Pakistanis.

However, I’m moving back to Karachi in December permanently and opening up a production house. I’m going to train journalists and film-makers to make quality film programmes for international television.

Q: Have you ever thought about opening a documentary channel?

SOC: I want the freedom to be able to work for many channels, such as Channel 4, Al Jazeera International, CNN, Discovery Times, PBS, etc. I would like to have four or five people who become the core team and who do individual projects under the banner of Sharmeen Obaid Films. Hopefully, the idea is that there would be a select group of people who would be trained at an international level.

I don’t think I can make documentaries for domestic television because the idea of documentary films in Pakistan simply does not exist. The appreciation is not there and quite honestly, quality programming on Pakistani TV stations does not exist. I’m talking specifically in terms of documentary films.

What I would really like to do is make documentary films for PTV when I come back. I think PTV really needs to revive itself and regain the glory that it once had. I’ve always had an affinity to PTV and I would really like to have something to do with them when I get back, along with international television as well.

It’s Springertime as MADtv opens its new season-CNN

September 15, 2007

From the ridiculous to the sublime. Or serious, at any rate. CNN’s sober, semi-regular documentary series

Special Investigations Unit takes viewers deep inside Afghanistan in the eye-opening Lifting the Veil, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s compelling followup to 2001’s Beneath the Veil.

By now, even a casual follower of the news knows the background: women were oppressed under the Taliban, attained new dignity and freedom after the fall of the Taliban, and are now facing repression again, as religious fundamentalists exert their influence in the wake of renewed Taliban attacks.

Obaid-Chinoy is a soft-spoken but quietly intense guide through the labyrinthine maze of Afghan society, and she shares several sad, intimate tales of women and young girls forced into arranged marriages, compelled to wear burqas and denied schooling. It’s not all a downer, though. At one point, Obaid-Chinoy has an emotional reunion with a young girl from Beneath the Veil; the girl is now in school, and happier for it. That’s a side of the story you don’t often hear about.

Lifting the Veil is well worth a look at something a little deeper and more meaningful than the usual Saturday-night TV fare. (8 & 11 p.m., CNN)

- - -

Lifting the Veil theage.com.au (Australian Newspaper)

September 14, 2007

Brad Newsome, Reviewer

This documentary looks at the plight of women in Afghanistan.

Lifting the Veil.

Lifting the Veil.

Type
Documentary
Channel
CNN
Date
Saturday September 15
Time
4:00 PM

Back in 2001 (before September 11), journalist Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy travelled across Afghanistan to make Behind the Veil, a documentary that revealed the hell that Afghan women lived in under the Taliban. This year she returned to see if things had improved, and for most of this harrowing documentary it seems that they haven’t. In Kabul she dons a burqa to beg with one of the country’s million war widows, seeing how the woman has to endure the abuse and contempt of men on the streets each day as she scrapes together a pittance to feed her two teenage daughters. From there, Obaid-Chinoy is off to a hospital to meet survivors of Afghanistan’s self-immolation epidemic. In some of the documentary’s most distressing footage, horribly burned young women - one of them six months pregnant - explain how they doused themselves in kerosene and set themselves alight in a bid to escape from and protest against the violence and oppression they endured. Then there’s a visit with a child bride - who also tried to burn herself, at the age of 11 - and the family of a murdered poet and the husband who killed her. There is some respite for the viewer in Obaid-Chinoy’s visits to schools where young girls run around squealing happily, but even here we are reminded that the Taliban has stepped up its murderous campaign against teachers and students. Although Obaid-Chinoy finds joy and hope in places she least expected to, she reminds us that Afghanistan’s problems have not been solved by the invasion and that billions of dollars in promised aid has still not arrived. The program will be repeated tomorrow at 4pm.

Lifting the Veil: CNN Special Investigations Unit

September 14, 2007

Regular airtime: various (CNN) Cast: Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

US release date: 15 September 2007

by Cynthia Fuchs

PopMatters Film and TV Editor

Just Something Women Do Here

I am caged in this corner, full of melancholy and sorrow.
My wings are closed and I cannot fly.
I must wail because I’m an Afghan woman.
—Nadia Anjuman

Early in Lifting the Veil, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy spots a woman sitting on a curb in Kabul. The woman is hunched over, dabbing at her eyes with her pale blue veil. Obaid-Chinoy decides to talk to her. She and her crew cross the street and sit down with the woman, to ask her name and how long she spends each day, begging. Bibi Gul tells her she begs every day, “from morning until evening.” Looking defeated, especially when a group of young men gathers to taunt her, Gul says she’s a war widow, one of more than a million in Afghanistan, Obaid-Chinoy adds. Without male relatives, unable to work because she is a woman, 40-year-old Gul, looks 20 years older when she removes her burqa at Obaid-Chinoy’s request. Her daughters, aged 14 and 16, want to go to school but she can’t afford the pencils and paper.

This is not the way it was supposed to be, Obaid-Chinoy says more than once during the documentary. Airing as part of CNN’s Special Investigations Unit, the film is a dynamic follow-up to a film she made back in 2001, at the start of the U.S. invasion. Back then, despite decades of war and poverty exacerbated by the Taliban’s oppressive rule, promises of freedom and aid brought hope. At the time of the invasion, the new film recalls, President Bush declared that women who were once “captives in their own homes” would now be “free.” Obaid-Chinoy counters this “confident” display with her own observations: “Now we’ve come back six years later,” she narrates, “to ask if life for women in Afghanistan is any better in a liberated country.”

The answers are complicated, but one overwhelming truth is grim: this “newly democratic state” has not made life “better” for enough women, who still face conservative men, horrific poverty, and an often overwhelming sense of helplessness. Obaid-Chinoy, a documentary maker who was born in Karachi, looks beyond usual Western assumptions and determinedly pursues stories that take her off standard tracks. Charismatic and almost conspiratorial in her asides to the camera, Obaid-Chinoy’s work refreshingly activist, in the sense that she doesn’t stop at the first answer, but seeks out complications. She dons a burqa to sit on the street and beg with Gul for an afternoon, and listen to the verbal abuses hurled by passing men. At the end of he day Obaid-Chinoy turns to the camera and sighs. “Let’s face it: this issue of the burqa is just the tip of the iceberg. Afghan women face far graver issues than whether to wear the burqa or not.”

Issues like destitution, rape, disgrace, and frankly monstrous family members—in-laws who beat them, husbands who terrorize them. Issues like lack of health care, due to underfunding and ignorance, as well as the fact that, as one doctor puts it, “It’s mostly mother-in-laws and husbands involved in making family decisions,” so that some 50 pregnant women die in Afghanistan every day (according to UNICEF). (For more on this topic, see the documentary Motherland Afghanistan.) Obaid-Chinoy visits a village hospital, where she sees rooms full of women who have tried to burn themselves to death. Their faces peeling and features deformed, the women she interviews seem frail and despondent. A doctor suggests that burning is a favored form of suicide because it’s a “poor country, so kerosene is widely available.” But Obaid-Chinoy has another idea. “I think these women wanted to make a point,” she asserts, “They didn’t want to die quietly, but in a way that let others know they suffered in life, a reflection of deep-seated issues in Afghan society that need to be addressed.”

It’s a grand assessment, but the documentary makes it seem simultaneously obvious and perceptive. Obaid-Chinoy puts together the pieces that too many journalists leave hanging apart, making an argument, a passionate argument, based on what she’s seen. Still, she’s less interested in self-promotion than in bringing her subjects’ sagas into the foreground. It’s not just that Hamid Karzai is having troubles coordinating his government or that warlords are in bed with the Taliban. It’s that beautiful young Shahnaz was sold into marriage by her drug-addicted father when she was just seven years old. “I felt depressed when I found out,” says Shanahz, now 14 and utterly polite. The camera cuts to her husband, skulking in the doorway, as Obaid-Chinoy speaks out on the girl’s behalf: “It’s difficult for us to talk to Shahnaz because her mother-in-law and her husband keep coming into the room.”

This is Obaid-Chinoy’s genius, the edge that makes her work both entertaining and astute. While the husband probably could care less that she’s called him out—in his world, she is a mere woman, after all—she invites her viewers into the storytelling process, working with recalcitrant subjects and difficult truths. When Shahnaz admits that she too burned herself three years ago, Obaid-Chinoy asks to see her scars. She raises her pants leg to show painfully thin legs, covered with burn marks. After learning that Shahnaz wants to be able to go to school, Obaid-Chinoy concludes this segment by walking out of the village, past sheep and a fairground Ferris wheel, a little bit of absurdity plunked down inside the nightmare. “Often,” she says as she walks, “child brides are little more than servants at home and virtual prisoners in marriage.”

Those who do speak out, like the poet Nadia Anjuman, are also at risk; as Obaid-Chinoy reports, she studied literature in secret and published a book before she died at age 25. Obaid-Chinoy tracks down Nadia’s husband, Farid, accused of her murder but never convicted released from jail after just two months. Though Nadia’s brother says his family “forgave” Farid, “because of our religion,” they remain distressed. For his part, Farid insists that the bruises on his wife’s body were not causal in her death. Yes, he beat her that night, but she killed herself. “She was trying to put pressure on her family to make them love her more,” he says, his hands suggesting he simply doens’t understand it, but, oh well. “It’s just something women do here.”

“Just something women do here.” Obaid-Chinoy doesn’t believe it any more than you do, and her film makes clear all the ways that such self-justifying is wrong. But she never lets the West generally, or the U.S. more specifically, off the hook. This makes Lifting the Veil those documentaries that purport to be “objective.” This film means to make you worry about the women you meet (even the young men who appear oblivious to the cruelties they inflict), and to make you mad that “billions of dollars in promised aid have failed to arrive or to reach those most in need.”

“As a Muslim woman,” Obaid-Chinoy says, “I know attitudes like these are not inherent in our culture, that there are places in the world where we can walk around freely.” The film makes clear her feelings of oppression and frustration in Afghanistan, in close or canted frames and handheld footage of passersby staring at her, sans burqa. It also shows the shafts of hope that surprise and move her, including the father of an eight-year-old girl who saw her mother murdered six years ago. Though their village has no piped water, her father is proud that little Rukhsana is attending school, and hopes that one day she might “study to be a doctor or engineer.” This from a guy who looks as old-school as any of the men Obaid-Chinoy interviews. He looks forward to a future beyond himself, one premised on his daughter’s achievements.

“Afghanistan’s problems were not fixed by the invasion,” says Obaid-Chinoy. Lifting the Veil makes clear the unmet obligation of the invaders and the obstacles that lie ahead. It also argues, passionately and shrewdly, that the women of Afghanistan are more than ready to do their own work.

Afghanistan — Lifting the Veil, The Seoul Times, CNN Special Investigations Unit Documentary

August 13, 2007

Asia-Pacific
Afghanistan — Lifting the Veil
CNN Special Investigations Unit Documentary

Hijab, more specifically the Burqa, has been enforced in Afghanistan since the Taliban took over major parts of the country in 1996 following years of civil war. The Burqa covers the entire body, head and face.

Six years after CNN broadcast the groundbreaking and award-winning documentary “Beneath the Veil,” the international network returns to Afghanistan and discovers that women still face dangerous and harsh living conditions even after the U.S. and coalition forces invaded the country following the September 11th attacks.
In AFGHANISTAN – LIFTING THE VEIL celebrated journalist and filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy criss-crosses the impoverished country, meets with ordinary Afghans and witnesses firsthand the struggles women face in a nation trying to rebuild amid continued war, corruption and chaos. Obaid-Chinoy learns that stalled foreign aid, repressive clerics and a dysfunctional government stymie progress.
Despite Afghanistan’s new democracy, little appears to have changed for the better, particularly for women. Six years after the Taliban was overthrown, many women are still forced by their husbands and families to wear burqas. Only two out of five Afghan girls attend school and since most women lack the skills and training to work, begging is often the only option even for a bleak life.
With such limited options, many women have chosen a devastating route of escape from their brutal oppression: self-immolation. Obaid-Chinoy speaks with suicide survivors in hospitals to try to understand what drives them to such desperate actions as setting themselves on fire. In a country of nearly 32 million, more than one million are widows – a consequence of 20 years of wars and conflict. Without husbands, the widows are essentially condemned to a life of abject poverty. Even married women do not appear to fare much better. In a culture in which most marriages are arranged and young girls are often sold into marriage by their early teen years, women are frequently doomed to lives of abuse by their husbands and in-laws.

But Obaid-Chinoy does find some faint signs of hope as well. In the northern town of Taloqan, she finds a girls’ school which seems to embody the promise of the “new Afghanistan.” A fiercely courageous teacher, who once risked her life to teach girls in secret, now teaches in a modest facility that educates 4,000 girls. Despite this progress, the school has not received the aid it needs to build new classrooms and the girls say they face strong resistance to study at home.
In 2001, Beneath the Veil introduced viewers to one family devastated by the Taliban. The father had been kidnapped, the mother executed and their young daughters were left alone in a house with Taliban fighters for days. Obaid-Chinoy returns six years later to find out how the father and two daughters have fared since liberation, finding a mixed message of Afghanistan’s pain and progress.
In a nearby village, Obaid-Chinoy speaks with a cleric who also speaks hopefully. He tells her that despite the crushing poverty, he is optimistic for the reconstruction of his war-ravaged village – perhaps a health center might open someday and more food may become available for the people.
Obaid-Chinoy concludes: “I have found joy and hope in places I least expected it, but I have also learned that progress is slow. Afghanistan’s problems were not fixed by the invasion … hanging in the balance, are the future of Afghanistan and the lives of its people, people desperate for peace … and for hope.”

Checking In On Last Year’s 10, The Toronto Star

August 13, 2007

It’s been a dynamic 12 months for alumni of the Star’s annual ‘to watch’ list

LESLIE SCRIVENER
FEATURE WRITER

Films made, books published, deals brokered, Olympic dreams in sight: 2007 was a very good year for the accomplished Torontonians the Sunday Star profiled a year ago in its “10 to watch” feature.
For some it was a year of dazzling births. In June, Janice Price ushered in the inaugural Luminato festival, an annual, 10-day celebration of the arts. Mo Johnston, manager of Toronto FC, helped set off a local explosion of soccer mania with sold-out games and devoted fans at the shiny new BMO Field at Exhibition Place.
“It was really, oh, amazing,” says Luminato CEO Price, 51, thinking back on 2007, which she calls “the fastest year of my life.” After working in New York and Philadelphia, she returned to her hometown to run the $12-million festival.
“It completely opened my eyes, that there really is an appetite for this kind of event.”

The past year also brought recognition to three of our 2007 nominees who work in the arts.
About 12 months ago, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, a documentary filmmaker, was heading to Afghanistan to do a film on women five years after the U.S. invasion. This year, that film, Lifting the Veil, was broadcast in Canada, the U.S., Britain and Australia.
“In some cases, women’s lives have become a lot worse,” she said on the phone recently from Karachi, where she was preparing to cover Pakistan’s parliamentary elections for The New York Times website and PBS (before the turmoil following the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto). Though an unprecedented number of women have been elected to the Afghan parliament, they have virtually no power, she says. “They are icons for the West to see.”
Still, there are glimmers of hope. More girls are being educated, though often their fathers disapprove, she notes. “… People in the West think that Afghanistan is well on its way to recovery. One of the wake-up calls is that women who were promised rights and freedoms still do not have them.”
Obaid-Chinoy, 29, also won the Broadcast Journalist of the year award from the One World Broadcasting Trust, which promotes filmmaking about developing areas. Her next film will be on the vanishing middle class in Iraq.
Artist Shary Boyle is back in Canada after a six-month residency in London, part of the Canada Council International Studio Program, which culminated in a September exhibition at a venue called Space in the U.K. capital. The piece she created was a new development, she says, combining overhead projections of her performance work with floating sculptures. Her subject was the effect of colonization “forces that change the world.”
Boyle, 35, was also an Ontario finalist for the $50,000 Sobey Art Award for a Canadian artist under 40. “Even though I didn’t get the award, there was a lot of buzz about it,” she says. Boyle was has been working on a monograph of her work called Otherworld Uprising, to be published early in 2008.
There was also buzz last year about playwright and poet Jonathan Garfinkel’s new book and first work of literary non-fiction, Ambivalence: Crossing the Israel/Palestinian Divide, which had set off a publishers’ bidding war. Ambivalence tells of his life in Toronto and his journey to Israel to search for a house where Palestinians and Israelis were believed to live together peacefully. “For me the story ends up speaking about so much more than the Middle East,” says Garfinkel, 34.
“There’s a longing for home, what it means to have a home, questions of identity and culture, and what it is we long and hope for.” He’s now working on a novel based on his experiences in the former Soviet republics.
The end of the year brought good news to one of Canada’s top wrestlers, Ohenewa Akuffo, 28 , who only two weeks ago qualified for Canada’s Olympic team. Though the Brampton native had won the championship at the Canada Cup in June, she didn’t improve her second-place standing at the Pan American Games in Brazil the following month, and failed to win a medal at the World Championships in China in September. “It was a little depressing, and I didn’t want that disappointment to carry through the rest of the year.”
Her goal is clear: the summer Olympics. “That’s all I think about. I’ve been thinking about it for four years.”
Toronto police inspector Peter Yuen, the highest-ranking Chinese Canadian police officer in Ontario, was often in the news in 2007. As the duty inspector who filled in for the chief of police after regular business hours, he was frequently called in to comment on Toronto homicides. “I was privy to many human tragedies,” he recalls. Earlier this month Yuen, 43, was reassigned to 55 Division, where he is second in command.
“A lot of people think policing is chasing cars and shootings. My style is to stress that to be a police officer in 2007 and beyond, you have to have customer service – be professional and be compassionate.”
Yuen also started a master’s degree in organizational leadership at the University of Guelph, doing course work online. His thesis may upset the police establishment, he says. “I believe Canadian police organizations should look at non-police officers for the position of chief-of-police. We’re too traditional.”

Finally, Zainab Taiyeb, whose experience selling Rogers telecommunications services door-to-door transformed her into a workers’ rights activist, was out of the country and not available for an interview. Taiyeb, 44, is chair of the board of directors of the Toronto Workers’ Action Centre. Says Deena Ladd, co-ordinator of the centre, “It’s important to have people directly affected by bad working conditions play a leadership role in our organization.”

I am Pakistani

August 12, 2007

[ Madeeha Syed ]…printed matter

‘I am Pakistani’
August 12th, 2007

sharmeen1.jpgWith her Mac on one side and a host of notebooks and papers on the table in front of her, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, journalist and independent film-maker (Reinventing the Taliban and the upcoming The Promise — A journey through Afghanistan) invites me to sit on her ‘see-saw’ sofa in the house she grew up in. She is energetic, loud, open and most importantly, she’s on a mission. Teaming up with a group of individuals, she’s formed the Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP) and they’re on a mission to do exactly that — archive the history of Pakistan in whatever way or form possible. And communicate it as well.

Some of the paintings on display include six life-sized murals based on every decade in Pakistan’s history; the photography is predominantly a contemporary look by prominent photographer on Pakistan itself. The documentaries includes those based on the last days of Lord Mountbatten as the viceroy of pre-Partition India, how different film-makers view Partition and also a documentary examining the social and political issues predominant such as poverty and inflation as well as the remnants of the British rule over South Asia: the bureaucracy.

Sheema Kirmani along with Tehreek-i-Niswan presented a play yesterday based on Lahore in 1947 on an immigrant family coming to stay at an allotted haveli, seemingly vacated, after Partition only to discover that the matriarch of the previous household continued to inhabit it. The dialogues had been taken from the poet, Nasir Kazmi’s original letters and writings and the story line itself was based on an actual incident that had taken place.

Talking about how the CAP formed, Sharmeen says, “Last year in the summers, I was having a discussion about Pakistan: its history, where we are and where we are headed. I realised that there was no place where you could absorb Pakistan’s history,” adding that there was a lack of national identity that the common Pakistani has, she mentioned that “we are lost as people.” Hence the idea of creating a platform through which one could know Pakistan, where it came from, who were the people who chose to support its formation along with the stages through which the country has progressed, both culturally and historically, took birth.

Realising that the project itself was too big for her to handle on her own, she brought together, in her own words, “a group of mad, creative but ambitious individuals.” These individuals happen to be Sarah Taher Khan (CEO Radio1 FM91), Omar Rahim, Amean Jan Muahmmad (photographer), Durriya Kazi (HoD Visual Arts, Karachi University), Minal Rahimtoola, Sabeen Mahmud (COO b.i.t.s.) and Altaf Qureshi (lawyer).

“We don’t give the general public any form of entertainment that requires them to use their brain cells,” says Sharmeen, talking about the content of the festival itself. “The partition of 1947 was a traumatic experience and remembering it gives a sense of how Pakistan came into existence. And who were the people who made it happen.” According to Sharmeen a lot of the photographs and material used in the festival had been donated to them by ‘like-minded indivduals’, also including some of the documentaries. “Looking at them you realise: we were civilised as a nation,” she says, observing thus after going through some of the photographs, “and now in some cases, it’s become so bad, it’s unrecognisable”. Talking about the murals exhibited in the festival, based on Pakistan’s history she say “that tidbit of history will be more alive than by just reading it in textbooks.”

An interesting aspect of the festival is that it is completely free of cost. From the exhibitions, plays, documentaries to the open discussions, street-theatre and musical performances, this is an event that costs the attendee nothing. At the minimum it requires that one simply to attend or as in the case of “closed events” pick their passes up early since they will be given out at a first-come, first-serve basis. It doesn’t end here, to ensure that people do not have a reason not to come, CAP has taken care of transporting interested individuals to the venue as well: “There will be free buses available on the 10th and the 14th — the two holidays — from 11am to 8pm, every two hours, back and forth from Nipa Chowrangi, Society Office near the Quaid’s Mausoleum and the Korangi Chowk,” says Sharmeen. “We don’t want to give people an excuse for not coming,” she adds.

Every person working for the festival has done so willingly and without expecting any monetary benefits in return. Perhaps a first in the history of the Karachi Arts Council, but they have provided the venue free-of-cost as well. Even the logo which had been designed by Khizra Munir from Interflow to the vocal booths provided by Radio1 FM91 has been done pro bono.

Speaking of the future of CAP and what it hopes to achieve, Sharmeen says: “A lot of this work will be electronically available on our websites. My hope is that next year we’ll be doing something different along those same lines. We’re hoping that old buildings in Karachi that we can either have donated to us or given to a trust so that we can build a museum. I imagine in 10 years’ time that this will be the place where people will give lectures and talks,” she adds about what they have currently collected so far that “everything that is being received is going to the museum. Till then we’ll look for a temporary place to house them.”

At the end of it all, more important than whatever goes on in the Shanakht Festival itself is what people will take home with them — a sense of renewed identity and a stronger sense of belonging and connection to the country they belong to as well as a desire to help bring it forward into the future. There aren’t many individuals willing to take time out and work for the enlightenment and betterment of the society itself, let alone doing it without expecting any materialistic benefit — CAP happen to be some of those ‘creative, mad but ambitious individuals’ who are doing precisely that. And it is important because: “We need to celebrate 60 years of Pakistan. I have walked across the border to Afghanistan and Iran and I have seen the other side,” says Sharmeen, adding that “while we have what we have, we need to learn to appreciate it and move forward.”

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