15.02.05 Afghanistan seit den Taliban

Assignment Afghanistan

October 9, 2004, election day in Afghanistan, had special meaning for Washington Post reporter Pamela Constable. "I wanted to remember this day," she writes, "this hushed and universal ritual of a fledgling democracy that once had seemed impossible to imagine. In another week, I would be leaving the country after nearly three years that had been among the most exhilarating, as well as the most grueling, of my career as a foreign correspondent. During that time I had covered the assassinations of two cabinet ministers, tiptoed through the human wreckage of car bombings, chronicled the rapid spread of opium poppy cultivation, witnessed the release of haggard war prisoners and the disarming of ragged militiamen. But I had also traveled with eager refugees returning home from years in exile, visited tent schools in remote villages and computer classes in makeshift storefronts, helped vaccinate flocks of sheep and goats, watched parched and abandoned fields come alive again, and reveled in the glorious cacophony of a capital city plugging into the modern world after a quarter century of isolation and conflict."

On election day, Constable concludes, "many Afghans who cast their ballots were not voting for an individual. They were voting for the right to choose their leaders, and for a system where men with guns did not decide their fates.

Aus dem viel zu unbekannten Magazin des Smithsonian

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