Ed is in Chicago

Last night we watched Visconti’s La Terra Trema. What a sad film – it is about these poor Sicilian fishermen who go through life being exploited by the wholesalers who supply the boats and the nets and then buy their fish off them at low prices, while the fishermen labour and lose their lives at sea. The story is focused on the struggle of one family’s attempts to break to model of exploitation. It reminded me a lot of Afghanistan in fact, and it made me feel more content with the idea of development, which I often feel very skeptical about. The film makes quite a good case for microcredit programmes that allow the very poor to break the cycle of poverty by allowing them to invest in their livelihoods in a small way, without getting into back-breaking high-interest debt. The problem is that there is such a lot of bad development going on, as well as some really great programmes.

The political side of things is the real cruncher. The poor and vulnerable will always be open to exploitation unless there is rule of law which protects them from the bigwig’s club, and rule of law is very difficult to preserve without transparent political system, and how do you put together a transparent political system. No one knows. Sometimes it just happens, sometimes it doesn’t. Experts on the subject talk about establishing civil society – and you can do a lot in that direction – Soros’ OSI being a good example. But you would have to be a pretty devastating historian to be able to put your finger on the right mix of causes. When did it happen in Europe? I am not very up on European history, but in England I guess it was somewhere between the 16th and 19th centuries – with the rise of the economic power of the bourgeoisie, and the birth of democratic movements embedded in society. Historians! Can you explain it more clearly to me – or suggest a good book on the subject?

When will it happen in Afghanistan? Well, much of the country is somewhere in the feudal era here. The warlords are something like medieval squires – some are exploitative bastards, others are strongmen who do at least protect their own. They control through direct taxation of trade routes, and the taking of tithes from their underlings. When you talk about corruption in Afghanistan it is rather deceptive, as it gives the idea of a poorly run democratic system which is being attacked by the worm of kickbacks and nepotism. In fact it is almost the opposite – the system that prevails is based on family, rank, contacts and economic power, and there has recently been an attempt to insert a new system based on democratic principles, rule of law and so forth.

And of course Kabul is a different world, much as London was a different world in the 17th century, where there was even an element of direct democracy exerted by the famous London mob which expressed its political opinions with brickbats. Talking with the fat-bearded merchant father of the Mazar Logistics guy, over a delicious rice meal one evening in his house in Kabul, we agreed that things would have to start in Kabul. It just needs peace to hold, economic freedom to be ensured, lawyers to be trained and the legal system to be overhauled, the power of the gunmen to be broken and the institutions of representative democracy to be put in place.

It might work. It is an exciting time to be here. The parliamentary elections seem to be so far unmarred by violence or intimidation (except in the south and east where the Taliban have turned themselves from a government in exile into a rather effective guerrilla force and are running around assassinating pro-government or pro-democracy figures every week.) We have had a few people from Human Rights Watch link staying with us at the guesthouse in Mazar, who are here to prepare a report on anything that might go wrong, but as far as major human rights violations goes, it seems that they might have more profitably used their plane tickets to go somewhere else. They display a peculiar mixture of frustration and relief when they talk about it – it’s good that there is not much going on, but it means that they could be doing something more useful elsewhere. Of course there are a few dodgy things going on – the odd journalist beaten up, and that kind of thing, but generally the candidates have been allowed to do their thing.

Having said that, so far the elections seem to have 2 major flaws:

1. People don’t know who to vote for
Almost all of the people I have asked here so far have told me that they do not know who to vote for, that they are overwhelmed by the number and variety of candidates. Driving along in the car yesterday, the Panjshiri Driver asked the Uzbek Engineer, ‘who should I vote for’. The engineer said ‘whoever your heart leads you to’. The driver persisted with ‘Yes, but WHO?’

Mazar is now literally pasted-over with the posters for parliamentary candidates. As I understand every one gets 2 minutes air time on the radio to introduce themselves, but seeing as they all say things like ‘I am going to improve schools, build roads and factories, and uphold human rights’, it is difficult to choose between them. I guess this is the case elsewhere too. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a few politicians who said things like ‘I am going to appoint my family to all the cushy jobs, I am going to steal from the public budget and use the money to buy myself a whole load of big gold chains like Mr T.’ Then you would know who to vote for. In Afghanistan it is exacerbated by the fact that this is the first time, so amidst all the patriotic seeming school teachers and university professors and doctors who are running, the only people who have any public recognition are the ones who people know that they don’t want – the commanders and the ex-combatants who are not known for the experience in legislation, but for chopping people’s heads off and burying them in ditches, or for stuffing their enemies into shipping containers and leaving them in the desert to suffocate or fry.

2. The bad guys have not been eliminated from the candidate list
This was the main problem that HRW guy identified. More could have been done to eliminate the baddies from the list. Of course, it is a fine balance. The Americans and UNAMA and the other politically-involved actors in Afghanistan clearly did not want to rock the boat too much, but you can see the effects already, as even now the parliamentary candidates argue that because they have not been eliminated, that they must therefore have been proven to be innocent of war crimes for anything they have done in the past, because the electoral protocol clearly states that no one who has committed war crimes can stand for election, and here they are standing.

My favourite thing about having the HRW people to stay, was that whenever the phone rang, the team leader picked it up and said in his best telephone voice ‘Human rights watch.’ The kind of voice that you expect a secretary in a large building to use, to be followed by ‘…how may I help you?’ I had imaginings of people calling up from Kandahar to say ‘Yes… is that Human Rights Watch? Yes, I’d like to register a complaint. My local councillor came round to my house and has been torturing me with an electro-shock baton for the last half hour.’

Was that in bad taste? Probably, but there was that atmosphere to our conversations. Like many professionals they had a tongue-in-cheek manner of discussing subject matter which they considered deeply serious – so doctors make jokes about horrific disease, and teachers ridicule their most tragic students. Thus any aid worker who has seen Beyond Borders, which stars Angelina Jolie as a UNHCR worker, will struggle to recognise themselves in the atmosphere of po-faced hand-wringing displayed by characters with nerry a moment taken off for the welcome release of irony. Oh, where is the film in which NGOs are portrayed as they are?