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In December 2001, Carlo joined the ICRC as an administrator and was sent on mission to Kabul for a year. He spent the little free time he had documenting the plight and hopes of Kabulis after the fall of the Taliban regime.
Together with him we selected twelve of his pictures which he agreed to comment on.
 Kabul: wisdom
"Hopefully these old men have seen the end of their last war to end all wars. In the setting sun of late autumn they sit in the ruins of a once prosperous trading market. Tea helps to shake off the cold of an approaching winter and they mention to me their desire to see Kabul return to the way it was before more than 20 years of war."
 Shomali high plain: family crossing between two villages
"A photo that alludes to the hungry, lonely reality that pains uncountable numbers of 'normal' families in Afghanistan. A family without a patriarch, children without a father, a wife without her husband. Estimations vary but it is accepted that there are at least 90,000 families without male breadwinners.
 refugee family returns
 kabul : refugee returns
"Shatteringly for many returning Afghans their homecoming was not the realisation of a dream which they had hoped for so long. Many hundreds of thousands had waited decades for this moment where their life-sustaining dream became a joyous reality. For many it was the dream of the return, the homecoming, which drove them to carry on.
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This refugee has just returned by truck from Pakistan. He fears the worst as he has been told that hardly any houses remain unscathed in the ancient Kabul suburb of Gada-e-Maiwaind where he used to live. He does not know where to go, or what immediate fate awaits him. It must be deeply painful to accept that a dream was just that, a dream."
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</font /></font />Alone, this family, their existence made almost insignificant by the scale of the barren lands behind them, set off from their province to seek the chance of a more 'abnormal' life in the newly liberated city of Kabul..""The refugee in this image has just returned from Pakistan. A truck has just dumped all his family and household belongings alongside the infamous football field in central Kabul used by the Taliban for public executions.
The 1979 Soviet intervention precipitated an exodus of epic proportions and gave Afghanistan the unenviable title of recording the world's largest refugee population. During the invasion and occupation, 2 million were displaced internally and 6 million refugees fled the country. During the height of the exodus 1 out of every 3 Afghans was either a refugee or internally displaced.
My family lives in Melbourne, Australia which has a population of almost 3 million, thus an exodus equal to that experienced by Afghanistan would require both the cities of Melbourne and Sydney to stand up and leave."</font></font /> </font> |
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