Talking with Reza at AINA, Kabul

Talking With Reza at the AINA Media Center
by Le Anne Clausen

“When you go home, just give a realistic report of this alarming situation,” he said. “If you forget again, it will explode again. Next time, it won’t be the Twin Towers, but all of New York.”

He is Reza Deghati, the famed photojournalist of National Geographic, perhaps best known for his coverage of Afghan Anti-Taliban warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was assassinated September 9, 2001. Now he spends his time at the AINA Media Center in Kabul, a nonprofit organization devoted to developing Afghan civil society through mass communication.

“The whole media can be run at cost of one bomb,” he said. He was quite blunt throughout our group visit in the courtyard of the center.

Why devote so much rehabilitation energy and resources to a media project, we asked. He responded the way a seasoned war photojournalist might. Wars continue to cause two types damage: the physical buildings and bodies–which one can photograph; and the deeper, main form of damage that perpetuates war–the identity and cultural destruction, the wounding of souls.

“You can build schools and hospitals in two or three months, but that doesn’t change people, they will just use schools and hospitals to build better wars. The Taliban trained in schools and were treated in the hospitals we built,” he says of the last round of U.S. invasion/ reconstruction/ abandonment, a quarter-century ago.

“These facilities get built because you can photograph them and get more money. Magazines are not photo-worthy.” Reza is especially passionate about the children’s magazine they produce, Parwaz (Dari for ‘to fly or rise’), which is distributed in schools throughout the country. It includes colorfully illustrated articles on science, culture, foreign language vocabularies, health, civic education, and letters sent in from young readers. The magazine is produced on heavy paper because the copies are passed through many hands, reaching unschooled children and their families as well. It only costs eighty cents a copy to produce, yet the project is in financial jeopardy, even despite the personal investment of Reza and other affiliated journalists.

“The children here have heard shooting from their first day of life. With this we can take them out of the confined world of war, and open the universe to them.” He sees it as treating the wounded souls through a form of peace education. “Material things can always be destroyed in war. What’s in your mind can’t be taken away, and this is the importance of this education.”

Reza sees new hope in the new generation of Afghans. AINA seeks to reach the ‘third generation,’ through societal, deep long term change, understanding the costs of war, instilling culture and pride.

Their other projects include eight mobile cinemas which go out to the villages to women audiences, showing educational films on women’s health and human rights. The documentaries are a strategy for educating populations who are largely illiterate. Also, he says, “Posters are not effective for women in burqas. On the street, you can’t see them if you can’t look sideways [due to the restrictive garment].”


The documentaries rely on Afghan folk stories to communicate today’s necessary messages. These are not new ideas, but forgotten ones. The cinema operators, men who are recruited from the target villages, show the films to the village elders ahead of time, and they routinely approve screenings for the rest of the population. “They never saw cinema before, it’s a medium that really sticks,” he says. In one day, they could reach all the women of the village in their own language. Topics include the need for peace education, ‘let the Loya Jirga work’--the more fighting the more scars destruction; sending daughters to school, and sending women who need medical care to the hospital, among others.

“This isn’t propaganda,” he says. They train volunteers at the center in drama in order to produce the films. The entire cost for the program is only $15,000--not $15 million, like the UN posters project. Still, there is not enough funding to keep going–even though they have all the equipment, and use workers from each village to develop the relationships necessary to being effective. They have not been able to stir up enough interest from donor agencies.

The journalist with his decades of experience left us with a last sobering thought. “The Taliban are regaining their footing among the people here because the U.S. and others said, “get rid of the Taliban, and we’ll bring you x, y, z...” But they have turned their backs on us and broke their promises.”