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Martin Pedersen: You're not a war correspondent or a photojournalist.
What prompted you to travel to Afghanistan?
Sean Hemmerle: On September 11th I lived across the river from the World
Trade Center. I commuted through there everyday. The towers were part of
my daily life. After photographing them when they fell, and then photographing
Ground Zero for two or three weeks afterward, it seemed like the logical
next step.
As soon as we started dropping bombs, I began wondering if bombing Afghanistan
back to the Stone Age was the answer. In October I started thinking that
I should go there. It took me until January to make a little bit of money.
Otherwise I would have gone sooner.
MP: You flew into Peshawar, a city in Pakistan about 200 miles from Kabul.
How did you get to Kabul?
SH: When I got off the plane, I had a whole bunch of contacts in Pakistan
and Afghanistan. I'd spent weeks cultivating them. And every single one
of them fell through. The phone numbers were either no longer active, wrong,
or the people that they were assigned to had moved on. By about the third
hour, I was panicking, so I walked out of the airport, with all of my gear,
wondering, "OK, what now?" And this man comes up and asks: "Do
you need a driver?" His name was Sohail and he described himself as
a "fixer," which is a very important position.
MP: What's a fixer?
SH: He helps journalists and westerners "fix" any of the problems
that might befall them. The bureaucracy of Pakistan is extensive. You need
a guard, a driver, sometimes a translator. You need paperwork for all of
them. You need paperwork for the border crossing. I had to check in with
the American embassy. I had to have my visa looked at by numerous people.
It's very complicated. So I asked Sohail, "How much money do you need?"
And he said, "Oh, whatever you can give me." That turned out to
be mistake number one, because "whatever you can give me'" is
not an acceptable answer in that part of the world. But Sohail was a very
good fixer. Within about a day, I had 90 percent of my paperwork finished.
MP: How much money were you carrying?
SH: About $4,000. I had it split up. I was carrying a fanny pack that was
my dummy. It had about $500. I was always reaching into it, just in case
there was someone watching me. Then I had $700 in my shoe. That was my absolute
backup. If everything went wrong, I'd still have that money to get home.
I had the remainder in a waist-belt that was tucked inside my underwear.
MP: Did you ever feel threatened, or have any second thoughts?
SH: Absolutely. When I got to the border I was passed over to a different
fixer, who was supposed to take me to Kabul, but first we stopped in Jalalabad.
That city had just been declared safe--the four journalists were killed
on a road near Jalalabad. There were constant rumors about people being
robbed there at gunpoint.
So we arrived in Jalalabad and my translator says to the driver, "Turn
right here." Then he says to me, "This is your hotel." I'm
thinking, hotel in Jalalabad does not equal me in Kabul. We go into the
lobby. There are all these guys standing around in camaflouge suits, holding
machine guns. Again he tells me: "This is your hotel." It's late
in the afternoon, dark outside, and dark in the lobby, except for a single
Coleman lamp. I'm standing near this flickering lantern and these men with
machine guns form a semi circle around me.
MP: Who were they with?
SH: I think the local warlord. I had no idea what kind of situation I was
in. My translator says, "You need to pay me now." I say, "Well,
our agreement was to Kabul." He says, "No, Jalalabad." I
tell him: "I will pay you when me and my bag are in my room."
At this point I'm getting a little afraid and a lot pissed off. I make him
carry my bag to the room. When the door closes, I pull money out of my fanny
pack and give him $150. Nothing extra. He grumbles and leaves. So I'm sitting
in my room now, stranded, wondering what to do next. I sit in the dark for
about an hour, smoking cigarettes for the first time in years, trying to
figure out my next move.
MP: How did you get out of Jalalabad?
SH: An hour later the lights came back on. I walked out to the lobby. This
is a fairly Western hotel with a beautiful staircase, a restaurant. The
guards who I'd seen earlier are sitting around a coffee table talking to
a British guy, who is trying to negotiate passage to Kabul. He's wearing
the same sort of Afghani clothes that I am, but his are sort of tattered.
And he seems really desperate.
MP: How far away were you from Kabul?
SH: Only about 100 miles. So this British guy is pleading and they're telling
him, "No, it's $300." He says, "I don't have that much money!"
And one of the men says, "That's really too bad. I hope you get to
Kabul."
I'm sitting there, listening. Finally, I say to the British guy, "How
much money do you have?" And the Brit looks at me startled, because
he thought I was Afghani. He has a $130. I suggest we split the fare. Not
possible. If you packed a car with 100 journalists, every one would pay
$300. And the way they're sitting there, staring at us with these eyes of
death, holding guns. It was the time I felt the most imperiled. The British
guy finally leaves.
"So, it's $300 to get to Kabul?" I say. "When do we leave?"
MP: Were you able to photograph during the drive to Kabul?
SH: I tried to, but the road to Kabul had been bombed so many times that
it's a road in name only. It's more like a lunar landscape. They wouldn't
stop the car either, because they didn't want to get ambushed.
So they took me to the Spinzar Hotel. It's one of the better hotels in downtown
Kabul. There's also the Intercontinental and a hotel called the Mustafa,
where a lot of Western journalists stay. When I was in Kabul I was thinking
of moving to the Mustafa, but this man, a total stranger, told me, "Don't
go there. In these days, bad things could happen there." Two days after
I was told a bomb went off in the lower portion of the hotel.
MP: Do you think he knew?
SH: I think he did. I made a few friends there. I don't exactly know why,
but for some reason a couple of people took me under their wing. I was very
fortunate to meet them.
In Jalalabad, the night before we left for Kabul, I had a long conversation
with my driver and my translator. We talked about our families. Often times
women who are about to be raped are given the advice, talk to your attacker.
If you can somehow make your assailant realize that you are a human being
and not just a target, you can subvert a lot of bad things.
I think that's what happened with me in Jalalabad. I'm pretty sure that
I was being set up. But once we established a human connection some sort
of wall dropped. And when that happened, it was then just about money. If
you're a Westerner with pockets full of money, you're seen as a target,
and it's completely within the ethical code to screw you over anyway possible
to obtain that wealth. However, the same person could have $1 million, wear
it on the outside of their clothes, and if they're guests of someone, then
they're extended certain courtesies. So, when people took me under their
wing, I became their guest.
MP: When you finally got to Kabul, how did you find a guide?
SH: On my first day I passed a very elegant man on the stairway of the hotel.
I say, "Salaam Malekum." He answered, "Salaam Malekum,"
then in English: "Where are you from?"
He was an older man, with a nicely trimmed beard. He had a very deliberate
way about him and really honest eyes. We started talking. He made me feel
very comfortable. His name was Mohammed Amin.
He asks me what I'm doing here. I tell him I'm a photographer. "A journalist?"
Mohammed asks. "Not really," I say, "I came to photograph
the minefields, battlefields, and the architecture."
"Oh, that's interesting," he says. "If you need a guide,
I can be your guide." Mohammed asks for $50 a day, but after the difficulties
in Jalalabad, I didn't have that kind of money. "I can pay you $20,"
I say. He looks at me for about a minute: "Okay, I'll do it, but you
have to meet my son . I'll bring him tomorrow. If you like him, he can be
your guide." "How old is your son?" I ask. "Sixteen."
Bells go off. I'm thinking: a 16-year-old guide in a war zone, maybe that's
not a good idea. But the next morning Mohammed and his son Rafi arrive at
my door. Rafi is small for his age. Any questions I have, I ask Mohammed
but Rafi answers. By the end of the day I'm just asking Rafi questions.
He knew a lot about what was going on. His English was good. And he seemed
really concerned about me. At one point we were walking through a neighborhood
destroyed by the civil war; the thing that got Rafi his job was, as we were
walking through he had the same expression on his face as I did. "Rafi,
what do you think of this?" I ask. And he looked at me with the saddest
face: "What can I say to you?" At that moment he became my translator.
Every morning thereafter Rafi showed up at my door at 6.
MP: What did father Mohammed Amin do for a living in Kabul?
SH: He had an interesting title: vice president of the Ministry of Light
Industry and Food Stuffs. His office was in the Spinzar Hotel. Government
ministries own all of the hotels, all of the major buildings.
MP: You stayed with Mohammed's family for a few nights. What was their house
like?
SH: They live in one room: he and his wife, two sons, and a daughter. Actually
there were two families living in two rooms, with one shared kitchen. The
other family was three sons, plus a mother and father.
Mohammed explained to me that they live this way because it's easier, communal.
The people living next door are his sister and her husband. So it's sort
of a combined family residence. Mohammed's brother-in-law was a soldier.
The week that we were touring the countryside he was promoted to general.
But this man lives in a tiny house. It really surprised me how a general
in Afghanistan lived.
MP: What did you want to accomplish in Afghanistan?
SH: I wanted to see what our bombs were doing, first hand. I wanted to see
if smart bombs actually fell where they were supposed to. I wanted to see
what Afghani people were like. Because all the photos I'd seen of them were
of these crazed extremists with rocket launchers. But actually what I saw
were people trying to get back to life, trying to get back to some semblance
of order and civilization.
MP: Did your opinions change based on what you saw?
SH: Yes. About 15 minutes after I saw the second tower collapse, my first
reactions was: we should go and bomb the hell out of the Taliban. When I
got over there, I started to understand that the Afghanis have a level of
hospitality that we don't understand. They exercise a level of sincerity
that we don't often practice here.
There is a lot of duality in their actions, but they seemed very concerned
that I was going to come back to America, saying I wasn't treated right.
They went out of their way so many times to treat me like a valued guest.
I was so touched by that. I made it my point in every situation to lead
with kindness and compassion. That's how I got into places. And I always
found that if I led with kindness and compassion, it was returned to me
exponentially.
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