: Waseem Mahmood
: Julia Dillon
: Good Morning Afghanistan
: Eye Press
: 9781908646668
: 1
: CHF 8.60
:
: Sozialwissenschaften allgemein
: English
: 240
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
The true story of how a courageous band of media warriors assisted a broken nation in finding a voice through the radio. Waseem Mahmood lost almost everything when his brother broke a confidence and filed a story in the world's highest circulating tabloid newspaper, the News of the World. He feared he would never work in broadcast media again, and history intervened with the events of 9/11, the attack on Afghanistan, and the fall of the Taliban. Headed by Mahmood, a group of local and foreign journalists responded to the events by producing a radio program based in Kabul to disseminate much-needed and, for the first time, uncensored information to the country's people. What they end up providing is hope for a devastated land and a voice for a people long smothered by oppression. Told with searing honesty, this is a story of struggle, cruelty, and courage populated by ordinary people who risk their lives for freedom.

September 11th, 2001


The evil that men do lives on after,

the good is oft interred with their bones….

William Shakespeare

It is a man’s own mind,

not his enemy or foe,

that lures him to evil ways.

Buddha

Stratford-upon-Avon


08.00 hours


It is the smell that stays with you. The sweet sickly smell of death alternating with the putrid gut-wrenching stench of rotting human flesh somehow managed to get right under my skin, assaulting a refined nasal palate more in tune with discerning between the vintages of various French châteaux than having to cope with the damning evidence of atrocities that man has inflicted on his fellow mortals.

The trip to the village of Racak in Kosovo six months earlier to document the discovery of mass graves had haunted me since, the events and smells a continuous loop that replayed endlessly in my mind the moment I closed my eyes and attempted to sleep. Until then, I wasn’t aware that smell was a sensation that one could experience so strongly in nightmares – but now I know.

That bright September morning I was fighting yet again the spirits of Racak; the smell, the sights, and the piercing, high-pitched wailing of mothers, sisters, daughters and wives who had come to find news of their loved ones had made my body tense, and I was sweating heavily, tossing and turning, violently lashing out at the multitude of demons inhabiting my every space. But there was no respite, no hiding; every single night, four hundred residents of Racak taunted my suburban complacency from beyond the grave, condemning my nights to a perpetual state of purgatory in that strange world that exists between sleep and waking.

Then the cat whose space I had dared to encroach upon in the bed, which it obviously saw as its personal territory, jumped onto my chest hissing and spitting loudly. In response to this unprovoked attack, I immediately sat up. Having spent so much time working in war-zones over the last few years, my body reacted instinctively to the threat, while my consciousness lagged several minutes behind. As my mind walked the long narrow tightrope from the killing fields of Racak back to the real world, Farah, my wife, walked through from the shower room into the bedroom. She was wrapped in a towel, drying her hair.

‘You’