Afghanistan
Beauty in Devastation (13’ 52’’)
GEORGE GITTOES: I've actually come back from Afghanistan shattered. I'm burnt-out. I'm damaged. I'm as damaged as I was when I came back from a Rwanda after seeing many people massacred. The human tragedy of the refugee camps is beyond description.
George Gittoes is no stranger to war and conflict, but Afghanistan today is worse than many places he's seen.
GEORGE GITTOES: I've seen Bosnia after four years of war, I've seen Somalia after similar droughts, but this place is just utterly destroyed.
Through his paintings, writings, film and photography, George Gittoes sees Afghanistan with an artist's eye.
GEORGE GITTOES: It's kind of like an alternative, negative Disneyland, a sense of someone on a donkey with traditional clothing and then you've got a jet fighter plane shooting overhead and laser-directed rockets, you know? It's unreal. It's surreal. It's probably more surreal than Disneyland.
George Gittoes is one of Australia's leading figurative painters. For the past two decades, he's worked as an artist in areas usually the domain of journalists.
GEORGE GITTOES: What's different for me going to war zones is that my art is about compassion. A lot of the art of the past, like, if you like Baron Gros, the great painter of Napoleon's victories, it's very much the heroic soldier but, in all contemporary warfare, it's the civilian population, it's the individuals, the normal human beings that are mashed by the machine and I very rarely see armies confronting each other and soldiers fighting it off. It's usually the civilian casualties and they're the kinds of stories that I try to tell.
He's left his home in Sydney to travel to Afghanistan twice before in 1999 and 2000. Both times, he worked on paintings associated with landmines. The devastation brought to Afghanistan by years of war provided powerful inspiration.
GEORGE GITTOES: I think the most moving moment for me as an artist and probably the painting that I love most of all my work is a painting I've called 'The Yellow Room'.
This painting portrays a boy who lost his father in the war and then stepped on a landmine while working with his brother.
GEORGE GITTOES: The brother was killed and the boy was blown through the air and, when he woke up, he was in his mother's arms and the whole of the insides of his stomach had been blown away. The mother no longer had a son or a husband and she'd managed to keep this boy alive with, you know, no stomach for six weeks, and there was a sense of his spirit hovering above his body, and it was like the boy was looking to me, he was in terrible pain, the mother was nursing him, and he was saying, "I can't go." And his mother's love was holding him there, her prayers, and yet his spirit was wanting to leave and I felt I'd walked into a room where the doorway between life and death was wide open.
George Gittoes has just returned from his third trip to Afghanistan, the first since the US campaign began.
GEORGE GITTOES: This painting's called 'Disney World - Afghanistan' and it came out of me being in Camp Generosity and finding these two old fighting dogs. This one had been through too many fights, it was malnourished, it could barely stand up and it reminded me of most of the population of Afghanistan. As I was drawing it, I turned around and there was this other really tough fighting dog, young and ready to tear my throat out, if it hadn't been tethered. And it reminded me of all the young soldiers I saw everywhere, from every side of what can be the next conflict in Afghanistan, heavily armed and ready to go once their masters let them off their leashes. And then there's the women in the burqas and, often, you see a group of women and they almost become like one creature. They're kind of like a jellyfish underneath this thing. It sort of disguises their anatomy. And the sense of America, of Hollywood, of Tom Nicks, the American soldiers on horseback.
He arrived in Afghanistan in early February, while an interim government had been installed and victory against the Taliban declared, the American bombing campaign was continuing and a US ground assault called Operation Anaconda was about to begin. For six weeks, he travelled with aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres, Doctors Without Borders. This allowed him to see much of the country and speak with over 1,000 ordinary Afghans.
GEORGE GITTOES: The idea that the Taliban were off in the mountains with bin Laden is crazy. They're everywhere. I'd go into a village and I'd ask to see the police commissioner to get permission to do something and the former Taliban police commissioner would come out and now he'd have a proper policeman's uniform on, but he was still a Taliban and I know that, you know, he's been indoctrinated and believes the fundamentalist philosophy.
He also heard disturbing stories about the behaviour of some Northern Alliance soldiers.
GEORGE GITTOES: You've just got to get outside of any of the major cities and you go, particularly, to the Pashtun community, and they've suffered terribly from Northern Alliance forces coming in and, under the excuse of going in to disarm them, but actually taking things from the house and threatening them. So there's a sense of tremendous insecurity in the country.
George Gittoes believes that the interim leader, Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun, doesn't have the necessary support of the Northern Alliance to keep the country unified. Meanwhile, an unhealthy cult has developed around assassinated Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massood.
GEORGE GITTOES: The whole time I was there - and I travelled right around the country - I didn't see a single picture or poster of Karzai in any office, shop, building, airport. Everywhere, there are pictures of Massood and that's very frightening because it means that there's an incredibly powerful propaganda machine representing the Northern Alliance, trying to say, "Well, we are now the controlling force in the country," whereas the Pashtuns, who are the majority of the country, are terrified about that because they see that as absolutely opposed to Pashtun interests, so there's a build-up towards civil war.
REPORTER: You'd go as far as thinking civil war?
I'm absolutely certain. I did not meet an intelligent person in Afghanistan who didn't feel that the country is building towards another civil war.
But it was the refugee camps that shocked George Gittoes the most. He visited huge camps in western Afghanistan that stretched as far as the eye could see.
GEORGE GITTOES: Hundreds of thousands of people living in subzero temperatures barely with latrines, barely with access to aid, living in little, like, two-man tents, children burnt from, you know, fires, there's no real firewood - every tree, every bit of wood that can be burnt has been burnt - terrible diarrhoea, pneumonia, malnutrition amongst the children. I can't...it's a living hell. I think, if you had to invent a hell, you couldn't invent one worse than what it's like in one of these refugee camps.
He says it would be a mistake for the Australian Government to consider repatriating any refugee to this hell. He met one family already repatriated from Pakistan, with devastating consequences.
GEORGE GITTOES: I know one father who was repatriated and he was told that his home was safe, he's took his children back to the house and he's said, "Kids, stay in the house. I'm going to go out and check about landmines." And the kids were just too keen. They ran off into the backyard to check to see if their swing was still there. The father was down the road checking about the landmines and he heard an explosion. And one of his sons was killed and the other one's now blind and I sat with that father, an educated man, and, you know, he'd been led to believe that it was safe to return.
GEORGE GITTOES(Reading from diary): ..driving around out of uniform but also wearing civilian clothes. They drive white cars...
For the six weeks of his journey, he kept a diary. In it he recorded every moment, from painful to humorous.
GEORGE GITTOES (Reading from diary): They used a headless calf, quite big and much bigger than a goat.
One event was a game of buzkashi in Mazar-e-Sharif. Buzkashi is a traditional Afghani game, involving two teams of horsemen. At this match, there were two special visitors.
GEORGE GITTOES Reading from diary): These big, clean, highly groomed Americans stand out from the turbaned Afghans, not just because they've been given the only white plastic seats, elevating them above all the others, but because of their freshness. They have that Hollywood artificiality, as if they've just stepped out from a McDonald's with self-closing doors, air conditioning hissing behind them to find themselves, like the cast of 'Stargate', in another dimension.
George Gittoes says the local reaction towards the American campaign is mixed.
GEORGE GITTOES: Well, as an artist, I can say that any of these situations is full of ambiguity. People will say to you, "We welcome the Americans back." However, a lot of bad signals have gone out. For example, dropping the yellow packages of food and then dropping the cluster bombs. The cluster bomb packages are the same shape and colour. They're both yellow. So that story's gone through the country and people think, "Well, how can you trust a country that will do that?"
As well as fear and misery, George Gittoes also witnessed a celebration in one of the refugee camps.
GEORGE GITTOES: You know, there was a beautiful moment for me on this trip. I went up on to the top of a truck because I was at this refugee camp where there were hundreds of people. I saw this swirling and beautiful colours and I heard music, and so I got down off the truck and ran with some kids over to what was happening. And it was a wedding. And there was a girl in brightly spangled clothes and she was holding her little tin glory box above her head and dancing with it, and she had all her girlfriends round her and other women with tambourines and flutes and music and she had make-up on. And, all of a sudden, the air just filled with money. Her father threw money into the air. And I don't know where he got the money, I mean, but that was what you do for your daughter. Everywhere I went, you know, there was this resilience of the human spirit. You'd find someone who'd actually got a ball bearing out of a tank and made a merry-go-round for the kids and you'd see the laughing kids spinning around on the merry-go-round, or you'd see a wedding with people with bright dresses and music or just kids enjoying themselves.
GEORGE GITTOES(Reading from diary): A bit further down the road was a simulant, manually turned ferris wheel. The children whooped and spun like buzkashi riders as the late afternoon sun spread crazy shadows over their fathers, who crouched, smiling, with Kalashnikovs held in their laps. Dr Atic pointed to the guns and said, "They treat them like a fashion accessory". I came close to the men with the guns sensing, sometimes, the truth is in the detail. The guns had all been decorated with little glittering heart-shaped stickers. Disney World - Afghanistan. Perhaps this is what Picasso meant when he said, "I don't seek. I find."