Pierre
de Paepe's Afgha.com was the sole independent international voice for
a rag-tag coalition of ethnicities who had been forced to bear arms out
of a small valley in Northern Afghanistan called Panjshir. He used his
contacts with Wali Massoud, brother of Ahmed Shah Massoud, administrators
in Islamabad, and Kabul, and the United Front Embassy in Paris to report
on the increasingly murderous Taliban, and the coalition led by Massoud.
When the world remained silent over the destruction of the Buddhas, Pierre
lashed out.
Meanwhile,
Massoud crept out of Afghanistan into Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan,
where he flew to France to speak to an assembly of European Union legislators
about the growing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the needs of the
United Front, and his belief in a broad-based democratic Government, independent
of his own front, which would be elected and representative of the people
of Afghanistan. Pierre says, "I believe the United Front can establish
peace…it represents all the ethnic groups of the country including
the majority Pashtuns, as demonstrated recently by the delegation which
visited the EU Parliament."
I asked Pierre how he became interested in the United Front. He says,
"In 1998, I was following a film project called, Massoud the Afghan
by Christophe de Ponfilly. I wanted to know more about the country, their
resistance, and in particular about Ahmed Shah Massoud. At that time,
there was not one mention in the world about the resistance (against the
Taliban.) I modestly decided to help. Since the taliban hid (everything
into) obscurity, my site had to be something that was open to everybody…full
of documentation, accessible to all. Eventually, a lot of people wanted
to participate in the project. My site grew and now some 30 administrators
who work from London, Paris, Brussels, Kabul and the Islamic world help
to edit it and have full editing capacity."
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Shelled
Mosque, Kabul |
I
asked Pierre what he thought about the future of Afgha.com.
"We
would like to open a German, a Spanish and a Dari (northern Persian dialect)
version of the site, but we lack the people. We would like to enlarge
our communication network, and maintain a group of Afghan journalists
locally. But that requires a lot of time and money."
By
the time the snow had melted in Afghanistan's northern provinces this
year, the Taliban had launched a series of major assaults on the United
Front, pushing them further into the Northern valleys of the Hindu Kush,
swallowing up land. With waning interest from the outside and only limited
supplies coming from Tajikistan, the Front was losing ground.
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