MPR: An Afghani perspective

An Afghani perspective
By Elizabeth Stawicki
Minnesota Public Radio
October 9, 2001

RealAudio

Those who grew up in Afghanistan and now live in Minnesota have a unique perspective given the current state of affairs. Minnesota Public Radio's Elizabeth Stawicki recently talked with some Afghanis living in the Twin Cities about the military conflict and how the United States can fight terrorism.

VOICES
Desperation, says Habib Amini, fuels the terrorist cells in his former country and in other parts of the world. Amini left Afghanistan as a teenager and married an American. He now lives with his family in the Twin Cities. Listen to his comments

Abraham Dehzad, headmaster at the Minneapolis school for refugees, Abraham Lincoln High School, says he wholeheartedly supports the President Bush's actions and wishes he could advise him on this national crisis. Dehzad says he understands the U.S. must bomb his native country, but he wants people to also remember the innocents living there as well.

"If you talk about Afghans in Afghanistan, imagine Jews in a concentration camp. They are like in a concentration camp," Dehzad said. "We have to go to their cells; terrorism is the evil of the world, even if I say animals, I'm insulting animals."

Those left in Afghanistan now, says Namath Sahar, are those who didn't have the means to flee during the past 23 years of war; first with the Soviet Union and later the country's own civil war.

Sahar, a Twin Cities Realtor, left Afghanistan in 1975 at age 17 to attend school in the U.S.

"(It's a)human catastrophe. (It) created widows, orphans, injured countless people who reside in refugee camps now, murder of leaders, fleeing of talented people of that country, people who couldn't afford to get out of the country. People that had economic means left," Sahar says. "People running businesses, left the country to go to the U.S. western countries. The people they left in that country are hopeless and desperate."

"Globalism shouldn't just be 'business can flourish,' but the U.S. taking a role of a moral superpower. You don't know the U.S., you probably know through McDonald's and Nike, but there's another part of this of civil rights that should be promoted and showed to the world."

- Habib Amini

That desperation, says Habib Amini, fuels the terrorist cells in his former country and in other parts of the world. Amini left Afghanistan as a teenager and married an American. He now lives with his family in the Twin Cities.

"In Afghanistan, you look in a child's eye and you don't see sparkle; instead you see horror, you see despair, fear, you see a sense of insecurity, they don't know if their country's going to be bombed today or another blown up body, hungry to bed that's what you see," said Amini.

Amini, who worked in one of New York's World Trade Center towers years ago, believes the U.S. now has a great opportunity to fight terrorism if it learns from the past. He says many of the Afghan people feel betrayed by America and other countries, because they left Afghanistan in ruins after the war with the Soviets.

Afghanis, he said, paid with their lives and hoped the U.S. would've stuck around to rebuild their country. Amini says the best way to fight terrorism now is not to leave after the military conflict ends, but to help the country democratically.

"Globalism shouldn't just be 'business can flourish,' but the U.S. taking a role of a moral superpower. You don't know the U.S., you probably know through McDonald's and Nike, but there's another part of this of civil rights that should be promoted and showed to the world.", he said.

Headmaster Abraham Dehzad has one request of other Americans and that is that they don't transfer their anger from the fanatical Taliban to other Afghan people.

"Please don't generalize. All Afghans, all Muslims, all Arabs are not evil. You can have evil everywhere. I love this country, (I have) enormous respect to our policies. I was starving for democracy and I found it," he said.

Although headmaster Dehzad knows of a student at his school who was harassed because she wore traditional clothing, he, Habib Amini and Namath Sahar say they haven't noticed any discrimination since the terrorist attacks.

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