Front-page newspaper stories and torn excerpts from a damning report on war crimes allegedly committed by Australian soldiers will feature prominently in a month-long exhibition in western Sydney about the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan
The documents form the basis of a confronting collection of protest collage artworks by Elyas Alavi, as he struggled to process the harsh and shocking findings of the Brereton report into war crimes in Afghanistan.
Among the media used in the collection are washes of the artist’s own blood.
“As an Afghan Australian I found it hard to imagine how the Australian Defense Forces could commit these crimes,” he told Guardian Australia.
“I have this document called citizenship, I’m sure, but in Afghanistan there are victims, and there are families of victims here.
“Afghanistan is so far away, the government says it’s a tragic country, there’s nothing more we can do, but Australia went there to help, and Australian soldiers killed innocent people. That’s why I use my blood.”
“It was hard for me to imagine how the Australian Defense Forces could commit these crimes”: Elyas Alavi in his study. Photography: Courtesy Elyas Alavi
About 50,000 Afghans now living in Australia will mark the first anniversary of the Taliban’s arrival in Kabul later this month.
More than one in five of these Afghan nationals, the majority of whom have arrived in Australia as refugees in the past 20 years, now reside in the greater Sydney area.
With the redacted version of the Australian Defense Force Inspector General’s Afghanistan investigation report, commonly known as the Brereton Report, now in the public domain, these relatively new Australians are grappling with a disturbing truth about how his adopted country treated its people.
Confronting Australia’s role as co-savior, co-conspirator and co-perpetrator is one of the dominant themes of Twenty Years: The War in Afghanistan, which officially opens at the Leo Kelly Blacktown Arts Center on Thursday.
The program includes a series of forums coordinated by Maryam Zahid, founder of Afghan Women on the Move, with speakers from the Afghan community including public interest lawyer Lala Pordeli, SBS journalist Abdullah Alikhil and exiled judge of Kabul court Farah Altaf Atahee, who fled to Australia with her husband and three children shortly after the Taliban took control of the capital last August.
On August 24, Afghan war crimes whistleblower David McBride will join an online forum discussing the future of Afghanistan and the social and political challenges facing Australia as a government militant Islamist
McBride was one of the subjects of an exhibit of photo portraits by Hoda Afshar recognizing the work of whistleblowers, which toured earlier this year.
The work of another exiled photojournalist, Najiba Noori, is featured in the Twenty Years exhibition. Noori worked for Agence France-Presse (AFP) as a video journalist based in Kabul until the Taliban took power a year ago. He now lives in Paris.
Endless Sorrow, a photograph by Najiba Noori. Photography: Najiba Noori
Noori told the Guardian last October that she feared for the family, friends and colleagues she left behind. The new director of Kabul University, where his younger brother was a music student, had just called for the death of all journalists.
In February, the International Federation of Journalists reported that roughly half of the media in Afghanistan had collapsed in the previous five months, and more than 70 percent of journalists who had fled or gone into hiding were women.
Journalist and filmmaker Antony Loewenstein co-curated the extensive program with artist and writer Alana Hunt. He wants the exhibition to provoke, inspire outrage and push a wider part of the community to confront Australia’s role in the longest war in this country’s history.
Loewenstein was in Afghanistan in 2012 and 2015; says that while the US-led war is officially over, its sad legacy lives on.
“We are all responsible as Australians for the current situation in Afghanistan,” he tells the Guardian. “We occupied the country for 20 years, committed war crimes against Afghan civilians and have very little [that’s] positive show for our involvement.
“The war has gone down the memory hole … our legacy there as a nation is haunted,” he says.
You call to put the focus back on Afghanistan
A federally funded Australian War Memorial project launched in 2016 to investigate Australia’s military engagement in conflicts in Timor-Leste and the Middle East is part of a controversial $500 million expansion plan for the national war museum.
However, Australia’s official military historians have not yet been granted access to the full, unredacted Brereton report, which may not be released until the investigations are completed later this decade.
Loewenstein says the Afghan community is concerned that if historians don’t have full access to the report, the War Memorial exhibition will continue to present a hidden narrative about Australia’s 20-year presence.
The concerns are not unfounded. The existing exposé documenting Australian forces in Afghanistan makes no mention of the alleged war crimes, despite the fact that, as Guardian columnist Paul Daley pointed out almost two years ago, the Brereton inquiry was already 18 months old by this stage .
Loewenstein says organizers hope the 20th anniversary exhibit and symposium will bring some media attention back to Afghanistan, which, perhaps because of entrenched racism, has been left behind by media and public policy. When Kabul fell, for example, the Morrison government promised refuge to just 3,000 Afghan asylum seekers out of its annual allocation of 13,000; Meanwhile, more than 8,000 Australian visas have been issued to Ukrainian refugees since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Both countries have roughly the same population of around 40 million.
“All refugees should be treated equally and the new Australian government has an opportunity to repair the damage caused by [the occupation]” says Loewenstein. “Australia has a moral responsibility to help the Afghan people.”
Twenty Years: The War in Afghanistan is at the Leo Kelly Blacktown Arts Center until 3 September