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Pastimes : The Boxing Ring Revived -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (851)	12/4/2001 2:27:30 PM
From: gao seng	Respond to of 7720

Ted Rall, singing a little different tune nowadays. I cannot find his older stuff from before he went to Afghan. But it was pretty inflammatory. Follow him here, he is getting interesting. dailynews.yahoo.com RUNNING THE ODDS WHEN NOBODY CARES By Ted Rall TALOQAN, Afghanistan (news - web sites) -- They came to kill me. I heard them pounding on my metal door. Everyone in this country who can afford metal doors has them; the sky turns pitch-black and the streets turn ugly after 5 p.m. The murderers were polite at first. Naturally, I didn't answer the door. It was 3 in the morning and it was Afghanistan. Anyone with a hot lead on an exclusive interview with Gen. Dostum or photos of child mine victims could wait until morning. Then they pounded angrily. I was glad I hadn't gotten out of my sleeping bag. They came back at 5, I think it was. They had young voices and they spoke Dari, the lingua franca of northeastern Afghanistan and by extension the Northern Alliance. They went away sooner this time. There were approximately 45 Western journalists living in private homes scattered around Taloqan, a backwater equivalent to a small town in Georgia, which serves as the provincial capital of Takhar Province. Taloqan was just 20 minutes from the front line at Kunduz on a fairly decent road. We were there to cover the siege of Kunduz, the fall of which would also open major roads to Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif and access to the Uzbek border. Conditions in the journalists' guest houses were squalid. The better rooms featured a few filthy mats on top of a flea-infested carpet. Heat was furnished by benzene lamps that caused nausea and burning eyes. There was no electricity. You couldn't eat during the day because it was Ramadan, and you couldn't go out at night. We paid $25 per person per night for these digs. Boiled hot water for bathing was $5 more. They really got you on food brought in from the bazaar. My favorite price-gouging moment -- and there were so many -- was my landlord's assertion that eggs were going for a buck each in a country with an average monthly salary of $1.40. The journalists said it was all CNN's fault, that the network paid so much for helicopter rides and cool shots of tanks that the Afghans began to believe that all Westerners were made of money. On the other hand, CNN was probably just another victim in a place where taxi drivers think nothing of asking $1,400 for a 10-minute ride. No one gave a damn about our security. The Northern Alliance never assigned guards for our houses or for journalist convoys, which were constantly getting ambushed. And neither the U.S. nor the Alliance would send a chopper for you if you got shot. The next morning, Nov. 27, I ran into Pedro, a Portugese radio correspondent who lived a few houses away. I asked him if anyone had pounded on his door the night before. "As a matter of fact, yes," he replied. A few hours later, the news spread that Ulf Stromberg, a 42-year-old Swedish cameraman who'd been living three doors away from me, had answered the door that night to find three or four young men pointing Kalishnikovs at him. When he shouted to alert his roommates, they shot him. The killers robbed the others and fled into the night. Forty-five journalists had come to Taloqan in my convoy. Stromberg was the third one killed for his money. I conducted an informal poll of the writers and TV people gathering at the tiny Foreign Ministry. All had been awakened the night before by knocks at their doors. Only Stromberg had answered. The killers had known where all of us lived. If we had all answered our doors, we all would have been killed for our carefully concealed $100 bills and whatever possessions intrigued them. "I don't mind dying in battle to get a story," a writer for the French daily Le Monde told me. "Getting killed in a stupid street crime is something else altogether." The Afghans are wrong, of course. We're not loaded. If and when I make it back home, I've got bills piled a foot high to contend with. But they're also right: Compared to them, we're zillionaires. One could try a long-term/short-term argument on them -- journalists tell the Afghans' story, people back home decide to help out, aid pours in, Afghanistan prospers someday and so do you -- but why bother? When the next meal is uncertain, a percentage of the population will act by any means necessary to secure that food and maybe a little extra. The fact that we're taking enormous risks to help them just doesn't matter. They ripped off Ulf Stromberg again, even after he was dead. Northern Alliance officials initially refused to issue a death certificate or permission to let his body leave the country unless they were paid a $2,000 fee. (This indecent behavior isn't without precedent; another murdered TV man's body was held on the grounds that, like himself, his visa had expired.) Later that day, Stromberg's colleagues loaded his coffin onto a pickup for the brutal six-hour trip on a bombed-out road to the Tajik border. Both the U.S. and the Alliance refused to send a chopper to spare his body this final humiliation. Finally, at 9 that night, a box containing Stromberg's remains was placed on a tractor-powered barge that crossed the Pyanj River. Next to the coffin was his backpack and equipment. On top of it was a green tarp covered with the powdery dust of Afghanistan. (Ted Rall, the cartoonist and writer, is covering the war in Afghanistan for The Village Voice and KFI Radio in Los Angeles.) Email this story - View most popular \| Printer-friendly format